Dentist gets prison for body parts scheme

NEW YORK, June 28 (UPI) -- A dentist was sentenced Friday to 18 to 54 years in a New York prison for orchestrating a scheme to sell human tissue and body parts from funeral homes.

Michael Mastromarino, 44, who owned Biomedical Tissue Services in Fort Lee, N.J., appeared at a hearing in state Supreme Court in the borough of Brooklyn, The New York Times reported. He pleaded guilty in March to a long list of charges.

One of the victims of the scheme was Alistair Cooke, the British journalist best known in the United States as the longtime host of "Masterpiece Theater" on PBS. Parts of his body were illegally taken after his death four years ago when his daughter picked a funeral home from the Yellow Pages.

During the investigation, seven funeral directors admitted being involved in the scheme and agreed to cooperate.

Tissue and body parts supplied by the funeral homes were sold by Mastromarino's company for medical research and transplants. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration shut down his company shortly before his indictment in 2006 because of failure to document the cause of death of tissue donors.