The Red Market (6 page)

Authorities, however, were willing to overlook the crime of grave robbing by the medical community as a necessary evil. Doctors needed dead bodies if they wanted to make living ones healthy. Arrests were rare and only targeted the lowly grave robbers who did it for profit—not the medical schools who hired them or the medical student who dug up bodies for free.

With authorities unwilling to intervene on the plundering doctors, the public’s outrage turned to vigilante justice. Between 1765 and 1884 there were twenty anatomy riots across America. While each riot had slightly different roots, they were generally spontaneous public outcries prompted when body snatchers were caught in the act, or by chance when a visitor saw someone he knew on the dissection table.

Riots of the era seemed to have inspired the climactic scene in
Frankenstein
. Crowds often formed in graveyards where they could see the empty graves for themselves and then proceeded to medical schools, where they threw rocks and brandished torches. Their goal was to destroy the offending anatomy labs. But they weren’t effective in quelling the practice. In several cases the only way to subdue the riots was to call in the state militia and fire into the mob, inevitably leaving several more fresh bodies in the graveyards. In a way, the riots were just another cost of doing business.

Outrage over body snatching was generally short-lived and burned out with the destruction of property. It would take more than mobs of angry citizens to spark real government reform. That had to wait until two Irish immigrants in Scotland hatched a plan to supply an unlimited number of bodies to the University of Edinburgh.

William Hare owned a run-down boardinghouse in the town of West Port. Occasionally a tenant would die without paying rent and he would be left with cleaning up the mess. While he was carting the body of one of his broke and recently deceased tenants to the graveyard, a doctor intercepted him and offered £10 for it. He also said he would offer a similar fee for any other body that Hare could turn up. Hare quickly enrolled the services of another tenant, William Burke, and the two embarked on a killing spree that lasted a year and claimed the lives of seventeen victims. The crimes were so gruesome and so captivated the public imagination that the story was retold in countless newspaper and penny magazine articles of the time. The tale continues to inspire films in this century.

Mostly in response to the Burke and Hare murders, England passed the Anatomy Act of 1832. The act severely limited body snatching in England by allowing doctors to claim any unclaimed corpse left in a city morgue or hospital. Similar measures were adopted in America.

The act came just in the nick of time. Besides being study aids, by the turn of the century, anatomical skeletons were becoming popular decorations and status symbols for American and European doctors. They were presented as a sign of medical competence in the same ways that stethoscopes and medical school diplomas are today.

According to Sappol, the skeletons either purposely lacked information about their provenance, or clearly indicated that hanging skeletons came from “executed negros,” to reassure patrons that the “funerary honor of members of the white community had not been violated.”
⁷

The only problem was that black executed prisoners were in short supply. So British doctors looked to their colonies. In India members of the Dom caste, who traditionally performed cremations, were pressed into processing bones. By the 1850s, Calcutta Medical College was churning out nine hundred skeletons a year, mostly for shipment abroad. A century later, a newly independent India dominated the market in human bones.

In 1985 the
Chicago Tribune
reported that India had exported sixty thousand skulls and skeletons the year before. The supply was sufficient for every medical student in the developed world to buy a bone box along with their textbooks for just $300.
⁸

If most of the merchandise was stolen, at least exporting it was legal. “For years, we ran everything aboveboard,” Bimalendu Bhattacharjee, a former president of the Indian Association of Exporters of Anatomical Specimens, told the
Los Angeles Times
in 1991. “No one advertised, but everyone knew it was going on.” At their height, Kolkata’s bone factories took in an estimated $1 million a year.
⁹

Another major supplier, the Reknas Company, sold thousands of skeletons to Kilgore International in Minnesota. The current owner, Craig Kilgore, remembers that at the time there was never any talk about grave robbing. “We were told that overpopulation was such a big problem that people would just die where they slept and carts would pick up the dead bodies off the street,” he says.

