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
it and they were two different signatures. the paperwork on its face made sense. it looked like there were family members who signed and gave consent, that there was proper signatures, there was proper information. but once you look behind it, it absolutely made no sense. that kind of set the alarm off that something s going on here. we have somebody forging somebody s signature. the interesting part about being in rackets is that, since you re doing a case proactively before the arrest takes place, you almost kind of see the headline that s going to be coming out. you may not know whether it s ghoul or body snatcher or what s going to happen, you know this is a story or it s going to be. once a reporter finds out, it s going to be on the front page. it was october 7th, 2005, and the headline read, body snatchers of new york, exclusive.
what mastromarino did was to light a flame under my imagination that will never be stilled. even though it has been years since this happened, and i try and put it out of my mind, when i do revisit it, all i can think of you know, he died at midnight. so it was dark and someone stole his body in the middle of the night. my father was skinned, and they took 900 square inches of skin, every bone they could and mutilated him. that breaks my heart. i have low testosterone. there, i said it.
with them hand-to-hand around me, they were all on tv, it was their big day, had the press conference of holding up the pvc pipe and saying, look what he did and it enraged the public. and again, lack of knowledge of what really transpires in a tissue recovery agency, how we recover is no different than how anybody else recovers. the indictment consisted of 122 counts. the most serious charge faced was called enterprise corruption. that charge alone could get him 25 years in jail, let alone the other counts. they were using enterprise corruption you typically see in a bookmaking case, a loan sharking case. mobsters. you don t see it in a tissue harvesting business that is intertwined with multinational corporations that are traded on the stock exchange. it was kind of a blur. you know, i knew i was in trouble. i kept telling myself, you know, it was inconceivable, enterprise
was not conducted in the standard way. these donors could have been infected and the processing not been sufficient to cleanse that bone and make it safe for transplantation. several of them actually had cancer. cancer to cancer, again, let s go back to cancer. we spoke about this earlier. unless it was lymphoma, leukemia, breast cancer doesn t affect the bone. brain cancer doesn t affect the bone. lung cancer, not unless it is metastatic cancer, there is no infection in the bone. however, the cancer will have eroded that bone, it will have weakened that bone. the treatment that the patient has received for that cancer will have compromised the tissue in a variety of ways. i can just speak as a person, not as a doctor. but i wouldn t want to receive that bone myself. so just on that gut level, it fails. hepatitis b is not an easy disease to catch.