FORESHADOWING – ALISTAIR COOKE
August 1, 2010

In 2006, I wrote a Law Letter entitled “Parts is Parts” about the oral surgeon who had been arrested for stealing body parts to be used in transplant surgery. His activities took place in both New York and in Pennsylvania. A couple of days ago, the Pennsylvania high court upheld his 25-58 year criminal sentence for those crimes. One of the bodies that Dr. Mastromarino chopped up for resale was that of the renown journalist, Alistair Cooke, who died from cancer at the age of 95.

I have noticed the irony of circumstances that sometimes surround death. Louis XVI of France, wanting a more humane method of capital punishment, commissioned the committee that developed the infamous guillotine. It was to be the instrument of his death and that of his wife, Marie Antoinette. Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, fathers of our country, died on July 4th, the day we celebrate its birth. In more modern times, Truman’s Vice President, Alben Barkley, died moments after proclaiming in a speech that he would rather “be a servant in the house of the Lord than dwell in the house of the mighty.”

Although Alastair Cooke was British, he became well-known for of observations on American culture and history. Some of us also remember him from the Masterpiece Theater series. One of his pieces on America was entitled Decadence v Vitality. In it, he compared the United States to Rome in its latter days. Cooke argued that, like the Romans, Americans’ love of luxury and wealth portended our country’s decline.

I don’t know how Cooke’s family came to select the New York funeral home that was selling bodies to Dr. Mastromarino’s outfit. Nor do I know how the funeral director chose which bodies he would hand over to Mastromarino’s “cutters.” I also wonder whether the men who chopped him up knew the identity of their victim. They labeled his body parts with fictitious information, but they did this for all of their “donors.”

I do know the motive for Dr. Mastromarino’s actions. Before getting into the used parts business, he had been a successful oral surgeon. In 2002, the Dental Board pulled his license in connection with drug charges. Needing a new source of income, he quickly organized Biomedical Tissue Services and went to work. His henchmen would remove bones from cadavers and replace them with PVC pipes so that the family members would not discover his "harvesting" activities when they viewed the bodies at the funeral. Although making millions in his new business, Mastromarino wanted to reduce his costs to increase profits. He began working with crematoriums that didn’t care what happened to the bodies when the cutters were finished. The court reported that they would leave the leftovers to rot in an alley.

Mastromarino clung to his warped ways of thinking when he argued to the appellate court that his sentence was excessive. He said that the court should have considered the nature of the actions, not the number of violated bodies- sort of a “volume discount” sentence. I’m happy to report that the court didn’t buy his suggestion.

So it appears that Cooke’s concerns about American greed were well-founded. Mastromarino did not hesitate to disguise diseased, rotted tissues as “healthy” tissues to be used as transplants. At least one patient developed a Hepatitis B infection that she traces to a Biomedical Tissue Service product.

Although the mutilation of Cooke’s body serves to underscore the very American greed he railed against, I don’t know that greed has become more rampant in our country in the past several years. Our history is replete with fraudulent schemes of one sort or another. Thanks to journalists like Alistair Cooke, we may be more aware of the evil-doers, but they have plagued humanity since the early days of the snake oil salesmen who pandered worthless tonics to the sick and dying. I think it’s more important to look at our government’s reaction to the likes of Mastromarino. The courts of Pennsylvania and New York took appropriate steps to punish him and to make an example of him. Perhaps it is when government turns a blind eye to evil doers that we need to become alarmed. If so, we’re not there yet.