Book summary “Body brokers”: summary

Introduction

When you lose a loved one, you trust that their remains will be treated with dignity and cremated or buried according to your wishes. You rarely consider that a shadowy network of brokers, morgue workers, and funeral directors might harvest and sell the body parts for profit.

A shadowy network of brokers, morgue workers, and funeral directors systematically harvests and sells human body parts for medical seminars and industrial products without family consent.

Annie Cheney exposes the multi-million-dollar industry of body brokering in her book Body Brokers. You will learn how human remains move from local funeral homes into an interstate supply chain for medical device companies and tissue processors. The book details the mechanics of corpse harvesting, the historical roots of grave robbing, and the institutional complicity that allows the trade to flourish.

You will discover the answers to several disturbing questions:

• How do corrupt funeral directors divert corpses without detection?
• What happens to body parts after they leave the morgue?
• Why do weak regulations fail to protect the dead and their families?

1. The Anatomy of a Body Brokerage

Dead bodies are highly vulnerable to theft as they pass through an unmonitored wilderness of hospital morgues, funeral homes, and crematoriums. Once families release their deceased loved ones, the bodies are handled by strangers with minimal supervision. Autopsies, embalming processes, and cremations create ideal covert opportunities for morgue workers, dieners, and body brokers to steal body parts for sale.

Corpse handlers and crematorium operators leverage respectable facades to secretly dismember bodies and sell parts for profit.

Joyce Zamazanuk received her son Jim Farrelly's ashes after his death from AIDS in San Diego, only to discover fourteen months later that his body had been dismembered at a crematorium.

The Facade of Respectability

Michael Brown ran a highly regarded, impeccably clean crematorium in Lake Elsinore, California, seventy miles from Los Angeles, where he comforted grieving families and frequently offered discounted or free services. Despite earning praise from state inspectors for his compassionate veneer, he privately viewed dead bodies as mere garbage.

State crematorium inspector Dan Redmond frequently recommended Michael Brown's facility as a model for how a crematorium ought to be run, unaware of his underlying activities. Brown relied on five admiring employees in his cremation business to maintain this image.

Michael Brown provided the crematorium and corpse access, Agostino Perna brought capital and industry connections for surgical seminars, and Allen Tyler supplied the anatomical expertise required to cleanly disarticulate bodies. Brown, Perna, and Tyler coordinated their operations across medical conferences in San Diego and Las Vegas before establishing their formal business partnership, requiring a five-hour drive along Interstate 15 from Lake Elsinore to Las Vegas.

Establishing Bio-Tech Anatomical

Michael Brown incorporated Bio-Tech Anatomical with a minimal investment, equipping it with meat freezers, butcher knives, and band saws. He created elaborate, compassionate promotional brochures praising silent teachers as heroes while secretly cutting up bodies for profit.

Agostino Perna provided a three-thousand-dollar investment to help launch Bio-Tech Anatomical, where Allen Tyler was made supervisor of anatomy and Perna was styled with a fake Ph.D. The operation charged fixed prices for human components:

• five hundred dollars for a head;
• three hundred and fifty dollars for shoulders or elbows;
• six hundred dollars for torsos;
• one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars for spines;
• four hundred dollars for knees.

These parts produced a total yield of four thousand four hundred and fifty dollars from one dismembered cadaver. Allen Tyler received a flat fee of two thousand five hundred dollars per trip plus expenses.

Allen Tyler systematically dissected freshly delivered corpses over weekend sessions, removing shoulders, elbows, hands, knees, and heads while Jennifer Bittner cataloged the parts and filled out falsified paperwork. Brokers systematically harvested parts from vulnerable suicide victims and indigents without family consent by substituting standard cremation paperwork.

Ronald King, a sixty-nine-year-old lung cancer patient from Murrieta, committed suicide with a 1918 Winchester pistol and left eight hundred and fifty dollars to pay for his cremation, but his body was instead dismembered by Allen Tyler without a signed Bio-Tech consent form. Ten days had passed before King had been hauled onto the embalming table, and Tyler could process up to ten corpses over the course of a weekend.

2. Surgical Training and Corporate Logistics

Medical-device companies and for-profit tissue processors fuel an interstate pipeline of human remains to test instruments and manufacture products.

The Business of Surgical Training

Surgical-equipment companies sponsor hands-on training seminars using human body parts to market their medical tools directly to doctors. You see these companies supply flights, hotels, and cadavers to doctors in exchange for testing and subsequently adopting their surgical instruments.

Companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Arthrex, and Nuvasive buy body parts or hire brokers like Augie Perna to organize deluxe corpse services for seminars.

Brokers transitioned from supplying live veterinary pigs to human torsos because human specimens offered higher financial returns and greater convenience for minimally invasive surgical training. As surgical education shifted toward minimally invasive techniques requiring precise human anatomical correctness rather than bleeding live animals, brokers realized human parts yielded significantly higher profit margins.

Augie Perna started in the business through Worldwide Mobile Vet transporting live pigs before founding companies like Surgical Body Forms and IMET to supply human torsos for thousands of dollars per seminar.

