Body Brokers Page 8

  A few minutes later, his second wife, April Malloy Perna, called from North Carolina, where she had moved after filing for divorce. Malloy runs a babysitting company called Emergency Nanny Care Services, which Perna funded. “She’s the one you should be doing a story on, not me,” Perna said. “Child care in America is the worst in the country.” From Perna’s tone on the phone, it appeared that the two were still very much together. “The business is booming,” he said proudly. Indeed, the company was doing so well that after just six months in business, its Web site announced, it was expanding into “care for the elderly.”

  When I asked Perna about his own plans for the future, he told me that he was moving forward with his idea to start a tissue bank. “The donor side is the place to be,” Perna said. “You know, when I first started this, man, I could’ve gotten eighty a week. Torsos were being destroyed! They were taking spines out of them. They were using their heads for dentistry and plastic surgery, and it was like, the torso, who wants it?” Now tissue banks can’t keep up with the demand. “If you want a shoulder, we’re talking ninety days at least!” he said, giggling. “That’s where the money is!” He picked up his fork and began slapping the back of the tines against his palm. “Oh, shoulders! Knees!”

  What about the bodies? I asked. How will you find them?

  “Mostly in nursing homes,” he said. “Funeral homes. People that can’t afford to get buried.”

  Unfortunately, a dead person is much more difficult to commodify than a live pig. Still, you can approximate a pig farm by choosing the right location. Florida, for example, would be perfect, Perna reasoned, except that it has too many rich people, who tend not to be impressed by any dollar-dangling. Give me your tired, your poor, I thought. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.

  As Perna sees it, there are plenty of people who would like to make something of themselves in death, if not in life. He imagines a streamlined future for the cadaver trade, in which straight talk about real needs replaces prudish euphemism. “If I was you,” he said, “I would open up a company that is just going to basically buy bodies.” The company would pay, he said, something like $20,000 for a cadaver, chop it up, and then sell the pieces for $200,000. Poor families would enjoy a new source of income, the company would make a large profit, and the marketplace would finally be provided precisely the parts it desired.

  “You wanna buy a heart?” he asked. “Here it is, baby! One through ten! Different sizes! Different blood types! Whatever! Think about it,” he said. “It would be like farming. You’d be farming people.”

  “Okay, ma’am,” he said, adopting an official tone. “You have a good liver. You have a good this and that. Sign up and we’re going to put a band in your butt. We’re going to monitor you twenty-four hours a day. And as soon as you die, you’re mine.”

  Augie Perna is not the first person to have seen a future in corpses. For centuries, men have made their livings tramping through the dark chambers of death and turning over the flesh and bones of their brothers for cash.

  chapter 5

  The Resurrection Men

  On a moonless night in December 1811, Joseph Naples rose from his rumpled bed with a hangover, threw on his clay-stained uniform, grabbed a large shovel and a crowbar, and headed out into the cold.

  It was three in the morning, and the streets of London were damp and nearly deserted, but for a few sleepy beggars and drunken prostitutes. A slight, nimble man, Naples scurried through the narrow, muddy alleys, stepping around the piles of horse manure like a small animal hunting its prey. He stopped at the iron gates of a graveyard and was soon joined by a group of sinister men. Like Naples, the others were dressed in dirt-caked clothing that stank of rotting flesh.

  Presently, a watchman appeared in the fog. He nodded to the men, swung open the heavy iron gate, and closed it behind them. He pointed out the new graves. Working quickly and quietly, the men threw the damp, icy soil expertly over their shoulders so that it fell in a small, neat pile.

  Working a grave was a delicate endeavor. The men had to be careful to avoid any rocks or gravel, lest the clank of their shovels attract the attention of a passing constable, a hungry watchdog, or an early-rising neighbor. Naples knew that within an hour or two, smoke would be rising from breakfast chimneys within sight of where he stood.

  When at last they reached the coffin, Naples inserted a crowbar and pried off the lid. Eagerly, the men peered down to inspect their prize.

