by Annie Cheney
“Am I going to compete with you?” King barked. “I don’t have a tissue bank. I’m a physician trying to get the best for my patients and to protect my patients.” King finally got some real answers—but only when his patient filed a lawsuit against the tissue bank.
From the moment I met Budelman, I wanted to see behind the veil of secrecy. Finally, in November 2003, after I had made several phone calls and sent two letters, RTI executives allowed me to visit the company’s headquarters in Alachua, a town of 6,000 people just northwest of Gainesville, where the University of Florida is located.
Wendy Crites Wacker, a prim, cheerful blonde, met me at the front desk, where we began the company tour. Our first stop was the processing facility, a 65,000-square-foot building, where couriers deliver bones and other types of human tissue every day in coolers. The company will not release exact numbers, but CEO Brian Hutchison says RTI processes tissue from “fewer than 4,000” corpses every year. Federal regulations don’t stipulate where tissue can be harvested. Some of it might be removed from a corpse in a morgue or a medical examiner’s office. Some might come from a surgical suite in a local tissue bank or from the embalming room in a funeral home.
The manufacturing facility is a large warehouse. Sitting off to the side of the company’s other buildings in a lush, green office park, it is constructed around a central area known as the “processing core.” There tissue is transformed into products under sterile conditions.
I followed Wacker into the building, and we were met by a hum one would expect to hear in a factory. She informed me that we would not be able to enter the core or to see any of the action up close. “You can’t walk in there unless you are suited up and gowned in and all of that kind of stuff,” she explained, leading me along a wide hallway with a shiny floor. One wall featured a poster board with pictures of RTI’s many products—the Cornerstone, the Tangent, and MD-II, and others, a variety of small anchors, chips, dowels, and wedges—the sort of implements one might see in a carpentry shop, but these were fashioned from pure white bone. “It’s all precision-tooled,” Wacker said proudly.
One of RTI’s other star products is Regenafil, an injectable bone paste. I realized this must have been what Gray Budelman meant when he mentioned grinding up bone. One form of the paste contains tiny chunks of bone. Another contains larger pieces. Both contain a gelatin-carrier base made from pigs. “It’s mostly like a filler, in layman’s terms. To fill in the gaps,” Wacker said. “If you have any holes in the jawbone, it actually grows new bone.”
Like any manufacturing process, the manner in which human tissue becomes a product involves many steps. First, the coolers are dropped off at a receiving area. After they are logged in, the tissue is removed and placed in a quarantine freezer at –50°C. “It’s nippy in there,” Wacker said. Each cooler that arrives should contain a vial of the donor’s blood, which is tested for HIV, hepatitis, and syphilis. If it clears these tests, the tissue is removed from the freezer and a technician cleans off any bits of flesh that still cling to it. Then it is repackaged and carried into another room, where it is cut and tooled into various shapes and sizes on a FADAL, a machine found in many factories.
An ingenious and versatile machine, the FADAL translates blueprints into computer code, which instructs the machine how to cut the material in question. It’s the type of machine that Lockheed Martin and Boeing use to cut aluminum.
Wacker led me to a narrow window through which I could see a tall young man dressed in a white gown and mask. He was stooped over a sleek lab table, staring at a series of bone screws. Behind him, another man lowered the head of a FADAL machine onto a piece of bone, sending bits of white dust flying. “The reason that we use so much computer-controlled machinery is because there is such a thing as human error,” Wacker said. “If we have a technician who makes a mistake on a piece of tissue, then it can’t be used anymore. It’s a disservice to the donor family.”
After the tissue is cut, it goes into BioCleanse, RTI’s patented cleansing system. BioCleanse resembles a state-of-the-art washing machine. It can scour and wash many different types of tissue, including bone. “The technician just shuts the door and presses a button. It takes out all the human error. It’s all computer-controlled,” Wacker said. BioCleanse can remove all blood, lipids, marrow, bacteria, fungi, and spores within five hours. It is also designed to remove HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C, even though those viruses are screened for before the tissue enters BioCleanse. “It pulls them all out,” Wacker gushed. “What you have left is a clean, white bone.”
