Body Brokers Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Main Characters

  Human Price List

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Wilderness

  Chapter 2: An Ideal Situation

  Chapter 3: The “Toolers”

  Chapter 4: “As Soon as You Die, You’re Mine”

  Chapter 5: The Resurrection Men

  Chapter 6: “Brokered Sounds Bad, Doesn’t It?”

  Chapter 7: The Bone Machine

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For my father, Richard E. Cheney

  Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.

  —Matthew 24:28

  The Main Characters

  Jennifer Bittner

  Former receptionist, Pacific Crematorium and Bio-Tech Anatomical Inc.

  Whistle-blower

  Michael Francis Brown

  Former owner, Pacific Crematorium, Bio-Tech Anatomical Inc., and California Bio-Science Inc.

  Now serving twenty years in a California prison for embezzlement and mutilation of human remains.

  A. Gray Budelman

  Funeral director, Orange, New Jersey

  Owner, Mortuary Services of New Jersey

  Jim Farrelly (deceased)

  Victim, Bio-Tech Anatomical Inc.

  Bonny Gonyer

  Knee-surgery patient

  Recipient of CryoLife tissue

  Brian Hutchison

  CEO, Regeneration Technologies, Inc.

  President, RTI Donor Services

  Dr. Gerald Kirby

  Former professor of anatomy, Tulane University School of Medicine

  Brian Lykins (deceased)

  Knee-surgery patient

  Recipient, CryoLife tissue

  Dr. Michael Mastromarino

  Former dentist, New Jersey

  Owner, Biomedical Tissue Services Ltd. (formerly Biotissue Technologies LLC)

  Ernest V. Nelson

  Body broker, California

  Former owner, Empire Anatomical Services

  Arrested by UCLA Police Department in March 2004 for receiving stolen property.

  Free on $30,000 bail.

  Joseph Nicelli

  Funeral director

  Former partner, Biotissue Technologies LLC

  Agostino “Augie” Perna

  Body broker, New Jersey

  Owner, Surgical Body Forms (formerly Limbs & Things), Mobile Medical Training Unit (MMTU) and Innovations in Medical Education and Training (IMET)

  Investor and client, Bio-Tech Anatomical Inc.

  Arthur Rathburn

  Funeral director, Grosse Pointe, Michigan

  Former diener, University of Michigan Medical School

  Owner, International Biological, Inc.

  Dan Redmond

  Inspector, Crematories and Cemeteries

  California Department of Consumer Affairs

  Henry Reid

  Embalmer, Los Angeles, California

  Diener, UCLA School of Medicine

  Arrested on charges of grand theft, March 2004.

  Free on $20,000 bail.

  Charley Reynolds (deceased)

  Body donor, Tulane University School of Medicine

  Rene Rodriguez

  Homicide detective, Riverside County, California

  James E. Rogers

  Founder, ScienceCare Anatomical, Inc.

  Richard Santore

  “Crazy Eddie of the Funeral Business”

  Former funeral director, Brooklyn, New York

  Founder, Anatomic Gift Bank of New York

  John Vincent Scalia

  Funeral director and body broker, Staten Island, New York

  Owner, National Anatomical Service, Inc.

  Daniel Schonberger

  Driver, Pacific Crematorium

  John Schultz

  Roller hockey coach

  Former partner, California Bio-Science Inc.

  Dr. Leonard Seelig

  Chairman, Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, Shreveport

  Louie Terrazas

  Crematorium operator, Pacific Crematorium, Bio-Tech Anatomical, Inc.

  Allen Tyler (deceased)

  Diener, University of Texas Medical Branch

  Consultant, Surgical Body Forms

  Employee and partner, Bio-Tech Anatomical, Inc.