  This moment was full of unpleasant surprises. One never knew what lay beneath the wormy soil: bodies jaundiced or eaten by maggots and half-rotted, or covered in festering smallpox boils. In that case, an angry call went out: “Thing’s bad!”

  But if the corpse was fresh, the men rejoiced and hauled it out of the dirt, removed its sacred white shroud, and stuffed it back in the coffin. Then they replaced everything as it was. They filled in the hole and smoothed over the dirt, taking care to arrange each stone as they had found it. Then they wrapped up the body like a trussed fowl, put it in a sack, and loaded it onto a wagon parked discreetly nearby.

  This particular December night, Naples was lucky. “Got three,” he noted laconically in his diary the next morning.

  The Borough Gang, as these men were known, were the forefathers of modern-day body brokers, part of an underground network of entrepreneurs that supplied nineteenth-century British surgeons with corpses. At the time, the only bodies that could be legally dissected were those of hanged murderers. There weren’t enough murderers to go around and so the surgeons depended on gangs of so-called resurrectionists, to supply them with “subjects.”

  The resurrection business was a lot like the cadaver trade today. It developed for similar reasons, employed the same kind of people, who used some of the same methods, and supplied the same sort of ambitious surgeons, who, like many surgeons today, were more concerned with their own education and professional advancement than with the provenance of their corpses. As long as they got them on time and in good order, that was enough.

  The word surgery comes from the Greek cheirourgia, which means, literally, hand work. The Greeks learned surgery from the ancient Egyptians, who performed elective operations like circumcision and even a form of plastic surgery, which they employed to heal battle wounds. The Greeks learned to tie arteries to stop bleeding. In the sixth century B.C., medical schools proliferated in what is now modern Turkey and on the island of Cos, producing such medical giants as Hippocrates, whose writings provide detailed case histories and treatments for fractures and hemorrhoids. One hundred and fifty years after Hippocrates’ death, in the fourth century B.C., a medical school in Alexandria, hosted dissection courses using the bodies of condemned criminals. Thanks to these courses, the famous surgeon Herophilos established the human brain as the center of consciousness and named the prostate.

  Sadly, in the Middle Ages much of the medical knowledge advanced by the Greeks and then Romans was lost. Papal law prohibited human dissection, and the human body came to be seen merely as a source of mysterious ailments. Though pockets of medical study persisted throughout the Arab world and in southern Italy, many medical schools closed down. If someone became sick, it was God’s wrath. If someone healed, it was a miracle. Knowing little of human anatomy, doctors abandoned the practice of tying blood vessels to control bleeding. Instead, they poured boiling oil or applied hot coils to the wounds of their patients.

  But the Renaissance brought a renewed interest in medicine and specifically in human anatomy. In the sixteenth century, the Papal ban on dissection was finally lifted. In that same century, Andreas Vesalius performed dissections on corpses in Italy, which attracted students from all over Europe. Vesalius hired a famous artist to create woodcuts of his dissections and then published the illustrations in the now-famous anatomical text, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Structure of the Human Body). In his book, Vesalius corrected many of the misconceptions of the time, providing a detailed
description of little-understood organs like the liver and the heart.

  Despite their knowledge of human anatomy, surgeons still worked with considerable limitations. There was no reliable form of anesthesia, no understanding of bacteria or infection. Surgeons performed operations on tables while their patients sipped wine to forget the pain. Understandably, these operations were done only in cases of mortal danger. Unlike today, surgeons mostly treated surface wounds, amputated limbs, healed fractures, and removed superficial tumors.

  By the late 1780s, dissection courses were being held in Vienna, Paris, as well as in London. In London, despite the growing need for corpses, there was no plentiful supply. Thus arose the resurrectionists.

