This is precisely the thing nobody believes when you tell them.

Chop shop.

...It was Mastromarino who built a business that took from the dead and gave to the living. There are many legitimate businesses that do this, but authorities say Mastromarino’s company, Biomedical Tissue Services, was not one of them.

BTS, they say, secretly carved up hundreds of cadavers without the families of the deceased knowing about it, then peddled the pieces on the lucrative non-organ body parts market.

Even scarier: They say BTS doctored paperwork to hide the inconvenient fact that some of the dead were old and diseased. As a result, they say, the market was flooded with potentially tainted tissue, and an untold number of patients across the country may have received infections along with their dental implants and hip replacements...

...Femurs. Tendons. Heart valves. Swatches of skin from the thighs, stomach and back.

The body parts, though no longer of any value to their owners, became big business for Mastromarino. His lawyer said he was among the first in the industry to figure out that one way to meet the high demand for donated human tissue — traditionally procured in the controlled environment of hospitals — was to turn to funeral homes.

Deals were cut with funeral directors in New York City, Rochester, N.Y., Philadelphia and New Jersey: BTS would pay a $1,000 “facility fee” to harvest body parts on their premises.

Three-man teams were dispatched to mortuaries. Two workers would extract the parts. A third would bag them and put them on ice until they could be stored in a freezer at BTS headquarters.

What’s been portrayed as a gruesome exercise was purely clinical, Cruceta said.

“We took our time with what we did,” Cruceta said. “We never made fun of any of these donors. We always treated everyone with respect.”

Internal documents from BTS suggest the company had, at least on paper, a strict set of rules for obtaining signed consent for the procedures. A script instructed interviewers to tell family members, “We are about to proceed with the medical social history questionnaire. I have about 40 questions and this interview should take about 20 minutes...”

Unfortunately, it seems that no questions were asked in hundreds of cases.

Family members have told investigators no one sought permission for body-part donations. The signatures at the bottom of the questionnaires, they said, were forged.

Mastromarino, through his lawyer, has blamed funeral home directors, insisting it was their job to get consent. The directors say it was the other way around.

As early as September 2003, the FDA detected trouble at BTS.

In a routine inspection, an investigator found evidence the company had failed to properly sterilize its equipment, and had no records of how it had disposed of tissue that failed screening for HIV, hepatitis and syphilis.

But nothing came of it. The FDA backed off after Mastromarino insisted he had voluntarily cleaned up his operation. In a letter, he told officials he would “look forward to your agency revisiting our facility...”

I'm sure no money was exchanged. After all, we're talking about the Federal Government, right?

...The case, said the prosecutor, is like a “cheap horror movie.” But few scary flicks offer the gruesome and gory details of the BTS scandal.

Authorities released photos of exhumed corpses that were boned below the waist like a freshly caught fish. The defendants, they alleged, had made a crude attempt to cover their tracks by sewing PVC pipe back into the bodies in time for open-casket wakes.

It also was alleged that the body of the British-born host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” Alistair Cooke, was among those abused by BTS.

Mastromarino, Cruceta, another cutter and a former mortician have been charged. “What you have before you is nothing short of a case of medical terrorism,” prosecutor Michael Vecchione said at an arraignment.

Lawsuits filed by implant patients accuse BTS of exposing plaintiffs to hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Families of the dead have sued too, claiming the biomedical firm caused distress by desecrating the dead for profit.

Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration shut down BTS amid its own investigation. The agency said it had uncovered evidence the firm failed to screen for contaminated tissue. Parts were recovered from people who had diseases which may have been “exclusionary,” an FDA report said.

Death certificates in the company’s files, the report said, were at odds with those on file with the state: The company’s version made people younger than they actually were, and altered the cause and time of the deaths.

The culprits “were just some irresponsible crooks who were doing this and slipped through the cracks,” said Dr. Stuart Youngner, a Case Western Reserve University medical ethicist and head of the ethics committee at Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, a large nonprofit tissue bank. “The good tissue banks ... don’t do that.”

Well. That settles it.

Still one wonders. If human trafficking is the international problem that continues, one wonders what is done with the merchandise after it's past its prime. It gives a whole new dimension to the problem of what to do with inconvenient bodies.

Unthinkable? Now that's pre-9/11 thinking.