Body Brokers: Inside America’s Underground Trade in Human Remains by Annie Cheney

Everyone’s heard the urban legend. A guy picks up a slinky foreign babe in a bar, then takes her to a restaurant where he wines her and dines her. They then head up to his hotel room for a “nightcap”. In the morning, the man wakes up in incredible pain, his naked body immersed in a bathtub full of ice. There is a red tinge to the freezing water, and a message is scribbled in lipstick on the mirror. His hand races to his side as the words sink in — “We have taken your kidneys. Call 911!”. Such a scenario may sound outrageous and unbelievable (it was even used as the basis for the film Dirty Pretty Things), but journalist Annie Cheney has stumbled across something even more sinister … and it’s very, very real.

No, she has not uncovered a ring of date bait organ robbers. Instead, over the course of an investigative probe into the funeral home/crematorium industry, Cheney has uncovered an equally unsavory scandal over the disposal and sale of human body parts. As part of her fascinating, if flawed, book on the subject, she exposes a few of the key players, these so-called Body Brokers, and lays out the facts of how the dead, from the indigent to the most beloved of family members, often become commercial chattel, and then commerce, for the people who’ve pledged to deliver them into the afterlife.

In a matter of fact, historically cognizant manner, Cheney illustrates how the growing need for body parts — for medical schools, surgical training seminars, corporate research and development — has, in turn, created an underground subculture and unethical chain of corruption with links from the biggest national laboratories and hospitals to the Mom and Pop funeral home down the street. The quick, easy money available and the inability of the “victim” to complain about what is happening to them leads many a moral man and woman to ungodly, ghoulish behavior.

For her story, Cheney specifically focuses on Augustino “Augie” Petra, an internationally known body broker, a man responsible for the collection of corpses and the sale of their various parts for all manner of industrial and educational needs. Like a mobster trafficking in frozen flesh, Petra has many willing associates, and the narrative highlights two of the most memorable. Michael Brown, a California crematorium owner, saw the financial windfall possible in delivering parts to Petra, pre-immolation. Along with Petra associate and body diener (a term for ‘morgue assistant’ derived from the German word for ‘servant’) Allen Tyler, the trio builds an empire out of vivisection and regulation violation. Naturally, as with all things nasty and nefarious, their downfall seems predestined. But things don’t always play out as fate has mandated.

With a subject this scintillating, all Ms. Cheney has to do is get her facts straight, and the story practically writes itself, right? Well, this is one of the awkward aspects of Body Brokers. Like the old saying goes, you can take the writer out of the reporter, but you can’t take the reporter out of the writer. Instead of handling these stories in a Hot Zone thriller mode, loading her story with sickening examples of corruption and greed, Cheney simple states the truth and moves on. Of course, this is compelling in its own way. Morbid curiosity drives our interest, and there is plenty of disturbing subtext involving doctors who substitute PVC pipe for bones and freezers overflowing with headless, limbless torsos.

But instead of placing this all within a context that would make for a smart, compelling read, Body Brokers treats its information like evidence, spreading it out before us in plain, unobtrusive text and letting us judge its value and worth on our own. Cheney makes no effort to be a storyteller. Instead, she puts on her Fourth Estate face and lets the data do the describing. Broken up into often unrelated chapters (unless you consider the overall subject matter as a satisfactory connection) we jump around a great deal while reading this book. At one moment we are with Brown and Tyler as their empires are crumbling, the next we are learning about how Florida based Regeneration Technologies, Inc. is redefining the role of hospitals and corporations in the body business.

Structure is indeed a problem here. Cheney divides up her ideas by people, confusing timelines and interchanging eras to complete one concept before moving on to another. Brown does get his entire saga spun, from initial interest to multiple indictments, in a single chapter. Similarly, when dealing with the historical perspective (complete with grave robbers and secret surgical societies) we are told everything important before moving on. This makes Body Brokers very choppy and vignette-oriented. It’s not like we’re reading an overall account of the illegal corpse trade. Instead, the narrative feels disjointed, and scattered, as if picking piecemeal through a daily or weekly bi-line.

Something similar like Blood and Money manages to take several divergent elements — the murder of Texas socialite Joan Robinson, the trial of her accused plastic surgeon doctor John Hill, and the life of flamboyant attorney Richard “Racehorse” Haynes — and fashions them into a compelling, complete whole. Perhaps the desire to avoid dramatization drove Cheney to format the book in such a stilted manner. Whatever the case, the scandalous subject matter has to keep us tuned in and attentive. Thankfully, it works, especially when the author uses real life examples of the defiled dead to show the thorny moral and ethical issues involved. Perhaps the most compelling material comes late in the narrative, when bone fragments “harvested” from an infected corpse find their way into bodies of healthy, unsuspecting donors. The resulting horrors do more to make Body Brokers points than the accompanying laundry lists of procedural violations.

In fact, had Cheney ditched much of the data and simply told the stories of families who traced their departed loved ones to freezers in funeral home attics or packing crates being handled by clueless FedEx workers, we’d have a wonderfully wicked cautionary tale — as darkly comic as it is horrifyingly heartless. As it stands, Body Brokers is the professional if perfunctory primer on a problem facing our technologically advanced medical society. On the one hand, the skill and science is there to save countless lives and advance human health. On the other, there are not enough corpses to perfect these procedures. The balance between the living and the dead is something that the underground brokers bank on when attempting to find recruits. Yet as this book consistently points out, these ruthless rippers will sink to any and all means necessary to meet the need — and there’s nothing phony about this sad, soulless fact.