Free The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 by Jeffrey Toobin Page B

he says. “In the last 20 years, we’ve seen only one confirmed death.”
    Rigney attributes that level of success in large part to the extraordinary safeguards his organization has helped build into the tissue-retrieval system, from the stringent donor criteria that disqualify 90 percent of would-be donors—not only the diseased but in some cases even those with tattoos—to the multi-layered testing of donors’ blood, to careful reviews of the deceased’s medical records, to elaborate interviews with loved ones to ascertain the donor’s lifestyle—the same safeguards, in short, that Mastromarino and his henchmen systematically ignored. And the one death that Rigney mentions is noteworthy. In 2001, a 23-year-old Minnesota man died following knee surgery to repair a torn ACL. An investigation later determined that the cadaver cartilage implanted during his surgery hadn’t been recovered until 19 hours after the donor’s death, during which time a deadly fungus grew in it, forming spores that withstood the sterilization process and blossomed inside the recipient into an overwhelming infection. Theinvestigation specifically cited the 15-hour limit for safe retrieval, the same 15-hour limit authorities believe was exceeded in Philadelphia in almost every case.
    Cohan will also have the testimony of these witnesses to offer to a jury: A 41-year-old Ohio man who tested positive for HIV and hepatitis C after receiving BTS bone implants in surgery for degenerative disk disease. A 30-year-old Colorado woman who had to undergo a repeat ACL replacement after her first BTS tendon failed. A 74-year-old widow from Ohio who received BTS bone for a lower-back surgery and developed syphilis.
     
    T HOUGH HE HAS THE MODEL SHIP READY, Dan Oprea hasn’t yet fulfilled his promise to his mother to deliver her ashes to the sea in a Viking funeral. “I intend to do this,” he says. “I’ve got the ship, I’ve got everything. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I have this feeling like…I’m throwing her in the trash. And I understand that’s not what’s happening, and I intend to do this eventually, but I’m just not ready yet.”
    Oprea says he’s struggled to get past the news of what happened to his mother’s body. His wife says she often catches him staring into space, and knows where his mind is. In many ways, Dan says, he wishes he never found out about it. “It’s just like something out of a horror movie,” he says. “You just can’t understand how anybody could do this.”
    And this poses the question, again, of what the greatest crime here may be. Irish journalist Mary Kenny, whose sister Ursula was among the unwitting donors, wrote that she doesn’t resent that her sister’s body was dissected, only that it was done without express permission. “What is a body after death anyway? Nothing but waxwork effigy,” she noted. “Her spirit remains strongly with me, hovering over so many moments in my life, and that is dearer to me than the fate of a mere anatomy.”
    Certainly the accused in this case may be guilty of much, offraud, of larceny, of misleading loved ones, of taking advantage of their vulnerabilities, of falsifying records, of harvesting remains in grotesque, unsanitary settings, and of introducing potentially infectious parts into otherwise healthy bodies. Isn’t that last thing, without doubt, their most egregious offense? Yet it hasn’t resulted in a single criminal charge. Instead, it’s the charge of “abuser of corpses”—defined by the Commonwealth as “a person who treats a corpse in a way that he knows would outrage ordinary family sensibilities”—that has given the government the most traction. That may seem, in the scheme of things, almost quaint. Except that for Dan Oprea and millions of others, it goes to the very heart of how we still look at an uncertain line, between life and death.
     
    D AN P. L EE writes about crime, science, and politics for Philadelphia magazine. Another