Prison for US body part snatchers

Mastromarino described his crimes as "disgusting and embarrassing"

Three men who admitted conspiring to sell on body parts harvested from corpses in the United States have been given at least eight years in prison.

A Philadelphia court jailed Louis and Gerald Garzone, who ran funeral homes in the city, from eight to 20 years.

The scheme's mastermind, Michael Mastromarino, was handed 25 to 58 years - to run concurrently with a similar sentence already received in New York.

The body parts were sold to biomedical firms without the consent of relatives.

They were then used by unsuspecting doctors in medical transplants.

Overall the operation generated $4.6m (£2.3m) for those involved.

Alistair Cooke

The court in Philadelphia - where the Garzone brothers last month pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy, theft and abusing corpses - heard from 40 character witnesses before sentencing.

Many said the accused had made a mistake, and all three defendants apologised in court.

"Words cannot express how sorry I am," Michael Mastromarino said. His crimes were "nothing less than disgusting and embarrassing," he added.

Mastromarino is already serving between 18 and 54 years in jail, a sentence handed down by a court in New York, where he ran the body parts operation.

His company, Biomedical Tissue Services, took body parts from funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Among the corpses used was that of veteran BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke, whose bones were sold for $11,000 (£5,400) after he died from cancer in New York in 2004.

In Philadelphia, Mastromarino paid the Garzone brothers - who ran two funeral homes and a crematorium - more than $245,000 for at least 244 bodies between February 2004 and October 2005.

After buying the corpses, Mastromarino would send a "cutting crew", led by former nurse Lee Cruceta, to Philadelphia to dissect the bodies.

The body parts were sold around the country for surgical procedures including knee and hip replacements, as well as dental implants.

The authorities have only been able to identify 49 of the 244 bodies sold by the Garzones, since the process entailed falsifying names, ages and causes of death to disguise the fact that some parts came from bodies too old or diseased to be harvested legally.