Garzone Funeral Home

The Garzone Funeral Home, in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, was operated by the brothers Louis and Gerald Garzone, who with James McCafferty also owned a crematorium, Liberty Cremations. Between early 2004 and September 2005 they sold the bodies of 244 people entrusted to them for cremation to Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, New Jersey, whose crews removed bone, skin, and tendon for sale to tissue processors. All three pleaded guilty in 2008. In 2026 Philadelphia police investigating the disappearance of seven women began examining the access that the pornographer R.C. Horsch is said to have had to the crematorium.¹²

Biomedical Tissue Services

Michael Mastromarino, a New Jersey oral surgeon who had lost his license over drug use, ran Biomedical Tissue Services from Fort Lee and harvested bodies in a back room of a funeral home in Spanish Harlem and at funeral homes in Philadelphia. The head of his cutting crew was a former surgical nurse, Lee Cruceta. Consent forms and death certificates were forged to alter ages and causes of death. The bones of the broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who died of cancer at 95 in March 2004, were taken before his cremation and sold for more than 7,000 dollars to Regeneration Technologies of Florida and Tutogen Medical of New Jersey, with his age given as 85 and the cause of death as a heart attack. His daughter said: "That people in need of healing should have received his body parts, considering his age and the fact that he was ill when he died, is as appalling to the family as it is that his remains were violated."³

A processor that noticed discrepancies in the donor records informed the Food and Drug Administration on September 29, 2005. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court later recited that when Mastromarino learned of the inquiry he "advised Appellees to destroy their records days before FDA investigators arrived." The agency stopped the company's operations that October, the company and five processors recalled the tissue, and on February 7, 2006, the agency ordered it closed for "serious and widespread deficiencies." Federal estimates of the number of patients who received the tissue ran to 10,000 or more. Recipients sued the company and the processors that had bought from it, among them LifeCell, Regeneration Technologies, Tutogen, Medtronic Sofamor Danek, and the Lost Mountain Tissue Bank, in consolidated litigation in the federal court in New Jersey. The processors said they had not known how the tissue was obtained.¹⁴

The Philadelphia Prosecution

After a grand jury investigation of sixteen months, District Attorney Lynne Abraham announced the arrests of the Garzones and McCafferty on October 4, 2007, and called the scheme "unbelievably craven." The grand jury found that Mastromarino had paid them more than 245,000 dollars, about 1,000 dollars a body. Bodies had been left unrefrigerated for days awaiting the cutters. The identities of only 48 of the 244 had been established. The brothers had given up their state licenses the year before and continued to operate. They had also billed the state welfare department for funerals that families had already paid for.²⁵

Cruceta pleaded guilty in Philadelphia on January 30, 2008, and was sentenced to six years and eight months, concurrent with his New York term. Mastromarino was sentenced in Brooklyn on June 27, 2008, to 18 to 54 years, and in Philadelphia to 25 to 58 years, concurrent. He died of cancer in July 2013. The Garzones pleaded guilty on September 2, 2008, the day their trial was to begin, to corrupt organizations, conspiracy, 244 counts of theft, abuse of corpse, and welfare fraud, and on October 22 were each sentenced to 8 to 20 years and ordered to pay 307,000 dollars in restitution. McCafferty, who had cooperated, received three and a half to ten years. The sentencing court also ordered the brothers to pay 84,796 dollars toward the salaries of the prosecutors and detectives assigned to them. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck that order on January 19, 2012, Chief Justice Ronald Castille writing that "although the crimes in this case are particularly heinous," the legislature had not authorized it. A third brother, James Garzone of Florida, reactivated his Pennsylvania license and reopened the business as Garzone Funeral Home Inc.¹⁵⁶

Horsch

At a gallery in Kensington in 2014 Horsch exhibited what appeared to be autopsy photographs of an unidentified woman and video of her body being put into an incinerator, which he said he had filmed at "a Kensington warehouse where the city morgue would send unidentified remains." A law enforcement official and four people who knew him told the Inquirer in 2026 that he had paid an employee of the Garzone crematorium, identified as George Newsome, in drugs and cash for access to photograph and film the dead. Newsome lived a block from the crematorium, was arrested for heroin possession in 2011 and cocaine possession in 2013, and died in 2014. Gerald Garzone said he had never heard of Horsch. He acknowledged knowing a man named George from the neighborhood and declined to say whether he had employed him. The Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office declined to say whether the city had sent unclaimed bodies to the crematorium. Horsch was not named in the 2007 case. The five women whom police believe to be dead disappeared between 2012 and 2023.²