A small request.

Just one line

Male Breast Cancer Link……………

Dear God, I pray for the cure of cancer.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost….

Amen 

Happiness and Peace.........for the Weekend........

When it is time to do a bit of "Soul searching",

I have a somewhere to go.

Now I go.

The picture shows we are really in dire need of rain

A Southern standby........Gardenia, 20 foot long hedge, in bloom.

Hope everyone has a good weekend. 

An x-ray of the lower part of a deceased person shows that PVC plumbing pipes were inserted where the bones once were in this photo released by the Brooklyn, N.Y. District Attorneys Office. Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, N.J., was charged with secretly carving up corpses and selling the parts for use in transplants.

NEW YORK - As a seasoned “cutter,” Lee Cruceta thought he knew when it was safe to harvest human tissue from the dead for transplants to the living — and when it wasn’t.

This time, it wasn’t.

The man’s body stretched out in front of Cruceta in the back room of a Manhattan funeral home after hours one day last summer had yellowish skin. His vacant eyes had the same sickly cast — a sign of jaundice. Cruceta telephoned his boss, Michael Mastromarino, to tell him the bad news: The body had failed inspection.

“We always went by the rule that if you come across a body and you say to yourself, 'I don’t want any part of that person in my body,’ you rule the case out,” Cruceta said.

But Mastromarino, by Cruceta’s account, surprised him. Stay put, he said.

The boss came down, checked out the body himself and declared that “everything looked fine.”

“I was overruled,” Cruceta said.

Out came the surgical tools. The extraction of flesh and bone began.

This is, again, Cruceta’s account. He, like Mastromarino, faces criminal charges in a scandal so grotesque that it reads like a real-life sequel to “Frankenstein.”

Cadavers harvested without permission

It was Mastromarino who built a business that took from the dead and gave to the living. There are many legitimate businesses that do this, but authorities say Mastromarino’s company, Biomedical Tissue Services, was not one of them.

BTS, they say, secretly carved up hundreds of cadavers without the families of the deceased knowing about it, then peddled the pieces on the lucrative non-organ body parts market.

Even scarier: They say BTS doctored paperwork to hide the inconvenient fact that some of the dead were old and diseased. As a result, they say, the market was flooded with potentially tainted tissue, and an untold number of patients across the country may have received infections along with their dental implants and hip replacements.

And it might have gone on indefinitely — except for an innocent phone call made by a doctor in Colorado, and a detective’s chance visit to a funeral parlor.

Using his contacts with companies that produce material for dental implants, Mastromarino opened Biomedical Tissue Services in Fort Lee, N.J., just across the George Washington Bridge from upper Manhattan, in 2001.

In 2002, Mastromarino sought licensing to do business in New York. As the company’s chief officer, he was asked on an application to the state Department of Health whether he “had charges sustained of administrative violations of local, state or federal laws, rules and regulations ... concerning the provisions of health care.”

“No,” he answered.

The license was granted.

Quest for new bodies
Femurs. Tendons. Heart valves. Swatches of skin from the thighs, stomach and back.

The body parts, though no longer of any value to their owners, became big business for Mastromarino. His lawyer said he was among the first in the industry to figure out that one way to meet the high demand for donated human tissue — traditionally procured in the controlled environment of hospitals — was to turn to funeral homes.

Deals were cut with funeral directors in New York City, Rochester, N.Y., Philadelphia and New Jersey: BTS would pay a $1,000 “facility fee” to harvest body parts on their premises.

 The scheme, authorities say, unraveled in two strands — one in New York, the other in Colorado.

In November 2004, New York City Police Department Detective Patricia O’Brien responded to a complaint from a funeral director in Brooklyn. The director claimed the parlor’s previous owner had stolen down payments for funerals.

But once inside the funeral parlor, she sensed something far more sinister.
The detective was surprised to find an embalming room that looked more like an operating room, with a steel table and bright overhead lights. When she reviewed old files, she found the names of biomedical companies. She later Googled the names and learned each was involved in tissue transplants.

O’Brien had gone into the investigation thinking she was dealing strictly with “a financial situation,” she said. “I had no idea. I was shocked.”

The NYPD’s Major Case Squad widened the investigation, interviewing the relatives of 1,077 dead people whose bodies were harvested for body parts. Only one said permission was given.

Meanwhile, the director of a Denver blood center, Dr. Michael Bauer, had been hired by several tissue banks to review medical charts of donors to make sure tissue was safe.

He toiled uneventfully until Sept. 28, 2005.

Falsified medical records
That evening, while flipping through charts at his desk, he spotted a notation on a woman’s chart saying she had chronic bronchitis. As a precaution, he picked up the phone and dialed the number listed for her doctor.

“All I wanted to know was whether the doctor thought that might be an acute infection,” meaning something present when she died, Bauer recalled. If so, the germ might still be in her tissue and make it unsuitable for transplantation.

A business answered, one “so unrelated to medicine that it didn’t feel right to me.”

So he picked up another chart and called another doctor.

Then another. And another.

Each time, no doctor answered. In each case, it appeared the charts were falsified.

“I got through the first 10 and that’s when all the hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Bauer said.

Case like a 'cheap horror movie'
The case, said the prosecutor, is like a “cheap horror movie.” But few scary flicks offer the gruesome and gory details of the BTS scandal.

Authorities released photos of exhumed corpses that were boned below the waist like a freshly caught fish. The defendants, they alleged, had made a crude attempt to cover their tracks by sewing PVC pipe back into the bodies in time for open-casket wakes.

It also was alleged that the body of the British-born host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” Alistair Cooke, was among those abused by BTS.

Mastromarino, Cruceta, another cutter and a former mortician have been charged. “What you have before you is nothing short of a case of medical terrorism,” prosecutor Michael Vecchione said at an arraignment.

Lawsuits filed by implant patients accuse BTS of exposing plaintiffs to hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Families of the dead have sued too, claiming the biomedical firm caused distress by desecrating the dead for profit.

Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration shut down BTS amid its own investigation. The agency said it had uncovered evidence the firm failed to screen for contaminated tissue. Parts were recovered from people who had diseases which may have been “exclusionary,” an FDA report said.

Death certificates altered
Death certificates in the company’s files, the report said, were at odds with those on file with the state: The company’s version made people younger than they actually were, and altered the cause and time of the deaths.

The culprits “were just some irresponsible crooks who were doing this and slipped through the cracks,” said Dr. Stuart Youngner, a Case Western Reserve University medical ethicist and head of the ethics committee at Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, a large nonprofit tissue bank. “The good tissue banks ... don’t do that.”

Cruceta is free on $500,000 bond. His name is on papers indicating that he was the one who conducted interviews with family members of the deceased — interviews that authorities say never took place. He insists he signed only because he was instructed to do so; prosecutors don’t believe him.

Mastromarino, 42, remains free on $1.5 million bail after pleading not guilty to body stealing, forgery, grand larceny and other counts. Through his lawyer, he refused requests for interviews by The Associated Press.

If convicted, he faces as much as 25 years in prison. But his lawyer, Gallucci, says he is more focused on establishing his innocence, clearing his name — and getting back to work.

He’s “hurt and depressed,” the attorney said. “He really believed he was helping mankind.”

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Starting the New Year off

with a BANG

As Autumn sets Upon us

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. the winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while care will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.

John Muir

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."