[Dave]

from The Times Online

Bodysnatchers stole bones of veteran broadcaster to sell for transplants

By Tim Reid and Times Online

The bones of Alistair Cooke, the veteran Letter from America broadcaster, were stolen by a criminal gang trading in body parts the day before his cremation, New York police have told his family.

Mr Cooke’s family expressed their horror to The Times yesterday after being informed that his bones were removed by a surgeon the day after he died, and then allegedly sold for about $7,000 (£4,000) to two transplant companies.

Paperwork describing the bones, which were cancerous and too old for use in transplants, was reportedly altered to say they came from an 85-year-old man who had died of a heart attack.

Mr Cooke, who presented Letter from America on BBC Radio for 58 years, died aged 95 at his Manhattan home in March last year of lung cancer that had spread to his bones.

Police believe that the following day, at the New York undertakers where Mr Cooke was taken, his body was cut open and his bones removed, before he was cremated.

The family, unaware of the desecration, scattered Mr Cooke’s ashes the day after in Central Park, in accordance with his wishes.

Last week prosecutors in the District Attorney’s office in Brooklyn, who are immersed in a year-long investigation into the illegal sale of body parts by a New York undertakers, called Mr Cooke’s daughter, the Rev Susan Cooke Kittredge, to tell her that her father’s body had been mutilated and plundered after his death.

"We are reeling from this," Mrs Cooke Kittredge, a ongregational minister in Vermont, told The Times. In a formal statement read over the telephone, she added: "Alistair Cooke’s family is hocked and saddened by the news that following his death parts of his body were illegally sold for transplant.

"That people in need of healing should have received his body parts, considering his age and the fact that he was ill when he died, is as appalling to the family as it is that his remains were violated."

Holly Rumbold, his stepdaughter, told the BBC that what had befallen her stepfather was corrupt and evil. She added: "I am furious. I am enraged. I am outraged. My stepfather is not the only one that has been used for this macabre purpose and people are making millions of dollars out of it."

Ms Rumbold described what happened to her stepfather’s body after his death.

"He died in the night and the undertakers collected him. His ashes, or what we thought were his ashes, were returned the next day. They were scattered in Central Park. Who knows — maybe some of the ashes were his — how do you know? It defies the imagination.

"I am most shocked by the violation of the medical ethics, that my stepfather’s ancient and cancerous bones should have been passed off as healthy tissue to innocent patients in their quest for better health. It is the wickedest idea I ever heard of."

Richard Price, the former chairman of Bafta and a close friend of Mr Cooke, told The Times: "Could someone tell me how anyone could do such an awful thing? It is disgusting, horrendous."

Police allege that the body of Mr Cooke, who was best known in the US for his 22-year presentation of Masterpiece Theatre, a popular Sunday evening television show, was one of hundreds of corpses illegally ransacked for profit in America’s lucrative organ transplant and body tissue industry.

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s investigation has focused on a New York undertaker and the manager of a body tissue processing company, amid allegations that they harvested bones, veins, skin, heart valves and other body parts from corpses, before selling them on to unwitting and reputable surgical transplant companies.

The investigation centres on activities allegedly managed by Michael Mastromarino, a former dentist who runs Biomedical Tissue Services, a bone and tissue recovery company in New Jersey, and Joseph Nicelli, his former business partner. Mr Nicelli, an embalmer, owned a Brooklyn undertakers.

Investigators are looking back over the past two years and focusing on up to six New York undertakers who allegedly tipped off Mr Mastromarino when bodies arrived. He and Mr Nicelli are under investigation over allegations that, without the permission of families, they stripped the bodies of tissue and organs, before selling them on.

Neither man has been charged. Mario Galluci, Mr Mastromarino’s lawyer, told CNN last week that his client had nothing to do with the illegal harvesting of body parts. "He is a pioneer in the industry," he said. "Nobody has shown us that absolutely anything has been done inappropriately."

In another recent statement, Mr Galluci said that his client was "recognised nationally for procuring the highest quality tissue".

David Grossberg, the lawyer for the Cooke family in New York, said that the family was still too shocked to decide what action to take but added that all options were open.

