The Big Business of Body Parts (page 2 of 4)

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Profits and Loss

The investigation generated front-page stories and sensational headlines such as "Body Snatchers of New York" and "Dead Reckoning." But the terrible crime also spotlights the growing need for body parts. It's big business.

More than a million transplants are performed each year with tissue and related products that repair injured knees, relieve bad backs, and replace damaged heart valves or burned skin. Tissue banks are regulated to identify, retrieve and prepare medically suitable bone and tissue for future use. Most donations are made in hospitals, where federal law requires that a death be reported to an organ procurement organization (OPO) and tissue bank. Through tests and questionnaires, the OPO or bank determines if the donor is eligible. Tissue (bone, tendons, ligaments, skin, corneas, heart valves, blood vessels) can be recovered up to 24 hours after death. (This differs from organ donation, such as hearts, lungs or kidneys, which requires a more immediate retrieval process because of the need for oxygen and blood flow.)

"Tissue donation provides the last opportunity you have on earth to help someone," explains Bob Rigney, CEO of the American Association of Tissue Banks, in McLean, Virginia. "We've found more and more ways to recycle the human body." But these high-tech procedures don't come cheap. Screening, procuring, storing and cleansing the tissue is expensive. It's about a billion-dollar industry with a steady growth rate.

Scene of the Crime
The investigation began when the new owners of the Daniel George & Son funeral home in Brooklyn discovered that money from some prepaid funeral accounts was missing, and suspected mishandling of the deceased. When police searched the premises, they found a virtual chamber of horrors: a cold, clinical operating room atop the embalming chamber, accessed through a private elevator. It's where so-called cutters removed bones, ligaments, tendons and other valued tissue before cremation or burial; it became the gruesome pit stop for transporters of bodies destined for area funeral homes.

Michael Mastromarino, funeral director/body transporter Joseph Nicelli, and two others who were involved in the scheme were indicted on 122 counts in February. Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon and co-author of a book called Smile: How Dental Implants Can Transform Your Life, launched BioMedical Tissue Services, a bona fide tissue-retrieval company, after drug problems led to the surrender of his dental license. Authorities believe Mastromarino charged funeral home directors between $500 and $1,500 for each body as a handling fee, mainly for transporting to a funeral home or mortuary. But it turned out to be a way to procure a body and reap much more for the sum of its parts.

Mastromarino's retrieval practice had huge profit potential. The fee charged to distributors for a femur (thighbone) of someone under age 65 is $970. It drops to $550 over age 66. A tibia (lower leg bone) is listed at between $385 and $600, and veins, depending on their size, run between $350 and $1,000. All told, one body could generate as much as $250,000.