Body Parts: Stealing from the Dead
For the first time, the Indianapolis businessman who first uncovered suspicious links to the harvesting ring tells his story exclusively to Eyewitness News.
X-rays of an exhumed body expose the horrific secrets of a harvesting ring. White plastic pipes used for home plumbing projects replace stolen human leg bones from the hip sockets down to the ankle.
The use of PVC pipe is standard practice in harvesting. But more than 1,000 deceased victims whose families never gave consent went to their graves with disturbing evidence buried inside them. Bone and tissue from one cadaver can bring sellers up to $250,000.
Indianapolis businessman Robert Nelms owns Memory Gardens. He operates more than a dozen funeral homes. Four of them are in Indiana, including Forest Lawn in Greenwood.
But it's the New York funeral home he bought in late 2003 that made national headlines. Nelms said that he had no prior knowledge about the bone and tissue harvesting taking place in the Daniel George and Sons Funeral home in the quiet working class Bensonhurst neighborhood in Brooklyn.
In early 2004, Nelms had two families come into his office with contracts for pre-paid funeral services. He discovered there were no records of those particular funeral files and the trust money the families paid was missing. Unable to get straight answers from the previous owner, Joe Nicelli, Nelms and his wife started digging into the records that were inside the facility.
He was taken back by what he found: Death certificates were changed. They would go to Home Depot with a Home Depot credit card and buy PVC pipe -- copies of checks, copies of FedEx receipts -- copies of you name it -- that would prove things didn't make sense.
But the FedEx receipts created a trail straight to Biomedical Tissue Services in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
Nelms was suspicious, but all he could prove stolen was money. He went to the NYPD in Brooklyn, then to the Kings County District Attorney two separate times. Nelms says he was sent away and told to take his records and go build a case. (Source)
