Grotesque scandal like a 'cheap horror movie'

Scheme unraveled in two strands
The scheme, authorities say, unraveled in two strands — one in New York, the other in Colorado.

In November 2004, New York City Police Department Detective Patricia O’Brien responded to a complaint from a funeral director in Brooklyn. The director claimed the parlor’s previous owner had stolen down payments for funerals.

But once inside the funeral parlor, she sensed something far more sinister.

The detective was surprised to find an embalming room that looked more like an operating room, with a steel table and bright overhead lights. When she reviewed old files, she found the names of biomedical companies. She later Googled the names and learned each was involved in tissue transplants.

O’Brien had gone into the investigation thinking she was dealing strictly with “a financial situation,” she said. “I had no idea. I was shocked.”

The NYPD’s Major Case Squad widened the investigation, interviewing the relatives of 1,077 dead people whose bodies were harvested for body parts. Only one said permission was given.

Meanwhile, the director of a Denver blood center, Dr. Michael Bauer, had been hired by several tissue banks to review medical charts of donors to make sure tissue was safe.

He toiled uneventfully until Sept. 28, 2005.

Falsified medical records
That evening, while flipping through charts at his desk, he spotted a notation on a woman’s chart saying she had chronic bronchitis. As a precaution, he picked up the phone and dialed the number listed for her doctor.

“All I wanted to know was whether the doctor thought that might be an acute infection,” meaning something present when she died, Bauer recalled. If so, the germ might still be in her tissue and make it unsuitable for transplantation.

A business answered, one “so unrelated to medicine that it didn’t feel right to me.”

So he picked up another chart and called another doctor.

Then another. And another.

Each time, no doctor answered. In each case, it appeared the charts were falsified.

“I got through the first 10 and that’s when all the hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Bauer said.

Case like a 'cheap horror movie'
The case, said the prosecutor, is like a “cheap horror movie.” But few scary flicks offer the gruesome and gory details of the BTS scandal.

Authorities released photos of exhumed corpses that were boned below the waist like a freshly caught fish. The defendants, they alleged, had made a crude attempt to cover their tracks by sewing PVC pipe back into the bodies in time for open-casket wakes.

It also was alleged that the body of the British-born host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” Alistair Cooke, was among those abused by BTS.

Mastromarino, Cruceta, another cutter and a former mortician have been charged. “What you have before you is nothing short of a case of medical terrorism,” prosecutor Michael Vecchione said at an arraignment.

Lawsuits filed by implant patients accuse BTS of exposing plaintiffs to hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Families of the dead have sued too, claiming the biomedical firm caused distress by desecrating the dead for profit.

Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration shut down BTS amid its own investigation. The agency said it had uncovered evidence the firm failed to screen for contaminated tissue. Parts were recovered from people who had diseases which may have been “exclusionary,” an FDA report said.

Death certificates altered
Death certificates in the company’s files, the report said, were at odds with those on file with the state: The company’s version made people younger than they actually were, and altered the cause and time of the deaths.

The culprits “were just some irresponsible crooks who were doing this and slipped through the cracks,” said Dr. Stuart Youngner, a Case Western Reserve University medical ethicist and head of the ethics committee at Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, a large nonprofit tissue bank. “The good tissue banks ... don’t do that.”

Cruceta is free on $500,000 bond. His name is on papers indicating that he was the one who conducted interviews with family members of the deceased — interviews that authorities say never took place. He insists he signed only because he was instructed to do so; prosecutors don’t believe him.

Mastromarino, 42, remains free on $1.5 million bail after pleading not guilty to body stealing, forgery, grand larceny and other counts. Through his lawyer, he refused requests for interviews by The Associated Press.

If convicted, he faces as much as 25 years in prison. But his lawyer, Gallucci, says he is more focused on establishing his innocence, clearing his name — and getting back to work.

He’s “hurt and depressed,” the attorney said. “He really believed he was helping mankind.”

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