Posted on 06/23/2006 3:23:33 PM PDT by robowombat
Alistair Cooke: Revered in life but deserted in death By Adam Goldman Associated Press
NEW YORK - After Alistair Cooke’s death in the early morning of March 30, 2004, he was wheeled out of his Upper East Side apartment on a collapsible gurney and whisked away into the darkness.
Three days later, Cooke returned home in a small, cardboard box.
Susan Cooke Kittredge examined the ashes of her father, the refined and legendary host of "Masterpiece Theatre" on PBS and longtime BBC correspondent.
Something was odd, she thought.
A minister, she had handled ashes in the past; usually there were shards of bone. Why were these smooth and fine, like tal***** powder? What was a coil of wire doing in the ashes? She wondered if it came from the knee replacement her father had had years before.
She told a few people what she found, but didn’t give it much thought.
"It never occurred to me for a minute," she says, "that it might be a byproduct of someone having engaged in some nefarious endeavor."
It never occurred to her that her father’s body had been plundered, its parts sold. It never occurred to her that her father would end his 95-year journey through life as a tabloid headline, embroiled in the worst scandal ever to hit the industry that deals in human tissue.
From 1946 until shortly before his death, Cooke produced his "Letter from America," a weekly, 13-minute show broadcast on the BBC in which he provided insights for Mother England into the character of the United States.
Cooke would type his letter in his apartment overlooking Central Park, many times working in his bathrobe after a hearty breakfast - a smoky haze lingering from the previous night’s entertaining. In his long life, cigarettes were a constant.
In late 2003, he developed a nagging cough. As fall turned to winter that year, it became hard for him to leave his apartment.
But on an unusually warm day in February 2004, he felt well enough to visit a doctor at Mount Sinai Medical Center.
The news was bleak: lung cancer. It had spread to his bones; he didn’t have long to live.
The next month, as he lay dying, Kittredge sat at his bedside and recited Scripture, comforting both to father and daughter.
But shortly before his death, Kittredge realized she had to make funeral arrangements. Her father wanted to be cremated (perhaps, she thinks, he felt it was "efficient and neat") and so turned to the phone book.
Thumbing through the pages, she found a good deal. The New York Mortuary Service in East Harlem agreed to do the job for about $600.
"I essentially chose the one that gave me the best price for a direct cremation," she said.
Her father died days later. She touched his warm hand and removed his watch. When the body was gone, she concentrated on the man, not his lifeless shell.
"You want to remember the person in the fullness of their life," Kittredge said.
And so it was that 2,000 people attended a memorial service at Westminster Abbey - a proper tribute to a man who received an honorary knighthood in 1973 - and heard remarks by Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC.
"He mistrusted dogma and blind faith wherever he found them, unless of course it involved the science of serving a perfect whiskey, or the beauty of Gabriella Sabatini’s forehand," Thompson said. "He was genuinely taken aback when age and infirmity caught up with him in his 95th year. He had fully expected to die in harness."
His daughter retreated to her home in Vermont. There, on her iPod, she would listen to the voice of her father - the voice that had imparted 2,869 "Letters from America," and had introduced so many classic "Masterpiece Theatre" productions.
"You crawl into people’s voices the way you crawl into people’s laps," Kittredge said. "It’s very consoling."
Police investigation
One Friday last December, Kittredge received a phone call from a New York City detective. Politely and respectfully, he asked if she had heard about an investigation involving the illegal procurement and sale of body parts. She had not.
He asked if her father was the Alistair Cooke. She said yes.
And then, he delivered the news: He had reason to suspect a New Jersey company had ransacked her father’s body.
She stopped listening. Her mind shut down. The conversation ended.
Over the weekend, she trolled the Internet looking for information about a crime that seemed like something from one of Dickens’ stories.
She called the detective on Monday. Could there be a mistake? Was there any chance that daddy’s body had not been taken?
No. Police had the receipts for his bones, which were sold for thousands of dollars to Regeneration Technologies Inc. and Tutogen Medical Inc., companies that profit from processing cadaver tissue for use in living people.
