Body Snatchers

About the same time that Rose Oprea was hospitalized for her stroke, the 62nd precinct of the New York City police department, in Brooklyn, was notified of a possible case of fraud. A couple — Deborah Johnson and her husband, Robert Nelms — had recently purchased the Daniel George & Son Funeral Home. A man had come to the home wishing to bury his aunt, who had prepaid for her funeral; Johnson could not find the appropriate documentation, and noticed larger-scale accounting irregularities. The case was assigned to Detective Patricia O’Brien.

O’Brien checked the files at the funeral home, which seemed to corroborate Johnson’s concern. But there was something else, Johnson told O’Brien. The detective accompanied her upstairs, to a hidden room. It was fitted out like an operating room, with hospital-style overhead lights, a hydraulic lift that rose through the ceiling of the embalming room on the floor below, a toilet with tubes into which blood and other bodily fluids were drained, scalpels, knives, saws. …

Back at the precinct, O’Brien began Googling addresses from forms Johnson had also shown her: All were for tissue-transplant companies, scattered around the country.

Through records from the George funeral home — many of them obviously fabricated — the investigation spread, from Brooklyn to the city’s other boroughs. O’Brien was joined by members of the NYPD’s prestigious major case squad, who fanned out, interviewing relatives of the deceased. The number of corpses that had been butchered at the funeral home increased first by the dozens and quickly by the hundreds. The police learned that in every case but one, permission hadn’t been granted — hadn’t, in fact, even been sought — for the harvesting of the dead’s skin, bones and tendons. The case seemed to grow more outrageous by the day. Detectives soon discovered that among those eviscerated was 95-year-old Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke, who’d died of lung cancer that had spread to his bones; his daughter, who had sought a cheap, simple cremation at her father’s request, would later speak of “lives torn asunder” by “these desecrations.” The exhumation of an 82-year-old Queens woman who died of brain cancer revealed that most of the bones below her waist had been cut out and replaced with plastic piping. When word of the investigation finally leaked out, a year after O’Brien first arrived at George & Son, the number of unwitting donors had eclipsed 1,000. The city was, to put it mildly, scandalized. BODY-SNATCHERS! shrieked the New York Daily News, which broke the story. Not to be outdone, GHOUL AND THE GANG! shouted the Post.

The investigation in New York was building steam, but 90 miles away as the crow flies — or in this case, a sparrow, which was flying, flitting, above the streets of Kensington, searching for a tree or some other place to perch — in Philadelphia, no one at Lou Garzone’s funeral home was aware of that. The sparrow arced down on Somerset Street, over an alleyway beside Garzone’s, where a mound of … something lay on a gurney, covered, oddly, by a large swatch of artificial turf. Later, a cutter would tell the grand jury he distinctly remembered the sparrow perched atop a human body that had been hacked to pieces and covered in fake turf — perhaps Rose Oprea’s, or one of the 243 others dismembered there — then left in the alleyway. The sparrow stood on two toothpick legs. Its head bobbed up and down, like a puppet’s. With its beak, it inspected the gaps between the artificial green blades of turf. Then it stared straight, fluttered its wings once, and flushed.

FINALLY, IN OCTOBER 2007, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office announced its own indictments: of Louis Garzone; his brother Gerald; their partner James McCafferty Jr.; the mastermind behind the entire enterprise, physician Michael Mastromarino; and Lee Cruceta, Mastromarino’s right-hand man. At the same time, the D.A. released a highly unusual 104-page report from the grand jury that had spent a year investigating the case. “What we found,” the grand jury wrote, “was appalling.”

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