By Brad Hamilton

February 26, 2006 -- Welcome to the Cutting Room, the heart of the gruesome body-snatching operation that allegedly saw ghouls secretly carve up at least a thousand bodies in chop shops across the city sell the parts for millions of dollars.

A large surgical light once illuminated the macabre chamber that was dominated by a high-tech stainless-steel surgical chopping board, which sat in the middle.

Cutters removed organs, bones and tissues atop the surgical table, before sewing up the cadavers. Shoving plastic piping in place of bones and casually tossing gloves and aprons inside them, before presenting the bodies to unsuspecting mourners for funerals.

Expensive saws and scalpels, were also once used at the giant table, which sat next to the white embalming table, pictured here. The table is specially built to tilt so the fluids would easily drain from bodies into a toilet.

This scene, prosecutors allege, was mirrored in funeral homes across New York as part of an elaborate scheme that prosecutors allege Joseph Nicelli, 49, and Michael Mastromarino, 44, masterminded to sell body parts for at least $7,000 each for medical purposes.

The Post got an exclusive tour of the Cutting Room at the Daniel George & Son Funeral Home in Bensonhurst yesterday alongside a worker who helped his husband-and-wife bosses, Robert Nelms and Deborah Johnson, bring down the ring after the business was bought from Nicelli in 2004.

A "filleted" body sprawled on an embalming table in the house of horrors was just one of the clues that tipped off the worker, who has asked not to be identified, to Nicelli and Mastromarino's alleged harvesting operation.

"It was disgusting," the worker said of finding a body with its leg bones removed. "I went 'yuck' and I walked out."

He said he confronted Nicelli, who was still involved in the funeral home, about the bloody scene, but was told the operation was a normal organ donation, and there was nothing to worry about.

The worker told The Post he first became suspicious when he noticed the extraordinary number of organ donations conducted at the home.

In 17 years working in the business, the worker had seen only a handful of organ donations. At Daniel George, they were doing about a dozen a month.

"I told my wife, "Boy, these people in Brooklyn, they're really generous," he said yesterday.

Adding to the new owners' suspicions were missing funds for a number of prepaid funerals.

On Nov. 15, 2004, Nelms made a move that would eventually see Nicelli and Mastromarino, along with two other men who allegedly cut up bodies, indicted on 122 charges this week.

He walked into the 62nd Precinct station house to complain about Nicelli.

The owners' complaint prompted Patricia O'Brien, a local detective, to visit the funeral home, where she ultimately discovered the Cutting Room.

Nothing about the somber public entry to Daniel George would give grieving relatives a clue to the horror inside.

But the back alleyway, where hearses would drop off corpses, leads to a virtual house of horrors, as The Post discovered yesterday.

A freight elevator delivered bodies from a funeral home's embalming room on the ground floor to the Cutting Room, a chamber situated on the floor directly above it.

The offices of the home are now left ransacked after police searched for clues of the gruesome cuttings.

Gone are the expensive instruments and stainless-steel table.

Instead, when the doors to the elevator open on the top floor, the white embalming table comes immediately into view.

Rusting surgical instruments, including clamps, were also found in the chamber of horrors.

The last stop on the nightmare tour is in the basement of the building, where The Post found the freezer where body parts were stored before being shipped to medical companies around the world.

With the electricity cut off, the basement is pitch black, but The Post could still make out the white mini freezer, which opened from the top.

The old-fashioned freezer is the kind of thing one might found in grandma's basement, a place where she stores meat.

At Daniel George, it was the last resting place for the organs of silent victims.

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/62433.htm