Everything was modern and nothing had been left to chance. Once the tissue is cleaned, Wacker explained, it may be freeze-dried, depending on the type. Then it is packaged and labeled and readied for shipping. “Every single piece of tissue is in a package that has a bar code sticker on it,” Wacker said. “The sticker will tell where the tissue came from and relate it to medical records, and it will relate to the donor-procurement agency who procured it.” In the shipping room, there were shelves with plastic bags full of bones waiting to be sent to distributors.
The tone of my tour was entirely upbeat, full of marvel at the wonders produced by computer-controlled equipment and cleansing procedures. It was easy to forget that human corpses were driving the gears of this process. As I followed Wacker around, I recalled something Augie Perna had said: “That torso that you’re living in right now is just flesh and bones. To me, it’s a product.”
I wanted to see the machine that makes Regenafil bone paste, but Wacker forced a smile and said the machine was deep inside the core and off-limits to visitors. After our tour, she led me back to the main building and ushered me into a plush conference room to meet with RTI’s CEO, Brian Hutchison. I sat down at a sleek table made of dark wood. Resting on the table was a narrow wooden case resembling a jewelry box. The box had been fitted with a glass lid through which I could see pieces of what appeared to be pure white bone.
As I gazed at the bone pieces, Brian Hutchison strolled in. In his early forties, Hutchison is tall and handsome. He wore a tailored gray woolen suit and exuded the confidence of a successful salesman. In 2003, Hutchison earned half a million dollars. As of this writing, his stock options were worth more than $4 million.
On the subject of donation, he was careful to be somber. “It’s the last good thing your loved one can do.”
Hutchison’s words haunted me.
A year later, the Brooklyn District Attorney in New York launched a criminal investigation into one of RTI’s suppliers. The target of the investigation was Biomedical Tissue Services, the tissue bank run by Michael Mastromarino, the ex-dentist who had approached Gray Budelman, looking for bones. According to those familiar with the investigation, the DA was looking into allegations that Dr. Mastromarino had been harvesting and stealing body parts from New York funeral homes and selling them to RTI and two other processors for as much as $7,000 each.
The details of the case were as familiar as they were chilling. Like Allen Tyler, Mastromarino performed his grisly work on metal gurneys in the embalming rooms of funeral homes. From a thousand or so dead subjects, Mastromarino lifted bones, tendons, skin, ligaments, and heart valves. When he was finished, he replaced the missing bones with plumber’s polyvinyl chloride pipe, sewed the bodies up, and hauled them back to his tissue bank in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The DA is investigating whether Mastromarino, in fact, obtained consent from all of the families.
Later, Mastromarino packed the parts in ice and shipped them out via FedEx.
The business was reminiscent of Michael Brown’s. But these body parts were not destined for hotel conference rooms or underground brokers. They were headed for hospitals, where they were to be transplanted into living people like Brian Lykins. In this case, Mastromarino was selling body parts under the watchful eyes of the FDA. In fact, the FDA had inspected his company, and the agency was well aware that he obtained parts from funeral homes. Their advice to him? Make sure the embalming rooms a
re kept clean.
Like Brown, Mastromarino was blessed with plenty of eager clients. According to those close to the investigation, Mastromarino had no trouble selling his deceitfully acquired wares. He simply provided his clients with forged consent forms and partial death certificates, the sources said. In one potentially dangerous case reported by the New York Daily News, the records of a woman who had died of drug abuse were changed to indicate death from cardiac arrest.
Many of the body parts harvested by Mastromarino wound up at Regeneration Technologies Inc. in the same facility that I had visited, where they were shuttled through factory machines, “tooled” into neat shapes, and reborn—thanks to BioCleanse—as pristine “products.” As of this writing, it’s not clear if the company ever questioned Mastromarino about the body parts he sold them, or if, like so many buyers in the morally ambiguous cadaver trade, they simply accepted what they were told. RTI, after all, actively encourages its suppliers to access bodies through funeral homes. In 2004, the company had relationships with as many as 300 funeral homes around the country.