Prosecutors have shown families consent forms that were allegedly forged, with ages and causes of death often falsified. By some estimates a single body, once it has been dissected and harvested, can be worth up to $150,000 (£85,000). Tissue and bone from Mr Mastromarino’s company have been sent to medical and dental facilities throughout the US and Canada.

The use of cancerous bone for transplant is a violation of the US Food and Drug Administration’s rules.

Last week it was reported that the body of an 82-year-old New York woman, which was exhumed as part of the investigation, was found to have had plastic plumbing pipe stuffed into her burial clothing. Nearly all her bones below her waist had been removed before burial.

The family of Michael Bruno, a New York cab driver who died last year, were visited recently by a detective with a donor consent form that his son, Vito Bruno, had supposedly signed.

Mr Bruno says that his signature had been forged on the form. Also changed was his father’s cause of death, listed as heart disease, instead of kidney cancer.

The undertakers that handled Mr Bruno’s body was run by Mr Nicelli. He denies any wrongdoing.

The crime has posed the question whether human body parts could be bought and sold in the UK. Nigel Hawkes, Times Health Editor, said to do so would be an offence under Section 32 of the Human Tissue Act, and conviction could lead to a jail sentence of up to three years.

"However, all laws are there to be broken, so it is impossible to say this couldn’t happen here," said Hawkes.

"So far there have no prosecutions under the Act, which came into force in November 2004."

The Act will be enforced by the Human Tissue Authority, which does not come into being formally until April 2006. It will license and inspect post mortem activities for hospitals and coroners, anatomical examinations, public display of human remains and storage of human tissue.

The new act and the establishment of the HTA emerged from the controversy over the retention of organs at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool and Bristol Royal Infirmary. Tissue and whole organs removed from babies during post-mortem examinations had been retained without the permission of their parents.

"While reprehensible, these scandals did not involve the sale of tissues, so they pale into insignificance compared to what has happened in the US," added Hawkes.

ILLICIT TRADE

From the early 18th century there was often a shortage of cadavers legally available for dissection and study by medical students

Those who illicitly traded stolen bodies for profit were sometimes termed "resurrectionists"

William Burke and William Hare, two immigrants from Northern Ireland, are believed to have murdered up to 30 people from 1827, to profit from the sale of their bodies to Robert Knox, an Edinburgh doctor. Burke was convicted and hanged two years later but Hare is said to have died a penniless pauper in London in 1858. No charges were brought against Knox, who accepted and paid for the bodies

This and similar cases led to the passage in 1832 of the Anatomy Act, which permitted the legal acquisition by medical schools of unclaimed bodies, those that no relatives had claimed within 48 hours of death. Paupers’ bodies from hospitals, Poor Law institutions, asylums and workhouses were commonly transferred to dissection rooms

According to Simon Chaplin, of the Royal College of Surgeons, discoveries of medical history such as the smallpox vaccine, advances in obstetrics, dental surgery and the treatment and detection of venereal disease may not have been possible but for the illicit trade

In the United States in 1788 outraged citizens of New York precipitated a riot while ransacking the rooms of anatomy students and professors at Columbia College Medical School in search of bodies which they believed had been stolen

The following year bodysnatching was prohibited by law, leading to a growth in illegal professional bodysnatching. It was not until 1854 that anatomy students were allowed access to unclaimed bodies from public institutions.

TheIndyChannel.com
Funeral Homes Busted In Body Parts Scandal
Acts Compared To 'Cheap Horror Movie'

POSTED: 6:51 am EST February 24, 2006
NEW YORK -- The owner of a biomedical supply house and three others were charged with selling body parts for use in transplants in a scheme a district attorney called "something out of a cheap horror movie."

Prosecutors said Thursday the defendants made millions of dollars obtaining bodies from funeral parlors in three states and forging death certificates and organ donor consent forms to make it look as if the bones, skin, tendons, heart valves and other tissue were legally removed.

