Seven N.Y. funeral directors plead in body-parts case
They will cooperate in the prosecution of four men accused of harvesting stolen and tainted tissue.
Seven New York funeral directors have quietly pleaded guilty since the summer to charges that they helped a biomedical company plunder cadavers for body parts that could be sold for huge profits.
The funeral directors admitted to unspecified charges in closed courtrooms as part of a deal to cooperate against four men charged earlier this year in Brooklyn, N.Y., with running the body parts scheme.
The guilty pleas were revealed yesterday, as the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office announced a new round of indictments against the four men - Michael Mastromarino, Joseph Nicelli, Lee Cruceta and Christopher Aldorasi.
Mastromarino, a disgraced former dentist, owned Biomedical Tissue Services, a Fort Lee, N.J., company that provided body parts - such as bones and tendons - for transplantation to living medical patients. His partner, Nicelli, used to own a Brooklyn funeral home.
The men have been charged with taking body parts from cadavers without consent and taking parts from people who would have been ineligible to donate because of age or disease. The men then faked their paperwork, prosecutors said, so the people who received the plundered parts had no idea of their origin.
The story of the ghoulish scheme garnered international attention and sensational headlines, but also threw a light on the fast-growing and lucrative business of peddling body parts.
One of the victims of the scheme also turned out to be Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke, whose body parts were taken after he died from cancer in 2004. The paperwork changed Cooke's age and cause of death to make him appear to be an eligible tissue donor.
Hundreds of patients who received body parts through Mastromarino's company, including many in Philadelphia and South Jersey, were alerted and warned that they should be tested for disease.
A raft of lawsuits have been filed, with many victims claiming to have contracted diseases from untested tissue harvested by Mastromarino's company.
Two Philadelphia funeral homes also were forced to close after they were implicated in the body parts scandal. An employee of Mastromarino's told the Philadelphia Daily News that he harvested parts from dozens of corpses at the Louis Garzone Funeral Home in Kensington.
An investigation by Pennsylvania authorities led Garzone and his brother, Gerald Garzone, who ran a funeral home in Hunting Park, to give up their funeral licenses and close.
Although the state charged them with "gross incompetence, negligence and misconduct," the brothers did not admit any wrongdoing. The Philadelphia district attorney launched an investigation, but no charges have been filed.
The Brooklyn investigation has focused solely on New York state. The new indictments yesterday added charges involving 14 looted bodies in Manhattan, the Bronx and Rochester, N.Y.