A business where human bodies were packaged and sold
PHOENIX: Sam Kazemi stood over the old man’s corpse. Nearby lay pliers, a scalpel and a motorised saw designed to cut drywall and pipe.
On a busy day, Kazemi might harvest body parts from five or six people who had donated their bodies to science. On this day in November 2013, the corpse before Kazemi typified the donors who gave their remains to his employer, Biological Resource Centre (BRC).
The man was a retired factory worker with a ninth-grade education. He had lived with his wife in a mobile home in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and had died six days earlier, aged 75. His name was Conrad Patrick.
But after he died and his body was donated, Patrick became a commodity, known by the company’s initials and a number: BRC13112103.
Reuters reviewed thousands of internal BRC records and confidential law enforcement documents containing profiles of Patrick and 2,280 other donors. The documents include invoices and inventories for thousands of body parts harvested from those people. They show how their bodies were dissected, which body parts were sent where, and why buyers obtained them.
Kazemi helped cut up and package Patrick into seven pieces. BRC shipped Patrick’s left foot to a Chicago-area orthopaedic lab. His left shoulder was sent to a Las Vegas company that holds surgical seminars. His head and his spine went to a project run by the US Army. And Patrick’s “external reproductive organs” were sent to a local university. His right foot and left knee were placed in the company’s freezers, where they became part of BRC’s million-dollar inventory of flesh and bone.
For more than a year, Reuters has examined America’s body trade, a little-known and almost unregulated industry. These businesses, which call themselves non-transplant tissue banks, are also known as body brokers.
The operations can resemble meat-packing plants. At BRC, body parts from heads to fingernails were harvested and sold. On Saturday mornings, Kazemi taught college students how to dismember cadavers in the company lab. He also starred in a grisly training video, demonstrating how to carve out a man’s spine using a motorised saw.
The documents obtained by Reuters – along with dozens of interviews with investigators, former BRC workers and families of donors – offer an unparalleled look at how one of America’s major body brokers operated.
The records, never before made public, also reveal how little the government or the donors themselves understood what was happening at the company, and show in graphic detail how a cadaver becomes a commodity.
Sales invoices detail many of those transactions.
For US$607 (RM2,500), BRC sold the liver of a public school janitor to a medical-device company. The torso of a retired bank manager, bought by a Swiss research institute, fetched US$3,191. A large Midwestern healthcare system paid US$65 for two femoral arteries, one from a church minister. And the lower legs of a union activist were purchased by a Minnesota product-development company for US$350 each.
For raw material, the industry relies in large part on people too poor to afford a funeral, offering to cremate a portion of each donated body for free.
A Reuters analysis of BRC donor files from May 3, 2011 through Jan 20, 2014 confirmed how important the disadvantaged were to business. The vast majority of BRC donors came from neighbourhoods where the median household income fell below the state average. Four out of five donors didn’t graduate from college, about twice the ratio of the country as a whole.
Before brokers accept a body, they typically present the donor or next of kin with a consent form. These agreements are often written in technical language that many donors and relatives say they find hard to understand. The documents give brokers the right to dismember the dead, then sell or rent body parts to medical researchers and educators, often for hundreds or thousands of dollars. At BRC, a whole body sold for US$5,893, records show.
Since 2004, when a federal health panel unsuccessfully called on the US government to regulate the industry, Reuters found that more than 2,357 body parts obtained by brokers from at least 1,638 people have ended up misused, abused or desecrated.
Documents reviewed for this article indicate that those figures are vastly understated. The extent of BRC’s operation surprised even investigators who raided the Phoenix-based company in 2014.
There, agents discovered 10 tons of frozen human remains – 1,755 total body parts that included 281 heads, 241 shoulders, 337 legs and 97 spines.
Applying a state forfeiture law, authorities hauled away the contents of BRC’s freezers, filling 142 body bags. One bag held parts from at least 36 different people.
The seizure was so large that officials struggled to properly handle the body parts. When plans to cremate the remains stalled, officials brought three walk-in freezers to a military base and stacked the body bags inside, one atop another. Parts from 851 different people remained in those freezers for almost three years before they were cremated.
The raid on BRC was part of a broader federal probe into the suspected practices of one of its clients, Arthur Rathburn. A Detroit body broker, Rathburn has pleaded not guilty to charges of defrauding customers. During a 2013 search of Rathburn’s warehouse, federal agents found rotting body parts along with four preserved fetuses, confidential photographs reviewed by Reuters show. It is not clear how Rathburn acquired the fetuses or what he planned to do with them. He was indicted for allegedly selling diseased body parts without warning buyers. His trial is set for January.
After the BRC raid, the company went out of business. Its founder and former owner, Stephen Gore, later pleaded guilty to fraud – not for selling body parts but for misleading customers by shipping them contaminated specimens. His punishment: probation. He is expected to testify at the Rathburn trial.
Gore’s attorney, Clark Derrick, said Gore always tried to act in the best interests of his donors.
“At some point the business grew exponentially, we became shorthanded, we cut some corners, and for that I apologise and make amends,” Derrick said on Gore’s behalf.
Gore housed his business in a 9,000-square-foot building once occupied by an insurance agency – a one-storey facility near two interstate highways and the Phoenix airport. From 2005 until early 2014, court records show, BRC received about 5,000 human bodies and distributed more than 20,000 body parts.
As Reuters reported last year, BRC also sold body parts to US Army contractors for military experiments. A Pentagon spokeswoman said BRC provided the body parts “under false pretenses,” misleading the Army that consent had been secured for donors to be used in destructive tests.
Among the parts BRC sold for the Army experiments were the heads and spines of Conrad Patrick and Leon Small, a 71-yearold retiree who had once managed a furniture factory.
On the consent forms Patrick and Small signed, each man checked a box stating that he did not wish to be used in military or destructive tests, records show.
(Audio) In this BRC recording, a company representative gets widow Dona Patrick to amend her husband’s donor agreement so his body can be used in military blast tests.
But just days after Patrick and Small died, a BRC employee called their widows and persuaded them to amend the forms so their husbands could be used by the military, according to recordings of the calls reviewed by Reuters. The widows said the calls came during a traumatic time.
“I didn’t understand what they were talking about,” Dona Patrick said. “But I said ‘OK.’”
Bodies or parts from at least 20 BRC donors were used without their consent in Army experiments, Reuters found. Parts from Small and Patrick, however, were not. The military halted testing when it learned of the raid at BRC. — Reuters
For more than a year, Reuters has examined America’s body trade, a little-known and almost unregulated industry. These businesses, which call themselves non-transplant tissue banks, are also known as body brokers.