Alistair Cooke body-snatcher case to go ahead

Feb 28 2008 Western Mail

THE leader of a body-snatching ring responsible for stealing the bones of veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke will plead guilty next week, despite US prosecutors trying to withdraw a plea deal, a judge ruled yesterday.

Michael Mastromarino netted millions of dollars for his role in the hacking up of hundreds of corpses before forging donor consent forms and selling the parts on for transplant.

Lawyers believe around 40 unsuspecting British patients received the stolen bone graft material.

Victims in the UK include Suzanne Green, 33, of Caerphilly, and dad-of-three Delwyn Herridge from Ebbw Vale.

In South Wales, 15 people who had surgery at the University Hospital of Wales were given the implants and informed in September 2006 of what had happened.

Many are taking part in class- action compensation claims.

Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Albert Tomei ordered US prosecutors to honour a plea bargain reached last month when Mastromarino appeared in court yesterday.

Repeatedly hitting the bench, the judge said, “I’m here to do justice. This plea bargain is fair under the circumstances.”

The judge dismissed the Brooklyn assistant district attorney’s argument that only a trial would fully redress the harm caused by Mastromarino as “specious and of no substance”.

“I’m not here to facilitate lawsuits ancillary to this particular case,” the judge said.

“There’s no doubt in this case the defendant did what he had to do. He gave information as to the state of his crimes and did it willingly.

“The public policy here of not enforcing plea bargains where the defendant has conformed would put the state in a very bad light when it comes to taking pleas. And it’s unfair.”

The judge ordered the 44-year- old former dentist to be able to enter a guilty plea in return for a sentence of 18-54 years.

“For Mr Mastromarino, who will never see the light of day under this sentence, to go through a trial and cost the good money of the people of this borough and this state is unreasonable,” the judge said.

Some of the material taken illegally from mortuaries in the US was implanted into British patients who underwent orthopaedic surgery in the UK.

Plus Orthopedics of Swindon bought tissue and bone from Regeneration Technologies in the US, and up to 82 units of affected bone graft material are known to have been implanted in patients across the UK.

Mastromarino and his criminal associates harvested more than 1,000 bodies, including that of Mr Cooke, the long-running host of the BBC’s Letter from America.

After the broadcaster died aged 95 in 2004, the ring stole his bones and sold them on for $11,000 (£5,500).

As part of the plea bargain, Mastromarino will co-operate with prosecutors in a probe of several companies that bought the stolen body parts and then sold them to more than 20,000 transplant recipients throughout the US, Canada and Europe. The transplants included bones, skin, arterial valves, ligaments and tendons.

The deal with prosecutors was largely agreed on January 11 during a five-hour session.

The body-snatching ring ran for more than four years, ending in the autumn of 2005, and more than 1,400 corpses were taken.

The bodies came from funeral homes in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Biomedical Tissue Services, which was owned by Mastromarino, shipped the body parts around the world.

According to the indictment, Mastromarino paid funeral home owners $1,000 (£500) for each corpse and forged next-of-kin permission documents.

Detectives told his Mr Cooke’s daughter Susan Kittredge that the gang had made Mr Cooke appear a suitable donor by falsifying his cause of death by listing it as a heart attack, not cancer, and listing his age as 84 rather than 95.