by Annie Cheney
Perna saw an opportunity. “This was something that I thought would always be around, because all of the new procedures that are coming out on the market are minimally invasive.” Cadavers were both more profitable—$1,500 for a torso versus $250 for a pig—and, being inanimate, easier to handle. “Businesswise,” Perna said, “the returns are there.”
In 1995, Perna founded his first company, Limbs & Things—the name was later changed to the more tasteful Surgical Body Forms. Three years later, he started IMET and, a year after that, a sister company, Mobile Medical Training Unit. IMET hosts half a dozen educational courses per year.
But the bulk of Perna’s income comes from supplying surgical-equipment companies and doctors with body parts to use in seminars. Perna offers them a top-drawer corpse service, transporting the parts, setting them up, keeping them fresh, and hauling them away. The companies reward him handsomely. “I’m doing a course for cancer where they want the bodies from the head all the way down to the midtibia,” he said. “That ticket? Sixty-eight thousand dollars! I make, like, $15,000 after it’s all said and done—for one day’s worth of work.”
Providing this type of service requires a certain amount of skill, particularly in the area of corpse maintenance. “Once we defrost the [torsos], the liquid comes out,” Perna said. “We also give them what you call a bowel prep.”
I asked him how one goes about prepping a bowel.
“With a device that we designed. We go up the rectum.”
Here I must have flinched, because Perna touched my arm softly, as if to soothe me. “You see, the moment you die, you have a bowel movement,” he said. “We take care of that.”
It’s not every man who would give a corpse an enema. Consequently, competition in Perna’s field is scarce. But the opportunities are substantial. There are hundreds of educational seminars held every year by associations, hospitals, universities, and educational companies like IMET. While many of these consist simply of lectures and slides, others, targeted at surgeons, offer “hands-on training” with body parts.
No one keeps track of exactly how many courses feature anatomical specimens, but Florida, a popular state for training seminars, provides some clues. Florida is the only state in the country that requires vendors to get approval from the state anatomy board before shipping in parts.
Florida state records show that in 2003, there were twenty-one requests to the board by companies and doctors who wanted to import body parts for surgical-training seminars. All twenty-one requests were approved, and over the course of the year, seventy-six heads and necks, eighty-three shoulders, thirty-four whole cadavers, thirty-two torsos, eighteen legs, ten knees, eight hands, six forearms, and one cervical spine crossed the border into Florida. In 1995, there were just two requests.
Every year, dozens of body parts enter the state undetected. Indeed, according to Dr. Lynn Romrell, the director of the Anatomical Board of Florida, Augie Perna never sought approval to bring his torsos to the Trump.
Companies that market minimally invasive technology—like Zimmer, Medtronic Sofamor Danek, Ethicon Endosurgery, Stryker Endoscopy, and US Surgical, to name just a few—not only hold conferences in hotels, hospitals, and universities, but some have also built their own institutes, where surgeons can attend courses showcasing the company’s devices.
In 2003, for example, Zimmer spent about $2 million to build a 15,000-square-foot training center in Warsaw, Indiana, for courses in minimally invasive joint replacement; the company plans to create satellite institutes around the world. Ethicon Endosurgery, a division of Johnson & Johnson, already has three institutes—in Hamburg, Tokyo, and Cincinnati. For those surgeons who don’t want to travel, Medtronic has even transformed a tractor-trailer into a mobile learning center. Surgeons call it “the cadaver truck.”
The more hands-on courses that are available, the more the demand for brokers. As Perna explained it, many companies with their own centers won’t get involved in the dirty work of corpses. Instead they contract it out to people like him. In some cases, Perna is hired directly by the doctors teaching the seminars.
Records show that he has provided torsos and torso expertise to some of the country’s most prominent surgeons. “These doctors are personal friends of mine,” he said.
“How did you work that angle?” I asked.
“They’re guys,” he said. “It’s that comradity that we have. You know, I’m not an egghead.”
