When the dead do not rest in peace
A journalist unveils a thriving industry in human remains
- Reviewed by Elizabeth Corcoran
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains
By Annie Cheney
BROADWAY BOOKS; 204 PAGES; $23.95
What happens when you die? Put aside all the theological and philosophical debates that question conjures up and instead focus on the most mundane aspect: What happens to your body?
Turns out, a lot more might happen than you expect.
In "Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains," freelance journalist Annie Cheney paints a chilling picture of a thriving, often illicit trade in body parts. Bodies headed for cremation end up instead getting hacked into pieces for parts like old cars. Body "brokers" negotiate the sales and arrange for shipping, sometimes in containers as common as Styrofoam crates packed with ice.
In 1968, the Uniform Anatomical Gifts Act set out to govern body-part donations by prohibiting the buying and selling of dead bodies. But as Cheney points out, there was a loophole: The law allows companies to recover their costs. "By inflating the amount they spend on labor, transportation, and the storage of bodies, [body brokers] can easily hide their profits," Cheney writes.
Since surgeons began dissecting cadavers to study anatomy, there has been a demand for bodies. But in the past 50 years, demand for cadavers has skyrocketed. Medical groups host conferences that teach doctors how to wield the latest laparoscopic equipment by practicing on human bodies. The Army needs to try out new weaponry. Surgeons need chunks of bone to implant in patients with failing parts.
The U.S. government requires organizations that collect organs for transplantation to be nonprofits; Cheney says the government monitors this activity tightly. Not so, however, other trade in human parts. Transplantable tissue, for instance, is a for-profit business, which Cheney says racks up $1 billion in annual revenues, and the organizations that provide body parts for research and education, she writes, are completely unregulated by the federal government.
Where there is money, surely there will be crooks. Cheney devotes the bulk of her book to describing in macabre detail the work of those willing to make a quick buck with a corpse. The events she describes have been documented in the press or in court, but Cheney aims to weave a more complete picture. For instance, Cheney writes about how a businessman named Michael Brown in Lake Elsinore, in Riverside County, turned his crematorium into a body-parts chop shop. Local detectives broke the case. In October 2003, Brown pleaded guilty to 66 counts of mutilation of human remains and embezzlement.
Since then, other body-part scandals have surfaced: In October, the New York Daily News broke a story about several Brooklyn funeral home operators who dismembered patients without the permission of the families. Now, the Brooklyn district attorney and federal Food and Drug Administration are reportedly investigating dozens of funeral homes in New York, as well as a company called Biomedical Tissue Services Ltd., of Fort Lee, N.J., that harvested body parts.
Any way you write this story, it's gruesome, unsettling stuff. Sadly, Cheney mars this compelling account by trying too hard to create pathos when the raw facts are haunting. After attending a conference of surgeons practicing their techniques on corpses, she retreats to her hotel room to reflect. "As I spooned creamer into my cup, I suddenly detected the smell of decomposing flesh," she writes. She takes a bath, then "a feeling akin to defiance compelled me to call room service and order a rare hamburger. When it arrived, I sat down on the bed and ate the bloody meat in my underwear." Spare us.
Particularly unnerving is the unanswered question of how frequently these kinds of abuses are taking place. When we send a body off to a funeral home or crematorium, we expect that our instructions will be honored. Yet even the late Alistair Cooke, the dignified host of PBS' "Masterpiece Theatre," fell prey to body brokers. Cooke, who died in 2004, had left instructions that he be cremated, according to his daughter, who is a pastor in Vermont. But investigators in the Brooklyn district attorney's office discovered forged papers that allowed his bones and tissue to be removed. "I am surprised by how upset I am," Cooke's daughter told the Washington Post.
Cheney doesn't offer any guess at how much of the trade in body parts is illicit. It's hard to fault her for that. But she closes the book with an ominous note so heavy-handed that it almost sounds like parody. Her phone rings one Saturday night and an anonymous caller with a "deep voice" tells her that " 'This thing has only begun. ... The tentacles reach to many different places. One doesn't know where it's going to stop.' "
"Yes, I thought. Soon the interwoven tentacles of the body brokers would emerge once again, somewhere new." Cheney deserves applause for having the guts to dive deep into this loathsome practice. She doesn't need to doll up the story to sound like an episode of "CSI" It should worry all of us enough.
Elizabeth Corcoran is a contributing editor for Forbes magazine.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/12/RVGN0HHDEQ1.DTL&hw=Elizabeth+Corcoran&sn=006&sc=261
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