Key figure in body-parts case dies

MICHAEL Mastromarino, the ringleader behind a ghoulish scheme to sell diseased tissue and bones that were harvested from corpses in Philadelphia and New York, died Sunday morning.

A spokesman for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said Mastromarino, 49, was pronounced dead about 10 a.m. at St. Luke's Hospital in Orange County, N.Y.

The cause of death appeared to be natural causes, the spokesman said. The New York Daily News reported that Mastromarino died from bone cancer.

The onetime oral surgeon founded a company called Biomedical Tissue Services in Fort Lee, N.J., and bought diseased body parts from three Kensington funeral home operators - Gerald Garzone, his brother, Louis, and James McCafferty Jr. - from 2004 to 2005.

All told, bones, tendons and other tissue were stripped from 244 Philadelphians. Mastromarino paid the Garzone brothers $1,000 per corpse. The remains were sold to hospitals around the country and used as implants.

In 2008, Mastromarino was given a 15- to 30-year prison sentence for similar crimes in New York, and a concurrent 25- to 58-year sentence in Philadelphia.

Louis and Gerald Garzone were given 8- to 20-year prison sentences that same year, while McCafferty, who cooperated with prosecutors, received a sentence of 3 1/2 to 10 years.

"There was not a semblance of sincere empathy or remorse expressed by him [Mastromarino]," Evangelia Manos, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the macabre case, said yesterday.

"I was probably working in the D.A.'s Office nine or 10 years at that time, and it was one of the most horrible cases that I had seen."