High bail ordered in body-plundering case

A bail commissioner put a high price tag on the freedom of three Philadelphia funeral home directors accused of using their businesses to steal body parts for resale.

Commissioner Francis Rebstock set bail Thursday night at $1 million each for Louis Garzone, 65, and his brother Gerald Garzone, 47, and at $500,000 for James A. McCafferty Jr., 37.

The three men, along with two brokers of body parts, were charged Thursday with cutting bones, tissue, skin, tendons and other parts from 244 cadavers without family consent.

Many of the parts were taken from people who would have been unsuitable donors because of disease, infection, age or other factors, a Philadelphia grand jury said. In addition, the tissue and bones were often removed under unsanitary conditions.

The parts were sold for transplant into thousands of patients around the country.

The Garzones remained in jail yesterday while bail money was being raised, said John Morris, a spokesman for Louis Garzone's attorney, Howard Kaufman.

It was not known yesterday whether McCafferty had posted bail.

The Garzone brothers each own a funeral home and McCafferty was the director at a funeral home owned by his mother, according to a grand jury report released Thursday. The three men also jointly owned Liberty Cremation.

Charges also were filed against Louis and Gerald Garzone's funeral homes - one at 1830 E. Somerset St., the other at 4151 L St. - and the crematorium, but not the McCafferty funeral home.

The Garzone brothers voluntarily surrendered their funeral director licenses last year, and the state revoked McCafferty's license in an unrelated case about a month ago, officials said.

The two body-parts brokers, Michael Mastromarino and Lee Cruceta, were expected to surrender to Philadelphia authorities next week.

Mastromarino's defunct company, Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, N.J., was accused of plundering 1,077 bodies in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He and three employees were charged last year with stealing from bodies in a 122-count indictment entered in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The Philadelphia grand jury said that between February 2004 and September 2005, Mastromarino paid the Garzone brothers and McCafferty $1,000 for each of the 244 bodies plundered.

Meanwhile, dozens of family members were left to wonder whether their loved ones entrusted to the funeral homes had been victimized.

Philadelphia investigators were able to identify only 48 bodies they said had been plundered, because the defendants falsified the paperwork necessary for donation of body parts, the grand jury said.

The defendants even changed the names of the dead for all but the 48 bodies the investigators identified, the grand jury said.

"Not a single one of them was asked anything about donating their loved one's tissue," the grand jury said.

It was unclear whether the District Attorney's Office was attempting to identify the remaining 196 bodies.

A spokeswoman for the office said she could not comment beyond the grand jury report, but said that concerned family members could call Assistant District Attorney Bruce Sagel at 215-686-8740.