Bodysnatching ring 'sold corpse parts'
Four men have been charged with running a bodysnatching ring that allegedly cut the bones of BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke from his corpse and sold them for transplants in a plot akin to “a cheap horror movie”, US authorities said today.
The group is accused of secretly carving up more than 1,000 bodies from 30 to 40 funeral homes and allegedly forging death certificates and organ-donor consent forms in order to sell the human bone and skin across America.
When investigators exhumed six bodies in the course of the inquiry they found that many of their bones had been removed from the bodies and replaced with plastic plumbing pipe.
They claim Biomedical Tissue Services, run by Michael Mastromarino, removed Cooke’s bones without his family’s permission before he was cremated, although they said today they did not believe the parts had actually been used as transplants.
The veteran broadcaster, who presented BBC Radio 4’s Letter From America for more than half a century, died of cancer at 95 but documents allegedly listed the cause of death as a heart attack and lowered his age to 85.
Today Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes announced that a grand jury had indicted Mastromarino and three alleged co-conspirators on 122 charges.
They were said to have made around $2m (€1.7m) from the alleged crimes.
Mastromarino, of Fort Lee, New Jersey, Joseph Nicelli, Lee Crucetta and Christopher Aldorasi are accused of charges including body stealing and opening graves, unlawful dissection, forgery and falsifying business records.
Enterprise corruption is punishable by up to 25 years in prison.
