Disrespected in death Posted on Thu, Mar. 16, 2006 Disrespected in death Tissue firm's ex-employee ties local funeral home to N.Y. scandal By SIMONE WEICHSELBAUM, MARY FLANNERY, KITTY CAPARELLA & GLORIA CAMPISI simone@phillynews.com 215-854-5324 THE ROOM SMELLED of death, with dried blood on the floor. An aged body with a medical bracelet lay on a stainless- steel operating table in the dirty, small space. This was not a sterile hospital room, which is where a technician normally would remove donated body parts to be used in patients in need of dental implants, spinal surgeries and joint replacements. But it was there, inside a back room of the Louis Garzone Funeral Home, on East Somerset Street near Ruth in Kensington, that a former employee of a now-closed New Jersey biomedical company said he chopped apart dozens of corpses for their spines, veins, tendons and bones. He said he took the body parts to his employer, Biomedical Tissue Services Inc., in Fort Lee, N.J., which was closed by the Food and Drug Administration last month. Biomedical owner Michael Mastromarino, his business partner and two tissue-recovery workers were indicted by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office last month on 122 charges for ghoulish crimes that included taking body parts without legal consent or without proper screening for disease. About 30 funeral homes that may have supplied countless body parts to Biomedical still are being investigated by the Brooklyn D.A.' s office. Only a few funeral homes were named. Prosecutors have said that they were in New York City; Rochester, N.Y.; and New Jersey, and that one, unnamed home was in Philadelphia. The former employee of Biomedical Tissue, Kevin Vickers, and two sources who are familiar with the investigation indicated to the Daily News that the home in Philadelphia is the Louis Garzone Funeral Home. Louis Garzone was not been charged or named in the indictment. Garzone, 63, declined to comment yesterday. "I don't have any comments on this situation," he said. Vickers told the Daily News in a February interview that during the last two months of 2004 he sliced open dozens of bodies that lay on a metal table inside the Louis Garzone Funeral Home. Vickers, 52, who lives near Rochester, N.Y., also was not named in the indictment. He said he assumed relatives of the deceased had given permission. He said he had never asked questions; just followed orders. Vickers said he and another Biomedical cutter used scalpels, mallets, scissors and a saw to remove the body parts. He said he had handed the cadaver parts to another Biomedical worker, who put them in plastic bags inside a portable cooler. He and other workers stuffed the corpse remnants inside body bags. Vickers said he believed Garzone later cremated the corpse remains. Biomedical owner Mastromarino, his partner Joseph Nicelli and two Biomedical recovery workers - Lee Cruceta and Christopher Aldorasi - pleaded not guilty last month to charges including body-stealing, unlawful dissection and forgery. They are all out on bail, which ranged from $250,000 to $1.5 million. Mastromarino relied on the funeral directors to screen bodies and get necessary approvals from next of kin, said Mastromarino's attorney, Mario Gallucci. "As far as he is concerned, the funeral directors did whatever the funeral directors did," Gallucci said. "He did what he was supposed to do right. "He acquired [the tissue] the way the FDA said to do it. And the FDA audited him every single year and found nothing wrong with his procedures." In New York, state law allows licensed tissue-bank workers to cut up bodies in funeral homes as long as families give consent to the bank, said New York State Department of Health spokesman Robert Kenny. Funeral directors can't give consent for the family, Kenny said. Also, the New York State Department of Health must certify the bank, the cutter, and the room where the procedure would occur. The room must be sterile and separate from all other funeral home activities, Kenny said. Pennsylvania laws are much stricter. Under state law, certified funeral directors can authorize the removal only of corneas from corpses. Family consent is required. Only two Pennsylvania organizations - Gift of Life in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh's Center for Organ Recovery & Education - are permitted to harvest other body parts. Vickers said he had taken the body parts he removed at the Louis Garzone Funeral Home to Biomedical to be cleaned and processed. Prosecutors have said Biomedical sold body parts to tissue banks, which in turn sold them either to an intermediary or directly to hospitals. Brooklyn prosecutors said that for nearly four years, Biomedical harvested parts from 1,077 corpses from various funeral homes in several states. Mastromarino, 42, allegedly pocketed up to $7,000 per dissected body as he sold different parts to various tissue banks, the Brooklyn D.A. has said. Mastromarino and his partner, Nicelli, paid funeral home directors $1,000 per body for harvesting the parts, prosecutors said. Because some of Biomedical's body tissues and parts were allegedly harvested from unscreened corpses in unsanitary rooms inside funeral homes, patients who received transplants are at risk of contracting HIV, syphilis, Hepatitis B and C, and other potentially fatal diseases, prosecutors said. The FDA shut down Biomedical Feb. 3 - three weeks before the Brooklyn district attorney announced the indictment - saying the company failed to screen donors properly and to keep accurate records about the corpses they sliced up. Tacony resident Darlene Krzywicki, 42, received bone marrow from Biomedical in January 2004, when she underwent spine surgery at Holy Redeemer Hospital in Montgomery County, said Aaron Freiwald, her attorney. Freiwald has filed suit against Biomedical and the tissue bank involved in the process on Krzywicki's behalf. Similar lawsuits, some of them requesting class-action certification, are being filed across the country. Some of the bodies Biomedical harvested were clearly too old or diseased, according to Brooklyn prosecutors. For example, one New York victim of the body-parts harvesting scandal, "Masterpiece Theatre" host Alistair Cooke, died of cancer in March 2004 at the age of 95. Brooklyn prosecutors allege that forged documents reportedly say he died of heart failure at 85. Cancer prevents a person from being a legal tissue donor, according to FDA regulations. Vickers said the corpses that he had worked on at the Louis Garzone Funeral Home had been elderly and frail. Vickers said he "firmly believes" in tissue donation and thought Biomedical was a legitimate business that