26. The Body Snatcher (Michael Mastromarino)

Support for swindled comes from Simply Safe.

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Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

The worst horror movie you've ever seen.

Imagine that ten times worse.

On a bright and sunny day in April 2002 in Noble, Georgia, a small town about 90 miles northwest of Atlanta, near an isolated area next to a major highway, a woman was walking her dog when it sniffed out a human skull just off the path in front of her.

The 16-acre property adjacent to where the skull was found belonged to the Marsh family, a family that was heavily involved and well-respected in the community, a community where they had operated a crematorium in their spacious backyard for the past 30 years.

Residents in the area had grown accustomed to the smoke and the smells that emanated from their neighbors' business, but finding a discarded human skull on the ground, that was out of the ordinary and a bit concerning.

After a few unfruitful phone calls, the woman was eventually directed to send an anonymous tip to the Environmental Protection Agency.

When local officials followed up on that tip and arrived at the tri-state crematorium to investigate, they located the skull that the woman had reported.

But as they walked deeper into the wooded area that surrounded the property, what they might have expected to find surely paled in comparison to what was actually there.

Bodies, human bodies, hundreds of them, uncremated, spread out on the ground in various stages of decomposition.

Some lied in coffins, freshly dressed for burial, marinating in their own fluids.

Others were exposed to the elements, where it seems they had been waiting on their burials for years.

And I know we have found some mummified bodies that I would easily say are between 10 and 20 years old, as far as having been buried and then

taken that long to get to this particular point.

Investigators sprout out over the entire 16-acre area, documenting everything they discovered.

One group followed the trail of corpses through the woods towards the Marsh family home, where they found even more remains, including a man in a suit piled on top of a heap of garbage.

Another group began searching the concrete vaults that were scattered all throughout the property, dreading what they might find inside once they were unsealed.

As we were uncovering and opening a sealed concrete vault, we discovered one concrete vault

stuffed or packed with more human remains.

More bodies stacked and folded on top of one another like forgotten toys in the attic, out of sight and out of mind.

Most of the corpses belonged to what appeared to be older people, mostly intact except for those that had been selected by local wildlife to host the nightly feast.

There were pieces of arms and legs and skulls everywhere.

There were also small wooden boxes stacked near the house.

Small boxes that were typically used for cremating babies.

We have found one definite set of infant remains, though, and there are also some other areas that we are examining right now that appear to have at least one small casket that would be an infant type that has fallen apart.

In total, 339 bodies were discovered on the grounds of the tri-state crematory.

More than 100 of them would never be identified.

However, the man who was responsible for this mess was identified.

28-year-old Ray Brent Marsh.

He had been running the crematory since 1996.

He dropped out of college and took over the family business when his father became ill.

But judging by the state of some of the bodies, the cremations at Tri-State Crematory had come to a halt years before the son had assumed control.

There is no logical explanation for having vaults filled with human remains and for having caskets dumped in the dirt and decaying and falling apart with more piled on top and more piled on top.

So what was was Brent Marsh's logical explanation for the improper disposal of over 300 bodies?

Why were families given urns full of wood chips and concrete dust instead of the ashes of their loved ones?

And why had their loved ones been simply dumped on the ground or stuffed into an overflowing vault where they were left to rot like yesterday's trash?

Well, Brent Marsh didn't really have an explanation.

He told authorities that his cremation oven was broken, but there was no evidence of that when it was inspected.

It didn't look like a result of laziness, either.

Moving and dumping and stacking over 300 bodies is much more physically exerting than simply pushing them into an oven.

Nor was greed a motivating factor, because there was no financial incentive.

Brent Marsh simply couldn't explain himself, and neither could his mother and father, who still lived on the premises.

Brent's mother and father claimed to be unaware that their property had become a minefield of corpses.

Understandably, these explanations, or lack thereof, did little to console the relatives of those who had been identified.

Burned in hell, with the rest of his family that knew about it, burned in hell.

And he's scum.

Brent Marsh was arrested on account of 787 felony charges that included theft by deception, abusing a corpse, burial service-related fraud, and making false statements.

He faced a possible sentence of 1,000 years.

After pleading guilty and apologizing to the families in court, Marsh was sentenced to 12 years in prison, 75 years of probation, and he was required to write a letter of apology to each one of the affected families.

I think if he serves the full 12 years, I'll be happy.

