Phila. funeral director pleads guilty in body-parts ring

A Philadelphia funeral director charged last year with being part of a multistate ring that sold stolen body parts for use in surgery pleaded guilty yesterday and agreed to cooperate in the upcoming trial of two other morticians.

James A. McCafferty Jr. pleaded guilty to charges of participating in a corrupt organization, conspiracy, theft by deception, welfare fraud, recklessly endangering another person, and 244 counts of theft pertaining to the removal of body parts from cadavers without relatives' permission.

Assistant District Attorney Evangelia Manos said that under the plea agreement McCafferty would testify if needed at the Sept. 2 trial of Louis Garzone, 65, of Kensington, and his brother Gerald, 48, of North Wales.

McCafferty, 38, of the Frankford section, and the Garzone brothers owned Liberty Cremation Inc. in Kensington. The Garzones also owned Garzone Funeral Home Inc., with branches in Kensington and Hunting Park.

The charges were the local fallout from a probe of interstate trafficking in human body parts that became public two years ago when seven New York funeral-home directors pleaded guilty to removing body parts from corpses and selling them for surgical use.

One of the cadavers was that of Alistair Cooke, the host of television's Masterpiece Theater, who died in 2004 of cancer. Authorities said many of the body parts should never have been used because the deceased individuals died of or had cancer or communicable diseases such as AIDS or hepatitis.

The investigation led to a North Jersey company, Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee; founder Michael Mastromarino, a dentist stripped of his license for drug offenses; and his partner, Lee Cruceta, a nurse who was one of the body "cutters."

Last October, a Philadelphia grand jury released a report detailing the scheme's alleged ties in Philadelphia, resulting in charges here against Mastromarino, Cruceta, McCafferty and the Garzones.

According to the grand jury's report, between February 2004 and September 2005 Mastromarino's company paid the three Philadelphia men $1,000 for harvesting each body.

Mastromarino and Cruceta have already pleaded guilty to charges in New York. Cruceta has also pleaded guilty to charges in Philadelphia, and Mastromarino is expected to do the same before trial.

New York authorities say Mastromarino's company took bones and tissue from 1,077 bodies at funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, making $3.8 million in illegal profits.

Those body parts were sold to at least five processing companies and one major distributor.

The parts could have been transplanted into as many as 13,000 patients, the Food and Drug Administration estimated.

The Philadelphia grand jury said that five Philadelphia and 41 Pennsylvania hospitals implanted parts that originated with Mastromarino's operation and that more than 200 Pennsylvanians got tissue from the Garzone funeral homes.

Hundreds of patient lawsuits have since been filed in federal court in New Jersey and state courts around the country on behalf of patients who contend they contracted hepatitis C after getting one of the illegal transplants.