Illustration of resurrectionists at work, accompanying the story of John Holmes and Peter Williams, whipped for stealing dead bodies. By Hablot Knight Browne (1815–1882)

Lee Cruceta fired up his electric saw as he prepared to harvest the spine of the corpse.

The body was scheduled to be cremated, so it had been a straight forward job. If there was a funeral viewing, he would have sawn off only the legs. Taking off just the legs may sound like a simple procedure, but there was a technique to it.

The legs have to be sawn off at precise points, right below the hip and just above the foot. Complete bones were valuable, so the femur thigh bones were taken whole. The Achilles tendons and other tendons were cut out. The same goes for the skin. Afterwards, the body would have to be sewn up. PVC plumbing pipes would be inserted in place of the leg bones (as per standard industry practice) so that the body would look whole when the legs are covered with clothes during the open-casket wake.

But as it was, the body was to go straight to the crematorium afterwards to be burnt into ash. Cruceta had carte blanche to harvest the body of all its useable parts — the bones, membranes, veins, tendons, ligaments, corneas, cartilage, the skin and the collagen — the “whole hog” as he called it. Sometimes, the body was just a disfigured, limbless torso by the time he was done with it.

Behind him, his co-worker was already bagging and labelling the tissue as it came off the body. Skin would be put in 16-inch jars. The skin of an entire body would fit into two jars. The man grunted as he packed the bagged tissue into picnic coolers, each of which was already filled with eight pounds of ice.

Cruceta eyed the the half-eviscerated cadaver on the porcelain embalming table. He had taken 45 minutes to extract the bones. He might have to hurry today. There were another five bodies waiting for him to be harvested. The bright overhead lights in the room gleamed on the bloodied scalpels, scissors and mallets arrayed beside him.

Revving up his power tool, Cruceta got down to stripping the body for the rest of its parts.

A Lucrative Business

Cruceta was an employee of Biomedical Tissue Services, a human tissue recovery firm in New Jersey. He was a certified tissue-bank specialist, the lead “cutter” in the company.

Tissue refers to any part of the body that is not an organ. Tissue recovery is the extraction of such body parts for reuse. Deceased human bodies, like used cars, can have their body parts transplanted to be reused in other living human bodies.

Nearly every part of the human body can be repurposed.

Tendons can be used to repair torn knee ligaments. Blood vessels are used in heart bypass surgeries to replace damaged arteries. Heart valves are needed for congenital heart defects. Bone can be used to repair fractures and to rebuild jaws and spines. Cartilage can be used to reconstruct faces. Collagen can smooth wrinkles and plump up lips. Skin can repair hernias and replace burned skin. Corneas can restore sight.

While it is illegal to buy and sell human tissue, the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 permits tissue donation. People can choose to donate their skin, bone, tendons, heart valves and arteries after their deaths.

Many may not know that organ and tissue donations are regulated differently. Organ donations are highly regulated in the United States. All organ banks are non-profit charities. In comparison, the regulations for donated tissue are far more lax, allowing many tissue banks to operate openly for profit.

And it was a very profitable business. As much as $80,000 can be made from the tissue of a single corpse. It was a situation that was ripe for exploitation for brokers in human tissue.

Michael Mastromarino, the owner of Biomedical Tissue Services, was one such broker.

Mastromarino recovered human tissue and sold it to tissue banks. The tissue banks, in turn, processed the tissue, and resold the tissue to hospitals, biotech companies and plastic surgeons for transplant, research, medical education and cosmetic surgery.

Mastromarino employed Cruceta and other “cutters” who traveled to funeral homes to harvest the tissue from the newly dead. It was a lucrative business. Cruceta was making $185,000 a year. He estimated that Mastromarino was earning up to $20,000 per body.

“The bones — tibia, fibia, femur, humerus, radia and ulna [leg and arm bones] — went for $5,000. Pelvis, tendons, ligaments, another $5,000. Skin, another $5,000. Spines, veins, valves… and you’re up to $20,000,” Cruceta said.

The procurement costs of the bodies were low in light of the profit. Mastromarino had an arrangement with the funeral homes in the New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania where he paid the funeral home directors $1000 per body.

But there was only one thing that made Mastromarino’s whole operation illegal.

The consent papers for the bodies were forged.

