Accused to admit part in stolen bodies investigation

The man accused of scheming to plunder bodies for parts used in thousands of tissue transplants in the US and Canada is poised to plead guilty.

In an effort to escape a lengthy jail sentence in cases in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York, Michael Mastromarino has agreed to talk to investigators about the companies that bought the stolen tissue, said his lawyer, Mario Gallucci.

"Let's just say that he is going to assist them and give any information he has about the processors and their role," Gallucci said.

The companies that processed the tissue already face hundreds of civil lawsuits. They claim however that they never knew the body parts were not legitimately obtained and insist the former oral surgeon's plea deal, expected to be announced on Tuesday, does not change anything.

The scandal broke two years when Mastromarino, then owner of Biomedical Tissue Services, was accused of furtively hacking up corpses - including that of Briton Alistair Cooke, host of "Masterpiece Theatre" host - from funeral homes in the north east. The body parts were sent to the processors, fetching as much as $7,000 (€4,787) apiece.

Mastromarino, 44, was in a position to know exactly how the business operated and who knew what.

"Mastromarino can certainly tell us things that may lead us in directions we haven't been able to go before," said a law enforcement official.

Mastromarino started BTS in 2001 and made plenty off the pilfered corpses. It was not a complicated business.

The bodies came from funeral homes in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. BTS shipped the bone, skin and tendons to Regeneration Technologies Inc., LifeCell Corp. and Tutogen Medical Inc., all publicly traded companies, along with two nonprofits, Lost Mountain Tissue Bank and the Blood and Tissue Centre of Central Texas.

Court documents show Regeneration, which recently agreed to merge with Tutogen in an all-stock deal, shipped a total of 19,446 pieces of tissue that BTS provided.

Minneapolis, Minnesota-based health giant Medtronic Inc., which distributed some of the tissue it received from Regeneration, also has been sued but says the case is without merit.

The parts were used in disc replacements, knee operations, dental implants and a variety of other surgical procedures performed by unsuspecting doctors across the US and in Canada. About 10,000 people received tissue supplied by BTS.

Among the bodies BTS looted was that of Mr Cooke, who died in 2004.

Medical records for Mr Cooke show Regeneration received the arms and legs. Cooke's pelvis and other tissue were also removed, but it is not clear where those parts were sent.

His daughter, Susan Cooke Kittredge, said Regeneration never bothered to verify her father's medical records or whether in fact he had agreed to donate his arms and legs.

Ms Kittredge insists the companies had to know what Mastromarino was doing.

"If you look at it through an ethical lens, they committed the same crimes as Mastromarino," she said.

"They did harm by taking the parts. Clearly they did not check to see if the wishes of the family or of the deceased had been honoured. They did harm and exhibited reprehensible greed. It was all about the money."

Regeneration and Tutogen did not comment.

The processors, along with Medtronic, have said Mastromarino was a seedy operator who deceived them along with everyone else, and they had no idea that the body parts were illegally obtained.

"If he's going to plead guilty to these charges, I think that is a positive sign. He's admitting his wrongdoing, and he deceived everyone involved, from the donors and their families all the way to the recipients," said Bert Kelly, a spokesman for Medtronic, which had no direct dealings with Mastromarino.

If improperly screened and processed, cadaver tissues can lead to infections, including the Aids virus. Despite the companies' assurances that their sterilisation methods are safe, hundreds have sued them.

If Mastromarino - who faces up to 54 years in prison is convicted of enterprise corruption, body stealing, opening graves, unlawful dissection and forgery - implicates the companies, their financial exposure could be enormous.

An attorney for one of the processors played down Mastromarino's cooperation, however.

"It does not change how we are going to defend these civil cases at all," said David Field, a lawyer for LifeCell.

Attorney Kevin Dean, whose South Carolina firm Motley Rice is handling 592 lawsuits against the tissue processors and represents another 27 people in New York whose family members' bodies were carved up without permission, thinks Mastromarino has plenty to say.

"Everyone on our end ... believes it's very exciting information," he said.