The indictment was the first set of charges to come out of a widening scandal involving scores of funeral homes and hundreds of bodies, including that of "Masterpiece Theatre" host Alistair Cooke, who died in 2004. The investigation has raised fears that some of the body parts could spread disease to transplant recipients.

"I think we can agree that the conduct uncovered in this case is
among the most ghastly imaginable," said Rose Gill Hearn,
commissioner of the city Department of Investigation. "It was
shockingly callous in its disregard for the sanctity of human remains."

Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort
Lee, N.J., was charged along with Brooklyn funeral home owner Joseph Nicelli.

Mastromarino was an oral surgeon who went into the tissue business after losing his dentist license, prosecutors said. Nicelli was a partner in the business, they said. The other defendants were Lee Crucetta and Christopher Aldorasi.

All four pleaded not guilty to charges of enterprise corruption, body stealing and opening graves, unlawful dissection, forgery and other counts.

Prosecutors said the defendants took organs from people who had not given consent or were too old or too sick to donate. The defendants forged consent forms and altered the death certificates to indicate the victims had been younger and healthier, authorities said.

X-rays and photos of recently exhumed cadavers show that where leg bones should have been, someone had inserted white plastic pipes -- the kind used for home plumbing projects, available at any hardware store. The pipes were crudely reconnected to hip and ankle bones with screws before the legs were sewn back up.

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes called it "something out of a cheap horror movie."

Prosecutors said the body parts were sold to tissue suppliers and
ultimately used in disk replacements, knee operations, dental
implants and a variety of other surgical procedures performed by
unsuspecting doctors across the United States and in Canada.

The bodies came from funeral homes in New York City, Rochester,
Philadelphia and New Jersey that contracted with the Brooklyn funeral parlor for embalming. Prosecutors said more arrests were possible.

Nicelli was paid up to $1,000 per body to deliver corpses to a secret operating room at his funeral parlor, where Mastromarino would remove body parts, authorities said. Crucetta, a nurse, and Aldorasi allegedly helped Mastromarino.

Mastromarino made up to $7,000 a body by selling the tissue,
authorities said, and the corpses were then returned to unsuspecting funeral directors for burial.

The scheme began to unravel in late 2004, when a detective responded to a report from the new owner of Nicelli's funeral home that he allegedly cheated customers out of funeral deposits. The detective grew suspicious when she saw the hidden operating room, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

Mastromarino "vehemently denies doing anything illegal or wrong," defense attorney Mario Gallucci said. Mastromarino contends he "was not responsible for interacting with the families of the deceased nor in obtaining the documentation needed to harvest the tissue."

Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration closed
Biomedical Tissue Services, saying it had evidence the company failed to screen for contaminated tissue. The agency warned that patients who received the company's products could have been exposed to diseases, although the FDA insisted the risk was minimal.

Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...icle352535.ece

Japan's rich buy organs from executed Chinese prisoners

By Clifford Coonan in Beijing and David McNeill in Tokyo
Published: 21 March 2006

Hundreds of well-off Japanese and other nationals are turning to China's burgeoning human organ transplant industry, paying tens of thousands of pounds for livers and kidneys, which in some cases have been harvested from executed prisoners and sold to hospitals.

When Kenichiro Hokamura's kidneys failed, he faced a choice: wait for a transplant or go online to check out rumours of organs for sale. As a native of Japan, where just 40 human organs for transplant have been donated since 1997, the businessman, 62, says it was no contest. "There are 100 people waiting in this prefecture alone. I would have died before getting a donor." Still, he was astonished by just how easy it was.

Ten days after contacting a Japanese broker in China two months ago, he was lying on an operating table in a Shanghai hospital receiving a new kidney. "It was so fast, I was scared," he says. The "e-donor" was an executed man; the price: 6.8m yen (about £33,000).

Beijing does not reveal how many people it executes, but analysts estimate as many as 8,000 people are killed each year. Reports of Chinese authorities removing organs from executed prisoners have been circulating since the mid-1980s, when the development of a drug called Cyclosoporine-A made transplants a newly viable option for patients.

Until now, most of the evidence linking executions to the organ trade has been anecdotal and has not been helped by a lack of transparency in the Chinese criminal justice system or the secrecy that surrounds prison executions.

