Bed bugs living in new or refurbished mattress

By 11:00 a.m., there were nine mattresses stacked in the van and more inside -- 22 in all.

He delivered them to a company we knew all too well.  In fact, in 1996 the company was called Quisqueya mattress and had sold us several contaminated rebuilt mattresses. 

Eleven years later, it's now called Brooklyn Sleep Products, and, it appears, business is booming. There's a fleet of delivery trucks and a huge factory and salesroom.

We watched as the bedbugs on that mattress hitched a ride in. What would Brooklyn Sleep Products do to make sure the bugs didn't come back out on a newly rebuilt mattress?

We went in with hidden cameras, and found men making rebuilt mattresses and spraying them here and there with a common household cleaner.

The owner told our undercover shopper his workers use disinfectants to prevent bedbugs, but he said there are no guarantees.

"If you don't spray, [there] can be bedbugs," said one worker who was spraying. "We've got to do it."

We asked him, "Do these have bedbugs?"

The worker answered "I can't say you yes or no. Because it's possible maybe the bedbug don't die with the, some bedbugs don't die."

Rick Cooper agreed. He says sprays like the ones used here kill bedbugs only on direct contact -- and they don't kill bedbug eggs.

Brooklyn Sleep Products also makes new mattresses. We saw stacks of them leaning up against newly rebuilt and old mattresses. It's a bad idea, says Rick Cooper.

"If one mattress is in contact with another, and there are bugs on it.  Then there's a very strong likelihood that they're going to move to the adjacent one."

There were mattresses everywhere.  How would we possibly determine if some had bedbugs?  This seemed like an undertaking that might require dogged determination.

Nudey is one of a handful of dogs Pepe Peruyero has trained to detect bedbugs.

"She's got a really, really good nose," he says. "Eight pounds.  You know no one would ever suspect that this is a detection dog."

A former DEA agent and police dog handler, Pepe runs J&K K-9 Academy in northern Florida where he's trained dozens of dogs to find drugs and pests. 

His star student is Gidget, a beagle mix rescued from a shelter. 

"Gidget is our machine," says Pepe.  "Gidget is like the old gunny sergeant in the military. She just absolutely loves to work."

Rick Cooper sometimes turns to Pepe's dogs for help finding bugs, so we flew him, his daughter who works with him, and the dogs to New York to see if they could find live bedbugs in mattresses. 

"Find your bees," Pepe told his dog. It's the dog's signal to start sniffing.

Pepe says it's easy to see when the dogs have detected the scent of a live bedbug.

"All of a sudden that head snaps. The tail may start to wag a little bit stronger and then of course the alert, the physical alert, of-- of scratching," he said. "Scratching right at the at the point where the odor is coming out of."

Sometimes, to indicate a bedbug, they just sit down.  If the dogs are to be believed, plenty of these old mattresses were infested with bedbugs.

What about the newly rebuilt mattresses?  We took the dogs to stores and factories and with some help from them, chose dozens of mattresses to buy and open up.  

Would we discover bedbugs?  And what else would we find?   

When trainer Pepe Peruyero and his detection dogs hit the Big Apple and started touring the bedding factories and stores of Brooklyn, he was struck by one thing right away.

"I could not believe how many mattresses are moved in just one of those stores on a daily basis.  It was amazing."

The factories we visited in Florida, California and New York were bustling.  Rebuilt bedding is a high-profit business not many people even realize exists. 

"They might pay a collector $5 per product," says bedding industry consultant Gordon Demant.  "They might sell that product to the consumer for $50. And all they've done in many instances is to put a new cover on it."

Refurbished mattresses are bought in bulk by lower-end hotels, shelters, and some school dorms.  Demant says though they fill a real need in low income neighborhoods, unsuspecting consumers don't realize the risks.

"They believe that they're getting a product which is maybe of lower quality, but not a product which could subject them to significant health problems."

We bought our first batch in New York -- 11 mattresses and box springs -- from two different stores, for about $40 each.

We brought them to Cooper Pest Management where bedbug experts Rick Cooper and Jeff White offered to help us examine them.

The first mattress looked clean and fresh and as good as new on the outside.

What we found on the inside gave new meaning to the term dirt cheap.

"Oh my gosh, look at this," said Dateline correspondent Victoria Corderi, seeing cigarette burns, dust and huge unsightly stains.

"This is exactly like what I saw ten years ago.  It's unbelievable."

Some of the mattresses looked ok inside. Others looked disgusting.

The fifth mattress we opened was filled with layers of old mattress covers, foam and even two long stuffed cardboard tubes.

Of more concern to Rick and Jeff was how the tops of old mattresses were layered one over the other under the cover, each one a possible carrier of bedbugs. 

We asked Rick Cooper, "So it's like layer after layer of opportunity from different beds?"

Cooper said, "Right.  Any one of these layers that has bugs associated with it is going to be a route of introduction of bugs into the mattress itself."

Jeff pointed out, "There's black stains all along the piping of that old one."

These dark marks -- called fecal spotting – are signs that bedbugs had been there, digested a blood meal and excreted it right out. 

All along the border of the mattress was clear evidence, says Jeff, that the mattress layer had once had a significant infestation.  Then there was more proof.

"I have a bedbug," said Jeff.
  
There was a dead bedbug amid the filth.

"So the fact that it's disgusting is not enough," said our correspondent.  "The fact that it could also have bedbugs?"

"That's what would bother me," said Jeff.

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