  Jim Walsh

  FBI agent, Texas City

  Joyce Zamazanuk

  Mother of Jim Farrelly

  Human Price List *1

  Introduction

  “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”

  —Epictetus

  One spring weekend in 2003, I attended a medical conference in Miami at the Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort. The Sonesta is a tower of antiseptic luxury rooms looming over an otherwise decrepit strip of shuttered motels. It offers private balconies with built-in Jacuzzis, a full-service spa, and a $6-million swimming pool “complex” as well as an enormous ocean-facing conference center booked with corporate retreats, annual sales meetings, and wedding receptions. The event that drew me there, organized by a company called Innovations in Medical Education and Training (IMET), had taken over the conference center’s Ocean Room, named for its commanding view of the pale, glassy surf.

  For this seminar, the gold taffeta curtains had been drawn and the room accommodated not a board of directors or the families of a bride and groom, but rather six stainless-steel gurneys on which rested the legless, armless, headless remains of six men.

  Gathered in groups of two or three around each of the torsos were the customers: thirteen urological surgeons from Canada and the United States who had covered their heads in blue paper shower caps and pulled blue surgical gowns over their golf shirts and Dockers. They had come to learn hand-assisted laparoscopic nephrectomy, a new procedure for removing a kidney through a tiny incision in the abdomen.

  Laparoscopy demands great skill in operating a fairly specialized set of medical instruments. If the surgeon misjudges the distance between his scalpel and the patient’s kidney, he might seriously injure the organ. Most of the surgeons at this conference didn’t learn this technique in medical school, so they’d paid up to $2,395 each to IMET to provide them instructors, state-of-the art equipment, fresh cadavers, and a place to practice.

  I watched a surgeon adjust his gloves and peer eagerly through his wire-rim glasses at the anonymous flesh. The torso was wrapped tightly, meticulously, in black plastic and secured to the gurney with gray packing tape. The plastic had been peeled back to reveal the corpse’s belly, which, owing to the force of gravity, was now a cavernous depression of chocolate-gray flesh.

  Next to the torso was a round instrument tray from which the surgeon selected a scalpel. He carved a line through the glistening skin near the navel all the way into the abdominal cavity. Using a smooth plastic ring called a Lap Disc, he stretched the incision into a bracelet-sized opening, through which he inserted a hose that was in turn connected to an air pump. Then he inflated the man’s stomach like a balloon. As the torso rose, the skin peeled in places, revealing pale flesh underneath and emitting the faintly sweet smell of decaying bowel.

  Beneath this canopy of flesh, the surgeon could now go about his work. He had already successfully performed this surgery twice on live patients. But each time he got close to the big blood vessels, he found his hand shaking. A trip to the Trump resort, with its promise of Florida sunshine, luxury rooms, an oceanfront view, and fresh torsos, seemed like a perfect way to build his confidence.

  The surgeon had
a partner, who looked sick and pale. Before the lab and after eating a lunch of cold cuts, he had excused himself to take a walk outside. I watched him as he paced around the balcony. “I still haven’t gotten over the cadavers from medical school,” he said.

  Nonetheless, he managed to perform his part in the surgery, which was to insert a long, telescopelike camera into the Lap Disc. Presently, the corpse’s interior was revealed on a video monitor above the body. It was a glossy landscape, globules of yellow fat clinging to marbled red tissue. While his partner held the camera, the surgeon made two smaller incisions above the navel into which he inserted two nickel-sized, sharply pointed shafts known as trocars.

  Like the Lap Disc, trocars allow surgeons to manipulate instruments inside them without harming the surrounding flesh. The surgeon removed the camera from the Lap Disc and inserted it into one of the trocars. Then he inserted a Harmonic Scalpel into the other. The Harmonic Scalpel uses ultrasound technology to both cut and coagulate tissue. One of its advantages, according to its manufacturer, is that it creates “minimal smoke.”

  The scalpel and camera in place, the surgeon rubbed his right hand with lubricant. Then, like a tentative magician, he reached through the Lap Disc into the dark, wet, icy mass of the dead man’s torso.

