The gruesome chaos wreaked by Biomedical Tissue Services continues to mount as medical officials and police investigators assemble their case against the New Jersey-based tissue supply company. The crimes committed by BTS and its main partners Michael Mastromarino and Joseph Nicelli are almost beyond human comprehension. The two are accused of using their company to steal heart valves, skin tissues, tendons, and bone samples from cadavers at their funeral homes, often without permission and without proper screening for diseases such as Hepatitis, Syphilis, AIDS, and HIV.

Further adding to the macabre allegations against BTS is that many of the tissues gathered from victims were done so without proper documentation or any documentation whatsoever. In order to legitimately harvest tissues from donors, tissue banks must provide copies of the death certificates demonstrating that the victims died from causes that would not cause harm to the recipient, and that person or their family gave permission to remove tissues.

Regulations established by the Food and Drug Administration mandate that all tissues samples must be accompanied by a blood sample from the donor, in order to be tested for any communicable diseases. BTS allegedly not only substituted blood samples for tissues from tainted sources, but even used the same blood for multiple tissues. Any prescreening for diseases is therefore unreliable.

BTS went to extreme lengths to steal tissues to sell on the billion-dollar a year tissue industry. Workers at BTS allegedly took tissues from cadavers of less-than-viable donors, and forged or obscured the death certificates in order to make it appear the tissues came from safe sources. Furthermore, they blatantly stole a wide variety of tissues from unknowing donors, and even went so far as to replace stolen bones with PVC pipe, and organs and tissues were replaced with bags of screws or surgical gloves in order to provide a proper appearance in open casket funerals.

Not only was Biomedical Tissue Services profiting from illegally obtained from innocent cadavers, they also exposed tens of thousands of people to not only serious infections diseases, but also to fungal and bacterial infections as well. BTS shipped their potentially tainted tissues to several distribution sites throughout the nation including Blood and Tissue Center of Central Texas, Tutogen Medical, Regeneration Technologies, Lost Mountain Tissue Bank, and Life Cell Corporation. By November 2005, Medical giant Medtronic alone received 13,000 grafts from BTS, and implanted over 8,000 of them.

All told, there are potentially 25,000 tainted tissue samples distributed throughout the United States between June 2002, and October 2005. Virtually anyone that received a tissue transplant between these months is at risk of developing serious and potentially life-threatening complications.