With each passing day, the investigation grew. Soon, police were investigating at least six funeral homes in New York and several more in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida.
Meanwhile, it was business as usual in the cadaver trade. While detectives from New York’s major case squad were busy chasing down new leads, RTI was busy reassuring stockholders. In a press release, CEO Brian Hutchison promised investors that “RTI takes every precaution available to ensure the safety of the patients receiving its processed tissue.” Yet after the scandal broke, the company took a full week to announce a recall of products made with what might have been stolen tissue.
One Saturday night, as I flipped through stories about Mastromarino in the local papers, the phone rang. It had been four years since another phone call with an anatomist first alerted me to the existence of the underground cadaver trade.
“This thing has only begun,” a deep voice said. “The tentacles reach to many different places. One doesn’t know where it’s going to stop.”
Yes, I thought. Soon, the interwoven tentacles of the body brokers would emerge once again, somewhere new.
Notes
The following notes list the most important sources for each chapter. They do not include the source of every fact or quotation in the book. Quotes that are not cited came from interviews I conducted during my research.
Introduction
My main source for the introduction was a visit to the Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort. I relied on an interview with Marsha Newton, from the Office of Clinical Standards and Quality at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid for information about organ-procurement organizations. I also drew on an interview with UNOS spokesperson Anne Paschke. The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 and the Uniform Anatomical Gift Acts of 1968 and 1987 provided additional information. The history of funerals was based on Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920, by James J. Farrell. Cremation statistics were provided by CANA (Cremation Association of North America). The tens of thousands of bodies that enter the cadaver trade includes those that are processed for tissue transplantation and those used for education and research.
1. Wilderness
My main source for this chapter was Jim Farrelly’s mother, Joyce Zamazanuk. Interviews with Jim’s sister, Joy, his stepfather, Paul, and his long-time partner, Billy Baker, provided additional information.
My main sources for the prevalence of body-parts thefts during autopsies were the following court cases: Brotherton vs. Cleveland et al. and Whaley vs. County of Tuscola. I also drew on reporting by Ralph Frammolino in the Los Angeles Times. In 1997, Frammolino revealed that the Los Angeles coroner was selling corneas removed during autopsies to the Doheny Eye and Tissue Transplant Bank for $215 to $335 per set. Many of the corneas were taken without explicit permission from their loved ones. I also drew on a State of New York Department of Health Investigation into the Onondaga county Medical Examiner’s Office. The Onondaga Medical Examiner was found to have retained more than 100 body parts from autopsied bodies without permission during the 1980s. Articles about the Onondaga Medical Examiner case by John O’Brien in The Post-Standard between 1989 and 2002 provided further information. See also Chapter Six: Dr. Martin Spector bought body parts that had been harvested from autopsied bodies. Allegations of body-parts theft during autopsies have arisen most recently at the Medical Examiner’s office in Portland, Maine, and at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Boston.
For cases of body parts thefts in funeral homes, see Chapters 2, 3, and 7. Also, People vs. Michael Francis Brown et al, People vs. David Sconce et al, and Bruno vs. English Bros. Funeral Home et al.
2. An Ideal Situation and 3. The “Toolers”
My main source for these chapters was the Riverside County District Attorney’s case file on Michael Francis Brown. I also relied heavily on transcripts from the criminal grand jury proceedings and from the proceedings of Brown’s sentencing. Specifics about the case were provided by Riverside Sheriff’s Investigator Rene Rodriguez, Investigator Robert Joseph, Sergeant Jeff Mullins, and Riverside District Attorney Karen Gorham.
Facts about David Sconce’s crimes were drawn from three books: Ashes: Terrifying True Horror of a Macabre Criminal Career, by Joseph James, A Family Business, by Ken Englade, and Chop Shop, by Kathy Braidhill.
