Bones and All

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Investigation Discovery: Love, Honor, Betray

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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. 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. Michael Mastromarino had hit rock bottom. After being arrested for drug possession and losing his medical license, he had to figure out how to provide for his family while also attempting to save his crumbling marriage. Him and Barbra were struggling to repair the relationship. All of the lying, drug use, and now an affair? This poor woman was being put through the ringer. As the couple worked on saving what was left of their marriage, Michael began to explore new career options. He hoped to find something that would allow him to use all of those years of medical training, even if he couldn't practice medicine as a doctor anymore. Michael decided that the best way to get back on top was to just be his own boss. He used his medical knowledge and familiarity with the medical industry to open his own business in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He named his new company Biomedical Tissue Services, or BTS. The main objective of BTS was to operate as a human tissue recovery firm, acting as sort of a middleman in the tissue donation and transplantation process. Michael's firm would be working with certified tissue banks to distribute viable material such as bones and tendons. Tissue banks are organizations that recover, test, store, and transport eligible human tissue for transplant patients to receive. Hospitals are able to obtain donatable organs through certified tissue banks with the assurance that that tissue has been properly screened, tested, and is of sufficient quality and quantity. The Association for Advancing Tissue and Biologics is a nonprofit organization founded in 1976 that works with transplant trade companies throughout the country. Their primary purpose is to ensure that any and all donated human tissue is safe to use and free of any infectious disease. They also work to oversee and certify all operating human tissue banks. Under federal law, tissue banks must meet all education, examination, experience, and ethical requirements in order to obtain certification. Once certified, the tissue bank must uphold the association's level of standards by retaining a specified amount of continuing education credits and obtaining accreditation recognized by the FDA. This includes following up with anyone and everyone who signed off on the donations, whether that be the donor, the next of kin, or power of attorney. The tissue and organ harvesting industry is an extremely profitable one with revenues in the billions of dollars. And a human body can be worth anywhere from $10,000 to $200,000. So Michael realized pretty quickly that he could capitalize off of this trade by underbidding for bodies and selling the recovered tissue at a large profit, essentially tripling the money he could make in an already lucrative field. He just needed a good scheme. Now, typically, a tissue donor firm would work with other tissue banks to utilize their facilities and materials, as this ensures that all harvested tissue is being recovered, tested, and stored in an appropriate manner. So say BTS was working with a company like LifeLink, which is an accredited member of AATB. The proper protocol would be for BTS to conduct their business operations through Lifelink, ideally using their resources so that the tissue is most definitely being recovered in a safe, sterile environment with access to on-site labs so that the tissue can be properly screened for any transmittable diseases. Now, Michael wasn't stupid. He knew how he was supposed to run this type of business. But tissue banks take a huge chunk of the profit, since they're the ones providing all the necessary resources to properly harvest the bodies. So even though BTS still had every opportunity to make really good, clean money, Michael went another way. I mean, he'd become accustomed to a certain lifestyle at this point. Those heated driveways were not going to pay for themselves, okay? So Michael began researching different ways to operate his business that would secure him the largest profits possible. He started by striking up relationships with local funeral homes in the surrounding areas. Michael would make deals with the funeral homes in order to obtain access to more cadavers. The bodies being stored at the funeral homes in preparation of burial would then be sold to BTS, selling for upwards of $1,000 per corpse. In some cases, the funeral homes would even offer the families of the deceased a free cremation service. This, however, was to conceal the true state of the bodies after BTS got their hands on them. See, the thing is, organ harvesting, body donation, and the whole tissue distribution process, it's a totally legitimate and legal industry. That is, when done by certified professionals and the deceased or next of kin have given consent for donation. Consent, say it with me, Michael. So that's where things got seriously dicey. Michael and his BTS goons would buy these corpses from the funeral homes so they could harvest tissue from them and