A recovering Mr Hokamura claims he is concerned with where his new kidney came from. "My translator said my donor was a young executed prisoner," says the businessman. "The donor was able to provide a contribution to society so what's wrong with that?"

"It was cheap," adds Mr Hokamura, now back in Japan. "I can always earn more money."

Rumours of problems with follow-up care and patients dying within one to two years of returning from China have failed to stem the tide. A single broker has helped more than a hundred Japanese people go to China for transplants since 2004 and the trade is growing. Official figures almost surely underestimate the numbers of people, many of whom fly without government knowledge. Mr Hokamura says his family is so pleased that his daughter has put his experience on the internet. In her blog she says she feels sorry for others to have to wait years for transplants and provides a link to a support centre in Shanghai. "Other people should know about this," she writes.

Sources say the cost of a kidney transplant runs to £37,000 and for a liver up to £88,000. Mr Hokamura paid another million yen for transport costs. There is little attempt to conceal the origins of the organs, the bulk of which are taken from executed prisoners.

Alarmed by the growing traffic, the Japanese health ministry has begun a joint research project with transport authorities in a bid to gain some control on the trade. But the government is likely to find it difficult to stop desperate people who have money from making the short plane hop to China. Says Mr Hokamura: "I was on dialysis for four years and four months. I was tired of aiting." The Chinese government insists it is trying to crack down on the market in illegal organs. According to regulations, even in the case of a donation by a close living relative, both patients and donors must provide legal proof of the relationship by blood or marriage or submit to a DNA test.

But the signs spray-painted on the walls outside clinics and hospitals in many parts of China tell a different story. Simple and direct, these show a mobile phone number and the character for shen, which means "kidney", written alongside. Postings fon numerous online bulletin boards and other internet sites also offer kidneys for sale. The sale of organs for transplants is illegal in China, but the black market is flourishing. And it's not just the small private hospitals and clinics springing up all over the country - even bigger hospitals in the capital Beijing and the business hub of Shanghai have adverts in toilet cubicles and on the walls of wards. "We have to wipe off the notices again and again. They even visit doctors, make numerous calls or write letters again and again," said Professor Ding Qiang, the head of Urology at Huashan hospital, part of Fudan university in Shanghai. "Donations that are subsequently made are surely organ trading, but 'organ donation' for money is strictly banned," said Professor Ding. However, China is a huge country and, as the proverb goes: the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. The legal ban may have an impact on the illegal organ trade in major public hospitals but the private clinics and small hospitals, which are run for profit, are extremely difficult to regulate, leaving room for profitable, illegal organ trading.

Generally, there is a lack of awareness in China about transplants. As in Japan, a cultural taboo, strongly related to Buddhist beliefs, has traditionally been associated with donating organs. The procedure is seen to make the body imperfect and, in some ways, it means the donor is being unfilial, even if the donation is to a family member.

AOL News
19/04/06
China 'Harvesting Prisoners' Organs'

Organs are being removed from executed prisoners without consent, it is claimed.

British transplant surgeons have accused China of harvesting the organs of thousands of executed prisoners a year to sell for transplants.

In a statement, the British Transplantation Society will condemn the practice as unacceptable and a breach of human rights, the BBC reports. Chinese officials denied the practice earlier this week.

The British Transplantation Society said increasing evidence suggested that the organs of thousands of executed prisoners in China were being removed for transplants without consent.

Professor Stephen Wigmore, who chairs the society's ethics committee, told the BBC's Radio 5 Live that the speed of matching donors and patients implied prisoners were being selected before execution.

He said: "The weight of evidence has accumulated to a point over the last few months where it's really incontrovertible in our opinion.

"We feel that it's the right time to take a stance against this practice.''

Prof Wigmore said he and his colleagues all knew of patients who had researched the possibility of going to China for transplants.

Last week a Chinese health official said organs from executed prisoners were used, but only with prior permission and in very few cases.

Chinese authorities recently announced steps to tighten regulations surrounding transplants. From July, selling organs will be illegal and all donors must give written permission.