Descriptions of events in the history of Bio-Tech Anatomical and California Bio-Science were drawn from grand jury transcripts and interviews that I conducted with Michael Brown and his employees, associates, and acquaintances. Jennifer Bittner was a primary source of information. Louie Terrazas, John Schultz, and Kathy Gross helped fill out the story. Interviews with Rose Tyler, Allen Tyler’s wife, and Kenneth Carter, Tyler’s best friend, provided additional information.
For information about Ronald King, I relied on an interview with King’s stepson, Mike DiMeglio. For the description of King’s dismemberment, I referred to documents from Brown’s case file and an interview with Jennifer Bittner and with Allen Tyler.
4. “As Soon as You Die, You’re Mine”
My main sources for this chapter were interviews with Agostino Perna, Allen Tyler, Mike Charloff, and Dave Myers. Dr. Harry Reich and Dr. Earl Sands provided additional information about advancements in minimally invasive surgery.
I also relied heavily on observations that I made during a visit to the IMET conference at the Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort in 2003.
For background on ScienceCare Anatomical, I referred to a letter from James E. Rogers to Michael Francis Brown obtained from the California Department of Health Services. I also drew on information obtained during interviews with Michael Brown, Agostino Perna, and James E. Rogers. For information about ScienceCare’s customers, I relied on requests made by surgical-equipment companies and doctors to the Anatomical Board of the State of Florida.
Information about the conferences held in Florida was taken from requests to import body parts filed with the Anatomical Board of the State of Florida between 1993 and 2003. I also relied on several interviews with the executive director of the Anatomical Board, Dr. Lynn Romrell.
My sources for the section about Richard Santore were a New York State Department of Health Case Report filed in 1987; an Associated Press report on May 3, 1979, “The Crazy Eddie of the Cremation Business,” which appeared in New York City Business (now Crain’s New York Business) June 3, 1985; and an interview with Richard Santore.
For my description of the bloody FedEx boxes, I relied on an investigative report filed by the Kirkwood Police on November 5, 2003, and articles published in the St. Louis Dispatch on November 20, November 23, and December 11, 2003, by Todd C. Frankel. An interview with Mike Nimoff of Airways Freight Corp. provided information about the company’s work with body brokers.
Information about the surgical training centers of specific companies such as Medtronic was taken from company Web sites, interviews, and d
ocuments filed with the SEC.
5. The Resurrection Men
My main sources for this chapter were A History of Surgery, by Roger Ellis, The Diary of a Resurrectionist 1811–1812: To Which Are Added an Account of the Resurrection Men in London and a Short History of the Passing of the Anatomy Act, by James Blake Bailey, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America, by Michael Sappol, Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Training, by Robert L. Blakely and Judith M. Harrington, and The Life of Sir Astley Cooper, by Bransby Cooper. The Regency Underworld, by Donald Low, was another great resource.
Two journal articles were essential to my reporting: The Journal of Medical Education, volume 37, 1962, “Medical Education from the Ground Up or Our Late Resurrection Men,” by Sam L. Clark, and Michigan History, LV/1, 1971, “Body Snatching in the Midwest,” by Martin Kaufman and Leslie L. Hanawalt. The Michigan anatomist’s quote on page 117 was taken from this article.
I also relied on articles about body snatching that appeared throughout 1878 in the New York Times.
For information about the passage of poor laws in the United States, I referred to the “Report of the Select Committee of the House of Representatives on So Much of the Governor’s Speech at the June Session, 1830, as Relates to Legalizing the Study of Anatomy.”
My main sources for the section about changes in medical school enrollment and the demand for cadavers were David Blumenthal’s article “New Steam from an Old Cauldron,” which appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, volume 350(17), April 2004; an interview with Dr. Todd Olson, professor of anatomy at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and an interview with Michelle Johnson, founder of MCJ Consulting.