  Just as many body brokers today begin as funeral directors, as crematorium operators, or as dieners at medical schools, resurrectionists first worked as grave diggers and cemetery caretakers. Naples, for example, worked as a grave digger at Spa Fields Cemetery in London before joining the Borough Gang. Unlike his cronies, he came from a respectable family—his father had been a bookbinder. He was well-mannered and polite. But he was soon corrupted by the resurrectionists and their money.

  A Scotsman named White introduced Naples to body snatching. White worked as a middleman, employing grave diggers to get him bodies and then selling them to gangs, who resold them to surgeons. One day, he enticed Naples to dig up a body or two and to procure for him some “canines,” or teeth. Corpse teeth were valuable—the material of choice for dentures of the day. A timid, hardworking man, Naples did as he was told and White rewarded him for his work.

  When he saw the money that could be made, Naples began to spend some of his night hours digging up bodies, and eventually he began robbing corpses full-time. A year or so later, he sold a body to White, who was stopped by a constable, and Naples was sentenced to two years in jail. He managed to escape but was unable to find work. So he joined the Borough Gang. For the next several years, he spent his days looking out for funerals and his nights digging up flesh.

  Naples kept a diary of his job that was later published as The Diary of a Resurrectionist. He made his notations in a sloping scrawl in a ledger book and titled them, simply, “remarks.” In the same way that a broker of today might call bodies “products,” Naples refers to them as “things.” He notes their size—“Large,” “Large small,” “Small,” “Foetus”—their condition, and their price.

  Monday October 5, 1812 Went to look out at different places, at night party went to Lamb [a cemetery] got 2 adults and 9 small took the whole to the Borough [hospital].

  Monday October 19th Went to Lamb, got 1 Adult M. [opened another whole but bad with the small pox] took the above M. to Barth. [Bartholomew’s hospital] came home . . .

  Tuesday October 20th Went to Barthol. Bill had got pd. for the above Male I borrowed of him £1.10.0 [one pound ten shillings] went to Lamb came home at night met at the White [a pub] Hollis myself Jack & Tom Light, Bill not with us could not find his clothes: went to Lamb two adults M. took to Barthol. Butler again not with us came home.

  Naples is matter-of-fact about his gruesome job. But that’s not to say that it didn’t affect him. He and the gang were often ill after handling a corpse, and they escaped the ghastly work by drinking. On the nights that they didn’t “go out,” they went to one of their favorite pubs to guzzle ale and “settle up the accounts.”

  Presiding over these evenings was their leader, Ben Crouch—or “Uncle Crouch,” as the anatomy students called him. A tall man with coarse features and a pockmarked face, Crouch was an amateur boxer and a cunning businessman. While the gang got drunk, he counted the money and made sure, when he passed out the spoils, to stiff each and every one of them. By that point, the boys were usually too drunk to notice.

  Crouch could be charming when necessary. At the beginning of each academic term, he went around to the medical schools to negotiate the rates. Dressed like a dandy, fobs hanging from his watch chain, he bustled around the dissecting room, bowing to the lecturers and winking at the dieners. But if he didn’t get the price he wanted, he quickly became rude and abusive.

  One of Crouch’s regular customers was Dr. Astley Cooper, a well-known surgeon and professor of anatomy at St. Thomas’s Hospital. Surgeons like Cooper knew well where and how the resurrectionists got their bodies. But the unspoken rules of the body trade forbade him to ask any but the most general questions of his ne’er-do-well procurers. Graveyard clay might be caked on their uniforms, but nothing would be said of the graveyard. A wink and a nod and full payment were enough, and the gang members were on their way.

  Cooper openly despised the resurrectionists and referred to them as the “lowest dregs of degradation,” but he was a generous and very loyal client nonetheless. His success depended on them.

  Every morning at six, Cooper rose and disappeared into the shed behind his house, which he used as a dissection room. There he experimented until breakfast on a variety of carcasses. Cooper would dissect anything he could get his hands on—not simply human corpses, but fish, chicken, stray mutts enticed to their death by his servant, and even, on one occasion, a massive dead elephant, provided by his friends at the London Zoo. He once boasted, “There is no person, let his situation in life be what it may, whom, if I were disposed to dissect, I could not obtain.”