Mastromarino’s company had harvested from the bodies without the consent of their families. Out of 1,077 bodies they handled, only one family had granted permission. The death certificates, consent papers and medical history forms were all forged to make it seemed as if the bodies had been donated voluntarily.

Michael Mastromarino and Lee Cruceta were modern day body snatchers.

Early Body Snatchers

Body snatchers, resurrectionists, sack-’em-up men. These are all names for the unsavoury profession of grave-robbing in the 19th century. But these grave robbers, unlike their ancient tomb raiding predecessors, were not interested in the gold or jewels buried with the dead.

They were only interested in the corpses.

It was an old profession, one dating back to the 18th century. The earliest body snatchers were medical students.

Since the 16th century, anatomists were always on the lookout for fresh bodies to dissect and study. The most famous of them being Leonardo da Vinci who dissected around 30 corpses in his lifetime, and produced two beautifully drawn anatomical manuscripts.

By the 18th century in Britain and the United States, medical students were required to obtain their anatomical knowledge of the human body through dissection. The usual route of acquiring corpses was through the gallows. Bodies of executed criminals were hauled to medical schools where they were sawed, sliced, bored and scrutinised.

But the field of surgical science was growing at an exponential rate. Medical schools were proliferating. And the schools were in short supply of corpses for lectures, demonstrations and private practice. The demand for bodies far outstripped what the gibbet noose can supply every year.

Medical students turned to grave robbing to steal bodies for their own anatomical studies instead.

The League Of The Resurrectionists

It was this disparity in the demand and supply of corpses that gave rise to a new class of professionals — the league of the resurrectionists. Out-of-work men who could resurrect the dead for a pretty penny. And the penny was pretty indeed.

A body in the 1820s could fetch nine guineas, the equivalent of $1,408 today. Surgeons and anatomy teachers paid these men handsomely for the bodies with no questions asked. The resurrectionist industry boomed. As many as 20 gangs of body snatchers provided 500 cadavers a year to London’s 4 hospitals and 17 anatomy institutions. It was estimated that around 600 to 700 bodies had been stolen from the cemeteries in New York City in 1850.

A Night In The Life Of A Body Snatcher

Body snatcher work was simple enough.

Resurrectionists browsed funerary announcements to find out where the newly dead would be buried in cemeteries. They wait for night to fall before they take to the streets. The tools were minimal. A shovel, a lantern and a bottle of whiskey for the nerves were all that was required.

Pauper cemeteries were preferred, because they were unguarded. But watchmen in middle class graveyards could always be bribed to close one eye. Jewish cemeteries were popular since it was their custom to bury their dead within twenty-four hours. Fresh corpses were highly coveted.

Unlike depictions in popular culture, resurrectionists do not dig up the entire coffin. Instead, they would dig a hole near the head of the grave that goes straight down towards the coffin. The caskets have lids that open from the head area. The lid could be snapped open with a shovel. The body would then be hoisted to the surface with a rope or a hook.

The body would be disrobed and the clothes thrown back into the grave. This was an important distinction between body snatchers and ordinary grave robbers. Before the enactment of the Anatomy Act of 1832, stealing a corpse was not a chargeable offence in Britain. Only the stealing of any clothes or jewellery of the dead was considered a crime. The dead body itself had no legal value or ownership. As long as the resurrectionist leaves the clothing in the casket, he was not breaking the law.

The dirt would be carefully replaced onto the grave to make it look as if it was untouched. The body would be quickly carried away to be sold to medical institutions in the wee hours of the night.

Mastromarino’s Downfall

Back in the 21st century, Mastromarino’s macabre business thrived with the steady stream of corpses that fed its profit machinery.

Mastromarino’s downfall came in 2004.

One of the funeral homes his “cutter” team used was sold to new owners. An employee was sent to inspect the funeral home on behalf of the new owners. He was stunned to discover a bloodied and half-hacked corpse sprawled on the embalming table.

Despite being assured by the previous owner that it was a normal organ donation, the employee remained suspicious of the high number of organ donations conducted in the funeral home. In his 17 years of working in the undertaker business, he only came across a few organ donations that were conducted at a funeral home. But this particular funeral home was doing a dozen a month.

