Hearing delayed for defendants in body-parts case

Michael Mastromarino, reputed ringleader of a national bodyparts scam arrested here last week on charges that he bought $250,000 in stolen, diseased tissue taken from 244 Philadelphia corpses, was supposed to have a hearing in Municipal Court yesterday.

And so was Mastromarino's right-hand man, Lee Cruceta, 34, a supervisor who dispatched "cutters" to Philadelphia to harvest body parts, according to a Philadelphia grand jury.

At the last minute, court officials decided not to bring the two defendants from Mastromarino's Biomedical Tissue Services Inc. from the cell room to appear before Municipal Judge Felice Stack just to set a new hearing date on Oct. 24.

Cruceta's wife burst into tears and fled from court, holding her preschool son. She and another woman had battled traffic from her Monroe, N.Y., home just to see her husband.

Cruceta, who is being held on $4 million bail, and Mastromarino, held on $5 million bail, have been quarantined at Curran Fromhold Correctional Facility on State Road since they surrendered on Oct. 9, and remained there last night.

If Cruceta cannot make bail, he could lose his job, according to his New York attorney, George Vomvolakis, who will represent him in a related Brooklyn trial on Jan. 15.

Late Monday, attorney Mary Moran was appointed to represent Cruceta, but was not told he was a defendant in the body-parts case here until yesterday.

Cruceta and Mastromarino will join three co-defendants - funeral-home operators Louis Garzone, Gerald Garzone and James McCafferty - in the Oct. 24 hearing. They will decide whether to set a date for a lengthy preliminary hearing, or to skip the hearing and go directly to a Common Pleas trial.

From February 2004 to September 2005, the five co-defendants allegedly conspired to steal bones, skin, tendons, spines and sometimes hearts from bodies that the funeral home operators were supposed to "care for, cremate and prepare for burial," according to the grand jury report.

Sometimes, the bodies were left on gurneys in an alley by the Garzone Funeral Home, on Somerset Street near Ruth, for up to four days awaiting the "cutters" from New York. Tissue is supposed to be harvested within 15 hours under sanitary conditions so it can be used for implants.

Each co-defendant was charged with more than 1,000 counts, including operating a criminal enterprise.

Philadelphia provided a quarter of the 1,077 bodies harvested from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. *