In late 2005, the
New York City Police Department investigated Michael Mastromarino and his company BTS for allegedly selling stolen human body parts. The probe was first reported by the
New York Daily News in October 2005, and led to a number of exhumations, including one of a
Queens woman who had had many of her bones removed and replaced with
PVC piping, which is a typical industry practice for cosmetic reconstruction of tissue donors. According to government witnesses, BTS sought business relationships with a number of
funeral homes in New York and
Pennsylvania solely to obtain access to recently deceased people, often paying the funeral homes $1,000 or more per corpse. The Cooke case was featured on a
2008 episode of
Horizon, "How Much Is Your Dead Body Worth?" Michael Mastromarino, the 42-year-old former
New Jersey–based
oral surgeon and CEO and
executive director of operations of BTS, Mastromarino was sentenced on June 27, 2008, in the Supreme Court in
Brooklyn, New York, to between 18 and 54 years in
prison. Director Toby Dye made the documentary
Body Snatchers of New York about this case in 2010. On September 4, 2008,
defense attorneys for human graft tissue distributors asked
U.S. District Judge William J. Martini to dismiss hundreds of charges, asserting that the companies "never knew the body parts were illegally obtained, and they say there is no evidence the transplanted tissue made anyone ill." According to the FDA, all tissue products collected and distributed by BTS were recalled and will be monitored for a complete accounting of all graft material. BTS sold its products to five companies; two of the companies were Life Cell Corporation, of New Jersey, and Regeneration Technologies, of Florida. Overall, about 10,000 patients in the United States and Canada received graft tissue from BTS. However, transplant patient Betty Pfaff was one person who suffered severe infection, septic shock, underwent dialysis and ultimately paralysis due to having received an implant made from infected cadaver tissue from Mastromarino's company. Although a recent judicial ruling has increased the difficulty of patients in proving pain and suffering from receiving bad donor tissue in cases like these, Pfaff's lawsuit is still pending. Other patients who received BTS-derived tissue and body parts include a Colorado woman who had to repeat her
ACL replacement surgery after her first BTS tendon failed, an Ohio woman who developed
syphilis after receiving a bone from BTS, and an Ohio man who developed both
HIV and
hepatitis C after receiving BTS bone implants in surgery. On January 8, 2010, Michael Mastromarino's now ex-wife Barbra Mastromarino appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show in a segment "Husbands' Secret Lives" and discussed the effect of the actions on her life and their sons' lives. After confronting his father about the reasons for his crimes while Dr. Mastromarino was incarcerated at
Rikers Island, their older son subsequently refused to speak to his father. During the broadcast, Barbra Mastromarino also listened to and apologized to the daughter of a victim of her husband's crimes, while mentioning she had no knowledge of her husband's illegal acts. Barbra Mastromarino acknowledged ignoring warning signs about the character of her ex-husband early in their relationship. On the morning of July 7, 2013, Michael Mastromarino died at St. Luke's Hospital after suffering from
bone cancer. He was 49. ==In popular culture==