Besides locating reliable suppliers like Brown, Perna also oversees the interstate trafficking of parts. If a customer in Kansas needs a shoulder, Perna will arrange delivery. I asked him how he got the torsos from Pennsylvania to Florida. These he may drive down, he said, but as often as not, he’ll simply pack them up like so many Kobe steaks and mail them. He said, “Why reinvent the wheel? You call a freight company and they deal with it.”
Perna and ScienceCare have accounts with Airways Freight Corporation, a pioneering middleman in the cadaver trade. Michael Brown was also an Airways client. “We do consider ourselves to be a leader in the movement of anatomical specimens,” said the marketing director at Airways, Mike Nimmo. He also said that Airways brokers about eighty body-parts shipments a month, using commercial airlines, FedEx, and UPS. But he was hesitant to provide details. “I don’t think the public realizes that these products are being shipped through the general system.”
Some shipping professionals are themselves surprised to find body parts in the mail. In November 2003, FedEx employees in Maplewood, Missouri, noticed that an unmarked package was leaking blood. When they opened the package and two others bound for the same destination, they found a leg and two arms. FedEx prohibits shipping human remains, but their clients do it anyway. In the Missouri case, the shipper was unrepentant. As he told a local reporter, “Boxes break.”
In the Ocean Room, one of the doctors himself was struggling with a leaking corpse. “Excuse me a moment,” Perna said, and hurried over to help. As I stood watching, a big-bellied guy with a suntan and round metal-rim glasses came over and introduced himself as Mike Charloff, IMET’s “Florida person.” Charloff was jolly and extraordinarily friendly. “I help them out when they’re lacking people,” he explained in a smoker’s rumble.
We were joined by Dave Myers, a cherubic blonde with a goatee, wearing surgical scrubs like Perna’s. “Having fun today?” he asked with apparent sincerity.
“Dave drove down and then stayed at my house for one night,” Charloff said. They left the torsos in the car. “I have neighbors across the street that are from Ghana, and if she knew about it she would pack up and leave. She would be like, ‘I got to go. I got to go.’” Charloff waved his hands in an approximation of Ghanaian panic.
The quality of the product is important in any business, but it is crucial in the body business, since corpses are in a state of decay. Myers, Charloff, and Perna have developed tricks for preserving the flesh. For example, before freezing a corpse, they massage Vicks VapoRub into the skin. That way when the body defrosts, the odor is of menthol, not old cheese. The most important thing is to keep the body cool. On long drives, they stop regularly at 7-Eleven for ice.
On the second morning of the Miami conference, I found Perna alone with his torsos in the Ocean Room. He was spritzing them with bright blue deodorizer from a spray bottle. Overnight, they had acquired a renewed vigor and their skin glistened as a live person’s might after a short jog.
“Can I touch one?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he said, guiding me to a torso in the corner. Through my plastic glove, the freckled skin of the torso felt cool. The flesh yielded to my fingers like clay.
Perna watched me closely.
“Does this ever get you down?” I asked him.
“The cadavers?”
“Yeah.”
“Not really,” he said, and sighed, as if I had missed something important. “You don’t see a face with it. There’s no name associated with it.”
At 11 o’clock, the doors
opened and surgeons began to make their way over to the tables. Perna had partitioned off half the room for a group of gynecologists. There were nine new stations with female torsos. The women were covered in plastic, except for their vaginas, which had been propped up on blocks like small ruddy mountains.
It is a rare woman who would expose herself in this way to strangers—let alone in a banquet hall—and even the surgeons seemed uncomfortable.
“I don’t want to know what’s going on over there,” one of the urology instructors told me as he put on his gloves. “I mean, a kidney is a kidney, but a vagina is human.”
Dr. Kenneth Rutledge, a soft-spoken urologist who had flown in from Atlanta for the course, stood nearby. Before he reached through the Lap Disc opening into a torso, he put four gloves on his hand.