• $1,500 cost for a torso versus $250 for a pig
• $68,000 ticket price for a single day cancer surgical course utilizing bodies from head to midtibia
• $15,000 profit made by Perna on that single course

Modern for-profit tissue companies streamlined corpse acquisition by offering free cremation and logistical perks directly to senior citizens, nursing homes, and hospices. Unlike medical schools that reject compromised bodies, companies like ScienceCare Anatomical accept flexible donor profiles—including obese or older corpses—and aggressively market free services to absorb bodies rejected elsewhere.

James E. Rogers founded ScienceCare Anatomical in June 2000, growing it rapidly into a major supplier for surgical-equipment giants like Arthrex and Smith & Nephew, while offering the $500 approximate value of free cremation offered as a donor perk.

Brokers and handlers developed specific preservation and grooming techniques to mask decay odors and manage the physical realities of dead bodies during transit and seminars. Handlers utilize chemical deodorizers, store bodies in commercial freezers, and apply household products to mask decomposition smells during multi-day training events.

Augie Perna, Mike Charloff, and Dave Myers massaged Vicks VapoRub into the skin before freezing corpses so they would smell of menthol upon thawing, and used a custom device to perform bowel preps on deceased torsos.

• Massage Vicks VapoRub into the skin of the corpse before freezing to ensure a menthol scent upon thawing
• Perform a bowel prep on deceased torsos using a specialized device inserted up the rectum to handle post-mortem excretions

Interstate Trafficking

The illicit body trade relies heavily on commercial freight companies, general parcel carriers, and airlines to move anatomical specimens across state lines largely undetected.

Brokers routinely ship frozen and packaged body parts via commercial freight services like Airways Freight Corporation, FedEx, and UPS despite formal corporate prohibitions against shipping human remains. Airways Freight Corporation brokered eighty body-parts shipments a month using commercial airlines, FedEx, and UPS.

In November 2003, FedEx employees in Maplewood, Missouri, discovered a leg and two arms leaking blood from unmarked packages bound for medical seminars.

3. History of Body Snatching and Legal Reform

Nineteenth-century British medical schools relied on underground resurrectionists to supply cadavers for dissection because legal bodies were limited to executed murderers. Surgeons and anatomy professors prioritized educational advancement and professional training over the provenance of their corpses. They maintained an unspoken rule of asking no questions as long as bodies arrived fresh and on time. Prominent anatomists like Dr. Astley Cooper generously funded and protected resurrection gangs from prosecution to ensure their students could practice dissections.

The modern black market descends directly from nineteenth-century resurrectionists and grave robbers who fed the insatiable demand of medical schools.

Joseph Naples went grave robbing on a December night in 1811. He joined the Borough Gang in London and kept a detailed diary of stolen bodies categorized by size and condition. Dr. Cooper spent £100 in 1828 keeping resurrectionists in business while he dissected animals and human carcasses alike to pioneer complex surgeries such as tying the carotid artery.

Resurrection Gangs and Surgeons

The extreme scarcity of corpses in Edinburgh drove two lodging house operators to commit serial murders specifically to sell bodies to an anatomist. William Burke and William Hare realized corpses were worth substantial cash when an old lodger died owing four pounds of rent. Instead of grave robbing, they murdered sixteen vulnerable people by smothering them with pillows. They sold their fresh bodies directly to Dr. Knox at Surgeon’s Square without raising suspicion.

After a lodger named Desmond died of dropsy, Burke and Hare took his body to Surgeon’s Square and collected seven pounds from Dr. Knox. This payment inspired them to begin murdering guests like the miller Joseph, for whom they received ten pounds. Over one year, they asphyxiated sixteen people before discovery led to the trial where 25,000 spectators watched William Burke hang.

American Body Snatching

American medical schools experienced explosive growth in the nineteenth century, creating a thriving underground market for stolen corpses known as ghouls. From 1810 to 1860, United States medical schools increased from five to sixty-five. Because America lacked willed-body programs and legal executions did not meet demand, medical schools relied on ghouls who robbed local graves using spades and saws. These operators eventually utilized railroads and pickling casks to ship bodies across state lines.

A Kentucky grave robber described to a reporter how they used saws to cut through coffin lids or drilled holes to attach hooks and pull corpses out of graves. Nineteenth-century American body snatchers frequently targeted the graves of the poor and African Americans due to social prejudice and burial convenience. Medical colleges explicitly advertised that they sourced subjects from the African American population to avoid offending white families.

The Medical College of South Carolina published a circular in 1831 stating that it obtained subjects from the African American population of Charleston for proper dissections without offending individuals. A diener at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine was still buying bodies from a ghoul in 1921.

The desecration of prominent graves in America triggered public outrage and forced state legislatures to pass anatomy acts legalizing the use of unclaimed bodies. When a special state committee in Massachusetts studied body snatching in 1830, the Massachusetts Anatomy Act passed the following year.

Benjamin Harrison and local police searched the Medical College of Ohio during the Harrison Horror in 1878. They discovered the naked body of former congressman John Scott Harrison being hoisted up through a trapdoor on a rope pulley. Tennessee became the last state to pass an unclaimed body law in 1947.

