movie, to be quite honest with you, i felt the same way that everybody else felt when they first heard about it. then he explained to me, yes, it s done every day, this is a legal business. and then i began to do my own research on the industry. so that was my first meeting with michael. like any case, if you don t know it, you have to educate yourself. if it s a medical case, you have to speak to a medical doctor. if it s a bone case, you have to speak to the people who process bone. then i learned it was legal. so it became like, well, i didn t know that. but let me take a look at it. it s been documented you cannot pay for bone, you can t buy bone. so what they call it is paying for recovery fee. the companies that process bones pay for the service of recovering their bone. sure enough, i just happened to be looking through documents to understand what was in those boxes, i looked at two documents that supposedly should have had the same person s signature on
prove our case and make sure that it was strong. i never understood what this smoking gun was until much later in the case, but eventually, the smoking gun was dna information. initially, we were puzzled on how the tainted tissue could get past the health checks. the processors did keep some of the tissue that was sent to them. so at that point, we basically sought out the assistance of our medical examiner s office in new york city, and they were wonderful in helping us conduct all the dna testing. in order to send tissue to a processor, the processor needs to do an evaluation on the tissue itself. so the first thing that you send to the processor is a sample of blood. the processor then processes the sample of blood, determines whether or not the person has a disease, such as syphilis, hepatitis, aids, what have you, and then they call up michael
forms and forging other documents. like i said, i made a lot of bad choices and just trusted the wrong person, and if i could go back and listen to my instincts again, like i said, i know i wouldn t be here. i regret the day i met michael, and i regret doing everything that i ve done to hurt other people. and the pain that i ve caused my family. mastromarino changed his plea to guilty when i guess he realized there was nowhere for him to run. he realized we had done our homework and we had him. so i think that s what pushed him. but he took us right up to the very end, literally pretty much on the eve of trial is when he decided to plea.
the bone has cancer so now the recipient has cancer. that s just not true. these are where i have problems with the industry and the so-called smart guys make up these rules. i would like to sit down with these smart people and talk about them. my name is john heeley. i m a physician and orthopedic surgeon, professor of orthopedics at cornell university medical school in new york, and the chief of orthopedics at sloan-kettering cancer center in new york city. dr. heeley was the expert that basically said what michael mastro mastromarino did and the type of tissues that he took put the transplant recipients in harm s way. bone that is osteoporotic who has had cancer or other disease is not as strong. it s not going to stand up long enough. it doesn t heal as well and so that is a serious problem. the hiv testing, for example,
corruption never heard of that charge until i was in court. four men accused of stealing bones from corpses and selling them to be used in transplants plead not guilty late today. bail has been set for the four defendants with mastromarino s the highest at $1.5 million and passports have also been revoked for fear they are a flight risk. the battle lines were drawn today and we expect to fight. they were very confident they were going to beat the case and their attorneys repeatedly told us we didn t have a strong case and that we wouldn t be able to prove it. he kept telling me everything was going to be fine. that they had no evidence. we felt that he could just blame it on the funeral directors and walk away from this. michael pled innocence up until the day i saw something that i had not seen before.