adhered to FDA rules. "It is bad enough if I operated on one body without consent," Vickers said. "I feel like I have been stealing from the dead." Vickers said he followed a routine when he traveled down the New Jersey Turnpike to work at the Louis Garzone Funeral Home. Wearing white lab coats, latex gloves and goggles, he, along with two or three other Biomedical workers, walked through the front door carrying ice-filled coolers and surgical instruments, he said. Vickers said he traveled with former Biomedical employees Lee Cruceta and Christopher Aldorasi, who have both been indicted. Cruceta's attorney did not return calls for comment. Aldorasi's attorney declined to comment. Vickers said he sometimes saw Louis Garzone walking around the first floor of the funeral parlor "still getting dressed." The two rarely chatted. Vickers and his co-workers snaked through Garzone's building and walked to another building, he said. Once inside, on the right was the entrance to a half-tiled room, which Vickers said was barely large enough to fit the steel operating table that had a drain at the top. The room was "dirty and smelly with years of body fluids dropping on the floor," Vickers remembered. Usually, Vickers said, he found the dead body lying on a gurney in the hall. "I could tell if they had been in a long-term-care facility," he said. "They had medical bracelets on their arm." Every time usable tissue was extracted, another Biomedical worker took it, washed it in the room's sink and placed it in a bag with a twist tie. The bag was labeled with the time, date and body part, then placed in the cooler, he said. No name was listed. Vickers said he used a mallet and scalpel to remove the pelvis. Finally, for the spine, the workers had to flip the body over on its stomach. Vickers said he had to use a saw to carefully remove the spine. Each body took up to about 40 minutes, he said. He usually worked on two to three bodies per trip. "I never did any reconstruction" on the bodies, he said. Instead, he and his co-workers placed them in body bags and left them on gurneys to "let Garzone take care of it." Vickers said because he never had to restore the bodies cosmetically, he assumed Garzone planned to cremate the corpses. Garzone is part owner of Liberty Cremation Inc., on Ruth Street across the street from his funeral home. In 1997, Philadelphia police investigated the Louis Garzone Funeral Home after a city trash collector found the cremated remains of a half-dozen people at the curb outside his funeral home. The neatly wrapped boxes of ashes were already in the back of the garbage truck when a trash collector noticed a name on one of them - and a date of death. Police determined there was no evidence of wrongdoing on Garzone's part. Garzone told police a burglar must have stolen the boxes from the funeral home and discarded them when he realized what they held. Garzone said he'd been holding ashes of the deceased for families who hadn't picked them up. Seven years after that incident, Biomedical was paying Vickers $500 a week plus $300 to $400 for each body he carved up, Vickers said. Vickers said he visited the Louis Garzone Funeral Home about a dozen times during the last two months of 2004. A source familiar with the investigation said Garzone had sold bodies to Biomedical since the beginning of that year. Vickers started working for Biomedical during summer 2004, shortly after beginning his career at a Rochester, N.Y., eye bank near his home. That fall, Biomedical invited Vickers to stay at a rent-free apartment in Fort Lee near headquarters, he said. Vickers continued to work for Biomedical until March 2005. A New York State Health Department investigator called him at home last November, he said, asking about his work with Biomedical and told him about the investigation. He researched the news online. "I was like, "Oh, Christ!' " he said. Then in February, Vickers received another surprise phone call. This time it was a Brooklyn assistant district attorney inviting him to a meeting at the Rochester Public Safety Building. He said the prosecutor and three New York City Police Department detectives grilled him for four hours. "They spent three hours calling me a liar," he said. Vickers said he had given the prosecutor a list of dates when he worked at funeral homes. Vickers said he had done similar work at funeral homes in Rochester, Newark, Manhattan and the Bronx. He said he has a lawyer and will fully cooperate with authorities. "I wasn't involved in any paperwork," Vickers said. "I was just a technician. "I got nothing to hide," he said. "I don't know if I can be arrested for being gullible." Biomedical's ghoulish activities came to light about a year before the New York State Department of Health found Vickers. In November 2004, the new owner of the Daniel George Funeral Home in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, went to his local police station to complain that Joseph Nicelli, his business' previous owner, had taken off with money customers had paid for a funeral, Brooklyn prosecutors said. At the funeral home, a NYPD detective found a secret operating room and later learned that Nicelli still went there to remove body parts from corpses for Biomedical, prosecutors said. The detective also found shipping receipts to tissue banks nationwide, which spurred the investigation. Prosecutors said the scheme began in January 2002, when Mastromarino went into the tissue business after losing his license as an oral surgeon. He partnered with Nicelli, who had embalming and cremation contracts with funeral homes, prosecutors said. Mastromarino, Nicelli and Cruceta and Aldorasi - it was the latter two whom Vickers said he worked with at the Louis Garzone Funeral Home - forged death certificates and lied about family consent, the indictment said. Prosecutors said the four knowingly had broken numerous laws to deceive tissue banks and lead them to believe that Biomedical sold legitimate body parts from healthy, screened corpses. Five tissue banks that bought body parts from Biomedical have recalled their unused human products: LifeCell Corp. in Branchburg, N.J.; Lost Mountain Tissue Bank in Kennesaw, Ga.; Blood and Tissue Center of Central Texas in Austin, Texas; Tutogen Medical, Inc., in Alachua, Fla.; and Regeneration Technologies, Inc., also in Alachua. The FDA has urged hospitals that bought human tissue from banks that contracted with Biomedical to notify their patients. Scores of people across the country are now receiving letters from hospitals notifying them about the potential problem. © 2006 Philadelphia Daily News and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.philly.com