An oral surgeon-turned-nurse-turned-organlegger has been busted in Philadelphia for buying corpses from funeral directors, extracting their valuable tissues, and selling them on to be used in surgery in the US and Canada:
Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon, paid funeral directors $1,000 per corpse, then sold the parts to tissue banks, Sagel said.The body parts fetched up to $10,000 apiece, though tissue banks resold them to hospitals for many times that amount, he said. Mastromarino is believed to have taken in $6 million to $12 million since 2001.
The body parts were used in disk replacements, knee operations and dental implants performed by unsuspecting doctors across US and Canada.
(Image: Roll Up for Your Dentures!, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Meanest Indian’s Flickr stream)