Involuntary anatomical “gifts”

Louis and Gerald Garzone have recently pled guilty in Pennsylvania to a variety of crimes including conspiracy, theft, abuse of corpse, and welfare fraud.  Here are the details from AP, Brothers admit stealing parts from 244 corpses, CNN.com, Sept. 3, 2008:

• Louis and Gerald allowed the corpses of 244 non-organ donors to be harvested for their anatomical parts without the permission of the decedents’ families.
• The scheme was devised by Michael Mastromarino who also pled guilty and, in fact, has already been sentenced in New York for similar offenses.  See this earlier discussion on this blog.
• “Authorities were able to identify only 49 of the 244 bodies, since the scam entailed falsifying names, ages and causes of death to disguise corpses that were too old or too diseased to be harvested legally. The Garzones burned their records in the crematorium when investigators started asking questions * * *.”