If he doesn't, I hope Tennessee picks him up and puts him under the jail.

When I get my letter of apology from him, I am going to write to him personally and ask him, beg him, please tell me why you did this all anybody wants to know is why

five years after the discovery of the bodies marsh's lawyer was able to offer one possible explanation for his client's actions it was discovered that the tri-state crematorium had a leak in its ventilation system which resulted in brent marsh and his father breathing mercury-laced air that was released when dental work present in some of the bodies was burned.

It was hypothesized that years of breathing the tainted air had poisoned both of the men.

Essentially, the Marsh's strange behavior was a result of Mad Hatter's disease brought on by mercury poisoning.

By the time Brent Marsh was released from prison in 2016, according to his lawyer, his mental capacities had returned to normal.

In total, over $100 million was paid out to the families through class action lawsuits against Marsh and the funeral homes that shipped the bodies to him, most of which was reluctantly paid by insurance companies.

The cleanup of the tri-state crematory costed the state and local government a reported $10 million.

The scandal served as a wake-up call to many state governments about an industry that was hardly regulated.

In Georgia at the time, all you had to do to obtain a license to operate a crematory was just ask, and Brent Marsh had not even done that.

If proper licensing, regulation, and inspection processes were in place, perhaps the entire situation could have been avoided.

Soon after after the discovery was made, Georgia and many other states moved to strengthen their control over the industry.

But perhaps the most interesting result of the tri-state crematory case is one that never completely unfolded.

Before Marsh pled guilty, when it looked as if his case might go to trial, his lawyers argued that no crimes had been committed because a corpse holds no monetary value.

His defense argued that a dead body was essentially worthless.

And the Georgia Supreme Court agreed that the defense had a valid point.

But a higher court ruling was never made because the plea bargain was accepted and the case was closed.

Meanwhile, during that same time period in Brooklyn, New York, a man named Michael Master Marino had discovered just how valuable a dead body could be.

A disgraced oral surgeon resurrects his career and his bank account by illegally harvesting body parts from the dead on this episode of Swindled.

They bribed government officials

for clear violations of FAA state law earlier in the U.S.

million dollars.

Support for Swindled comes from Simply Safe.

For the longest time, I thought home security meant an alarm going off after someone broke in.

But if the alarm is already blaring, it's too late.

The damage is done.

That's a reactive approach, and it leaves you with that awful feeling of violation, even if the intruder runs away.

That's why I switched to Simply Safe.

They've completely changed the game with Active Guard outdoor protection, designed to stop crime before it starts.

Their smart, AI-powered cameras don't just detect motion.

They can tell you when there's a person lurking on your property.

That instantly alerts SimplySafe's professional monitoring agents in real time.

And here's the game changer.

The agents can actually intervene while the intruder is still outside.

Talk to them through two-way audio, hit them with a loud siren and spotlight, and call 911 if needed.

It's proactive security.

And that's real security.

I trust SimplySafe because there are no long-term contracts, no hidden fees, and a 60-day money-back guarantee.

They've been named best home security systems by U.S.

News and World Report for five years in a row, and I can see why.

Get 50% off your new SimplySafe system at simplysafe.com/slash swindled.

That's 50% off your new SimplySafe system by visiting simplysafe.com/slash swindled.

There's no safe like SimplySafe.

The day of my wedding was a very happy day.

The whole prospect of starting a life with him and going forward, having his children, just everything was just really was wonderful.

When Barbara Rayfell saw Michael Master Marino walk through the doors of the tanning salon where she was working in 1986, she knew that she was going to marry him.

Michael felt the same way too.

In fact, when he left the tanning salon, he drove straight to his current girlfriend's house and broke up with her.

Michael told his blindsided lover that he had met the woman of his dreams earlier that day and that it was undeniable and that nothing was going to get in his way.

When you know, you know.

And Michael Mastamarino and Barbara Raphael knew that their Tanning Salon love connection was meant to be.

They were married in 1988.

Barbara stayed at home and cooked and cleaned and played the role of the supportive spouse while Michael attended the New York University College of Dentistry to ensure a brighter future for his new wife and future family.

In 1994, during a time when Michael was working late nights as a requirement of his dental residency, the couple welcomed their first son, which only made hard work even harder.

But Michael Master Marino was not afraid of hard work.

Never had been.

It was the only way to survive in the rough Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up, surrounded by tough guys and organized crime.

