Biomedical Tissue Services
Fort Lee, New Jersey, tissue-recovery company run by Michael Mastromarino that took tissue from more than a thousand corpses without consent and sold it to processors, until closed by the FDA in 2006.
Biomedical Tissue Services, Ltd. (BTS) was a tissue-recovery company licensed in New Jersey and based in Fort Lee, with offices in Brooklyn and a satellite office in Brighton, near Rochester. It was founded in 2002 by Michael Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon, to sell "human tissue from cadavers to tissue banks around the country." From 2001 to 2005, by Mastromarino's admission, it took bone, skin, tendon and other tissue from the bodies of people who had not consented, using forged consent forms and falsified records of age and cause of death. The processors that bought its tissue recalled it in September and October 2005, and the Food and Drug Administration ordered the company to cease manufacturing in early 2006.1234
Operations
BTS paid funeral directors about 1,000 dollars a body. In Brooklyn it worked from a room in the Daniel George & Son funeral home, owned by Mastromarino's partner Joseph Nicelli; in Manhattan, among other places, through the New York Mortuary at 2242 First Avenue; and in Philadelphia, from 2004, through the Liberty Crematorium of Louis and Gerald Garzone and James McCafferty, which supplied at least 244 bodies. Before the Philadelphia arrangement, cutters had to rebuild the bodies with PVC pipe to hide the removals from families at funerals.12 The New York Daily News reporter William Sherman said that the tissue went to "just about every state, including Alaska," to five Canadian provinces, and to England, Ireland and other European countries.5 Its Rochester office paid funeral homes the same standard fee; in 2006 the Monroe County District Attorney, Michael Green, indicted four BTS employees, Darlene Deats, Kevin Vickers, Nicholas Sloyer and Kirssy Knapp, and three funeral directors, Jason Gano, Scott Batjer and Serrell Gayton, over 36 bodies taken in 2005.6
Recall
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the tissue went directly to five processors, Regeneration Technologies, LifeCell, Tutogen Medical, the Central Texas Regional Blood and Tissue Center, and the Lost Mountain Tissue Bank, which recalled it in September and October 2005. The CDC dated the FDA's order to BTS to cease manufacturing and to retain all its tissue products to January 2006; the FDA's own statement, reported on February 6, 2006, described the order as issued that day.37 About 10,000 people received tissue supplied by BTS, and the processors faced hundreds of civil suits from recipients.4
Relationships 6
- Food and Drug Administration3
Sources
- Commonwealth v. Mastromarino, 2 A.3d 581, 2010 PA Super 128 (Pa. Super. Ct., filed July 21, 2010), opinion of Stevens, J. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1483314488518887260 ↩
- Office of the District Attorney, Kings County. "Kings County District Attorney Charles J. Hynes, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Department of Investigation Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn Announce Indictment in Tissue Theft," media release, February 23, 2006. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/downloads/pdf/pr_tissueharvesting022306.pdf ↩
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Investigation into Recalled Human Tissue for Transplantation, United States, 2005-2006," Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 55, no. 20 (2006), p. 564. ↩
- Goldman, Adam. "Body-parts big pleads guilty," Philadelphia Daily News, March 19, 2008. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/hp/news_update/20080319_Body-parts_big_pleads_guilty.html ↩
- "Four Named in New York 'Body-Snatcher' Crimes," Day to Day, NPR, February 23, 2006 (William Sherman of the New York Daily News interviewed by Madeleine Brand). https://www.npr.org/transcripts/5230097 ↩
- "7 charged with stealing body parts from corpses," NBC News, 2006. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/7-charged-stealing-body-parts-corpses-flna1c9473448 ↩
- [FDA statement on Biomedical Tissue Services], Infection Control Today, February 6, 2006. ↩
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