  Like Perna’s course in Florida, these morning sessions gave Dr. Cooper the chance to practice his techniques and to experiment with new ones. As a result, Cooper became one of the great innovators of his time. He was the first surgeon to tie the carotid artery for an aneurysm and the first to amputate a leg at the hip. This last operation required him to tie four blood vessels, all while his patient was awake, sipping wine. Later, King George IV handpicked Cooper to remove a tumor from his head, a difficult operation even by today’s standards, but which was a great success.

  After a bit of tea and breakfast, Cooper saw patients in his home. At lunchtime, he hurried to Guy’s Hospital, where he made rounds, lectured to students, and performed dissections in the amphitheater. By seven, he was home for a quick dinner and then set out to see more patients or to teach another class.

  When he finally crawled into bed, Dr. Cooper was often awoken by a knock at the door. There, standing in the moonlight, would be one of the resurrectionists, claiming he’d found some fresh grave to work but needed an advance to bribe the grave digger or the watchman. Always eager for more specimens, Cooper handed over the money, never suspecting that the gang had tricked him and taken the bodies to another school where they got twice the price. Cooper and his suppliers often fought about money.

  Wednesday, January 22, 1812 At 4 o’clock in the morning got up, Bill & me went to the Hospital Crib and [got] 1 for Mr. Cooper’s Lectures, had a dispute with the party, at home all night. Ben got drunk.

  Successful gangs fiercely guarded their territory, and if they found interlopers trying to poach their corpses or customers, they quickly squashed them. Perhaps a friendly trip to the constable to turn in the miscreants. Perhaps a visit to the anatomy lab for some dissection of their own. The point was to render their rivals’ bodies useless for dissection.

  On Monday, August 24, 1812, when the Borough Gang ran into a group of their competitors, a Jewish gang of body snatchers run by Israel Chapman, they followed them through town until they “lost scent.” But when they learned that Chapman had got a “Male,” they made an appointment to settle the score and had a “row.”

  Anatomy instructors learned to keep quiet about these battles. The resurrectionists had the upper hand. If the professors spoke out, they risked seeing their supply of corpses abruptly dry up—or even seeing corpses that had been bought and paid for disappear. In fact, rather than hold the resurrectionists accountable, surgeons were more likely to appease them.

  When the gang members were arrested, Cooper had them freed. When they were locked up, he supported their families. When he sent them into the countryside to pick up the body of someone who had died of an interesting
ailment, he paid for their coach, their lodging, and food expenses, as well as for the cost of the bodies themselves.

  In 1828, Dr. Cooper spent nearly a hundred pounds keeping the resurrectionists in business. The reason for this was simple, he later said: “I would not remain in the room with a man who attempted to perform an operation in surgery, who was unacquainted with anatomy, unless he would be directed by others; he must mangle the living if he has not operated on the dead.”

  The London constables were equally circumspect. Though British law strictly forbade grave robbing, and constables made a show of disapproval, they were partial to the doctors, fearing that if they cracked down too hard on the resurrectionists, the medical students wouldn’t be properly trained, since the number of executed bodies made available every year for study didn’t begin to meet the needs of the medical schools.*2

  They had a good reason to protect the interests of the doctors and medical students. In 1803, England had plunged into a major war with France, and those who fought the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte had learned to expect massive casualties. The lives of thousands of brave British soldiers depended on the skill of military surgeons at the battlefront.

  More than a decade after the Borough Gang got started in London, two men in Edinburgh conceived of a far more sinister plan to procure corpses.

  William Hare managed a grim lodging house in an Edinburgh slum: three ramshackle rooms with a pigsty in the back. The lodgers were the usual sad assortment found at such places: They were often poor, often destitute. Many were sick and couldn’t afford a proper doctor. A few hoped desperately to better themselves, but many had simply given up.