Free A Family Business by Ken Englade

removal of tissue. On one version of the form the phrase was capitalized so it would draw a casual reader’s attention. In a later one it was not, perhaps on the theory that he did not want the reader to notice the wording. And in one of the early forms, tissue removal was not mentioned at all. Furthermore, the phraseology and typography used in the forms would prove to be a very contentious point among the people David brought in to help in the tissue bank operation; they had more scruples than David or the laborers who jammed the retorts and extracted gold teeth. Eventually the forms would play a major role in David’s undoing. But in the beginning he was blind to potential problems; he saw nothing but dollar signs.
    The more David studied the possibility of creating a tissue bank, the better the idea looked. If a serious harvester went to work on a human body, it was possible to collect organs and tissue—parts ranging from bone and ligaments to valves and the organs themselves—worth a considerable amount of money. According to a fee list used by the University of California at San Diego, organs, bone, skin, corneas, and other parts could easily bring in $25,000 per body. That included $2600 for a knee joint and $750 for a set of three tiny bones from the ear. A single heart valve, according to the list, was worth $2300.
    But David did not envision an operation as sophisticated as would be required to thoroughly mine the cadavers that passed through his crematorium. Even if he could not reap the really big bucks, like those paid for transplantable organs, he could nevertheless realize a quite tidy profit just by stripping bodies of the more obvious and easiest to obtain organs and selling them for research purposes. At the time, a brain that could be used by a tissue supply house would bring $80. A heart fetched $95; a pair of lungs $60. Corneas started at about $525, and whole eyes—called “globes” in the industry—could be sold separately at fluctuating prices depending on the market. This was not big money, but it could add up. David confided to one co-worker that he hoped to make as much as $500,000 a year from just one supply house. If he was processing 8000 or more bodies a year and he could salvage one usable body part—a brain, heart, lung, cornea, globe, or spinal column—from each cadaver, plus an average of one gold crown, he could easily double the fee he was getting for a cremation. If he were cremating a minimum of 8000 bodies a year, he could, even figuring conservatively, increase his gross annual income to more than $1.25 million, plus an unknown amount, maybe as much as $75,000 a year, from the surreptitious sale of dental gold. And this was exclusive of any fees being brought in by Jerry and Laurieanne through the Lamb Funeral Home.
    Again moving swiftly, like any businessman seeking advice in a field outside his own area of expertise, David zeroed in on someone who could help him turn his tissue bank idea into cash. The person he picked was a Japanese exchange student barely out of his teens, a shy youth named Joyji Bristol, nicknamed “George.”
    On the surface there was nothing exceptional about Bristol. He was about twenty years old, of average height and build, with dark hair and dark eyes, and a fairly poor working knowledge of the English language. In short, he could have disappeared without a trace in Southern California’s large Asian community. But there was one thing about him that attracted David, one quality in particular that prompted David to court him as avidly as a sought-after lover: Bristol knew about tissue banks; not only how to remove organs, but how to maneuver through the laborious record-keeping and inspection processes. He was, in fact, knowledgeable enough about such operations for David to begin what proved to be a successful campaign to lure him away from his then current employer, the Medical Eye Bank of Orange County. It was a change that Bristol would later