  As the other doctors delved into their patients, a New Jersey businessman, Augie Perna, stood watching from the corner, sucking his teeth. Perna is noticeably short, with delicate, pretty features and thick, dark brown hair. He was dressed in his usual business attire: green surgical scrubs, pale blue Puma sneakers, and, hanging on a chain around his neck, the golden head of Jesus, crowned with thorns. Perna is the founder of IMET—“I’m the head cheese,” he said by way of introduction.

  Although we had never met in person, I had been investigating Perna since 2002. In January of that year, I had received a phone call from an editor at My Generation magazine. “We’ve got an assignment for you,” he said. “We want you to write a story about people who donate their bodies to science when they die.”

  The phone call caught me off guard. Only a month before, I’d learned that one of my good friends from college had committed suicide. The thought of writing about death—just a month after his funeral—was unbearable. I’d hardly eaten or slept, and I was still haunted by the image of my friend—only twenty-eight years old, with a wonderful future—a man who usually wore blue jeans and a T-shirt, dressed in a stiff black suit, lying dead in a coffin. Despite the valiant efforts of the funeral director, he didn’t appear peaceful or asleep. His body was wasted, his nose misshapen, and the expression on his face oddly waxy.

  But something compelled me to accept the assignment. I think I hoped that writing about body donation would ease my pain, remind me that the dead can help the living. I had no idea then where the story would lead me or what I would uncover.

  At first, my research yielded a simple story: Generous people donate their bodies, and in doing so they help to advance science. Cadavers enable medical students to learn human anatomy. They make it possible for scientists to further their research and for companies to develop innovative medical technology. In some cases, dead bodies even save lives. As I reported the story, I visited medical schools. I watched as the students thoughtfully examined each artery and vein and identified the important organs. I spoke to researchers who used cadavers for crash testing cars and to develop protective gear for soldiers in the perils of war.

  If I had approached the assignment at another time, I might have focused my attention solely on the uses of corpses, not on the corpses themselves. But losing my friend had emboldened me. Now, I was curious about the dead and also a little protective. I wanted to know everything about them: where they had come from, whom they had belonged to, and how they had ended up in the hands of scientists.

  So I started asking specific questions about the corpses: How are corpses acquired? What are the costs? Who is paid? How does a dead body wind up on a crash-testing course? Is it shipped or delivered by truck? Does the family of the deceased know about it?

  That’s when the story took a turn. Confronted with my questions, many people whom I interviewed, who were otherwise eager to talk, began to stonewall me. To my great confusion, they concluded that I was writing an exposé. They thought my article would discourage people from donating their bodies. Over and over, I had to reassure them that this was not the case.

  Their resistance piqued my interest. Just before the story went to press, I made a lucky call to an anatomist at a medical school.

  “Who regulates dead bodies?” I asked him.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  I explained in the gentlest tone I could muster that I was writing for a magazine published by the American Association of Retired Persons. There was a pause. Then the anatomist said, “If you don’t mind holding, I’d like to close my door.”

  When he came back on the line, he said. “You and I need to talk. Body donation is wonderful. But if you pull back the tablecloth from this wonderful feast, you’ll see there’s rotten wood underneath.”

  The anatomist suggested that I write something about surgical-training seminars. He said the courses were often held in hotels—a practice that, amazingly, does not break any state laws—and that they featured human body parts obtained through a little-known and largely unregulated network of independent operators. Human body parts are an industry, he said. “Here’s a name. Augie Perna.”

  So I began to investigate Perna and his industry. I learned from the National Funeral Directors Association that in 2003, 73 percent of American corpses were buried and the rest were cremated. I also learned that no one keeps track of what happens to corpses before they reach those final destinations.

  At that moment, I began another story, which was published in Harper’s magazine and inspired this book. I spent three years investigating the underground trade in corpses and body parts in the United States. Though I focused on body parts used for research and education, a largely unregulated business in the United States, I was shocked by what I found in regulated sectors of the corpse trade, including practices that put patients’ lives at risk.

