Three funeral directors held in selling body parts

Three Philadelphia funeral-home directors were charged yesterday with turning their businesses into gruesome human chop shops that pilfered bones and tissue from the dead to fuel a booming, $1 billion transplant industry.

The parts - bones, skin, tendons and spines - were taken from the deceased without family permission, in unsanitary conditions that one witness likened to a "butcher shop."

Much of the tissue was taken from people who were unsuitable donors because their age or the condition of their bodies, or because they had infections such as hepatitis or HIV, according to a 103-page grand jury report.

The funeral-home directors and their partners, two men who bought the tissue for resale, then falsified paperwork to make the "donors" appear healthy, the report said. Those potentially dangerous body parts were sold and transplanted into thousands of patients.

"For them, nothing was beyond the pale - not stealing flesh and bones from the dead or lying to the bereaved, not forging and lying on thousands of documents, not putting the public's health at risk," the report said.

The three funeral-home directors - Louis Garzone, 65; his brother Gerald Garzone, 47; and James A. McCafferty Jr., 37 - were accused of plundering 244 cadavers between February 2004 and September 2005.

The Garzone brothers each own a funeral home and McCafferty was the director at a funeral home owned by his mother, the report said. The three men also jointly own Liberty Cremation.

Charges also were filed against Louis and Gerald Garzone's funeral homes and the crematorium, but not the McCafferty funeral home.

The Garzone brothers voluntarily surrendered their funeral director licenses last year, and the state revoked McCafferty's in an unrelated case about a month ago, officials said.

Dion Rassias, an attorney for the James A. McCafferty Funeral Home, at Frankford and Unruh Avenues in Mayfair, said James McCafferty Jr. was not a director at his mother's funeral home.

Much of the work took place at the Louis Garzone Funeral Home, at Somerset and Jasper Streets in Kensington, where bodies were left on gurneys in a dingy alley behind the building, the grand jury said.

One of the "cutters" who removed body parts told the grand jury that he once saw a body in the alley, covered with a blue "Astroturf-like material," a sparrow perched on the head.

After the body parts were removed, the deceased were taken across the street to Liberty for cremation.

"This was not a coincidence," the grand jury said. "For one thing, cremations made it easier to deceive the next of kin."

All three men were jailed yesterday. A reporter seeking comment at their businesses was told to leave.

Louis Garzone's attorney, Howard Kaufman, said he had not seen the grand jury report and so could not comment on the charges. He said he anticipated that prosecutors would ask for a high bail at an arraigment today.

"He's going to plead not guilty, and from what I've heard, the amount that's been suggested for bail is excessive. He's not a flight risk," Kaufman said shortly after visiting his client last night. "He's obviously not in great spirits, but he's doing OK given the circumstances."

An attorney for Gerald Garzone did not return a phone call seeking comment.

In Kensington, neighbors defended Louis Garzone.

"Nobody knows the whole story," said Carmen Cologne, 47, who resides across the street. "I love Louis."

The three men were paid $1,000 for each body by Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, N.J., the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office said.

The founder of that company, Michael Mastromarino, a dentist stripped of his license for drug offenses, and his partner, Lee Cruceta, also were charged yesterday. The two men were expected to surrender to Philadelphia authorities this week.

"They couldn't and wouldn't permit the dead to go to their graves with a shred of dignity," said District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham. "They were motivated by greed."

Mastromarino - and the sensational accusations against him - first drew national headlines last year when he and three employees were charged in Brooklyn, N.Y., in a 122-count indictment.

Those charges are pending, but seven New York funeral- home directors pleaded guilty last year to helping Mastromarino steal from bodies. One of the cadavers was that of Alistair Cooke, the host of Masterpiece Theater, who died in 2004 of cancer.

Authorities said Mastromarino's company took bones and tissue from 1,077 bodies at funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, making $3.8 million in illegal profits.

Those body parts were sold to at least five processing companies and one major distributor. The parts could have been transplanted into as many as 13,000 patients, the Food and Drug Administration estimated.

The body-part industry has been booming, growing from 200,000 transplants in 1989 to 1,200,000 in 2003. The largest demand is for bone used in spinal surgery, but a growing sports-medicine business also has driven up demand for tendons, ligaments and cartilage.

Experts estimate that a single body can be worth $100,000 in parts, and the industry as a whole has topped $1 billion in revenue per year.

The grand jury said five Philadelphia and 41 Pennsylvania hospitals implanted parts that originated with Mastromarino's operation.

More than 200 Pennsylvanians got tissue that came directly from the Garzone funeral homes, according to the grand jury report.

Hundreds of patient lawsuits have been filed in federal court in New Jersey and state courts around the country. Dozens of patients, including some from Philadelphia and New Jersey, said they contracted hepatitis C after getting a transplant.

One national law firm has clients who were patients at Temple, Hahnemann, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein Hospitals in Philadelphia, Holy Redeemer Hospital in Montgomery County, and Shore Memorial Hospital and AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in New Jersey.

In such a growing industry, small, unaccredited outfits outnumber the accredited ones, experts said. In fact, the grand jury said, the lack of oversight helped Mastromarino go undetected for years, and it recommended a raft of changes that state and federal overseers should make.

In 2003, the grand jury noted, an employee at a tissue- processing company described Mastromarino as "one of the leading procurers in the country," who was providing "a phenomenal amount of stuff."

Some of the parts taken in Philadelphia came from people who had died of cancer, sepsis, HIV and hepatitis, the grand jury said. Others were "riddled with infections."

Parts are supposed to be harvested within 15 hours of death, but some of those in Philadelphia sat unrefrigerated for up to 100 hours. Some even had rigor mortis, the grand jury said.

Mastromarino then falsified paperwork to change the causes of death, the age of the deceased and their medical history, the grand jury said. Of the 244 bodies here, he changed the names on all but 48.

Mastromarino claimed that none of the deceased died in a hospital, in order to explain why there were no medical records, according to the grand jury report.

Despite surrendering their licenses, the two Garzone funeral homes have continued operating under the control of a third brother, James, who revived a dormant Pennsylvania funeral home director license. The other location is at L and Lycoming Streets in Juniata Park.

The grand jury report said, though, that James Garzone is not the one in charge. "Both Louis and Gerald continue to run their businesses, pretty much as they did before," the report said.

"We, by law, had to grant [James Garzone] his license," said Basil Merenda, commissioner of the state Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs. "There was no basis for us to take any action against James."

He said the state was investigating whether Louis and Gerald Garzone were still running their businesses without a license.

The district attorney also charged McCafferty and Louis and Gerald Garzone with defrauding a state welfare program that offers help to the poor for burial expenses. Investigators found 112 cases in which the three men charged indigent clients for services - then billed welfare as well.

The grand jury found that the three men collected more than $183,000 from those families and $84,000 more from welfare.

Louis Garzone even ran this scheme, the grand jury said, in the case of five children killed in a 2005 fire in Tacony, a tragedy that drew an offer from the musician Stevie Wonder to pay for the funerals.

"Despite receiving $1,959 per child from Stevie Wonder, Louis Garzone filed a welfare claim for $750 for each," the grand jury said.

Find the indictment, photos, past coverage and more at http://go.philly.com/bodyparts EndText