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Alistair Cooke body parts gang is jailed
Ed Harris23 Oct 2008
THREE men who conspired to plunder corpses and sell body parts, including the corpse of British broadcaster Alistair Cooke, have been jailed in America.
The gang's victims said they had carried out a gruesome, greedy scheme that violated the most basic principles of trust and human decency.
"They betrayed us and they abused, in the most despicable manner, our family members," said David P Blatt, whose father's body was among those "harvested". Michael Mastromarino, the owner of a New Jersey-based biomedical tissue company, was sentenced to 25 to 58 years in prison by a Philadelphia court.
Mastromarino, 45, had pleaded guilty in August to abusing corpses, forgery, theft and other allegations. He made millions from the plundering.
His Pennsylvania sentence will run concurrent with an 18- to 54-year prison term he received in New York for running the same operation. Among the corpses violated was that of Alistair Cooke. Brothers Louis and Gerald Garzone, who provided bodies from a pair of funeral homes and a crematorium they ran in Philadelphia, will serve eight to 20 years.
"Words cannot express how sorry I am," Mastromarino told the court in a shaky voice. He called his crimes "nothing less than disgusting and embarrassing," and broke down and cried.
Mastromarino paid the Garzones for at least 244 corpses that were carved up without families' permission and without medical tests, prosecutors said. Skin, bones, tendons and other parts, some of them diseased, were then sold around the country for dental implants, knee and hip replacements and other procedures.
The tissue stolen from a single body often fetched about $4,000.
William Carter, of Maryland, who entrusted his mother's body to the Garzones, told the court: "It's hard for me to remember my mother now. They've sort of inserted a horror movie in the middle of all of the memories I have."
