Habeas Corpses

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Investigation Discovery: Love, Honor, Betray

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The Body Snatcher’s Wife by Barbra Reifel

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Transcript

Speaker 0:17

Welcome to You Should Be Sorry, a podcast dedicated to sharing real life scary stories of the unethical, the immoral, and the criminal. Each season we'll cover a different case, telling the story over multiple episodes in normative scripted format. At the end of the season, we'll wrap up with an episode where I freely discuss my own personal feelings on the case and why I chose to cover it. Podcast information and sources are listed in the episode notes. Follow the show on Instagram at you should be sorry pod and subscribe to the pod's Patreon, where members get access to exclusive content and perks. You won't be sorry.

Speaker 1:01

On a cold November day in 2004, Deborah Johnson walked into the King’s County police department in Brooklyn, New York, to file a report regarding potential fraud at her new place of business. Deborah and her husband, Robert, had recently become the new owners of a local Brooklyn funeral home, named Daniel George & Son. The previous owner, Joseph Nicelli, had regularly collected pre-payments for funeral services, ensuring Deborah and Robert that all proper documentation of any and all sales were accounted for.

Speaker 1:54

This type of transaction is not uncommon in the funeral service industry, where people come in and essentially plan their own funerals and pay for the costs in advance. Some funeral homes call this a pre-need. And while it's not atypical, it is important to keep records of all of these sales. So when a man came into the Daniel George funeral home to make arrangements for his recently deceased aunt, who had prepaid for her funeral and burial, Deborah couldn't find any record of the pre-need paperwork or invoices for any such sale. This led her to uncover a trail of financial discrepancies that Joseph Nicelli had left behind when he owned the business, including selling pre-need funeral packages and other services to clients and then pocketing the funds. Believing that she and Robert may have unwittingly participated in some type of scam, Deborah promptly filed a police report with the district attorney's office. Detective Patricia O'Brien was assigned to the case and promptly made a visit to the Daniel George funeral home to look into Deborah's claims. Hoping to quickly determine if this type of fraud would be a civil or a criminal case, Detective O'Brien poured over numerous records, noting a number of strange files, including a large amount of FedEx slips with names of companies she'd never heard of. This is when Deborah leaned in and whispered to the detective that "there was something else... There's doctors harvesting teeth." Detective O'Brien accompanied Deborah to the second floor of the funeral home, where Deborah explained that she had encountered something strange. Upon a tour of her newly purchased business, Debora came across a tucked-away room where someone was working on a body. But what baffled her was that the body wasn't being prepared for a viewing, like you'd expect to see if a body is being worked on in a funeral home. It looked like this man was performing a surgery. It turns out that this hidden room, later referred to as the cutting room by detectives working the case, had a much more sinister purpose than anyone had realized. Directly above the embalming room was a small sealed-off space, fitted like an operating room, complete with overhead lights, a surgical table, and a small elevator used to transfer bodies through the ceiling and into the next room. Surgical equipment and tools were stored on shelves, but there were also more crude tools, like large knives and saws. In the corner of the room was a toilet with several tubes emerging from it, what appeared to be some type of drainage system. After looking into the companies listed on the suspicious-looking FedEx slips, Detective O'Brien realized that these were companies that purchased human tissue from cadavers and then distributed the human tissue to hospitals for transplant surgeries. But why would a funeral home be doing business with a tissue harvesting service? She called in the Kings County Racket Division's major case squad, and an investigation was quickly underway. What authorities discovered was this: Bodies that were at the funeral home awaiting service, burial, or cremation were being shot up from the embalming room to the cutting room using that small elevator lift. The bodies would be placed on the surgical table, prepped and laid on their backs, and then cut open to expose and recover viable tissue. Skin, ligaments, and bones were all removed from the bodies, packaged up like Christmas presents, and sold to distribution centers that handled processing the tissue for patients to receive. Bones of all sizes, ranging from smaller leg bones like the fibula all the way up to large bones like the pelvis, were cut out of these bodies. To make the bodies appear whole for their upcoming viewings, bones were replaced with PVC pipes. Gowns and gloves were even stuffed into the body's empty spaces before being sewn back up. It would later be