“We’re risking ourselves here,” he told me later, “because we don’t know if some of these people may have died from HIV.”
He looked at the torso, and his expression crumbled.
“Oh, this is gross,” he said. “This is worse than a horror movie.” He looked up at me. “I’m amazed that you, as a nonmedical person, can be in here and not be vomiting.”
It was a good point. I decided to head for the ocean.
To get to the beach at the Trump, you have to walk down three flights of whitewashed concrete stairs at the back of the hotel. Even after Trump’s big investment, it feels like the entrance to a municipal swimming pool. The metal railing beside the stairs was hot beneath my hand. The sun beat down, but I couldn’t get rid of the chills. I was wearing a heavy wool pantsuit and a long-sleeved shirt, but my teeth were chattering.
I thought: Get out on the warm beach with live people. Shake off all this death. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I turned the corner and there before me were dozens of torsos: white fleshy torsos, walnut-colored torsos in bikinis, hot sweaty torsos on towels in the sand.
I stood for a moment on the concrete landing, feeling the heat through the rubber soles of my shoes. If Allen Tyler cut off the heads and limbs of these bodies on the beach, they’d look a lot like the ones upstairs. Fresh torsos are like that. They look and feel real, which is precisely what makes them so valuable.
In 1789, a writer named Francis Hopkinson published a poem entitled “An Oration, Which Might Have Been Delivered to the Students in Anatomy.” The poem contains the lines:
No where’s the difference?—to th’ impartial eye
A leg of mutton and a human thigh
Are just the same—for surely all must own
Flesh is but flesh, and bone is only bone.
In the poem, Hopkinson defends the practice of anatomical dissection and points to something that I was quickly learning: When your livelihood depends on dead bodies, it helps to think of them as something else. In the funeral industry, that something else is very often meat.
I’ve talked to many people in the funeral business—funeral directors who spoke in melancholy whispers, members of the local Lions Club, brassy salesman types, and guys who carried guns with them when they picked up a body, “just in case.” When it came to questions of human flesh, the analogies they offered were much the same.
“How long can a fresh body last in a van?” I asked one man.
“You ever put a steak out in the sun?”
“How hard is it to cut one up?” I asked another.
“It’s like carving a turkey. If someone wants a drumstick, you better know where the joints are. If you’ve got a sharp knife, it ain’t hard.”
“Can you freeze a corpse?”
“Just like a chicken.”
A veteran New York City cop who has coped with dead bodies found everywhere—from suitcases to trash cans—put it most succinctly: “You don’t think about what it was. You think about what it is. And it’s a lump of meat.”
Upstairs in my room at the Trump later that evening, I ran water for a bath and set about making coffee. As I spooned creamer into my cup, I suddenly detected the smell of decomposing flesh. I sniffed the white powder. Yes, there it was. But it was everywhere. In the coffee beans. Out on the balcony. Was it me?
I took off my clothes, avoiding the enormous mirror on the closet door, and slid into the tub. The hard porcelain rubbed painfully against my bones, and I realized, looking down, that in two days I had dropped at least five or six pounds. My stomach was sunk below my ribs, my arms floated like the branches of a sapling, and I could smell the foul odor of death wafting up from the warm water. I stuck my nose into a bottle of the Trump’s green sea-grass aromatherapy bath gel until the gooey liquid was touching my nostrils, but the nauseatingly sweet smell only intensified. (Olfactory hallucinations, I later learned, are very often associated with psychological conditions, and it is common for people who experience them to believe that they themselves are the cause of the odors.)
As I lay in the tub, my fear mounting, I remembered a conversation that I had had with Richard Santore, a retired funeral director from Brooklyn, who sought to be known in the 1980s as the “Crazy Eddie of the Funeral Business.” Santore was one of the first people in the funeral industry, as far as I can tell, to start his own donor program. In the 1970s, he founded the Anatomical Gift Bank of New York, which shared offices with his funeral home, and which was later investigated by the Health Department for not obtaining and filing the proper paperwork for donated bodies. In 1979, five of his cadavers went missing and were discovered in a warehouse in Florence, Kentucky. But Santore continued to receive bodies until the 1980s.
