by Annie Cheney
Over the next three days, Brown and I talked for a total of eight hours. Tape recorders are prohibited at North Kern, so I had to take notes as he spoke, balancing the telephone receiver between my ear and my shoulder. This made observing him difficult. When I looked up, I was met by his probing stare. Brown spoke in a monotone. Most of the time, he addressed me as “Ms. Cheney.” Occasionally, though, when he wanted to plead his goodness, he called me by my first name.
“I need to let you know where my heart’s at, and the true conviction that I had to serve,” he said. “It was an incredible injustice, and it never should have happened. If a body is not donated, you don’t chop it up and sell off the body parts. I can’t make it any clearer than that, Annie.”
So what happened? I asked.
“I was the captain of that ship,” he said. “But I let other people captain it.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I had a lot of unethical people around me, and I should’ve been smarter. I should’ve fired them on the spot for the wrongful disarticulation of human remains,” he said, rubbing his nose.
“But you pled guilty.”
Brown smiled. “You obviously don’t understand the concept of pleading guilty. Jennifer Bittner doesn’t tell a lot of truth,” he added. “She’s a Jerry Springer candidate.”
Brown spent several hours trying to explain the crime that had landed him in prison. Mostly, he blamed others. “Once our company incorporated and once we received the donations, it was evident that we were not going to have enough material,” he said. “We were receiving one hundred orders a day, and we were only able to fill two. Instead of telling the customer no, I would refer them to Augie or Allen. Allen Tyler made sure that I had plenty of material.”
He paused for a moment, eyeing my expression. “Now, don’t get me wrong, Annie,” he went on, “my eyes were open all the time. . . . I don’t want to sound like the victim. I knew that when that first package came from UTMB [University of Texas Medical Branch], we were headed in the wrong direction. Anyone scrambling around on training wheels looking for a mentor would have known that.”
“So you’re saying Allen Tyler sent you body parts?” I asked.
“He sent me hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of body parts,” Brown replied.
“So who made the money?” I asked.
“We did.”
According to the Riverside district attorney, there is no evidence that Allen Tyler or Augie Perna sent body parts to Brown’s business for any reason other than to be cremated after a conference. But Brown was adamant. “They were my partners. They were officers in my companies,” he said, his voice rising. “Those two were distanced from me as if I was the mastermind to take some Frankenstein lab and to swindle people out of their loved ones’ remains. I can tell you that Allen Tyler and Augie Perna did a masterful job of alienating themselves in case of the fall. And we all know that the fall did come.”
At other times, Brown seemed to blame the business itself. “The brutality involved in the anatomical world deadens your nerves,” he said at one point. “My son said, ‘Dad, I can’t get through this in my heart. Cutting up dead people?’” Brown shook his head. “Some people never get through that. Once you cross over to the unethical area, then I don’t think you look at dignity anymore.”
This sort of indifference held true for the brokers who tempted him and the buyers who played along, he said. “They could’ve cared less. They needed the material and they sent me the check. I had plane tickets given to me. Clothing. Cases of wine!” he said. “The money you could make was incredible. It was like putting a mountain of money in a field and no one accounting for it.”
Even if he was guilty, what difference did it make? “One way or another someone makes money off of the dead,” Brown pointed out. “Funeral homes, they’re all for profit.” Besides, whether you cut up the bodies or not, death is an unpleasant business. “When you drive by a funeral home and you see those signs that say that stuff about dignity and care? There’s no dignity in death,” he said, wagging his finger at me. “The body purges, it bloats, and it bleeds. The embalming process is a mutilation of the body. I’ve seen it! There is not one mortuary in southern California that I would choose to go to when I pass away. Put me in a boat. Light it with fuel and send me off like the Vikings.”
On Saturday, I visited Brown’s old crematorium. One of his former clients had taken over the business after Brown was arrested, and I had heard that he had hired Louie Terrazas to stay on and do the cremations. This seemed like a peculiar decision, since Terrazas had been charged with one count of conspiracy and was sentenced to a year in the county jail, which he served by working at a road camp. But sure enough, when I called the crematorium, Terrazas answered the phone. I told him that I was interested in getting a tour, and he agreed to meet me.
The sun was setting as I pulled off Interstate 15 and made a right onto a dead-end street and into the empty parking lot, where Terrazas was waiting for me. It was quiet except for the caw of a distant bird. On this brisk February evening, Terrazas was dressed in army shorts, a white, short-sleeved, button-down shirt, and sandals.
“Everything’s the same. Nothing’s changed,” he said, referring to the decor as he unlocked the door and reached inside for the light switch, illuminating a large, white-tiled foyer. The cavernous room was empty except for a small Formica box in the center, which someone had decorated with a plastic fern.
“We used to have a brass dolphin fountain in the middle there,” Terrazas said, pointing to the table. In the corner, he showed me where Brown kept his fish tank. Then he led me into a kitchen, where he helped himself to a can of Bud Light.
“You want something?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” I said.
To the right of the foyer was a chapel. A reproduction of The Last Supper hung on the wall. Terrazas led me along a long, narrow hallway to the crematorium, a large garagelike room with two retractable metal doors. To the right of the doors were three cremation ovens, vaguely resembling commercial pizza ovens, with cylindrical stacks leading up and out through the roof.
