Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Made Millions Selling Human Body Parts // The Michael Mastromarino Scandal

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Michael Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon whose license was revoked due to drug addiction, orchestrated a massive illegal body-snatching enterprise between 2001 and 2005 through his company, Biomedical Tissue Services. He conspired with several funeral directors to plunder tissue, bone, and organs from over 1,000 cadavers.

So this guy made $4 million selling other people's body parts? Now the guy's name is Mastro Marino, and Mastro Marino is 36 when this story starts, and he's living in New Jersey. And Mastro Marino, he's a successful guy. He's actually a dentist, specifically he's an oral surgeon. However, he also has a problem. He's addicted to prescription painkillers. He once had a back injury and he was prescribed some medication,

and over time he became addicted to it, and he started using his status as a dentist to obtain it. And of course, he keeps this addiction a secret from everyone, so no one suspects a thing. But one day in 2000, everything starts to fall apart for him. Because he's at work in the middle of performing oral surgery, and suddenly Master Marino gets the urge to take some painkillers. So he excuses himself from the operating room to go to the restroom.

And there, he injects himself with Demerol. But I guess he does too much of it and Master Marino gets so high that he can't make it back to the surgery and boom, he just collapses right there on the restroom floor. And so quite a bit of time passes. And the hospital staff members start to notice that Master Marino has been gone for a long time. And his patient is still under anesthesia waiting for him to get back. So the staff goes looking for him and that is when they find him, passed out on the restroom floor. with a syringe in his hand like a junkie. So after this incident, his staff knows that he's an addict,

and I guess someone reports him, and eventually, bam, Master Marino is arrested for being under the influence of a controlled substance. And from there, he's court ordered to attend drug rehab and he's temporarily suspended from practicing medicine. But Massa Marino doesn't seem to care about all that. He starts practicing dentistry again, this time without a license. and eventually he gets caught and he's suspended from practicing for another four years.

So by this point, it's 2001. And Master Marino, he has no job because he can't be a dentist and he needs money. He has a family to take care of. And that is when he uses his contacts and his professional expertise to get into the human tissue recovery business. The human tissue recovery business involves the collecting and selling of human tissues like tendons and heart valves and bones and stuff like that, which is totally legal with the proper consent.

Like people donate organs all the time, and they donate their body to science and whatnot all the time. So Massiforino starts thinking that if he can supply human tissue to the tissue processing companies, he could make some serious money. But in order to do that, he needs access to human bodies, dead ones. And that is when he comes up with another, idea. Why not get them from funeral homes? And like I was saying, tissue donation from the deceased

in funeral homes is legal. However, to do that, Master Marino would need consent from that dead person's family. But I guess he's like, well, fuck all that. I ain't trying to get permission. And so he sets up his own tissue collection company, biomedical tissue services. And he starts reaching out to funeral home directors across the region. And he tells them that if they will allow him to harvest the body parts he needs right there in their facilities, he will pay them $1,000 per body. And the funeral directors are like, sweet, let's do it. So Master Marino gets to work. He goes to these places and he gets the deceased bodies and he basically lutes them of their parts. He strips them of anything of value, bones, skin, tendons, heart valves, anything he can take.

And of course, he's not getting the family's consent for any of this. Instead, he goes and he forges consent forms, and I guess that's good enough for the funeral directors, so they let him take whatever body parts he wants. Then Master Marino takes these parts, and he sells them to the tissue processing companies. Now, the tissue processing companies also require consent documentation. But no problem, Master Marino just gives them more forged consent forms, saying that the families have all signed off on this. And this plan works, and it works really well. And, and my Master Marino gets paid over and over and over again. Now, there's obviously a big risk here.

Mass Marino knows that if the deceased person's family ever found out that their loved one's body was being desecrated and sold for parts, his entire scheme would fall apart and he would probably go to prison. So he takes steps to make sure that they never find out. And this is where the story gets really messed up. When the family of a deceased person requests the body, like to display in an open casket funeral, Master Marino ensures to make it look untouched. Like he will carefully replace the tissue and the bones and stuff that he removed with other things.

Like if he removes a leg bone, he'll replace it with a PVC pipe and then he'll stitch the body back up. Or I guess to maintain a body's shape, sometimes he'll stuff surgical gloves or old rags or paper towels or things like that, into it, like a human stuffed animal, so that it looks filled out, and then he'll, like, sew it back up. And once that's done, the body is returned, and usually it'll look perfect. In fact, it'll look so perfect that not a single family ever suspects a thing. So he keeps going, and he does this again and again and again. And soon his operation grows bigger and more bodies are coming in. And with more bodies coming in, comes more money. And Master Marino is making a lot of it.

On average, he makes somewhere between $7,000 to $10,000 per body. Because one body can provide multiple parts, so the profits are stacking up fast. But even after making all this money, Master Marino still isn't satisfied. He wants more. So he adjusts his scam to involve elderly people. Because, here's the thing. Tissue donation has rules. Things like donors can't have diseases and donors can't be too old and stuff like that.

And Master Mino isn't about to follow any rules. That would limit his supply and therefore limit his profit. So he ignores the rules completely. And he decides that everyone's tissue is usable, no matter how old or diseased. And to make that work, he starts falsifying more records. Like if a donor is 104 years old, he writes 70. And if they died of cancer, he writes heart failure. And eventually, patients who receive transplants from the tissues that he sells,

they start getting sick. And they start reporting that they have hepatitis or syphilis or whatever illness they got from this. But Master Marino still doesn't care. He keeps going. He keeps harvesting, he keeps selling, and the processing companies he sells to keep distributing those tissues to patients all around the world. And years go by.

And he's still doing it. So it's starting to look like he might actually get away with all this. Visit BetMDM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

Peace contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Until... Until one day in 2004. A funeral home in Brooklyn that Master Marino works with sometimes, it gets sold off to a new owner. And as soon as this new owner settles in, she finds out that the previous funeral director had taken money from a client. for a funeral and then never carried out that funeral. So she reports this to the police and police start investigating.

And during their investigation of this funeral that never happened, they noticed some documents linked to tissue processing companies. And after a while, they uncover everything Master Marino has been doing, specifically his secret tissue harvesting operation, which by this point is worth more than $4 million. And during his operation, over $4 million, And during his operation, over a thousand bodies had been used for harvesting. And out of all those cases, only one had proper consent from that person's family.

And so, police get an arrest warrant for Master Marino, and eventually he turns himself in. Here's his mugshot. And so ultimately, he takes a plea deal, and he gets sentenced to a maximum of 54 years in prison.