But Michael could handle his own.

He was tall, strong, athletic, and attractive, but he was more than just a well-tanned piece of meat.

Michael Mastermarino was smart and driven, and he had bigger plans for life than just living and dying as another neighborhood wise guy.

By the end of 1996, Michael Mastermarino had become one of the finest oral surgeons Manhattan had to offer.

He opened a beautiful office in Rockefeller Center across the street from St.

Patrick's Church.

He co-authored a highly regarded book about dental implants and became well respected in his field.

He found himself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife and two healthy baby boys.

Life was beautiful, but beauty is only skin deep.

Beneath the surface of Michael Master Marino was something ugly.

There was something dark tugging at his soul.

The type of self-destruction that could steer anyone off course.

And that darkness began to reveal itself one night in March of 2000, while Michael and his wife and sons were staying at a hotel with Michael's parents.

Michael's wife, Barbara, was awakened by Michael's frantic mother.

She explained to Barbara that she had found Michael in the bathroom with the syringe in his arm.

Barbara rushed to her husband's side and found him stumbling and leaning into walls.

She remembers his eyes rapidly moving back and forth while she tried to communicate with him.

Michael assured her that he was fine, that it was just a shot of dimerol to numb the chronic pain in his back caused by a football injury in high school.

Being on his feet and hunched over all day performing surgeries had only exacerbated the issue.

Michael apologized to his wife for scaring her and said that he must have accidentally taken too much.

He promised her he would be more careful in the future and that it would never happen again.

But in the following months, Barbara watched her husband transform into someone that she no longer recognized.

Michael's face had become gaunt, his eyes were sunken into his skull, skull, and lie after lie poured out of his mouth.

Michael's addiction had completely overtaken his life.

Barbara said it looked like he had aged 20 years in just a few short months.

Michael was returning home from the office later and later.

She was finding used needles discarded around the house within reach of their two toddlers.

Michael Mastermarino's addiction to painkillers followed him to work, too.

One day, Barbara received a call from one of her husband's assistants.

A nurse had found Dr.

Master Marino collapsed in the bathroom with his pants around his ankles, a syringe dangling from his arm, and an unconscious patient waiting for him on the operating table in the other room.

It wasn't the first time that it had happened either.

Earlier that year, Michael had fallen asleep standing over a patient in the middle of performing an operation.

He had to be woken up to finish the job.

Master Marino also accidentally severed the seventh cranial nerve in a patient's jaw, which controls the muscles in the face.

That patient woke up with a brand new smile and a permanent facial droop.

As the malpractice lawsuits poured in, Michael became even more reckless.

When he didn't return home one night in July of 2000, Barbara left the house at midnight to search for him.

She eventually found Michael on the side of the road not too far from where they lived.

He was easy to spot because he was illuminated by the blue and red lights of a police cruiser.

She could see that Michael was in handcuffs, and she could see that someone else was with him.

It was another woman, the same woman whom Michael was having an affair with, according to one of Michael's assistants who had told Barbara about it a few weeks earlier.

Barbara wasn't sure who she was more upset with, her husband for cheating on her, or herself for believing him when he told her that the rumors of the affair were nonsense.

Michael Master Marino was arrested for possession of Demerol.

Michael's mistress, who was behind the wheel of his car, was arrested for driving while intoxicated.

A few days after Barbara bailed him out of jail, Michael Master Marino checked into a rehab facility.

His dental license had been suspended for two years, but he would get it back if he could clean up his act.

But the sharp claws of addiction were dug in too deep.

He relapsed soon after returning home from rehab and lost his dental license for good.

Michael Master Marino was unemployed, but not all hope was lost.

He was able to keep his marriage together, and he had an idea for a new line of work.

And besides, maybe a change of scenery would do him some good.

In early 2002, the human tissue processing industry was just finding its feet.

Once upon a time, only entire organs were available for transplant.

But in the early 2000s, instead of just hearts, lungs, and livers, modern techniques had been developed to allow the reuse of everything from skin and veins to corneas and cartilage.

Mobility could be restored using ligaments and tendons.

Pieces of bone could be ground into a putty and used to fill fractures in the spine, like patching a hole in drywall.

Fueled by this technological innovation, the human tissue trade became a $1 billion a year industry, seemingly overnight.

And it had plenty of room to grow.

because the demand for those materials and those type of procedures was astronomical.

