For nearly a year after cops began probing a body-parts snatching ring, patients who received the illicitly harvested organs were unaware of the danger lurking in their bodies – and doctors weren’t alerted to stop using the potentially tainted tissue, The Post has learned.
An NYPD detective began the probe in November 2004 – but the Food and Drug Administration didn’t issue a recall of the bones, tendons and heart valves until this past Oct. 13 – days after the alleged scheme hit the news media.
A law-enforcement source said the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office alerted the FDA to the probe “well before” the recall.
Early this month, the FDA formally ordered Biomedical Tissue Services to stop selling the parts harvested in a secret autopsy room at a Brooklyn funeral home.
“The severity of the situation was unknown when the investigation was started,” FDA spokesman Stephen King said in an e-mail. “As the danger to public health became clear, FDA initiated appropriate steps to order BTS [Biomedical Tissue Services] to cease operations.”
He declined to comment on when the FDA was notified by law enforcement.
BTS workers allegedly falsified the ages and cause of death on the paperwork that accompanied its cadaver parts – raising fears that patients who received them may have contracted serious illnesses.
“The tissue processors have been working cooperatively with FDA to ensure that the implanting physicians whose patients may have received the products are properly notified,” said King.
Four men were arrested Thursday in the ghoulish scheme on charges they used a Brooklyn funeral home as a secret operating room to steal parts from 1,077 bodies. They face a 122-count indictment and could face 25 years in prison if convicted.
Lawyer Sanford Rubenstein, representing alleged victims of the organ-harvesting scheme and their families, said: “The FDA should have acted in a more timely fashion considering the potential ramifications were known many months earlier.”
Michael Mastromarino, 42, the multimillion-dollar ring’s alleged mastermind, once had a dental career that showed so much promise that he had offices in New Jersey and Manhattan.
He was arrested in Fort Lee, N.J., where he lives, in July 2000 after his urine tested positive for Demerol and cocaine.