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Unearthing Evidence
Vito Bruno was another one who learned about this crime the hard way. An award-winning recording industry producer, he had worked himself up from his dad's immigrant Italian roots. His 75-year-old father, Michael, proudly supported his family as a New York City cabdriver before succumbing to cancer at a veterans hospital in Brooklyn in May 2003. Bruno followed his father's wish for cremation and made arrangements with a local Brooklyn funeral home that authorities now say supplied bodies to Mastromarino's alleged scheme.Then late last year, police detectives knocked on Bruno's front door. They gently explained that his father was part of an ongoing bone-harvesting investigation, and they showed him the tissue transfer documents. "It was not my signature on the paper," Bruno says, "and they changed the cause of death from cancer to heart attack. Somebody was obviously pulling a scam, what could have been the perfect crime because the evidence was destroyed." Bruno described the disclosure as agonizing because "if my father had known that he could have made other people sick -- if he had a grave, he'd be rolling over in it."
Authorities continued to make the horrifying notifications, but they knew they needed physical evidence to make their case. On a chilly November day, law enforcement, medical and funeral industry officials gathered at a Queens, New York, cemetery as the coffin of Esfir Perelmuter was unearthed. It became the first in a series of exhumations, followed by autopsies, to determine whether tissue had been taken from the deceased. Authorities say the 82-year-old woman died of a brain tumor, but paperwork from BioMedical indicated she died at 69 of heart disease. Investigators also found an eerily similar pattern after more bodies were examined: tissue and bones from the waist down were gone.
"And what we discovered in their place was PVC pipe," says Michael Vecchione, chief of investigations for the Brooklyn DA. "An elbow-shaped pipe would be jammed into the hip and then a long pipe would be running down the leg and mimic the bone that was there. It would then be attached to the ankle or foot by a bolt that was driven through the pipe and screwed in on the outside of the leg."
"You don't go to Home Depot and get some PVC pipe," says Mastromarino's attorney Mario Gallucci, who explains that the pipe "has been acceptable" for this specific use. Gallucci says the funeral homes, not his client, handled consent forms. And he says the tissue banks accepting the body parts were responsible for testing tissue and blood samples sent by BioMedical.
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