On the west side of the room was a narrow white door leading to the embalming room. Affixed to the door was a plaque with the following message:
REMEMBER: Behind these doors is the most sacred room in the building. It is where loved ones come to be prepared for the most difficult event in a family’s life. Those that work behind these doors pledge to each family a never-ending commitment of respect and service to those that place their trust in us.
Terrazas giggled as he looked up at the plaque. Then, glancing at me, he shook his head and said, “I read that thing every day and I think, What a bunch of bullshit.”
Inside the embalming room were two metal gurneys and, behind them, two porcelain sinks. On the opposite wall was a cabinet containing boxes of paper surgical gowns and shoe covers.
Next to the embalming room was the walk-in refrigerator. A piece of paper was taped to the door. In typewritten letters it read: “Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence.”
Below it was another sign: “Daniel was preferred above the presidents and princes because an excellent spirit was in him.”
“Why was Daniel preferred?” I asked Louie.
“Because an excellent spirit was in him.”
“That’s not a reference to Brown’s employee Daniel Schonberger?” I asked.
“No,” Terrazas said. “It’s just a verse from the Bible.”
He opened the door to the refrigerator. The room was damp and stale.
“I’m afraid I’m going to see a ghost,” I said.
“Your mind plays with you,” he said.
Metal racks lined the right-hand wall of the refrigerator, where there were a few long cardboard boxes containing bodies, I presumed. We stood there for a moment, and then Terrazas showed me the machine for morselizing bone left over after a cremation. The machine, w
hich is common to crematoria, was a small metal bowl with an electrical blade on the bottom, not unlike a food processor’s. Terrazas explained that after the ashes cool, he whirrs them up in the morselizer until he’s achieved a powdery dust. Families are more comfortable receiving fine dust than dust with hunks of bone. But this very same process makes identifying the remains difficult. The process of cremation destroys all DNA, and without bone fragments, it is hard to tell if the ashes are even those of a human. “Don’t you want to see the upstairs?” Terrazas said suddenly, as if I had forgotten the best part.
“Sure.”
“Okay. I’m going to have to get another beer for that.” Terrazas retrieved another Bud Light from the refrigerator, and I followed him up the stairs.
At the top, lined up in a row along the wall, were the meat freezers. Terrazas nodded at them as if to say, “I told you this was no joke.” Taped to the top of each freezer was a small, square piece of paper on which was a number written in black marker. Terrazas opened #5.
The inside was deep red, like dried blood, though it was only rust.
“When my new boss took over, we dumped all kinds of bleach in them to get rid of the stench,” Terrazas explained.
“What did they smell like?” I asked.
“Like something gone bad—real bad.”
When I opened #4, the odor made me gag. It was sour, like spoiled meat.
Styrofoam coolers were piled in the corner.
“Are those left over from when Brown owned the place?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” Terrazas said.
On our way back to his office, Terrazas stopped suddenly at the door to the embalming room. He looked around nervously.
“Right now I remember the noise that the saw made. A hand saw,” he said “Like when I would go and get a body in the cooler, I would hear that noise, you know? I never heard that noise before.”
“Does it bother you to think of it now?” I asked him.
“I don’t think about it,” he said. Terrazas got another beer—his third in less than two hours—and I left.
On Sunday, Brown was jumpy when he arrived for our interview. He kept rubbing his chin and blinking. “I stayed awake last night and I thought, Why did I do this?” he said. “The accentuation of the tragedy is the fact that we were so honorable.”
Like many criminals, Brown blames his victims. Corpses are vulnerable, he tried to tell me. They’re just asking for it. Anyone would be tempted. “Right before Nixon resigned, he looked at the portrait of Kennedy and he said, ‘People will look at you and wonder who they can be and they will look at me and know what they really are.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked him.
“People look at me as Frankenstein and a ghoul and they know what they are,” he said, glaring at me. “Kennedy was just as much a crook as Nixon. Both fell from grace. Every man and woman goes to the altar and says, ‘Do I want to go right or left?’ And the greater responsibility you have, the greater the chance it is that you’ll slip up.”
Brown said the cadaver trade is rife with people who “slip up.” He said it was the nature of the game, since demand for body parts is high, supply is low, and dead bodies don’t talk. “We all have a line in the sand, Annie,” he said, “and people in the anatomical business have an eraser in their right hand and a stick in their left, and that line is moved daily. Daily!”
I asked if it was possible to regulate the business. He thought for a few moments and then shook his head.
“There won’t be any regulation. The only regulations that stay true are the ones that someone had an aggressive conviction about, like the mother that loses her child to a drunk driver.”
In the visiting room, someone had switched on a boom box. In the glass, I could see the reflection of an inmate dancing to some obscure fifties tune.
Brown leaned in to the window. He said, “It would be an arduous task to try and regulate it. You’re going to have lobbyists like J and J. It’s not going to happen. These toolers don’t want regulation.”
“Could you ever remove the profit from it?” I asked.