Pictures of the (now-defunct) Reknas factory floor show a full-blown operation of lab-coat-wearing professionals assembling entire skeleton families. In the golden era of the skeleton trade, the export houses were among the most prestigious employment options in the city. Like doctors in colonial America, the skeleton industry was a path to success with a low bar of entry. The industry was also supported by the city, which issued licenses to skeleton dealers. Not only were they taking care of the unclaimed dead, they were providing a valuable revenue stream for a city that the rest of India thought was past its heyday.

But the profits couldn’t last without covering up a dirty secret. Simply collecting the corpses of destitute people and from the local morgues wasn’t enough. Some companies tried to increase the supply by buying bodies before death, offering a small purse of cash to people who promised to donate their corpses when they had passed on. But attempts for a willed donation program were too slow and unreliable. A company that worked like that could take years to get a particular skeleton, while fresh bodies were being set into soil and were ripe for the taking. Just like colonial America and the United Kingdom, skeleton supply companies saw grave robbing as the only solution. History was about to repeat itself.

The West’s unquenchable appetite for skeletons meant that West Bengal’s graveyards were being picked clean, and the lure of ready money soon attracted criminal elements. In an event that mirrored the murders by Burke and Hare, the industry shuddered to a halt in March 1985, when a bone trader was arrested after exporting fifteen hundred children’s skeletons. Because they’re relatively rare and illustrate transitional stages in osteological development, children’s skeletons command higher prices than adult ones. Indian newspapers claimed that children were being kidnapped and killed for their bones.

Panic spread with news of the arrest. In the months after the indictment, vigilantes combed the cities searching for members of the alleged kidnappers’ network. In September of that year, an Australian tourist was killed and a Japanese tourist beaten by a mob after rumors spread that they were involved in the conspiracy. The attacks themselves might have been enough to stall India’s bone industry, but the government had already taken action: A few weeks earlier, India’s Supreme Court interpreted the national Import/Export Control Act to prohibit the export of human tissue.

In the absence of competing suppliers in other countries, the court’s decision effectively shut down international trade in human skeletons. Medical schools in the United States and Europe begged the Indian government to reverse the export ban to no avail.

Since then, natural human bone has been difficult to come by. The voracious demand for fresh cadavers in medical education consumes nearly all donated corpses in the United States, and in any case, processing skeletons is a slow, messy business that few people care to take on. When high-quality specimens do become available, they tend to be costly. A complete skeleton in good condition now retails for several thousand dollars, and orders can take months, even years, to fulfill. Students no longer buy their own bone boxes; instead, schools usually keep an inventory that’s replaced only when specimens are damaged or stolen. Stanford Medical School allocates half a skeleton, cleaved down the middle, for every two students. Such policies mean that many established institutions already have all the bones they need. The biggest buyers of skeletons are new and growing schools throughout the world that need to outfit their labs. Many medical schools around the developing world, most notably Pakistan and China, still source their bones from local graveyards—occasionally risking public ire. But large-scale exports have dwindled.

In the United States some institutions have turned to plastic replicas. But artificial substitutes aren’t ideal. “Plastic models are reproductions of a single specimen and don’t include the range of variations found in real osteology,” says Samuel Kennedy, who stocks the anatomy program at Harvard Medical School. Students trained on facsimiles never see these differences. Moreover, the models aren’t entirely accurate. “The molding process doesn’t capture the detail of a real specimen,” Kennedy adds. “This is especially critical in the skull.”

In the United States, major dealers like Kilgore International who made a fortune when importing skeletons was legal are now making do selling replicas. “My father would have done almost anything to get back into the bone business,” says Craig Kilgore, who runs the company his father founded. “He was legally blind but would still come to the office and write letters to anyone, anywhere in the world, that he felt could be of help to reopen the supply.”

Some of those letters found unlikely homes. Shortly after the ban, while investigating potential new sources of bones in famine-plagued regions of Africa, a bone dealer in Nigeria told him about warehouses full of bones that were ready for export. For $50,000 he would have a near-unlimited source of human materials. The only problem was that the money would have to be delivered in cash. In Lagos.