4. Institutional Complicity and Processing

University morgues, medical schools, and commercial tissue processors systematically bypass oversight to turn human remains into standardized industrial commodities.

Arthur Rathburn used his position at the University of Michigan morgue to build contacts and later formed International Biological. He joined professional anatomy associations using fake credentials and built a massive commercial body-brokerage operation. SUNY Syracuse billed Rathburn 159,435 dollars between 1992 and 1999. In 2005, Rathburn paid 1 million dollars for a crematorium in Richmond, Virginia.

Arthur Rathburn sent a letter to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine requesting massive quantities of body parts. His requests included 180 hands and wrists and 261 heads and necks. Prestigious medical schools with surplus corpse supplies routinely utilized brokers to offload bodies.

Tulane University Medical School supplied National Anatomical Service with a large portion of its surplus corpses. Tulane charged broker John Scalia 960 dollars for each corpse. Over a ten-year period, 500 Tulane donors potentially entered the underground trade. June Reynolds discovered that her husband Charley's body was shipped to Arthur Rathburn in Detroit for a hip-replacement course in Vail, Colorado. Charley had donated his body to Tulane under the assumption it would be used in an anatomy course. The military paid Scalia 37,485 dollars for nine bodies to test ballistic armor on land mine experiments.

University Complicity

Third-party brokers rely on internal morgue workers to secure a steady supply of body parts. You find that institutional oversight often fails when profits enter the academic medical supply chain.

Industrial Processing

Major processors use automated industrial machinery and proprietary chemical washes to transform human remains into standardized medical commodities. Regeneration Technologies, Inc. processes bodies at its 65,000-square-foot facility in Alachua, Florida. Wendy Crites Wacker explained the processing core and computer-guided milling of bone products during an author visit. RTI processes approximately 4,000 corpses annually.

You handle incoming material according to strict industrial steps:

• Log in and place delivered tissue coolers in a quarantine freezer at minus 50 degrees Celsius.
• Test donor blood vials for HIV, hepatitis, and syphilis.
• Remove tissue from the freezer and clean off remaining bits of flesh.
• Cut and tool the tissue into various shapes and sizes using a FADAL computer-controlled machine.
• Place the tissue into the BioCleanse system to remove blood, lipids, marrow, bacteria, fungi, and spores within five hours.
• Freeze-dry, package, and label the tissue with a bar code linked to donor records.

Compromised cadaver tissue can transmit lethal bacterial infections to healthy patients undergoing routine surgical procedures. When tissue banks accept bodies past refrigeration limits, dangerous spores are implanted into living recipients. A CDC investigation revealed 25 cases of serious infections in similar operations.

Brian Lykins, a 23-year-old in Minnesota, died in November 2001 from a Clostridium infection introduced by a knee cartilage allograft. The tissue came from Donor 58600, a young man in Utah. CryoLife paid 10,500 dollars for the tissue of Donor 58600.

Ex-dentist Michael Mastromarino harvested bones, tendons, and heart valves from approximately 1,000 corpses in funeral home embalming rooms. He established Biomedical Tissue Services Ltd. and Regional Funeral Services to supply commercial processors like RTI. Mastromarino replaced missing bones with PVC pipes, forged consent forms, and received up to 7,000 dollars per set of harvested parts. The Brooklyn District Attorney launched a criminal investigation into Biomedical Tissue Services after discovering that Mastromarino harvested parts without consent and altered cause-of-death records.

Conclusion

The commercialization of human remains and the absence of federal oversight create a hidden market where brokers profit from the dead without family consent.

You can protect your loved ones from becoming part of this illicit trade by taking specific precautions when planning for death.

1. Refuse commercial brokers and instead donate directly to accredited university medical programs.
2. Require written verification of how a facility handles, uses, and disposes of remains.
3. Review cremation authorization forms carefully to prohibit third-party transfers and tissue harvesting.
4. Specify your precise wishes in an advance directive or legal will to prevent unauthorized exploitation.

10 Key Ideas

1. A shadowy network of brokers, morgue workers, and funeral directors systematically harvests and sells human body parts for medical seminars and industrial products without family consent.
2. Corpse handlers and crematorium operators leverage respectable facades to secretly dismember bodies and sell parts for profit.
3. Medical-device companies and for-profit tissue processors fuel an interstate pipeline of human remains to test instruments and manufacture products.
4. The illicit body trade relies heavily on commercial freight companies, general parcel carriers, and airlines to move anatomical specimens across state lines largely undetected.
5. The modern black market descends directly from nineteenth-century resurrectionists and grave robbers who fed the insatiable demand of medical schools.
6. American medical schools experienced explosive growth in the nineteenth century, creating a thriving underground market for stolen corpses known as ghouls.
7. University morgues, medical schools, and commercial tissue processors systematically bypass oversight to turn human remains into standardized industrial commodities.
8. Third-party brokers rely on internal morgue workers to secure a steady supply of body parts.
9. Compromised cadaver tissue can transmit lethal bacterial infections to healthy patients undergoing routine surgical procedures.
10. The commercialization of human remains and the absence of federal oversight create a hidden market where brokers profit from the dead without family consent.