“Not in a capitalistic society. There are a lot of little naturalists banging their little boats into oil tankers. It’s not my idea of how to do things, but they’ll try. In the end,” Brown said, “they’re not going to succeed. There’s too much money to be made.”
chapter 4
“As Soon as You Die, You’re Mine”
In Miami, Augie Perna stood in the conference room of the Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort. Looking out the picture window, Perna studied the swimming pool, where children were playing and women were tanning, and gazed at the pale blue ocean beyond. Then he closed the drapes. In the dimness, he and two other men took six large ice-filled coolers from the corner and unpacked them. From each one they lifted a plastic-wrapped torso. They laid them on gurneys. Then, like an expert tailor arranging fabric for a suit, Perna turned back the plastic and taped the torsos in place.
A broker is only as good as his source. Luckily for Perna, after Michael Brown was arrested, he had no trouble finding a new supplier. Perna now gets most of his torsos from an Arizona company called ScienceCare Anatomical, which supplied all of the torsos for the seminar I attended in Miami.
ScienceCare was founded by a man named James E. Rogers four months after Brown started Bio-Tech Anatomical. Brown said he met “Jimmy” while Rogers was working as a salesman for Mission Life Insurance. According to Brown, Rogers stopped by his crematorium looking for new clients. The two men started talking business, he said, and soon Brown was bragging about his success with Bio-Tech. Rogers, according to Brown, was intrigued. “I’ve never seen anyone so excited as he was,” Brown said. “Jimmy was like a rocket off of a launching pad. He took it and went with it. I don’t know whether it was the money or his own entrepreneurial spirit that got him to do it,” Brown said. “But you know, the entrepreneurial spirit can’t be tamed.”
Rogers denies ever meeting or knowing Brown. But during their search of Brown’s crematorium, Riverside detectives seized a letter from Rogers to Brown in which Rogers thanked Brown for taking the time to meet with him. In the letter, Rogers enumerated the laws in place regarding anatomical donations and their penalties, specifically pointing out the prohibition on buying and selling body parts. “This is another good reason to charge procurement and processing fees etc. as opposed to fees for a specific tissue,” he wrote to Brown. In a postscript, Rogers asked, “What do you think of the logo, my friend?” ScienceCare’s logo at that point consisted of three miniature symbols: the Washington Monument, an atom, and a copy of an anatomical drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci.
ScienceCare opened in June 2000. Thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign, within two years the company was selling body parts to major surgical-equipment companies such as Arthrex and Smith & Nephew—big companies with a great need for corpses.
ScienceCare has modernized the corpse-recruiting process. Unlike Brown’s company, whose corpses presented themselves, ScienceCare obtains donations by advertising in the newspaper and at senior citizen conventions and sending its employees to nursing homes and hospice centers in and around Arizona to pitch the perks of donation. These include free transportation for every corpse, free filing of death certificates, and a free cremation, a value of approximately $500. The company advertises in the yellow pages under Cremation: ScienceCare Anatomical Inc. “Cremation at No Cost.”
Unlike medical schools, which reject autopsied or obese bodies or the bodies of people who have died of certain diseases, ScienceCare is somewhat flexible. Though the company rejects bodies infected with HIV and hepatitis, it has no limits on age or size, and if a body is missing an organ or some other part, the company can always find a home for the rest. The company has advertised this fact freely, sending letters and faxes to medical schools and offering to take bodies that they refuse, though most medical schools have been reluctant to refer families to a for-profit company.
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br /> ScienceCare’s success has spawned a branch in Denver and a similar company in Oregon called BioGift, which is owned by a former ScienceCare employee.
Perna stood for a moment in the Ocean Room, his petite hands on his hips, admiring the torso at Station 1, which was so tiny it could have been mistaken for that of a child. The arms and legs had been removed, and the stumps that remained exposed curly masses of veins and muscles. “See here?” he said, gesturing matter-of-factly with his hands. “This is where the arms would be. And the legs—they would be there. But we don’t need the legs for this type of thing. That would be wasteful.”
Like other brokers, Perna rarely buys a whole corpse. It’s cheaper for him to just get the parts that he needs, and it’s more profitable for companies like ScienceCare, which can sell the legs and arms and heads to someone else. Corpses are precious commodities, and once dismembered, each one goes much farther than it would have had it been left intact.
Perna buys his torsos precut and frozen from ScienceCare and has them shipped from Arizona to his warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He keeps fifty or sixty torsos on hand, each of which takes about four days to defrost. The thaw time varies with the size of the corpse, which means it varies a good deal. “Look at that one over there,” Perna said, pointing to a beach ball of a torso in the corner. “Look at how much larger that one is.”
Augie Perna got his start in the body-parts business through pigs. In the mid-1990s, a veterinarian friend gave him a job at his company, Worldwide Mobile Vet. The company, Perna said, bought live pigs from farms in southern California and elsewhere and trucked them to medical-training seminars at hotels, universities, and hospitals around the country. For decades, live pigs were the specimen of choice for educating surgeons. Their anatomy is amazingly close to that of a human being and like a human patient under anesthesia, but unlike a corpse, pigs bleed. During the 1990s, as courses in surgery began to focus on minimally invasive techniques, anatomical correctness became more important than the propensity to bleed.