Too old to go on his own, Charles Kilgore recruited his son, Craig, to get on a plane and meet the dealers at the Hilton Hotel. His contact convinced him to get in a car with him and drive to the outskirts of the city to an abandoned warehouse district that bordered the jungle. “A person could go into that jungle and probably never come out,” he recalled.

Worried that it was a setup, he started using the names of bones that he was interested in by the wrong terms; the distributors he was with didn’t bother to correct him. Sensing danger, Kilgore convinced the purported dealers that the money was in another location and that they would have to drop him off so that he could retrieve it. When his associates were out of sight, he took a cab to the airport and caught the next plane out of town. Even though Kilgore and several other domestic skeleton importers scoured the world for new sources of bones, they were never able to find any, and the industry fell into a steep decline.

Craig’s father, who died in 1995, didn’t live to see the reemergence of the trade.

TUCKED AWAY ON A
side street between one of Kolkata’s largest graveyards and one of its busiest hospitals, Young Brothers’ headquarters looks more like an abandoned warehouse than a leading distributor of human skeletons. The rusted front gate appears to have been padlocked and forgotten a decade ago. Above the entrance, the company sign is a tableau of peeling paint.

It wasn’t always this way. The building was bustling with activity in 2001, according to former Kolkata Health Department chief and head of West Bengal’s opposition party Javed Ahmed Khan. At the time, neighbors complained that the Young Brothers offices stank of death. Huge piles of bones lay drying on the roof. Part Eliot Ness and part Ralph Nader, Khan is the sort of politician who has no patience for police inaction and is happy to take the law into his own hands. His tactics can be brutal and have landed him in jail on several occasions—like the time in 2007 when he assaulted a doctor in a medical school who was accused of raping one of his constituents.

In 2001, when the police refused to file a case against Young Brothers, Khan raided the building with a posse of bamboo-wielding heavies. It was a version of vigilante justice that would have been familiar in nineteenth-century England and America.

“There were two rooms full of human skeletons,” Khan told me. It took five trucks to haul them away. He also seized thousands of documents, including invoices to companies all around the world. “They were sending shipments to Thailand, Brazil, Europe, and the United States,” he says.

Sixteen years after the export ban, it was as if the law had never taken effect. I meet Khan in the back room of a deserted boathouse. He introduces me to a young woman wearing a colorful headscarf who was employed as a clerk for Young Brothers between 1999 and 2001. “We used to fill orders all over the world. We used to buy bones from Mukti Biswas. I saw more than five thousand dead bodies,” she says. She requests anonymity in case of reprisal. The company took in roughly $15,000 a month from abroad, and she tells me that Biswas’s operation was just one of many. There were other suppliers and factories up and down the length of West Bengal.

Khan’s raid prompted the police to arrest Young Brothers’ owner, Vinesh Aron. He spent two nights in jail, but just like Mukti, he was released without charges.

TODAY, THERE ARE NO
bones on the roof. I’ve been poking around the area for an hour or so, interviewing neighbors, when a white van pulls up to the building. A man dressed in a pink-checkered shirt steps out. He walks briskly to a side door and knocks: Vinesh Aron.

Aron sees me snapping photos and knocks more forcefully, but his assistant inside is having trouble with the lock. As I try to quickly formulate a question, my translator shoves a microphone in his face and asks whether he’s still shipping skeletons to the West. Looking flustered, Aron blurts out, “We won that case!” The entrance cracks open and he slips in before the door slams in my face.

In a subsequent phone conversation, Aron says he now sells medical models and charts, but no bones. However, a month later I meet a vendor of surgical instrument supplies who claims to be Aron’s brother-in-law; he says Young Brothers is the only bone distributor in the country. Behind the counter of his small shop in Chennai are several cardboard boxes full of rare bones. He pulls a fist-sized skull of a fetus out of one box and smiles like he is holding a rare gem. “My brother-in-law is the only man who still does this in India. He is the only one with guts,” he says. Then he offers to dig up a skeleton for me for
1,000 ($25).