Body Brokers Read online

  Some corpse applications receive more scrutiny than others. Though many Americans associate underground corpse trafficking with organs, the federal government actually does a good job regulating organ procurement organizations. By law, organ-procurement organizations (OPOs) must be non-profit charities, which means that their financial records are open to the public. They cannot compete for donors, since only one OPO is allowed per region, and their organ related activities are routinely audited by the federal Department of Health and Human Services. If an OPO isn’t meeting its legal obligations, the federal government can shut it down.

  The federal government also regulates transplantable tissue, which includes heart valves, bones, veins, corneas, skin, tendons and ligaments. The Food and Drug Administration inspects tissue banks to ensure that the tissue they supply to hospital patients is free of disease.

  But the federal government does not regulate bodies and body parts used for research and education. Much of this business takes place in the shadows. If a body broker decides to form a company to sell body parts for research or education, there is no one to check his books or to make sure he obtains bodies legitimately. The federal government does not regulate nontransplant tissue banks. Only New York States licenses them, and until 2004, New York did not regularly inspect them. No agency keeps track of how many bodies go into the nontransplant system and no one knows what happens to them. Bodies and parts may be funneled to or stolen from medical schools, tissue banks, morgues, funeral homes, or crematoria. The buyers receive little more than a package of parts and ID numbers. No one besides the broker or supplier may know where the parts came from or how they were acquired.

  The cadaver trade has flourished as Americans have disassociated themselves from death. Most people today see their loved ones for the last time in a casket. Two hundred years ago, families buried their own dead. If a beloved relative died, the women of the family laid out the body at home. They washed the body, and, when they were finished, wrapped it in a cloth and called for the undertaker. The undertaker was in most instances, a local man, perhaps a cabinetmaker earning a few dollars on the side building coffins. In many cases, the undertaker knew the deceased or the deceased’s family, so he had a natural respect for their feelings.

  Things might have proceeded along these lines, if it hadn’t been for embalming. During the Civil War, doctors pioneered the technique of embalming, which involves siphoning blood from a corpse and replacing it with chemicals to preserve the bodies of fallen soldiers so that they could be sent home. After Abraham Lincoln died in 1865, word of this miraculous procedure spread. Lincoln’s body was embalmed, then paraded around the country on a funeral train for twenty days. Americans came by the hundreds of thousands to see it, marveling at Lincoln’s lifelike appearance.

  Undertakers realized the financial potential of this new science and quickly put it to use. For a fee, a corpse could be saved for up to a week with an inoffensive odor. Now the funeral could wait for the distant relatives to arrive. As it was no longer necessary to say a rushed good-bye, it seemed only proper to display the body in an expensive casket and make it the centerpiece of an elaborate funeral.

  For the first time, some funeral directors became prosperous men, serving a large area and people they didn’t know personally and reinventing undertaking as a profitable business. Now it became more and more common for the people who handled dead bodies to have never known those people or their families in life. More and more often, what was required of a funeral director was feigned grief, a spectacle worthy of its great cost, the illusion that the corpse was in a peaceful sleep.

  Today, most Americans wouldn’t dream of handling the bodies of their dead friends or relatives alone. Even though most states allow it, almost no one chooses to bathe their dead relatives or to lay them out at home. Families don’t prepare corpses for burial or cremation or lay them in the ground themselves—they entrust these things to funeral directors.

  As we have grown more distant from death, we have also grown more deferential to doctors and scientists. Body brokers count on this, cloaking their greed in appeals to help the future of science and medicine. “I equate it to a confidence-game swindle,” an FBI agent who’s investigated body parts thefts told me. “How do you gain the confidence of the guy you’re trying to swindle? You bring in the confidence man. This has got a confidence man built into it. You’re dealing with doctors. Who comes to the table with more credibility than doctors? People go, ‘Obviously, this is legitimate. There’s a doctor involved.’ That’s the steamroll that makes it happen.”

