Long prison terms for bodysnatchers
Three men who conspired to plunder corpses and sell the sometimes diseased body parts were sentenced to prison for what victims said was a gruesome, greedy scheme that violated basic principles of trust and human decency.
One of the victims of the scam's mastermind was British journalist Alistair Cooke.
In New Jersey, meanwhile, a federal judge ruled against some of the patients who sued after receiving some of the body parts, saying they had failed to establish grounds to sue.
The mastermind, Michael Mastromarino, was sentenced to 25 to 58 years in prison. Brothers Louis and Gerald Garzone, who provided bodies from a pair of funeral homes and a crematorium they ran in Philadelphia, will serve eight to 20 years.
Mastromarino previously was sentenced to 18 to 54 years for running the scam in New York, where the bodies plundered included that of Cooke. Mastromarino's two sentences will run concurrently.
The scandal dates to February 2006, when Mastromarino - then owner of Fort Lee, New Jersey-based Biomedical Tissue Services - and others were accused of cutting up corpses from funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The parts were sold and used in about 10,000 surgical procedures performed by unsuspecting doctors in the US and Canada.
Mastromarino paid the Garzones for at least 244 corpses that were carved up without families' permission and without medical tests, prosecutors said.
Skin, bones, tendons and other parts - some of them diseased - were then sold around the country for dental implants, knee and hip replacements and other procedures.
The three defendants, who had pleaded guilty to charges including abusing corpses and theft, apologised in court. "Words cannot express how sorry I am," Mastromarino told the court. He called his crimes "nothing less than disgusting and embarrassing," and then broke down and cried, burying his face in his hands.