The crooks had slipped up, the detective said, leaving a paper trail.
To transform him into a suitable donor and erase signs of his diseased tissue, they falsified his cause of death, listing it as a heart attack, not cancer, authorities say. The age was listed as 85, not 95.
Later, Kittredge learned the bones came from Cooke’s legs.
"To know that they chopped off his legs, then you can’t help but see in front of you a truncated person on the floor whose head comes up to the waist," she said.
That’s when the nightmares began. Kittredge dreamed of opening a door and finding a screaming, legless father reaching out to her.
Her father was just the most famous victim of many, authorities say. They said a New Jersey company, Biomedical Tissue Services, lacked consent to take bones, tendons, ligaments, skin and other tissue from cadavers. The owner of BTS and three others have pleaded not guilty to the charges. The company has closed.
Kittredge was appalled by the scope of the allegations. She was shocked by the possibility that some recipients of infected tissue might have become seriously ill.
And she wondered what happened to her father’s bones. Was someone using them? She was told no, that the bones were never implanted in anyone.
She’s not so sure. She doesn’t even know what happened to the rest of her father, his torso and arms. Did the remainder wind up in the trash?
And the ashes she scattered in Central Park. Were those even her father’s?
Kittredge is a slender woman with an elegant presence. Her delicate hands gently punctuate the air when she makes a point. Like her father, words come easily to her.
Inside her 1820 farmhouse near Burlington, Vt., there is an enlarged black-and-white photograph of father and daughter at the family’s beach house on Long Island, more than a half-century ago.
Susan, 4 years old, stands at her father’s feet; she waits for him to take her to the beach, while Cooke taps away at the keys of an old typewriter.
She’s clearly fond of this picture. It’s a good memory.
http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/06082006/health/106852.htm
Bastards!
OMG , how horrible!
Somethings are more important, more valuable, to relegate to the lowest bidder. What do you expect to get for $600 especially in NY?
I've always wondered why cremation isn't treated the same as being buried.
If I were instructed to cremate someone's remains, there would be a service at a chapel, and then a procession to the crematorium, and then those of us in the escort, and closest family would be present as the body was committed to the flames.
I know we do the same thing for burials at sea. Cremation should be no different in our respect for the dead.
The mind boggles..
Solyent green is ... Cooke!
" there is an enlarged black-and-white photograph of father and daughter at the family’s beach house on Long Island, more than a half-century ago. "
I have been in this house . It is up on a hill at the end of Nassau Point Road in Cutchogue . Fantastic view of the Bay and beyond .
" I were instructed to cremate someone's remains, there would be a service at a chapel, and then a procession to the crematorium, and then those of us in the escort, and closest family would be present as the body was committed to the flames. "
This is basically how it is done in Japan .
Do they still cremate on a pyre in India?
I understand it is quite painful the way they do it in India.
Makes good sense to me...
Shameful....the bastards!
Why we haven't lost what friends we have left in the UK over this, I've no idea. Find the people responsible, and then do to them what they have done to him - except start in on them while they're still alive.
My God, this is just horrific!
Heather Augustin, 42, lives in southern New Jersey and had two disks in her neck removed last year, supposedly replaced with bone taken from a youngish corpse. Three months later, her surgeon told her that her new neck bone had in fact come from rogue funeral homes, likely from the cadaver of a very old person.
Augustin hasn't slept particularly well since.
"You think, 'I'm carrying a bone in my neck from someone who didn't want to get chopped up,' " she said. "I'm, like, in total shock. What am I supposed to do with these thoughts?"
The New York City medical examiner's office in the past few months has exhumed three bodies from cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens. Investigators discovered one female cadaver missing about half its body.
The New Jersey biomedical firm shipped large coolers filled with tissue to five suppliers across the nation. No one knows how many patients are affected. But the examples uncovered so far are suggestive:
Between early 2004 and September 2005, 60 surgical patients at Shore Memorial Hospital in Somers Point, N.J., received implants said to have originated with the corpse-snatching ring. Another 74 patients in Nebraska received stolen bone tissue during surgeries in the same period.
