FOR MORE than 18 months, three "unscrupulous" funeral-home operators stole diseased body parts from the corpses of 244 Philadelphians and sold the tissue for nearly $250,000 to two "predatory" operators of a New Jersey company, a Philadelphia grand jury found yesterday. That company, Biomedical Tissue Services, or BTS, in turn resold the tissue for $1 million to four companies, which processed it for hospitals.

The tissue - some infected with cancer, HIV, hepatitis and other diseases - was then implanted in unsuspecting victims in 46 Pennsylvania hospitals, including five in Philadelphia, as well as in other states and countries, said the report.
The grand jury indicted five men, whose actions were described as "sheer, wanton, craven, odious crimes" by District Attorney Lynne Abraham. "They wouldn’t allow the dead to go to their grave in peace," she added.

After yesterday’s news conference, Abraham credited the Daily News with triggering the grand jury’s 16-month investigation, based on this newspaper’s series of stories about the operation.

"Nothing was beyond the pale," the grand jury concluded "- 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. What we found was appalling."

BTS used real names for only 48 of the 244 Philadelphia corpses. Records were falsified for the others. None of the relatives consented to the harvesting.

The grand jury also found that the state Department of Public Welfare had been defrauded of $86,000 by the funeral-home operators, who were supposed to provide "free" funerals for poor people.

Double-<TH>and triple-billing families, insurance policies, nursing homes and even charities became the norm with the operators collecting $183,611 - and yet still billing DPW in 112 cases.

To show its wrath for the wide-ranging corrupt scheme, the grand jury recommended that five defendants and two businesses be charged with operating a state criminal enterprise and with more than 10,000 other counts. Many crimes were counted 244 times - one for each abused corpse.

In custody last night were three Philadelphia-area defendants Louis Garzone, 65, of Kensington; his brother, Gerald Garzone, 47, of North Wales, Montgomery County, and James McCafferty, 37, of the Frankford section.

Also charged were two corporations: Liberty Cremation Inc., jointly owned by the Garzones and McCafferty on Ruth Street near Somerset, and the Garzone Funeral Home Inc., which has one home on Somerset Street near Ruth in Kensington and another on L Street near Hunting Park.

The jury also recommended charges against BTS owner Michael Mastromarino, 44, a disgraced former dentist, of Fort Lee, N.J., and BTS team leader of "cutters," Lee Cruceta, 34, of Monroe, N.Y.

Mastromarino’s business dealings in New York and New Jersey erupted into a national body-parts scandal in 2005 involving the Food and Drug Administration and other federal agencies.

Also, lawsuits are pending from hundreds of families of those who received the tainted tissue. Furthermore, there are allegations that some families did not receive the ashes of their loved ones, as they had been told.

Abraham said that two BTS cutters who retrieved tissue here, Kevin Vickers and Richard Bifone, described the Philadelphia scheme for the grand jury and would not be charged. Vickers is charged in a similar scheme in Rochester, N.Y., however.
Bifone testified that on his second BTS assignment, he helped to harvest the bones of 95-year-old Alistair Cooke, the renowned British-American host of Public Television’s "Masterpiece Theater."

Other cutters, Chris Aldorasi, Darlene Deats and Mastromarino’s girlfriend, Kirssy Knap, worked here infrequently and will not be charged, since they face charges in New York, said Abraham.

Mastromarino and Cruceta were expected to turn themselves in.

Last night, Mastromarino’s attorney, Mario Gallucci, denied "all these allegations as we have denied them in Brooklyn.
BTS "was only the harvesting company and had no responsibility in obtaining any of the consents from the donors. We maintain our innocence and we look forward to a trial," he said.

Mastromarino, out on $1.5 million bail, is awaiting a Brooklyn trial on Jan. 7.

Cruceta’s New York attorney, George Vomvolakis, said he was shocked by the new charges. "Lee Cruceta has cooperated fully with the D.A.’s office in Philadelphia," he said. "...He didn’t know about the schemes going on."

At McCafferty’s funeral home, a man who answered the phone said the operators had "no comment."

Attorney Howard Kaufman said Louis Garzone intends to plead not guilty. "We intend to vigorously defend him," he said. He added, "I’m not in a position to comment on the allegations."

Garzone employee Anthony Garafolo testified that he had become an unwitting assistant in the harvesting operation by picking up about 200 bodies at hospitals, nursing homes and the medical examiner’s office and taking them to Liberty Cremation.

He testified that he had been told to leave the bodies in Louis Garzone’s alley on Somerset Street. When he returned to move them to the crematorium nearby, he found the bodies disfigured, missing limbs and sometimes just torsos. Their body bags were full of blood.

Vickers, who visited Philadelphia 12 times for BTS "training," recalled that a body lying in the open on a gurney in the dirty alley was covered with blue Astroturf with a sparrow perched on the head of the deceased.

There was no refrigeration, the report said, and bodies lay in the open for days, with rigor mortis setting in.

The remains of Diane Thomas, who died of metastasized cervical cancer, sat out for more than four days before Cruceta’s team dissected it.

Vickers said Garzone’s tiny embalming room where bodies were dissected was "filthy," with its "floor dried with blood and pieces of tissue."

"It looked like the back of a butcher shop, quite frankly," he added. "It was clearly a room plagued with bacteria ... I wouldn’t let my dog stay there."

Vickers said he was trained by a legitimate body-parts-recovery agency to be meticulous about contamination by sterilizing tools and changing protective clothing frequently.

Then, Mastromarino saw Vickers washing his hands and told him there was no need to do that.

Instead of taking four hours per body to recover tissue, Mastromarino, Cruceta and their teams ripped bodies apart in 30 minutes, the report said.

Calling them "butchers," Vickers said they "slashed arms off" and "raced to see how fast they could go."
Taking a thin layer of skin could take 35-40 minutes if done properly, but Aldorasi "hacked the whole skin off in a minute or less," the report said.

In a legitimate recovery operation, it may take three hours to obtain consent and medical history from family members.
At Garzone’s, there was no discussion about the bodies - except for Gerald Garzone asking for a check for the bodies. And none of BTS workers met with families to obtain consent or medical information about the deceased.
In fact, Abraham said, nearly all the harvesting records were falsified - with phony names, ages, dates of death and claims of being disease-free.

On May 27, 2005, Joseph Gibson, 81, died of stomach cancer, but his BTS recovery report claimed he died three days later, and his tissue recovery was performed the next day - 92 hours after he really passed away.
BTS received $2,518 for Gibson’s tissues, which were implanted in at least seven patients.

One other strange twist involved music legend Stevie Wonder, who was so moved by the tragedy of a 2005 Tacony house fire that critically burned a woman, Shannon Bowers, and killed five children under age 5, including her three daughters, that he paid $4,000 for the funerals.

Louis Garzone originally offered to do the funerals for free. He suggested depositing Wonder’s check in a bank account for the grieving mother. When Bowers showed up for it, Garzone replied, "Lady, I don’t think you understand - the money has been spent; it isn’t here anymore."

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