Stolen human tissue leads to arrests of 4 men

NEW YORK (AP) -- The owner of a biomedical supply house was charged along with three other men Thursday with secretly carving up corpses and selling the parts for use in transplants across the country.
The case was "like something out of a cheap horror movie," Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said.
Prosecutors said the defendants obtained the bodies from funeral parlors in three states and 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. The defendants made millions of dollars from the scheme, prosecutors said.
The indictment was the first set of charges to come out of a widening scandal involving scores of funeral homes and hundreds of bodies, including that of "Masterpiece Theatre" host Alistair Cooke, who died in 2004. The investigation has raised fears that some of the body parts could spread disease to transplant recipients.
Who was charged
Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, N.J., was charged along with Brooklyn funeral home owner Joseph Micelli.
Mastromarino was an oral surgeon who went into the tissue business after losing his dentist license, prosecutors said. Micelli was a partner in the business, they said. The other defendants were Lee Crucetta and Christopher Aldorasi.
All four pleaded innocent to charges of enterprise corruption, body stealing and opening graves, unlawful dissection, forgery and other counts.
A judge in Brooklyn set Mastromarino's bail at $1.5 million and Micelli's at $250,000. Bail for Crucetta and Aldorasi was $500,000 each.
Forged forms
Prosecutors said the defendants took organs from people who had not given consent or were too old or too sick to donate. The defendants forged consent forms and altered the death certificates to indicate the victims had been younger and healthier, authorities said.