  In this book, I focus on the suppliers, brokers, and buyers of bodies used for medical education and research. I write about a crooked crematorium owner, greedy medical school employees, and complicit professors who are lured into the business by brokers offering lucrative deals for body parts. And I write about the brokers themselves, entrepreneurs in the shadows, who make sales to major U.S. corporations in need of body parts. These companies close their eyes to the unethical and sometimes criminal aspects of the cadaver trade, while accepting the anonymous product it offers.

  I didn’t intend to write about transplantable tissue, which is regulated by the FDA. But I discovered disturbing connections between this business and the underground brokers supplying body parts for research and education. I found a similar culture of secrecy in both fields, especially where profits are concerned. Where I found connections, I wrote about them.

  What follows is the story of what I found when I immersed myself in the underground cadaver trade: a macabre world populated by odd, strangely alluring characters. The players in this business have an unusual relationship with death and dead bodies. To them, corpses are commodities like any other, something to be sold, like a television set or a new car.

  Over the course of my investigation, I found myself disturbed and sometimes even amused by their unusual take on death. Most of all, I was shocked to learn that American corporations, researchers, and even physicians have been supporting the underground traffic of these brokers for years. The cadaver trade is hidden in plain sight—in our hospitals, in our boardrooms, on our highways, and in our cemeteries. This book is my attempt to reveal it.

  chapter 1

  Wilderness

  Joyce Zamazanuk knew that her son was dying. She knew it when the nurses quietly wheeled Jim to a private room on the seventh floor of the hospital in San Diego. His new room had a bed, a metal chair, and an oxygen tube, but little else. Outside, few visitors wandered the halls. A hush hung over the nursing station. Joyce thought, This must be where they bring the sick patients to die.

  Six days in the hospital had done little to help Jim. AIDS had ravaged his body. The tumor that engulfed his lungs appeared larger in each new CAT scan. Always slender, Jim Farrelly, forty-five, was now reedlike beneath the cotton sheets and blankets. His thick brown hair had thinned to a soft, downy fur. He had trouble talking. Death by asphyxiation was certain.

  Joyce wondered what awaited her beloved son: Would he feel pain in the moment of his passing? How much longer before he left her?

  Joyce had been just seventeen years old when Jim, her third son, was born; the two had always been close. Even as a baby, Jim was gentle in his manners and feminine in his tastes. He wanted to do whatever his mother did. Unlike his macho brothers, Jim would learn to cook and to sew. Later, when his sister was born, he styled her hair and embroidered flowers on her clothing. At school, the other children called him all the usual names: sissy and mama’s boy.

  But Jim was a scrapper, tougher, his mother always said, than any of his tough brothers. When they lost Jim’s father, it was Jim who stepped in and took care of Joyce. Jim planned his father’s funeral. He bought the Christmas presents. He was a comfort to his mother. When he grew up and settled in San Diego, Joyce often came to stay. She and Jim shared their sorrows and secrets.

  AIDS was one secret Jim had tried to keep. When he was diagnosed with HIV in 1994, he lied to his mother a
nd said, “The doctor just found a polyp. Nothing for you to worry about.” Joyce was relieved. But within a year, the virus had progressed to full-blown AIDS.

  Jim tried to prepare his family for his death. He knew it was coming—he’d seen many of his friends die—and so he made sure everything was ready. With the little money that he had, he bought a cemetery plot in Arizona. He drew up a will and arranged to be cremated through a funeral home in San Diego. With his debts paid and his last wishes clear, Jim assured his mother there was nothing more to worry about.

  The end came quickly. Jim had only been on the seventh floor for six or seven hours when he began making a guttural, gasping sound. By now, everyone had arrived: Jim’s sister, Joy; his best friend, Billy, and countless others. Startled, they rushed to his bed.

  “What is it, Jim?” his mother asked.

  “Can I help you? You’re not crying. Please don’t cry.”

