NEW YORK, NY February 24, 2006 —Four men have been indicted by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office for allegedly running an elaborate and illegal trade in body parts. WNYC's Fred Mogul.

D.A. Charles Hynes showed pictures and x-rays of plastic pipes, gloves and surgical aprons that were sown into corpses to preserve their structure and destroy evidence.

The bones and body parts allegedly had been removed and donated to transplant companies and facilities. Technically "selling" these tissues is illegal, but legitimate institutions pay millions of dollars for them in "service fees." That's how much the DA says Michael Mastro-marino and Joseph Nicelli made, between 2001 and 2005, for dismembering almost 11-hundred bodies. One of them belonged to author and public TV host Alistair Cooke, who died in 2004.

The DA says the defendants forged consent forms from the deceased and their relatives, and often disguised both the age and the cause of death so the bodies would conform with regulations. Mastro-marino, Nicelli and two helpers all pleaded Not Guilty yesterday in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Mastro-marino's attorney says he followed regulations for harvesting tissue donated by families at funeral homes.

The Food and Drug Administration last year ordered a recall of the potentially tainted products and warned that numerous transplant recipients could have been exposed to various diseases.