The body of BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke was one of more than 1,000 bodies plundered by an alleged corpse-snatching ring that sold the bones for use in transplants, US authorities said.
Four men pleaded not guilty yesterday when they appeared in court on a 122-count indictment, accused of taking body parts from people who had not given consent or were too old or too sick to donate.
The group was said to have made $2 million by secretly carving spines, bones, tendons and other body parts out of cadavers from funeral homes in three states and forging organ donor consent forms to pass them off as legally harvested tissue.
Michael Mastromarino, the owner of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, New Jersey, was said to have been the leader.
Brooklyn funeral director Joseph Nicelli, Lee Crucetta, and Christopher Aldorasi faced multiple charges including enterprise corruption — which carries a jail term of up to 25 years — unlawful dissection and forgery.
All except Mr Aldorasi are also accused of body stealing and opening graves.
The men are accused of raiding the corpses over the course of four years in a secret operating theatre in Nicelli's funeral parlour, Daniel George & Son.
The bodies came from 30 to 40 unwitting funeral homes in New York City, Rochester, Philadelphia and New Jersey that contracted with the Brooklyn funeral firm for embalming and were paid around $1,000 per body.
Then the organs were allegedly sold to tissue suppliers to be used in surgery by unsuspecting doctors across the United States and in Canada. Death certificates were allegedly doctored to make the dead out to have been younger and healthier than they had been.
In the case of Mr Cooke, who died of cancer at 95 in March 2004, documents listed the cause of death as a heart attack and lowered his age to 85, investigators said.
So far they have not found any evidence his bones were actually used in transplants but said there were still further checks to be made.
The family of veteran broadcaster Mr Cooke, who presented BBC Radio 4's Letter From Americafor more than half a century, have said they are appalled by the allegations. They had scattered his ashes in Manhattan's Central Park.
When investigators exhumed six bodies, they found that many of the bones had been removed and replaced with plastic plumbing pipe.
The "unspeakable desecration" allegedly extended to the mortuary staff also tossing gloves, aprons, and other evidence into the cadavers before sewing them up again ready for viewing.