  Every year in the United States, tens of thousands of corpses enter the cadaver trade, a business that supplies the bodies and body parts of the dead to scientists, surgical equipment corporations, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and researchers all over the world. Corpses that enter this business are cut up into parts, not unlike chickens, and distributed through a complex network of suppliers, brokers, and buyers. Some corpses remain whole.

  In the cadaver business, suppliers sell bodies and body parts to brokers, who in turn funnel them to buyers. Suppliers include morgues, medical schools, tissue banks, independent companies, funeral homes, and even, on occasion, crematoria. Brokers, who facilitate the corpse sales, may be independent businessmen or employees in some of the same places. Their clients include medical associations, major U.S. corporations, researchers, doctors, and hospitals. The demand for bodies and parts surpasses the supply, which keeps the prices of human flesh and bones very high. Each corpse that travels through the system can generate anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000, depending on how it is used.

  Whereas the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, approved and recommended for enactment in all states in 1968 and amended in 1987, prohibits buying and selling dead bodies, the law allows companies to recover their costs, which makes life very easy for brokers. By inflating the amount they spend on labor, transportation, and storage of bodies, they can easily hide their profits.

  With so much money to be made and a limited corpse supply, players in the cadaver trade are not always scrupulous about the way in which they acquire dead bodies. Most bodies that enter the cadaver trade are acquired legally, with consent from the deceased person or his or her family. Still, even in the case of legitimate donations, the donors often have little more than a vague notion about how their bodies will be used. Most are never informed that the cadaver may be sold off to middlem
en or parceled out to surgical equipment companies. Certainly, none of them imagines that their relative’s torso will end up taped to a gurney at a Trump resort.

  Some in the cadaver trade employ sinister means to acquire corpses: deception or even outright theft. Bodies headed for cremation are particularly vulnerable. Only ten percent of states in the U.S. inspect crematoria or require their workers to be certified. Roughly half of all states have no laws governing cremation at all. The average untrained crematorium worker earns minimum wage and may be easily tempted by the body parts business. As one crematorium employee pointed out, when it comes to ashes, “There’s no way to tell if you’re missing you head or your shoulders or your knees.”

  The trafficking of corpses is nothing new. In fact, the cadaver trade has a long history in the U.S. The business was born in the late 1700s, when surgeons began dissecting cadavers to learn human anatomy. At the time, there was no legal supply of corpses, so surgeons enlisted the help of “resurrectionists” or “ghouls,” as body snatchers were known—a class of cagey, often desperate men who trolled the cemeteries of New York and other cities on the East coast, stealing bodies from graves and selling them to doctors and to medical schools. By the mid nineteenth century, the country was teeming with these men. Body snatching was a grim business, but then, just as now, corpses paid handsomely. In 1828 in New York, a ghoul, who would have made a dollar a day as a laborer, could sell a corpse for ten dollars.

  The cadaver trade faded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as laws were passed around the country designating unclaimed bodies and the bodies of paupers fair game for dissection. But over the last fifty years, science has found new uses for corpses, and the demand for them has once again surpassed the supply.

  Today, roughly 10,000 cadavers a year are used to introduce U.S. medical students to the miracles of anatomy. They are also used for postgraduate seminars for surgeons, and for commercial seminars held by instrument companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb, Medtronic, and Johnson & Johnson, which use human body parts to demonstrate the latest medical gadgetry. Fresh corpses also serve as the raw material for research experiments, and in the production of a variety of surgical and cosmetic products. Bones can be ground into dust that is made into paste and used in periodontal surgery; hearts can be dissected, and their valves transplanted into living people; skin can be used to patch the bodies of burn victims, or it can be freeze-dried, stored, rehydrated, and injected into lips, sagging facial lines, and penises; and on and on.