  Jim shook his head. He was laughing. “It’s okay, Mom,” he whispered. “I am less and less. There is more and more.” Then he fell into a coma. Soon after, he was dead.

  Everything went as planned. In the hospital room, Joyce said good-bye to her son. After she went home, the nurses came and took Jim’s body down the long hall, into the freight elevator, and downstairs to the morgue. Several weeks later, someone from the mortuary called Joyce to say that Jim’s ashes were ready. “Okay, send them along,” Joyce replied. But when the urn arrived, she didn’t open it. She clutched it and placed it on her shelf, where she gazed at it for weeks. Finally, she sent it on to Tucson, where it was buried beside the urn of Jim’s father.

  Fourteen months passed. Then, one afternoon, the telephone rang in Joyce’s house.

  When she answered it, a woman asked, “Are you the mother of Jim Farrelly?”

  “Yes,” Joyce said. “What is this regarding?”

  “I’m a victim’s advocate.”

  Joyce wondered if one of her sons was playing a joke. “But my son is dead,” she said.

  “Yes, I know,” the woman said.

  Could it be identity theft? Joyce pressed the phone to her ear and took a deep breath. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What is this about?”

  The female caller paused. “I’m calling to tell you that your son has been the victim of a crime.”

  “A crime?” Joyce almost laughed.

  “Ma’am,” the woman’s voice was somber. “We have identified your son’s body parts at a crematorium. His body was dismembered.”

  Dismembered? But Jim’s ashes . . . He’d been buried. He was fine. Joyce said, “I’m going to have to call you back.”

  Later, Joyce would recall that final night in the hospital. In retrospect, it seemed odd to have left Jim alone. And yet, what could she have done? No one had invited her to the morgue. Did the hospital even have one? Joyce had never thought to ask. The nurses, who had been so solicitous when Jim was alive, said nothing about his corpse. Joyce had signed some papers at the funeral home. But she never saw Jim’s body. Now, Joyce wondered: Where had they taken him? Why hadn’t she been there for her son?

  Corpses lead a perilous existence. Whisked from the arms of family and friends, they embark on a journey under the care of strangers. In most cases, those to whom we entrust our dead take care to ensure that they’re laid to rest safely. Most morgue workers, funeral directors, and crematorium operators keep careful track of each body. Indeed, many care for them as they would the dead bodies of their own relatives. Still, body brokers have been known to haunt this dark landscape, hunting for body parts, which they can later sell.

  At each stage of the journey, there is ample opportunity for theft. At the hospital, a nurse or an attendant shuttles the corpse first to the morgue, where it’s stored in a steel refrigerator. If a family requests it, an autopsy may be performed. As it happens, an autopsy is an ideal situation for body brokers inclined to theft. Pathologists routinely take samples of specimens relevant to their investigation—a slice of kidney, for instance—which get preserved in paraffin blocks and transferred onto slides. An honest pathologist may remove a whole brain and keep it fixed in preservative for weeks. Otherwise, the brain matter will not yield its secrets. This is perfectly legal as long as the doctor has permission from the deceased’s family.

  But consent forms vary in their specificity, and pathologists often work with unlicensed assistants known as dieners, a word derived from the German for servant. Dieners do the work that no one else wants to do: They dissect bodies, cutting through bone and muscle and removing whole organs so that the pathologists can weigh and examine them. They are responsible for cleaning up the morgue and assisting pathologists. A diener may work with a pathologist, while at the same time harvesting body parts for tissue banks. Stealing body parts is easy for a diener, and the money is good. Dieners often become brokers.

  Numerous diener thefts have been discovered over the years, from Maine to Los Angeles. Nearly all of these cases were uncovered purely by chance. Often the families of the dead noticed something odd on an autopsy report. Only later did they learn that parts of their family member’s body had disappeared owing to an intricate deception.