When I mentioned this incident to him over the phone, Santore became agitated and told me to turn off the tape recorder. Later, he suggested that I stop concentrating on the past. “Just because Charlie Jones did something terribly wrong five years ago, is it right to rehash it today in such a way that it makes it appear as though I do it as a regular practice? That’s wrong. That’s yellow journalism,” he told me from his new office in Tennessee, where he published a now-defunct online newsletter titled Today in Deathcare. I asked him, if he ever got up to New York, whether he’d like to meet me and talk in person.
“Yes,” he said. “And maybe I’ll strangle you.”
After we hung up, Santore called me at two in the morning. His number showed up on my caller ID. When I picked up the phone, there was no answer, but I could hear the caller breathing heavily on the other end of the line.
“Hello? Hello?” I said.
After I got out of the bathtub, a feeling akin to defiance compelled me to call room service and order a rare hamburger. When it arrived, I sat down on the bed and ate the bloody meat in my underwear.
As the weekend dragged on, the smell of death in the Ocean Room grew stronger and stronger until it was unbearable. Charloff, the assistant, was angry.
He said, “I told the guy from the hotel at the beginning, that if you keep it cold in here, there will be no smell. If you don’t, there’s nothing we can do.”
During nearly ten hours of torso work, the doctors had successfully performed nephrectomies, both hand-assisted and laparoscopic; some had even removed the prostate laparscopically, an incredibly challenging operation. They had learned how to sew and cut and cauterize tissue, manipulating their instruments through minute incisions.
Perna was delighted by their progress. He said the next thing he was going to do was expand into gastric-bypass surgery, also known as stomach stapling, a “very upcoming field.” Perna said that 65 percent of people in the United States are overweight, with the fastest-growing obesity rate among children.
“Augie is really a very bright man,” Charloff said later. “He really is. He’s a thinker when it comes to business.”
“Now, the three of us, we want to get the bodies for ourselves,” Charloff confided. “You have to do some market research . . . go to hospitals.”
Listening to Charloff, I was reminded of Michael Brown. Charloff seemed like an unlikely candidate to run his own body-parts company. He was simple and not at all dark, the sort of
guy who likes to drink a beer and sit out on his back porch in the evening, watching the stars and playing with his dog.
“Augie pretty much will have to direct me as far as how to sell the product,” Charloff went on. “How to say the right things to the people and how not to make people think that I’m a bad guy because I don’t know the lingo, so to speak. That’s where Augie comes in.”
“I feel like I’m witnessing something revolutionary,” I said, half in disbelief.
“You are! You know why?” Charloff looked at me and grinned. Then he explained to me that he had called officials in Pennsylvania and Florida to discuss the legalities of the tissue-banking business and they had no idea what he was talking about. “So that means I’ve got to be one of the first hundred or less that’s doing something like this, and you know, I don’t mean to sound coarse, but that’s a nice living.”
Charloff nodded toward the torsos and laughed. “And it’s not like you’re selling cars, because what you’re doing is you’re bettering mankind.”
I asked him about the shaky legality of profiting from corpses.
Charloff smiled and said, “We’re not selling these. They’re being leased.” Then he laughed. In fact, Perna has the remains cremated when he is done with them. Then he either returns the ashes to the supplier, which returns them to the families of the deceased, or he simply has the crematorium scatter them to the winds.
After I got home from the conference, I met up with Perna at a diner near his house in New Jersey. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. He looked smaller without his surgical scrubs. His cell phone rang throughout our conversation. The first time, it was his mother. “Hi, Ma,” he said, exasperated. “Yes, Ma.” Covering up the mouthpiece he whispered, “I take care of my parents, too.” And then he hung up the phone.