And Michael Mastamarino Mastamarino was fully aware of that fact.

He used to buy dental implants from those same tissue processing companies all the time.

So he used his old connections to land jobs at places like Regenerative Technologies, and he bounced around as a supplier for a few other tissue companies for a little over a year until he acquired his own license for tissue harvesting and launched his own company in 2002.

called Biomedical Tissue Services.

Michael's new business plan was simple.

Instead of selling tissues to medical professionals for tissue processing companies, Michael would be the one selling the tissues to the tissue processors.

Without accounting for operations that take place in a bathtub in some sketchy motel in Russia, about 90% of all tissue harvesting happens in the confines of a hospital.

Funeral homes account for the remaining 10%.

Master Marino wanted to keep a low profile and a short supply chain, so he set up shop on the second floor of a funeral home home in Brooklyn, all perfectly legal.

However, in the United States, profiting from donated tissues is not legal, which was a problem since Master Marino's entire business plan was dependent upon profiting from donated tissues.

So instead of charging for the human tissue that he harvested, Processing companies simply paid a handling fee when Michael's shipment of donations were delivered to the doorsteps.

A gigantic loophole that Michael Master Marino was happy to exploit.

Michael made deals with multiple funeral homes in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

They would send him cadavers and he could harvest what he needed.

Michael employed a former nurse in his early 30s named Lee Crusetta to do the dirty work.

Michael hired Crusetta because he was good with a power saw.

Crusetta brought a carpenter's approach to the job.

So Master Marino put him in charge of a small team of cutters, a small team of cutters who became so efficient at their jobs, or perhaps careless, that they could strip an entire body of all its usable parts in less than 30 minutes.

A proper harvest in a hospital setting could take up to four hours.

Removing a thin layer of skin from a body could take more than half an hour if done correctly.

Crusetta's team could do it in less than 60 seconds.

Limbs were sawed off at their joints and then split open to remove the fully intact bones.

Every inch of skin was peeled off and then packaged and sold.

Tendons and hearts and even spinal cords were removed using the same kind of tools that you can buy at your local hardware store.

After the cutters completed their harvest, what was left of a body was thrown onto a gurney and wheeled across the street to be cremated.

Sometimes the crematorium employees would open the body bags to find nothing but a headless and limbless torso.

lying in a pool of its own blood.

For those cadavers that opted for a burial instead, their bones were usually replaced with plastic PVC pipe just in time for an open casket funeral.

Again, the services provided by Master Merino's biomedical tissue services were perfectly legal, not to mention extremely profitable.

Michael was purchasing the cadavers from the funeral homes for about $1,000 each.

After every salvageable part was sold piece by piece, each one of those $1,000 bodies was worth up to $15,000.

As a result of the hefty profit margin, in less than four years, Michael Master Marino and Biomedical Tissue Services amassed about $4 million in revenue.

And nobody was more proud of Michael Master Marino than his wife Barbara.

She had watched her husband hit rock bottom and then climb his way back to the top.

He had gone from respected oral surgeon to junkie to jail to rehab to reformed millionaire in the span of three years.

The Master Merino's troubles were completely behind them.

Or so, she thought.

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There was suddenly a banging repetition of a sound that I don't know how to describe, not at all like shots, like somebody dropping a rack of trays.

Half a dozen of us were startled enough to charge through the door.

And it had just happened.

But it was a howling jungle of cries and obscenities and flying limbs and two enormous men, Roosevelt Greer, the football player, and Rafa Johnson, I guess, the Olympic champion, piling onto a pair of blue jeans.

There was a head on the floor, streaming blood, and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it, and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce.

on an ice cake.

There were flashlights by now, and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders.

She was slapping a young man and he was saying, listen, lady, I'm hurt too.

And down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child lying on a cathedral tomb.

That's the voice of Alistair Cook describing the scene of Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968.

Cook was at the Ambassador Hotel that night on assignment, standing merely feet away from the presidential hopeful when he was shot three times by 24-year-old Sir Hans Sir Hahn.

Aleister Cook's retelling of that night's events on his radio show Letter from America was just one of a lifetime of memorable broadcasts from the British-born journalist.

36 years later, in March 2004, on advice from his doctor, Cook finally stepped away from the longest-running spoken word radio show in history.

and retired at the age of 95.

Aleister Cook died less than a month later from lung cancer, which had spread to his bones.

