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Grotesque scandal like a 'cheap horror movie'
Body-parts company spread disease, desecrated the dead for profit
 AP file An x-ray of the lower part of a deceased person shows that PVC plumbing pipes were inserted where the bones once were in this photo released by the Brooklyn, N.Y. District Attorneys Office. Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, N.J., was charged with secretly carving up corpses and selling the parts for use in transplants. |
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NEW YORK - As a seasoned “cutter,” Lee Cruceta thought he knew when it was safe to harvest human tissue from the dead for transplants to the living — and when it wasn’t.
This time, it wasn’t.
The man’s body stretched out in front of Cruceta in the back room of a Manhattan funeral home after hours one day last summer had yellowish skin. His vacant eyes had the same sickly cast — a sign of jaundice. Cruceta telephoned his boss, Michael Mastromarino, to tell him the bad news: The body had failed inspection.
“We always went by the rule that if you come across a body and you say to yourself, 'I don’t want any part of that person in my body,’ you rule the case out,” Cruceta said.
But Mastromarino, by Cruceta’s account, surprised him. Stay put, he said.
The boss came down, checked out the body himself and declared that “everything looked fine.”
“I was overruled,” Cruceta said.
Out came the surgical tools. The extraction of flesh and bone began.
This is, again, Cruceta’s account. He, like Mastromarino, faces criminal charges in a scandal so grotesque that it reads like a real-life sequel to “Frankenstein.”
Cadavers harvested without permission
It was Mastromarino who built a business that took from the dead and gave to the living. There are many legitimate businesses that do this, but authorities say Mastromarino’s company, Biomedical Tissue Services, was not one of them.
BTS, they say, secretly carved up hundreds of cadavers without the families of the deceased knowing about it, then peddled the pieces on the lucrative non-organ body parts market.
Even scarier: They say BTS doctored paperwork to hide the inconvenient fact that some of the dead were old and diseased. As a result, they say, the market was flooded with potentially tainted tissue, and an untold number of patients across the country may have received infections along with their dental implants and hip replacements.
And it might have gone on indefinitely — except for an innocent phone call made by a doctor in Colorado, and a detective’s chance visit to a funeral parlor.
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To all the world, Michael Mastromarino appeared to be a man of character and accomplishment: College athlete. Oral surgeon. Family man. Author. Multimillionaire.
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'He told me it was all lies'
There were rumors. Cruceta, a 33-year-old nurse who worked closely with Mastromarino for three years, recalled asking his boss if it was true that he’d had run-ins with the authorities.
“He told me it was all lies,” he said.
This much is true: At the University of Pittsburgh, Mastromarino was a 6-foot-2, 195-pound defensive back out of middle-class Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The Panthers’ 1985 media guide indicates that in the previous year, he ranked dead last on defense, with one tackle in two games.
He reversed field and became a more serious student after an oral surgeon he considered a mentor took him into the operating room, said his lawyer, Mario Gallucci. He earned degrees in dentistry and dental surgery from New York University.
By the late 1990s, he had practices in midtown Manhattan and New Jersey. He co-authored a book, “Smile: How Dental Implants Can Transform Your Life”; the blurb on the inside cover said he traveled the country, lecturing about bone grafting techniques for implants.
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