Selling cadavers and body parts get's you in trouble

From the LA TIMES

"The Los Angeles County district attorney's office announced criminal charges today against two men who allegedly ran a cadaver-trafficking scheme at UCLA's medical school, capping a three-year investigation that led to the temporary closure of the school's body donor program.


Henry Reid, 57, an embalmer who was director of the willed-body program from 1997 to 2004, was charged with conspiracy and grand theft for allegedly funneling donated bodies to a middleman, who then sold them to others for profit.

The middleman, Ernest Nelson, 49, was charged with conspiracy, grand theft and tax evasion. He has acknowledged cutting up about 800 cadavers and selling them to large medical research companies, including Johnson & Johnson; Nelson says the school authorized the sales, but UCLA officials say he was acting on his own.

Both Reid and Nelson were arrested today by UCLA police and are being held in lieu of $1 million bail each. Neither man could be reached for comment. They could be formally arraigned in a downtown criminal courtroom as early as Thursday.

Reid's lawyer said he had not seen the complaint and could not comment on it.

Nelson's civil lawyer, Thomas Brill, said he suspects the criminal charges were an attempt by UCLA to slow down civil lawsuits filed against the university by families of those who donated their bodies."

"I've never seen any evidence that he's involved in any criminal activity," he said. "These are all facts that they've known for at least three years, so I don't know why they waited this long to file the charges if they really had something to go on."

"The willed-body investigation has been going on since March 2004, when UCLA placed two employees on leave for their alleged role in stealing body parts. Days later, UCLA suspended its program and did not reopen it for more than a year.

According to the criminal complaint, Reid sold human body parts to Nelson beginning in May 1999 and deposited at least $43,000 into his personal bank account. In addition, the complaint said, Reid received other cash payments from Nelson that were made to conceal their actions.

In turn, the complaint said, Nelson made more than $1 million by selling cadavers and body parts supplied by Reid to more than 20 medical, pharmaceutical and hospital research companies.

According to the complaint, both men conspired to hide their actions by creating fake forms to make it look like Nelson properly received the bodies from the UCLA program. When the California Department of Health Services investigated the matter in January 2003, Nelson denied being involved, the complaint said.

Nelson was also accused of providing false laboratory reports to a San Diego research company.

Prosecutors said the scheme began coming apart in the spring of 2003 when Reid asked Nelson to return body parts. Months later, Nelson filed a claim with the University of California regents saying he was owed more than $241,000, the value of the parts he returned. That tipped off the university to a potential problem.

Attorney Raymond Boucher, who is representing several hundred of the families in civil litigation against UCLA and the companies that received the parts, said he hopes the arrests will bring to light new information on what took place. He said he believes there was corruption within the UCLA program that "went up the chain of command."

On the day Nelson was first arrested in March 2004, he acknowledged in an interview that, twice a week, he had gone to UCLA's body freezer on the seventh floor of UCLA Medical Center with saw in hand to disassemble bodies. He said he was collecting knees, hands, torsos and other body parts needed for medical research by his corporate clients, which he said numbered between 80 and 100.

In another interview with The Times last year, Nelson said he was frustrated that his name hadn't been cleared. He said he was working on his memoirs and helping lawyers suing UCLA on behalf of families of those who donated their bodies to the school."

He said he was open to selling his story, saying, "I have to do something to try to turn a negative into something positive."