His body was taken to a funeral home in Manhattan, where it was cremated.

His ashes were given to his family three days later and then scattered throughout Central Park.

Two years later, Alistair's daughter, Susan Cook Kittridge, received an unexpected phone call from a detective with the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office.

And then he asked me if my father was Aleister Cook, the Alistair Cook.

And And I said,

the Aleister Cook, and I said, yes.

And he told me that he had reason to believe or suspect that my father's body was one of the ones that had been stolen.

And I honestly don't remember what he said after that.

As it turns out, before Aleister Cook's body was cremated, they made a pit stop at the offices of Michael Master Marino's Biomedical Tissue Services, where his cancerous bones were removed and sold for $11,000.

The paperwork on file for Cook's tissues listed his cause of death as a heart attack instead of cancer, and it listed his age as 85 years old instead of 95.

Not to mention, Aleister Cook had never agreed to have his bones harvested.

Neither had 75-year-old Michael Bruno, a former cab driver who had also died of cancer.

His body parts, too, were pillaged and sold.

This is Michael's son, Vito Bruno, describing how he felt when he he found out what happened to his father from a detective on the phone.

And he's explaining this thing, the kids running around and family, and he's explaining how these people stole your dead father's body parts and all this is going on right.

It was like the most surreal,

sickest thing you could imagine.

You know, who would ever believe that such a hideous crime would exist in this day and age.

And just like Alish DeCook, the cause of death on Michael Bruno's paperwork had been changed from cancer to heart attack.

The total number of bodies that biomedical tissue services mutilated in this way without family consent is estimated to be between a few hundred to more than a thousand,

many of them much older than the suitable donor age of 65.

Furthermore, Master Marino's cutters were reusing blades and gloves, creating a risk for possible cross-contamination.

Flesh and bones were stored unrefrigerated in plastic coolers, and sometimes those coolers were even stored in the alleyway behind the funeral home for days.

The recommended time limit for harvesting human tissue is 15 hours.

At biomedical tissue services, sometimes the body is set waiting to be harvested in room temperatures for hundreds of hours at a time.

You know, most of us would not even have thought

that

anybody could study the system the way it was studied

and

the things done that were done.

It's just totally repugnant.

Worst of all, the cadavers that Michael Master Marino purchased were never screened for diseases before they were dissected.

And if the cause of death was known, as in the case of Alistair Cook and Michael Bruno and many others, the paperwork was falsified and Next of Kent's signatures were forged so that the processing companies would buy them anyway.

Master Marino's team would go as far as to create new identities for the deceased and ship the tissues with vials of blood from other corpses that they knew would test clean, because in many cases, those tissues were far from clean.

In addition to cancer, many of those butchered cadavers had died from complications related to HIV, hepatitis, and more.

And those dirty tissues were shipped around the world and surgically implanted into over 10,000 people.

People like 65-year-old Betty Faif, who, as a result of a tissue transplant, suffered from septic shock and eventual paralysis.

People like Patricia Battisti, a 74-year-old woman who contracted syphilis after receiving a bone graft during back surgery.

And people like Brian Likens, who went in for a simple outpatient knee surgery and never made it out alive.

This is his father, Steve Likens.

He was a healthy 23-year-old boy that went in for just a routine surgery and the bacteria that they put into him with this tissue literally killed him in four days.

The news of Michael Master Marino's bone trafficking operation became public on October 7th, 2005.

The front page of the New York Daily News, who broke the story, read, quote, body snatchers, bones and tissues stolen from corpses in city funeral homes.

It was revealed that Master Marino's operation had been under investigation for over a year as a result of a business business dispute involving the former owner of the funeral home in which biomedical tissue services cutters were operating.

In April 2004, Joseph Nicelli sold the funeral home that he owned and operated for $1.5 million to an out-of-state couple named Robert Nelms and Deborah Johnson.

Soon after, Nelms and Johnson began receiving complaints from customers who had made prepayments for funeral costs.

Those customers were alleging that those prepayments were not being honored because the funeral home had no records that those payments had ever been made.

Usually, when a business is sold to new owners, assets like prepayments are deducted from the purchase price.

But in this case, it appeared that Joseph Nicelli had kept them off the books.

When Deborah Johnson arrived in Brooklyn to investigate the matter in person, an employee of the funeral home informed her about the tissue harvesting operation that was happening on the second floor of the business that she had just purchased.