then sell that tissue to other tissue banking companies. They used the embalming rooms in the funeral homes to conduct their operations. The bodies would be set up in supine position on the table and hooked up to various draining tubes. Remember that scary toilet situation we talked about before? They'd then remove as much tissue as they possibly could from the bodies, including but not limited to the tibia, fibula, femur, humerus, achilles tendon, and patellar ligament. They would then store and ship the harvested tissue to a distribution center, who would then supply the tissue to hospitals for patients in need of a transplant. Now, Michael has claimed in interviews that the harvested tissue was always sent to a lab for testing. I call bullshit. There is no way that you would cut this many corners and disregard so many safety procedures, but that'd be totally cool to incur the large expense of sending these tissue samples out to a private laboratory. Another thing to note is that many of Michael's employees, or cutters, as the media referred to them as, were not properly trained or certified to be performing anything remotely resembling a surgical procedure, regardless of whether the patient was alive or deceased. They were basically just Michael's little puppets, following orders and seemingly having no qualms about the unethical nature of their jobs. Then employees of BTS began frequenting local Home Depot stores for supplies. So often that they each actually had their own company credit card to use at the store. The supplies they were always up there buying? Industrial PVC pipes. They would stuff the carved up bodies with PVC piping in place of where the bones used to be. This gave the illusion of a natural-looking corpse ready for burial. It would be very difficult for someone to be able to tell if a corpse had been cut open and had their bones removed and were actually being held up by PVC pipes. I mean, at this point, the bodies are likely dressed up and placed in their casket. So if you were at a funeral and were looking at the deceased body in the casket, what are the chances that you would be able to notice if that body contained regular human bones or plumbing pipes? Well, there was one surefire way to tell if something wasn't right. Just because Michael and his squad of cutters replaced the bones with PVC, that didn't help with the empty pockets that were left in the body where the other organs had been removed. So to give the impression that everything was still intact, the bodies were also stuffed full of latex gloves and sterile gowns, like the kind you'd see a surgeon wearing. And if I had to guess, it was probably the same gloves and gowns these guys wore while they were working on that very body. The way I imagine it is that they probably got done scooping everything that they wanted to get out of that poor corpse and then just started stuffing it like a pinata, using whatever materials they had available to them. Like, just take your gloves and gown off and use those. No need to take brand new ones out of the box. We're penny pinching here, guys. Michael was able to operate his underground butcher shop for nearly four years before being caught. He made millions of dollars running the scheme while evading any consequences. So on that fateful day in November of 2004, when the Kings County Police Department discovered the cutting room at Daniel George, a full investigation into Michael and BTS was underway. And not long after, the FDA and even the FBI got involved. When Michael learned that the authorities were conducting an investigation into his business, he went full-on batshit. He called Barbra in a panic, telling her that the FBI was raiding one of his properties and he said he didn't know why. When Barbra pressed him on it, Michael insisted that he had not done anything wrong and that whatever was going on, he wasn't a part of it. He said that maybe his employees did something illegal, but he completely denied having any knowledge about why the FBI would be ransacking a BTS property. He frantically tried to cover his tracks, destroying BTS records and even encouraging the funeral homes he worked with to burn down their own establishments to conceal any evidence. Obviously, his efforts were futile, and in May of 2006, Michael Mastromarino was arrested. So after an 18-month-long investigation, Michael and three of his co-conspirators were served with a 122-count indictment. One of the defendants indicted was actually the previous owner of Daniel George Funeral Home, Joseph Nicelli. The other two defendants worked for BTS as Michael's cutters, or little ghoul juniors, if you will. The FDA soon issued a cease and desist order against BTS and any other businesses being run by Michael. And not much time had passed before an official recall was being made on all human tissue donated from cadavers secured by BTS. In the next episode, we'll talk more about the victims of this horrendous body snatching ring, who they were, what hell they went through, and how Michael's desperation for status and an overinflated ego landed him and three others in orange jumpsuits and handcuffs, looking down the barrel of a possible life sentence in prison. You should be so sorry, Michael.