Louis Garzone

Louis Garzone was a licensed Philadelphia funeral director who, with his brother Gerald Garzone and James McCafferty, owned the Liberty Crematorium at 2778 Ruth Street in Kensington. From early 2004 to September 2005 the three supplied at least 244 bodies to Michael Mastromarino of Biomedical Tissue Services, without the knowledge or consent of the families, and received more than 245,000 dollars. He pleaded guilty on September 2, 2008, and was sentenced on October 22, 2008, to 8 to 20 years.¹²³ The history of the business is set out under Garzone Funeral Home.

The Crematorium

As owners of a crematorium, the brothers and McCafferty had access to bodies destined for cremation, which, the court record states, could be provided "without concern for their post-harvesting condition." Mastromarino's cutters removed arms, legs, bones, ligaments, tendons and skin, "often leaving only a head and a bloody torso behind in a bag for cremation," and bodies awaiting them sat unrefrigerated in an alley for days. Mastromarino had told the brothers that donors had to be under seventy-five and free of disease; they supplied the bodies of people over eighty who had died with cancer, HIV and hepatitis. In September 2005, told by Mastromarino to burn their funeral homes, they instead incinerated their records in the crematory oven days before FDA investigators arrived, and told the investigators that the records had been destroyed in a flood.²³

Welfare and Disability Fraud

The brothers also filed false claims with the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare for funerals of the indigent that families had already paid for, each claim for the maximum of 750 dollars; Louis received 25,250 dollars. Louis alone was also charged with disability fraud, having claimed from March 2006 that he could not work because of depression and received 18,300 dollars on eight claims through September 2007.¹²

Plea and Sentence

On September 2, 2008, the day their trial was to begin, Louis Garzone pleaded guilty to corrupt organizations, conspiracy, theft of body parts, abuse of corpse, reckless endangerment and welfare fraud, and forfeited two properties, 1830 East Somerset Street and 2778 Ruth Street, "the location of the crematorium." His share of the brothers' joint restitution was 144,000 dollars, with a further 18,000 dollars on the disability count; the Pennsylvania Supreme Court described the joint restitution as "over $300,000 to be paid to the affected former clients of appellees' funeral homes." On a post-sentence motion by the Commonwealth, the court ordered him to pay 90,101 dollars in costs, of which 84,796 dollars was for the salaries of the prosecutors and county detectives and 5,305 dollars for grand jury costs. The Superior Court vacated the salary portion on April 14, 2010, and the Supreme Court affirmed on January 19, 2012, holding that the legislature had not authorized such costs.¹³