Johnson was taken to the hidden room upstairs, where she saw the entire operation with her own eyes.

There was an operating table in the middle of the room, illuminated with overhead hospital lights.

There were knives, scalpels, saws, and an internal hydraulic lift that allowed for the easy ascension of bodies from the floor below.

And there was a plastic tube stretching from the table to the toilet where blood was drained and flushed.

You know, it happens to be almost a perfect crime.

Your evidence is either buried or cremated, so it's nearly the perfect crime these guys got away with.

Deborah immediately ordered the closure of the room and contacted authorities.

After an 18-month investigation, in March 2006, Michael Master Marino, along with Joseph Nicelli and Lee Crusetta and another cutter named Chris Aldarasi, was arrested and charged on 122 counts, including reckless endangerment, body stealing, and the most serious charge, enterprise corruption.

What we charge here is these defendants systematically and callously forged official documents which disguised the cause of death and had the potential of transmitting infectious diseases.

They would, in conjunction with funeral directors, who would divert bodies that were either going to be buried or cremated to Master Marino.

Mastro Marino would then

employ these various cutters, we call them, who would extract the bones from the body and other tissue, like tendons, etc., and would then sell those bones and tissue to a

processing company down in Florida and other places in the South.

It was shockingly callous in its disregard for the sanctity of human remains.

It is a family's worst nightmare that a loved one entrusted to the care of a funeral home was actually defiled.

Where it's illegal is that they did it without the permission of the family members of those individuals who were deceased.

And they also falsified documents indicating that the bones were of people who had no diseases when in fact most of them did have diseases which would make the harvesting of those bones and the reselling of them illegal.

The media went into a frenzy.

Master Marino's tissue harvesting operation had become front-page news, and almost every living relative of the known victims had a camera and a microphone shoved in front of their faces.

I would think only a matzo could do something like this.

Can't have a good heart to do something like this to people.

It's a horrible thing because now somebody committed a crime against my sister.

She got sick, there was no crime committed.

But now to think that my family has been victimized by criminals is a whole nother grief process.

Even Nancy Grace got in on the action.

She invited Alice DeCook's daughter Susan onto her show and broached the topic with that trademarked Nancy Grace gentleness and care.

Your father's body was chopped up.

When did you learn your father had fallen victim to basically a human chop shop?

Human chop shop.

Nice touch, Nancy.

In public, Michael Master Marino had no comment.

Sir, can you comment on the case?

Not right now.

I'd like to, if you can't.

All right.

Michael assured his wife and his lawyer that he had done nothing illegal and that it was all a big misunderstanding and that he wanted to plead not guilty.

But at home one night, after posting $1 million in bail, Michael Master Marino's attitude began to change.

Barbara recalls her husband pulling her into the bathroom.

He turned on the sink faucet as cover for any bugs planted by the police that he was convinced were listening to him at all times.

Michael leaned into his wife's ear and nervously asked, Barb, should I run?

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Honestly, Quince has become my go-to for just about everything.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash swindled for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's q-u-in-ce-e.com/slash swindled.

Free shipping and 365-day returns.

Quince.com/slash swindled.

Barbara convinced Michael to stay.

She convinced him to own up to his mistakes and to take accountability for his actions.

And for the first time in a long time, Michael Master Marino took his wife's advice.

On March 18th, 2006, Master Marino walked into the district attorney's office and admitted to everything.

He admitted to stealing bones and tissues from hundreds of corpses.

He admitted to forging consent forms and medical records.

He admitted to selling cancerous and disease-ridden bones to tissue processing companies.

And he said he did it all to meet the ever-increasing demand for the product.

Michael Mastromarino changed his plea to guilty and at 44 years old was sentenced up to 54 years in prison.

After the hearing, Josh Honschaft, the prosecuting attorney overseeing the case, told reporters, quote, he cut limbs, he cut legs, he cut arms, he mutilated bodies for profit and greed.

This is Wendy Kogat, whose sister was one of Master Marino's victims.

I think they should have prison time for somebody to commit such a crime against people and not even to know the long-term effects on other people.

And if you're that greedy, you need to serve some prison time and have everything taken away from you that you tried to get through victimizing so many different people.

Lee Crusetta, Biomedical Tissue Service's head cutter, and Joseph Nicelli, the funeral director, also pleaded guilty and both were sentenced to 8 to 24 years in prison.

