We've all heard of the man who wakes up after a wild night in an ice-filled bathtub with a bloody stitched incision around his side and a note thanking him for a kidney. Don't worry about him. He can be dismissed along with the alligators in the sewers we used to hear about.

There are, however, real victims of human organ theft, but for them awakening never comes.

On the Black Market your body is more valuable in pieces. Like stolen cars sent to a ‘Chop Shop’, stolen corpses are picked over for parts and sold at a tremendous profit all over the world.

A TECHNICIAN AT A HUMAN EYE BANK IN MIAMI HOLDS A PAIR OF FRESHLY-REMOVED EYES ON THEIR WAY TO SAVING THE SIGHT OF OTHERS. ORGAN GANGSTERS ARE NOW SELLING CORNEAS OF PRISONERS EXECUTED IN CHINA FOR $5,000 ON AN ILLEGAL GROWING GLOBAL MARKET.

PHOTO BY RON LAYTNER, EDIT INTERNATIONAL.

Like any business, it comes down to simple supply and demand. Waiting lists for legal transplants are impossibly long and many die before seeing their name on top.

But for those who can afford it and condone it, there is a grisly alternative. The illegal sale of human body parts is big business, and more widespread than anyone had thought.

For the right price crooked doctors, mafia controlled surgeons, corrupt funeral parlor directors, even failed medical school students, will supply you with the organs or tissues you need – even if they have to steal them.

And business is good. According to reports by U.S. insurance companies and hospitals, the going rate for a lung is $116,400, a kidney $91,400 and a heart $57,000 – making a human body one of the most lucrative thefts around.

Even dead, your body may be worth a fortune in parts. This horrifying revelation comes after the fall of two major international body brokers helped expose a vast international trade in human tissues stolen from corpses.

Organ transplant criminal cases are slowly spreading across the United States. Los Angeles police charged a doctor in a north California Regional Medical Center with giving drugs to a comatose 26-year-old man to hasten his death for a transplant team. The man didn’t die after being taken off a life support machine and police charged the doctor with hurrying his death.

The University of California, a major destination for organs and cadavers donated to science, has become so alarmed by the revelations of grisly body snatching that they are considering inserting super-market style bar codes or radio frequency chips into corpses to make sure they are not nabbed by body snatchers.

But the new plans come too late to save thousands of bodies cut up and sold in a twisted plot carried out last year in America by disgraced dentist turned tissue salesman, Michael Mastromarino, and funeral home operator, Joseph Nicelli.

Nicelli set up a secret operating room in his Brooklyn, New York funeral parlor where Mastromarino opened up possibly thousands of bodies to get at the valuable tissues – including leg bones, knee caps, ligaments, and heart valves.

Joseph Nicelli was paid $1,000 dollars for each corpse and Michael Mastromarino went on to turn a profit by selling the pieces through his company, Biomedical Tissue Services, for upwards of $7,000 dollars.

Both men were arrested when a NYPD detective stumbled across the secret operating room. By court order, several bodies that had passed through Nicelli’s funeral home have been dug up and analyzed. Even hardened coroners were shocked by the findings.

Where legs should be, X-rays revealed cheap plastic plumbing pipe, hastily bolted to the hips with the skin sewed over to make it look natural during open casket viewings by grieving family members.

Now horrified doctors who used body parts from Biomedical Tissue Services are worried that dangerous diseases may have been passed on to their transplant patients.

Already reeling from the fallout of the Biomedical Tissue Services scandal, the $12 billion dollar tissues industry took another hit this summer when the Food and Drug Administration ordered the shutdown of Donor Referral Services and the recall of all their harvested tissues citing “serious deficiencies” in how the company screened donors and kept records.

Police say the New Jersey company forged death certificates of harvested corpses changing cause of death, age, and risk factors such as intravenous drug use and diseases.

The fall of Donor Referral Services has again brought to light strange and horrifying tales about the players in the human tissues industry.

Before opening Donor Referral Services, company founder Phillip J. Guyett Jr. ran the willed body program at an osteopathic college in California. His career with the college ended abruptly in 1999 when he was arrested for pocketing money from the sale of a cadaver.

When police raided Guyett’s warehouse they found three freezers stuffed with severed human heads and harvested hearts.

In June of 2008 Mastromarino plead guilty, apologized to the families of those whose body parts had been stolen and sold and was sentenced to between 18 and 54 years in prison.

While gruesome, the indictment of the two tissues companies are just the tip of the iceberg in the illegal sale of human body parts. These are small players whose crimes, while disturbing and disgusting, pale in comparison to the gangsters, and even governments, who run the more sinister Black Market in organs stolen before death or just moments after.

In massive population nations such as China and India, body parts are worth much more than the lives of their owners and there have been rumors for years that human organs were being sold.

“We estimate about 6,000 prisoners are executed in China each year,” William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, USA, told reporters. “About 90% of transplanted kidneys come from these executed prisoners.”

The sale of prisoner’s body parts is so prevalent in China that executions are tailored to organ transplant needs: a bullet in the head for kidneys, lungs, livers or hearts; a bullet in the chest for corneas.

In recent years China has expanded crimes punishable by death possibly because of the big money that organs sales bring in: foreigners pay $5,000 for corneas, $20,000 for kidneys and $40,000 for livers, $60,000 for hearts, in addition to $40,000 for the transplant operation.

China is taking steps now to ban the sale of human organs following the deaths of several Japanese medical tourists who travelled to China for transplants.

It is estimated at least two million people in China need transplants each year but only up to 20,000 can be conducted because of the lack of organs, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

Voluntary donations fall far below the level of demand because of Chinese cultural biases against organ removal before burial.

It is a complete fabrication... to say that China forcibly takes organs from the people given the death penalty for the purpose of transplanting them, says Qin Gang a Foreign Ministry spokesman.

China's foreign ministry has admitted that organs from prisoners were used but only in "a very few cases" and with the express permission of the convict.

Near New Deli, three leading Indian transplant surgeons, the owner of the Noida Medicare Centre, a hospital famed for transplants, and six others were arrested after Shaukat Ali, a mechanic, complained he'd been drugged and robbed of a kidney during a routine medical examination. Two similar accusations had already been filed against the centre including the theft of a kidney belonging to a mentally retarded child.

Indian police said stolen kidneys are being sold for between $6,000 to $10,000. Many Indian doctors make less than $10,000 in a whole year so the temptation to steal organs is high.

2009

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