Michael Mastromarino - aka: "The Organ Grinder"
In the spring of 2004, Cruceta was with Mastromarino at the AATB spring meeting in Clearwater, Florida, when Aldorasi called from the Harlem funeral home to say that Alistair Cooke was on the table. What should he do? Mastromarino's answer, according to Cruceta, was "Proceed."
If it went as most cremations did, Alistair Cooke-with his diseased heart and cancerous bones-was deboned in his arms and legs, with Aldorasi also cutting and handing to the back-table the skin from the chest and back, and maybe some heart valves and veins. The remains of the remains would have been left on the table, while choicer parts went into the freezers at headquarters. Cruceta says they had only two freezers, "so we tried to get everything out as fast as possible."
Within 48 hours, Kittredge received the "cremains" but did not learn until just before Christmas 2005 that they were rather incomplete. A detective with the Brooklyn D.A.'s office called to say there was evidence Alistair Cooke had been stolen. By any chance, was this the Alistair Cooke? he wanted to know. "I told him yes," Kittredge later wrote in the Times. "He whistled through his teeth." She hung up and "stared, slack-jawed, into space."
Mastromarino's second fall was set in motion when Nicelli sold the Daniel George, and the new owners ushered the cops into the secret room of horrors. The cops were stunned by the hydraulic table and the trap door, by "the shocking fact that bones had been removed and replaced with crude plastic pipes." These were only the standard practices of funeral homes and tissue-banking, but they appeared so suspicious to assistant D.A. Josh Hanshaft that he kept digging until at last, sorting papers "right here at my desk," he says, he found the crime-forgery!
On top of ignoring other standards, Mastromarino's company had, it seemed, completely bypassed the hurdle of consent. In all but one of 1,077 cases, the D.A.'s office charges, they simply took without asking. Death certificates, medical-history forms, consent papers-all of it had been forged, making the dead appear willfully donated and, as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, "younger and healthier on paper." Thus, it was not Susan Kittredge of Vermont who gave Alistair Cooke over to the knives but a fictitious Susan Quint of the Bronx. His invigorating second death had killed him ten years younger than he was before and from a quick and merciful heart attack.
Unleashed upon the world, Cooke and the rest became, in the eyes of the D.A., public-health threat No. 1. Who knew what diseases their parts might carry or how far they might spread? Hynes stood at his press conference beside close-up photos of the exhumed and rotting dead, saying ominously, "God knows what the consequences could be."
If a viewing was scheduled, they took only the legs, sawing them off just below the hip and just above the foot. Cremations were another matter, the only time they went whole hog.
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Jack Kevorkian aka: "DR. Death"
Jack Kevorkian is a former medical pathologist known for his high-profile antics in support of voluntary euthanasia. A 1952 graduate of the University of Michigan medical school, Kevorkian soon became known to colleagues as "Dr. Death" for his keen interest in dying patients. After a career in various hospitals in California and Michigan, he settled in Michigan in 1982, where he earned a living in part by publishing articles on euthanasia in European medical journals. He became famous in the 1990s for his "death machine," a device he invented that allowed a user to self-inject an anesthetic and then a lethal dose of potassium chloride. (He called the machine a thanatron, after Thanatos, the figure of death in Greek mythology.) His initial "assisted suicides" led to a 1993 Michigan law that specifically prohibited him from continuing, a law he openly defied in an effort to force the issue into the courts.
For most of the 1990s Kevorkian -- now widely known as "Dr. Death" -- was on TV talk shows, in the news and in and out of court (and jail) for his role in a number of deaths. In September of 1998 he videotaped the death of Thomas Youk; the tape was broadcast by CBS television's 60 Minutes in November, and Kevorkian ended up on trial again, charged with murder and the delivery of a controlled substance. (Having lost his licenses to practice medicine in California and Michigan, Kevorkian's use of potassium chloride was illegal.) He was convicted in April of 1999 and sentenced to 10-25 years in prison. Denied parole in 2005, Kevorkian, in failing health, was granted parole at the end of 2006 and released in 2007. Supporters argue that -- idiosyncrasies aside -- Kevorkian is a hero who helped more than 130 terminally ill people end their own lives with dignity. Critics say he is a weirdo who exploited sick and disabled people for his own morbid experiments. Either way, he gets credit for bringing the issue forward into public debate. After his release from prison he settled outside of Detroit, and in 2008 he announced his intention to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
His first brush with professional controversy came in 1958, when he lost his job for suggesting that medical experiments be performed on consenting death row inmates in lieu of execution... Kevorkian moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s and reportedly made a feature film (based on Handel's Messiah), but the film was never distributed and the details are sketchy at best... Kevorkian is of Armenian descent... Kevorkian used to advertise himself as a "death consultant," and he dubbed his field "obitiatry"... He says he first got the nickname "Dr. Death" in 1956, for his research in photographing the eyes of dying patients... Kevorkian used carbon monoxide gas when he was unable to procure potassium chloride... Many of Kevorkian's clients passed away in his 1968 Volkswagen bus, which he had rigged for his equipment.
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