Michael Mastromarino

Michael Mastromarino (died July 7, 2013) was a New Jersey oral surgeon who, after losing his dental license, founded Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS) in 2002 and ran it as a business "selling human tissue from cadavers to tissue banks around the country." Between 2001 and 2005, by his own admission, he and a team of "cutters" removed bone, skin, tendon and other tissue from the bodies of people who had not consented to donation, forged consent forms and death records, and sold the tissue to processors whose products were transplanted into patients. He pleaded guilty in Brooklyn in March 2008 and in Philadelphia in August 2008, and was serving concurrent sentences of 18 to 54 years in New York and 25 to 58 years in Pennsylvania when he died of cancer, aged 49.¹²³

Dentistry

Before BTS he was a maxillofacial surgeon and the co-author of a book on dental implants, Smile: How Dental Implants Can Transform Your Life. The writer Kerry Howley reported that a patient charged that he had been "stoned on Demerol" during a botched operation, and that he then lost his license.⁴ The Pennsylvania trial court found that "in 2002, after unrelated criminal charges resulted in the loss of his dentistry license, [Mastromarino] started a business called Biomedical Tissue Services."¹ NPR reported that he "gave up his license after he got addicted to drugs."³

Biomedical Tissue Services

BTS and a companion firm, BioTissue Technologies, were licensed in New Jersey but kept offices in Brooklyn. Mastromarino's partner, Joseph Nicelli, an embalmer who owned the Daniel George & Son funeral home at 1852 Bath Avenue in Brooklyn and a business transporting bodies to funeral homes, supplied corpses; in "a secret room" at Daniel George & Son, according to the Kings County District Attorney, Mastromarino "would remove bones, tendons, heart valves and other tissue from recently deceased people," replaced the bones with PVC piping and repaired the incisions so that nothing would show at the funeral. Funeral directors were paid up to 1,000 dollars a body, the payments disguised as fees for services. The case began when the new owners of Daniel George & Son complained to the district attorney that money paid in advance for funerals was missing from the books.⁵

In February 2004 Mastromarino approached James McCafferty and the brothers Louis and Gerald Garzone, owners of the Liberty Crematorium in Philadelphia, who agreed to supply bodies destined for cremation at 1,000 dollars each; his cutters, usually led by Lee Cruceta, worked on at least 244 of them. Many of the dead had been elderly and ill, some with HIV or hepatitis, and the bodies were cut outside the recommended time after death. The Pennsylvania court found that he "replaced blood samples for tissues from diseased cadavers with mislabeled blood samples from disease-free cadavers," so that "doctors across the country unknowingly transplanted diseased, mislabeled, or otherwise unsuitable tissue into transplant patients." He received more than 1,105,751 dollars from tissue banks for the Philadelphia material alone. When he learned in July 2005 that he was under investigation by New York authorities and the Food and Drug Administration, he continued until September, then "destroyed BTS records and encouraged the Garzones to set fire to their funeral homes."¹⁶

Among the bodies was that of the broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who died in March 2004 of lung cancer that had spread to his bones; according to sources quoted by the New York Daily News, Mastromarino changed Cooke's age from 95 to 85 and his cause of death to a heart attack in the paperwork given to the two processors that bought his bones.⁷ BTS sold tissue to processors including Regeneration Technologies, LifeCell and Tutogen Medical; about 10,000 people received tissue it had supplied.²

Prosecutions

On February 23, 2006, the Kings County District Attorney, Charles J. Hynes, announced a 122-count indictment of Mastromarino, Nicelli, Cruceta and Christopher Aldorasi for enterprise corruption, body stealing, opening graves, unlawful dissection, forgery, grand larceny and falsifying business records. "What happened here," Hynes said, "is like something out of a cheap horror movie."⁵ The four were charged with removing bone and tissue from 1,077 bodies at funeral homes without the permission of families.⁸ On March 18, 2008, Mastromarino pleaded guilty in Brooklyn to fourteen counts including enterprise corruption, body stealing and reckless endangerment, admitting that he had carried out the scheme from 2001 to 2005 and had forged records of the time of death and ages of the dead and switched blood and tissue samples; he agreed to forfeit 4.68 million dollars, and his wife, Barbra, 190,000 dollars. "What he did was wrong," said his lawyer, Mario Gallucci.² At his sentencing to 18 to 54 years before Judge Albert Tomei, relatives of the dead addressed him; a woman who said she had contracted hepatitis from one of his bones implanted in her back called his actions "sick, disgusting, appalling." Mastromarino said: "I'd just like to take the opportunity to apologize for the pain and grief I've caused to the donor families and the donor recipients... God have mercy on my soul."⁹ Aldorasi was sentenced to 9 to 27 years; Cruceta pleaded guilty and testified against him.¹⁰

In Philadelphia, after a grand jury investigation begun on May 4, 2006, Mastromarino entered an open plea of guilty on August 29, 2008, and on October 22, 2008, was sentenced to 25 to 58 years, concurrent with his New York sentence. The judge sentenced him on 32 of the 244 theft counts consecutively and gave aggravated sentences for abuse of corpse because the conduct was "so beyond the pale of what the guidelines contemplate." Because he had forfeited 300,000 dollars in cash, the Commonwealth sought no further restitution. The Superior Court affirmed the sentence on July 21, 2010.¹

Death

Mastromarino died on July 7, 2013, at a hospital in New York, of metastatic liver cancer that had spread to his brain and bones, diagnosed the previous October. In a prison interview the year before, he told NPR: "This case was completely blown out of proportion," and "no one talks about, you know, the gorilla in the room... And the gorilla is how much money everybody's making." His wife had divorced him after he admitted his guilt.³ He and his wife had agreed to pay back 4.6 million dollars, NPR reported.³