“Boy, these people in Brooklyn, they’re really generous,” he later told his wife. Suspicious of the funeral home’s previous activities, the new owners called the police and handed over boxes of documents found in the funeral home.

It sparked a two-year-long investigation into Mastromarino’s company. Police investigators followed the paper trail. They discovered that almost all the signatures on the medical paperwork were forged and the information falsified. After identifying the scale of the fraud that spanned three states, the police closed in on the leaders of body parts theft ring.

In February 2006, Mastromarino and three other men involved in body parts harvesting were indicted on over a hundred charges that include grand larceny, forgery and fraud.

The Fall Out

The scandal rippled from New Jersey to hospitals in Florida, Nebraska and Texas as thousands of people were informed that they had received skin and tendons that were stolen. The case provoked further outrage when it was discovered that Mastromarino had harvested the bones of famed journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke as well.

Heather Augustin, 42, had undergone an operation in 2005 to replace two disks in her neck with new bone. Three months later, her doctor contacted her to tell her that her neck bone was likely from the rogue sources, possibly from the cadaver of a very elderly person.

Augustin was shocked and unnerved.

“You think, ‘I’m carrying a bone in my neck from someone who didn’t want to get chopped up,’ “ she said. “I’m… in total shock. What am I supposed to do with these thoughts?”

Families were horrified and devastated by the desecration of their relatives’ bodies.

Dan Oprea, who worked in the Navy, was told that his mother’s body parts had been harvested by Mastromarino’s business. Oprea said he struggled to comprehend what had happened to his mother’s body. His wife said sometimes she catches him staring into space. “It’s just like something out of a horror movie,” he said. “You just can’t understand how anybody could do this.”

Alistair Cooke’s daughter, Susan Cooke Kittridge, was appalled. Her father had died at age 95. He had a horror of being cut open and had asked to be cremated. She had not given permission for her father’s body parts to be harvested. She can’t stop thinking about her father “with his legs cut off”.

“I am surprised by how upset I am,” she said. “You wanted to remember your loved one in the fullness of life. But I’ve lived with the image of his cadaver pressed against my face now for a month.”

“You have lives torn asunder, and I hope the people responsible for these desecrations get their comeuppance.”

Diseased Tissue Of Corpses In Living People

But another bigger issue was at play — the spectre of infection. Mastromarino had harvested heedlessly from corpses which were diseased with cancer and AIDS. He then sold the tissue to be implanted in living people. Alistair Cooke, whose body Mastromarino had looted from, had died from lung cancer which had spread to his bones.

About 10,000 people had received tissue that was supplied by Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS). 65-year-old Betty Pfaff was one such transplant patient. After receiving human tissue derived from BTS cadaver skin during surgery for abdominal hernias, she suffered severe infection, septic shock and paralysis.

There were other cases.

A 74-year-old widow from the Ohio developed syphilis after she had a BTS bone implant for her lower-back surgery. A woman from Colorado had to undergo another knee ligament operation after the first BTS tendon she received failed. A man was tested positive for HIV and hepatitis C after he received BTS bone implants for his degenerative disk disease.

To this day, numerous other recipients of BTS tissue live under the constant fear that they might be harbouring hidden diseases within their bodies.

Cosmic Irony

In June 2008, Michael Mastromarino pleaded guilty to enterprise corruption, reckless endangerment, body stealing and numerous other charges. He was sentenced to 18 to 54 years of prison.

Cruceta pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy, taking part in a corrupt organisation, abuse of a corpse and 244 other charges of theft and forgery. He was sentenced to 8 to 24 years in prison.

In a strange twist of fate, Mastromarino developed liver cancer that metastasised to his bones while he was incarcerated. The irony was not lost on the families affected by Mastromarino’s debacle.

Vito Bruno’s father died of kidney cancer in 2003. He was later notified that his father’s body parts were sold by Mastromarino. He was suing Mastromarino and the funeral home involved.

“You don’t want to wish anything bad on anyone, but karma’s a son of a bitch,” he said. “He committed a horrendous crime against a lot of people. There are tens of thousands of people affected.”

Alistair Cooke’s daughter, Susan Cooke Kittridge said, “Irony has its way. My father had lung cancer that metastasised to his bones. Of course you wonder about cosmic irony.”

Mastromarino passed away in prison in July 2013. He was 49 years old.