tales from the brooklyn crypt keeper

Wow, this is some crazy shit. I wonder what the prices for certain organs fetch on the secondary market? Spleen? Gall bladder? Liver? 'Tissue recovery' must be code word for illegal organ monger. such craziness in the world today.

Staten Island Advance
Brooklyn man files suit in body-parts probe
Some Islanders' corpses believed included in emerging scandal
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
By SALLY GOLDENBERG
ADVANCE STAFF WRITER

Shortly after his father died from cancer on May 22, 2003, Vito Bruno brought the urn to the Bay Ridge office where he works. It contained a small plastic bag of dark gray ashes, all that remained of his father, Michael. Or so he thought.

Bruno now believes that some of his father's body parts were pilfered for profit in an emerging scandal -- which is said to include the bodies of some Staten Islanders -- that the Brooklyn district attorney's office is investigating.

"This is some real hideous, medieval stuff," Bruno, a 49-year-old concert producer, said after a news conference yesterday in the Brooklyn office of his attorney, Sanford Rubenstein. Bruno filed the first lawsuit in the widespread investigation yesterday in Brooklyn Supreme Court. A source close to the investigation has said parts from at least 100 bodies, including some from Staten Island, were stolen and sold without families' consent, and roughly 40 victimized relatives have been identified.

"We're not even halfway there yet," the source said, adding that exhumations are imminent. Bruno was still grieving the loss of his 75-year-old father, he said, when investigators from the NYPD's Major Crimes unit arrived at his Borough Park home last week to tell him that his dad's body parts allegedly were sold for profit to a tissue-harvesting company in New Jersey. Bruno said he never gave consent for the procedure, his signature was forged and the cause of his father's death was switched on paperwork to a heart attack.

"I just sat there in absolute stunned disbelief that this could actually happen in this day and age," he said. Bruno's suit names the English Brothers Funeral Home in Brooklyn, a New Jersey tissue-recovery firm and the two men alleged to have orchestrated the plot: Rosebank resident Joseph Nicelli, 49, and New Jersey resident Michael Mastromarino, 42, who runs Biomedical Tissue Recovery Ltd. in Fort Lee.

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