  If an autopsy isn’t ordered, someone at the hospital calls the funeral home of the family’s choice. A driver comes to pick the body up and take it to the funeral home. There, the body is refrigerated until the time comes for what’s known in the funeral trade as “final disposition.” If the body is to be cremated, it may be sent to another funeral home equipped with a crematorium or to a crematorium at a nearby cemetery. Here, once again, a stranger, who often has little training or supervision, assumes control of the body. If the crematorium operator is so inclined or is familiar with the market, he may be tempted to remove a body part before sliding the cadaver into an oven. Once a body is cremated, there’s no way to know if anything is missing.

  If the body is to be embalmed, the procedure takes place at a funeral home. But there too, a corpse may not be safe. The funeral home may have an agreement with a tissue bank. Each body may produce a tidy kickback, a thousand dollars, perhaps. Or, more disturbing, the funeral director may own his own tissue bank, earning thousands of dollars selling the parts of each corpse entrusted to his care. He might not bother to ask permission.

  Relatives rarely have the opportunity—or the inclination—to accompany their deceased loved ones into the realm of hospital morgues and funeral homes. They sit by their bedsides while they are alive, clutching at any sign of life. But once death comes, they are quick to release them into a world, which, for many, is a kind of wilderness. And there, as in the wild, vultures are drawn to the dead.

  chapter 2

  An Ideal Situation

  In 2001, Michael Brown had a thriving cremation business in Lake Elsinore, California, a pleasant suburban town seventy miles southeast of Los Angeles. He had five admiring employees, a beautiful wife, and two sons. Brown, who was in his early forties, was a loving and supportive father. On most weekends, he could be found racing dirt bikes with his older son and attending the boys’ ice hockey games. Brown took both boys camping in the Nevada wilderness. He Jet Skied with them on the town lake, played golf with them, and taught them how to fly radio airplanes. Brown beamed when he spoke of his children. “Those kids are my heart and soul,” he said.

  Brown wasn’t a devout Christian, although he displayed in his spare office a Bible engraved with his name. Sometimes he even quoted Matthew 7:3—“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”

  The California state crematorium inspector, Dan Redmond, saw this same humble philosophy in Brown’s work and was impressed by it. “You can honestly tell when these guys are just in the business to make an extra buck, and Mike was not like that,” Redmond said. Redmond noticed that when Brown talked to grieving families, he listened, counseled, and was careful to avoid any sales talk or to push a fancy coffin. If a family couldn’t afford a funeral, Brown offered to cut
his rates or provide a service free of charge.

  “He had one of the best crematorium in southern California,” Redmond said with a smile. In 1996, when a nearby funeral home got in trouble for improperly storing bodies, Brown was the first man Redmond called as his expert witness. “When other guys in the business had problems, I used to tell them to go and look at Brown’s place. That’s how a crematorium ought to be run.” Brown’s records were always in order; there was never a document out of place, never a signature missing. He was constantly mopping and sweeping.

  But beneath his caring manner, Brown had little feeling for his customers, living or dead. Later, he would say, “I don’t believe a body is worth more than garbage once you pass away.”

  One afternoon in February 1999, Jennifer Bittner stood in the parking lot of Brown’s crematorium. She was a pretty, pale-skinned girl, with delicate features, blue eyes, and long brown hair that she wore loose down her back. Bittner appeared older than her eighteen years. Her shoulders slumped and her face was drawn with grief.

  Shading her eyes from the glaring sun, Bittner stared at the long, low building. Made of stucco and stone, the crematorium was like all of the other buildings in the office park. It was flat and rectangular and resembled a warehouse. Bittner couldn’t see much through the tinted glass door. But looking up, she could make out three small chimneys.

  When Bittner appeared in Michael Brown’s doorway, he jumped up, shook her hand, and led her into a back office. Brown made an impression on the young woman. He was about six feet tall, blond and blue-eyed, with the muscular build of a high school football star. Bittner admired his neatly trimmed goatee. Later, she recalled finding him “very attractive.” He was also instantly empathetic. Brown listened and patted her arm as she explained that her cousin had just died and her family didn’t have enough money for his funeral.