Some "respectable" people are willing to become ghouls to make money. It's a symptom of our sick materialistic society in which the only real crime is being poor:
NEW YORK (AP) -- Authorities are investigating allegations that hundreds of bodies were illegally carved up in funeral homes around New York City and sold for parts without the permission of the families of the deceased.
Corpses, including that of famed British broadcaster Alistair Cooke, were used to harvest human bone, skin and tendons which were then sold for a profit, authorities allege.
Worse, health officials discovered some of the stolen body parts were diseased and infected patients who received them in skin grafts, dental implants or other orthopedic procedures -- a risk concealed by paperwork doctored with forged signatures and false information.
In the Cooke case, authorities confirmed this week that investigators contacted the late broadcaster's family after finding paperwork indicating his bones had been removed and sold by a Fort Lee, N.J., tissue bank, Biomedical Tissue Services, before he was cremated. Cooke, best known as the host of "Masterpiece Theatre," died from cancer last year at 95 in Manhattan.
The family insists it never signed off on the procedure, and that someone had falsified documents by changing his cause of death to heart attack, and by lowering his age to 85. Harvesting bones from cancer patients violates rules by the Food and Drug Administration.
The probe -- first reported by the Daily News in October -- has generated other gruesome stories. In one instance, the corpse of a Queens grandmother that investigators exhumed last month had nearly all the bones removed below the waist and replaced with PCV pipes.
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