discovered that all of the consent forms for such donations were never presented to the next of kin, which means that no one legally signed off on the deceased body's organ donation. Instead, all of the medical history forms and required signatures had been revised and forged. Death certificates had been altered to make the deceased appear younger and healthier. So, say a patient was 95 years old and died from cancer, their death certificate would now read that maybe they were only 80 years old and died from natural causes, because this would create the illusion of viable, healthy tissue that would actually be eligible for donation. Essentially, this meant that those that died of any terminal illnesses or disease were still being used as tissue donors for unwitting transplant recipients. What Detective O'Brien uncovered turned out to be much more than a case of just bad bookkeeping. It turned out that there was an undercover body snatching ring right in the middle of New York City. The district attorney went on to describe the scene as, quote, something you'd see in a cheap horror movie. Authorities set out to find answers, and the media was going crazy. What was happening to all of this tissue being harvested? How was the Daniel George funeral home involved in all of this? And who was the ringleader of this ghoulish scheme? Across the harbor, 40-year-old businessman Michael Mastromarino was thriving. A New Jersey native, Michael often commuted to New York City for work. He enjoyed how fast everything seemed to move in the Big Apple. All of that potential was intoxicating to him. He was once a prominent oral surgeon with multiple practices spanning across New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Now, he was the CEO of his own company, which had become extremely successful. When he wasn't on the hunt for new and exciting business opportunities, he spent time at his lovely suburban oasis in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Michael appeared to be living the perfect life that many can only dream of. He was married to the love of his life, Barbra, and they had two young sons that adored him. Michael would go on to use his extensive medical training and knowledge to start his own company, which he named Biomedical Tissue Services, which began operations in 2001. Biomedical Tissue Services, or BTS, as we'll refer to it, was a New Jersey-based tissue recovery firm, which claimed to provide quality human tissue, organs, and bones to credible transplant agencies. So this whole thing may sound a little strange, but actually the business of harvesting and selling human tissue is perfectly legal. That is, if done in compliance with all of the laws. The company operated as a quote, non-transplant tissue bank, or what's also known as the body broker industry. Tissue banks specialize in recovering and distributing human tissue. This includes removing tissue from cadavers, testing, processing, and storing the tissue, and then transporting and selling the tissue to a facility that will then be able to use it for transplant surgeries. The tissue donation industry is a highly profitable industry, but it's a difficult industry to keep well regulated. The National Organ Transplant Act states that it is illegal to sell human organs for value. However, BTS was able to operate in a legal gray area of sorts, as tissue banks and facilitating companies are legally allowed to charge for the recovery of human tissue from cadavers with consent. Organs such as hearts, lungs, and kidneys are strictly governed by federal law when it comes to donation and are not typically recovered by credible tissue banks. Bones, however, are considered the most valuable commodity of the human body, as bones can be harvested and stored easier than any other tissue. Bones are also more versatile in the sense that bone can be used in a large number of surgeries, such as spinal fusions and even dental implants. This makes bones what you would call a top seller in the body broker industry, making up about 28% of the revenue that tissue banks see each year. Bone powder can even be sold for up to $10,000 on the tissue market, just drops in the bucket for an industry that's worth over $8 billion. When Michael founded BTS, he was confident that it was going to be a success. But once he realized the even heavier potential line beneath, all he started to see were dollar signs. Within four years, Michael turned BTS into a multimillion dollar company. But at what cost? It turns out that BTS was never an accredited member of the American Association of Tissue Banks. As a matter of fact, they never even applied. So not only was BTS operating under a mask to the FDA, they weren't being properly regulated and therefore were engaging in unsafe, unethical, and even illegal practices. Michael Mastromarino would soon be exposed as what the media called a ghoulish body snatcher, and he would eventually be indicted on a whopping 122 counts, including enterprise corruption, falsifying records, reckless endangerment, dismembering of a body, and body stealing. This season, we are going to be digging into Michael Mastromarino and his company, BTS, and how he went from being on top of the world as an eminent, well-respected doctor to a scheming, organ nabbing, convicted criminal. You should be sorry, Michael.