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Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, New Jersey, a biomedical supply house, along with three others including Brooklyn funeral home owner Joseph Nicelli, were recently charged with selling body parts for use in transplants in a scheme a district attorney called "something out of a cheap horror movie."
Mastromarino was an oral surgeon who went into the tissue business after losing his dentist license, prosecutors said. Nicelli was a partner in the business, according to prescutors. The other defendants were Lee Crucetta and Christopher Aldorasi.
Prosecutors said the defendants made millions of dollars obtaining bodies from funeral parlors in three states. According to Prosecutors, they allegedly forged death certificates and organ donor consent forms to make it look as if the bones, skin, tendons, heart valves and other tissue were legally removed. "I think we can agree that the conduct uncovered in this case is among the most ghastly imaginable," said Rose Gill Hearn, commissioner of the city Department of Investigation. "It was shockingly callous in its disregard for the sanctity of human remains."
The four men are accused of harvesting tissue from cadavers without legal consent and without proper screening for medical conditions that would make the tissue unsuitable for transplantation. Those allegations related to activity in New York City, most of it in a single Brooklyn funeral home owned by one of the men who was charged.
The bodies came from funeral homes in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey that contracted with the Brooklyn funeral parlor for embalming. Prosecutors said more arrests were possible. Prosecutors said the defendants took organs from people who had not given consent or were too old or too sick to donate. The defendants allegedly forged consent forms and altered the death certificates to indicate the victims had been younger and healthier, authorities said.
X-rays and photos of recently exhumed cadavers show that where leg bones should have been, someone had inserted white plumbing plastic pipes. The pipes, which were the kind used for home plumbing projects available at any hardware store, were crudely reconnected to hip and ankle bones with screws before the legs were sewn back up.
Mastromarino harvested the tissue, skin, bones, veins and other material at the funeral homes and packaged them in sterile plastic bags and placed in coolers filled with ice. The coolers were sent by commercial airliner to New Jersey, where they were repackaged and deep-frozen at the company's facility, sources said. Material then was sold to five larger tissue processing concerns, which in turn provided specimens to hospitals, physicians and laboratories around the country. Possible recipients may include patients who received tissue from Medtronic Sofamor Danek, and Regeneration Technologies, of Alachua Florida.
Prosecutors said the defendants forged death certificates and organ-donor consent forms to make it appear the parts were taken legally. The defendants made millions of dollars from the scheme, prosecutors said.The FDA ordered the recall of all of Biomedical Tissue's products in October, saying concerns had been raised that the social-medical histories of some donors were inaccurate. Federal regulations require that a prospective donor's history be examined to ensure the donor doesn't have communicable diseases and that his or her body parts are medically useful. The nine-month investigation into the ring centered on BioMedical Tissue Services and BioTissue Technologies, both headquartered in Fort Lee, N.J., authorities said.
The FDA recommended that, as a precaution, patients who had received material gathered by Biomedical Tissue be tested for viral hepatitis, syphilis and the viruses that cause AIDS. For a free case evaluation, please fill out the form below:
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