Stories like these make you wonder if fundementalists religious sects that refuse organ and tissue transplants might be onto something.
This is the slippery slope of treating humans as a fungible commodity.
I see just the opposite. The more people allow their remains to benefit the living, the less need there is for a black market.
Undertakers yield licenses
Posted on Wednesday, June 14 @ 00:55:24 CDT
Topic: Follow Up
Linked by state to parts probe
By SIMONE WEICHSELBAUM
A Kensington funeral director and his brother, who owns an undertaking business in Hunting Park, have surrendered their licenses during a state-led probe alleging that they played a role in a nationwide body parts scandal, the Department of State announced yesterday.
Louis Garzone and his younger brother, Gerald, voluntarily allowed the state's Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs to revoke their funeral directors' licenses and their funeral home license, the agency said.
The brothers agreed to close up their businesses on Wednesday, said the agency.
They will no longer operate as funeral directors in Pennsylvania, the agency said.
Louis Garzone, 63, received his directors license in 1966, and his brother, 46, obtained his in 1985, records showed.
Louis Garzone also partly owns Liberty Cremations, Inc. The fate of the crematorium was unclear last night. The city sent at least 128 unclaimed bodies to Liberty in 2004 and 2005.
The Department of State and the Philadelphia district attorney's office launched separate investigations into the Louis Garzone Funeral home in March after the Daily News reported that the parlor was linked to a multi-state probe led by the Brooklyn, N.Y., district attorney.
Brooklyn authorities alleged in February that Biomedical Tissue Service Inc., of Fort Lee, N.J., teamed up with about 30 funeral homes in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia and illegally dissected corpses for profit.
Two former Biomedical workers - Kevin Vickers and Lee Cruceta - told the Daily News that they extracted bones, veins and tendons from dozens of corpses inside the Louis Garzone Funeral Home. One Biomedical employee said he began dissecting bodies at Garzone's in February 2004 and stopped last September.
Gerald Garzone was never linked to the allegations until yesterday.
According to a Department of State press release, the Garzones allegedly acted with "gross incompetence, negligence and misconduct over an 18-month period from 2003 to September 2005."
Also, separate agreements signed by the Garzones made evident for the first time, in writing, allegations connecting them to the body-parts scandal.
It was alleged that the two brothers may have permitted, inside their funeral homes, the removal of body parts from corpses they were going to bury.
The two brothers didn't admit such activities took place, according to state documents.
Despite giving up their businesses, the brothers would not say whether they were connected to the now-defunct tissue company or its owner, Michael Mastromarino. The Garzones were not named in the Brooklyn indictments.
"Respondents do not admit any wrongdoing," stated the Department of State's Agreement of Voluntary Surrender and Order, signed by Louis Garzone.
Gerald Garzone signed a similar agreement.
"The [State Board of Funeral Directors] moved quickly once the alleged activities of the Garzone brothers were reported by the Daily News," said Commissioner Basil L. Merenda of the Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs, whose section of the state agency called for the probe.
The bureau provides licenses in a variety of careers, ranging from "doctors and cosmetologists to accountants and funeral directors," according to its website.
And, "the Garzones did cooperate with this investigation," Merenda said.
The Department of State worked with the Philadelphia district attorney's Office and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Merenda said.
The D.A.'s office is conducting its own probe into Louis Garzone. In March, Philadelphia investigators paid a surprise visit to employees at his funeral home and questioned workers for several hours, according to one source.
Investigators also interviewed at least two tissue-recovery Biomedical technicians in April, according to several sources close to the case.
Merenda said he did not know why the Garzones agreed to give up their careers three months after the state and the D.A.'s investigation began.
Merenda said their decision ended what would have been a longer process, including hearings and witnesses' testimony.
Attorneys for the brothers could not be reached for comment last night.
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/14786544.htm
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