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.
The man’s body stretched out in front of Cruceta in the back room of a Manhattan funeral home last summer had yellowish skin. His eyes had the same sickly cast: a sign of jaundice. Cruceta phoned his boss, Michael Mastromarino, to tell him the bad news: The body failed inspection.
But Mastromarino, by Cruceta’s account, surprised him. The boss came down, checked out the body himself and declared “everything looked fine.” 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.” 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 was not one of them.
Authorities say Biomedical Tissue Services secretly carved up hundreds of cadavers – among them that of “Masterpiece Theatre” host Alistair Cooke – without the families of the deceased knowing it. They then peddled the pieces on the lucrative body-parts market.
Even scarier: The authorities say BTS doctored paperwork to hide the fact that some of the dead were too old and diseased to be donors. As a result, they say, patients across the country may have gotten infections along with their dental implants and hip replacements.
Body parts became big business for Mastromarino. His lawyer said he was among the first in the industry to figure out that one way to meet the high demand for donated human tissue was to turn to funeral homes.
Family members told investigators no one sought permission for body-part donations and that their signatures were forged.
The New York City Police Department has interviewed relatives of 1,077 people whose bodies were harvested. Only one said permission was given.
Meanwhile, the director of Denver’s Bonfils Blood Center, Dr. Michael Bauer, was hired by several tissue banks to review donor charts to ensure tissue was safe.
Last Sept. 28, 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 called the number listed for her doctor.
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. Each time, no doctor answered.
“I got through the first 10, and that’s when all the hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Bauer said.
The case, said the prosecutor, is like a “cheap horror movie.”
Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration shut down BTS amid its own investigation.
Cruceta and Mastromarino are free on bail. Mastromarino refused requests for interviews.