The other cutter, Christopher Alderasi, the only defendant to plead not guilty, was found guilty on all counts by Supreme Court Justice Albert Tomei.

He was sentenced to 9 to 27 years in prison.

Later that year, in October, seven funeral home directors were charged for their involvement.

All seven pleaded guilty.

As part of his plea deal, Michael Master Marino agreed to pay $4.6 million to the victims' families, but little, if any, of that money was ever repaid.

900 civil suits from the victims followed, but again, there was little money left to be squeezed out of anyone involved, and their insurance companies maintained that their policies did not cover criminal activity.

But the universe has a way of evening the score.

Seven years later, while in prison, Michael Master Marino was diagnosed with bone cancer.

His lawyer, Mario Gallucci, told reporters that Michael chuckled when he shared the news because he recognized the poetic justice of his situation.

And so did the families of his victims.

Susan Cook Kittridge said, quote, Irony has its way.

My father had lung cancer that metastasized to his bones.

Of course, you wonder about cosmic irony, but at this time, I feel so deeply for his family and his children.

Vito Bruno, whose father had his organs plundered by Master Marino, said,

It's full circle, baby.

You don't want to wish anything bad on anyone, but karma's a bitch.

On July 8th, 2013, Michael Master Marino died at St.

Luke's Hospital from bone cancer.

He was 49 years old.

My only concern is that we talk about this as though it was all in the past.

And I think that this is an industry that continues to thrive above board and below board.

It's a question of supply and demand.

If you ask yourself how many people you know who've had any kind of knee replacement or tendon work or dental implants, you're going to say that you've heard of lots of people, we all have, and then ask yourself how many people you know have willingly donated their body parts.

And you'll see that the seesaw is completely imbalanced.

There's a huge demand for tissue and very little legitimate supply.

And this is where the thieves come in and

make off with it.

Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen.

The music in this episode was written and performed by Trevor Howard, who's in a band called The Lungs from Los Angeles.

If you're into fast, loud, angry music, go check them out at lungslungs.bandcamp.com and welcome Trevor to the team.

For more information about Swindled, visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Swindled Podcast.

You can support the show by going to patreon.com slash swindled and joining the recently rebranded Swindled Valued Listener Rewards program.

For five bucks a month, valued listeners get early access to new episodes when possible and exclusive access to bonus episodes.

If you sign up today, you will get instant access to all of the past bonus episodes, including the most recent one about DashCon, the Feld Tumblr Convention.

And there's another one coming up soon related to the fallout from the tri-state crematorium that you heard about in the intro of of this episode.

Valued listeners also receive free exclusive merchandise on a pretty regular basis.

We just sent out hundreds of art prints to everybody that wanted one.

Don't worry, if you missed out this time, there will be more opportunities in the future, I promise.

But you gotta join the party.

Patreon.com/slash swindled.

Or you can support the show by buying something at swindledpodcast.com/slash shop, where new stuff is added all of the time.

There are stickers, patches, hoodies, posters.

We even have Fired Festival t-shirts for sale at the moment.

So go snag one of those before Billy McFarlane finds out.

If you don't want to join Patreon or do you want to buy anything, you can always send a one-time donation using the form on the homepage at swindledpodcast.com.

No pressure, but anything is appreciated.

One more thing, if you're a Reddit user, Swindled now has a subreddit which can be found at r slash swindled.

Come join us.

We're waiting for you.

That's it.

Stay tuned for promos from other independent podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

You've heard the stories of bloody murder and horrendous homicide.

But what about the rest of the crimes people fall victim to every day?

What about the forensic chemist who falsified evidence?

Or the thief who robbed a U.S.

president's safety deposit box?

What about the arsonists, stalkers, drug lords, and fraudsters?

I'm Lindsay, the host of Mugshot.

Mugshot is a true crime podcast that tells the stories of the non-murderous crimes you didn't know you needed to hear.

Season 2 starts January 14th of 2019, so be sure to catch up on season one on your favorite podcatcher.

Until then, be on your best behavior, or you may end up pictured in your very own mugshot.

Thanks to Simply Safe for sponsoring the show.

Get 50% off your new SimplySafe system at simply safe.com/slash swindled.

That's 50% off your new Simply Safe system by visiting simplysafe.com/slash swindled.

There's no safe like Simply Safe.