$704,600 Billed for Cadavers

Over six years, a UCLA medical school official sold 496 cadavers for $704,600, according to invoices that provide the first evidence of the scope of the scandal in the school’s body donor program.

The invoices on UCLA letterhead, covering transactions from 1998 through 2003, were shown to The Times by the law firm representing Ernest V. Nelson, the entrepreneur who purchased the body parts and resold them to large research corporations.

Among the companies that bought the body parts from Nelson was pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, according to correspondence sent by the law firm to the University of California and reviewed by The Times. Reached after hours, a spokeswoman for Johnson & Johnson, Susan Odenthal, said she was unfamiliar with any such transactions and could not immediately reach company officials for comment.

The new information came to light as UCLA scrambled to address the crisis enveloping its willed body program, in which program director Henry G. Reid, 54, is suspected of illegally selling body parts to Nelson for personal gain. Nelson, 46, who is not a UCLA employee, is suspected of reselling the parts to medical research companies. It is illegal to sell body parts for profit.

University officials said they had not seen the invoices reviewed by The Times and suggested they could have been fabricated. But the officials acknowledged that they had no idea of the volume of the alleged transactions, nor the amount of money involved.

“We simply, actually, do not have the facts,” Dr. J. Thomas Rosenthal, associate vice chancellor of the UCLA School of Medicine, said in an interview.

Both Reid and Nelson were arrested by UCLA police over the weekend. Reid was accused of grand theft, Nelson of receiving stolen property. Both men have posted bond and been released from Los Angeles County Jail. Reid and another UCLA employee were placed on leave more than a week ago.

Reid, whose UCLA salary is $56,760 annually, has declined to talk to reporters, and left a note on his door Monday asking the media to respect his privacy.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office is still deciding how the case will be prosecuted, said head Deputy Dist. Atty. John Lynch. He said he is looking through the codes and statutes to figure out if there are special sections dealing with the disposal of bodies. “We haven’t finished the research,” he said. “I haven’t seen the facts. The facts will dictate what law applies.”

Also Monday, attorneys filed a lawsuit in Superior Court on behalf of relatives of people who had donated their bodies to UCLA since 1997, when Reid became director. They plan to seek class-action status.

“The families we represent are devastated over the gruesome facts that have come to light in the last few days,” said lawyer Raymond Boucher.

Boucher also represents donors and families in an ongoing 1996 class-action lawsuit in which UCLA is accused of commingling ashes from donated corpses with medical waste, and dumping them in a landfill. As part of the first case, he will ask a Superior Court commissioner today to shut down the program until the problems can be sorted through.

The new lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages for families of donors “whose gifts have been completely and totally violated.”

Dr. Gerald S. Levey, vice chancellor of UCLA Medical Sciences and dean of the medical school, apologized to donors and their families at a news conference Monday afternoon.

“These alleged crimes violate the trust of the donors, their families and UCLA,” he said. “We are deeply sorry.”

Levey said UCLA is reevaluating its oversight of its willed body program. “We truly thought that we had adequate policies and procedures,” he said. “We are investigating how our policies failed to detect these employees’ illegal activities.”

Rosenthal said the school decided not to close the program because officials did not want to cut off the flow of cadavers and body parts for researchers and medical students. But he said the program will be run with direct oversight of the dean’s office and former Gov. George Deukmejian, who has agreed to oversee reforms.

Meanwhile, UCLA police announced that they had seized the records of the willed body program after obtaining a search warrant. Medical school officials said they will be able to consult the records as needed, with police oversight.

UCLA police also executed search warrants over the weekend at the homes of Reid and Nelson. Karl T. Ross, acting chief of the UCLA Police Department, said officers seized three computers, a firearm, and several boxes of documents, computer discs and compact discs from Reid’s home. They took two computers, two firearms and several boxes of documents and discs from Nelson’s home.

Ross said there is a “strong possibility” that the men will be charged with additional crimes. As the investigation continues, he would not rule out bringing in the FBI if detectives suspect that stolen body parts were taken across state lines.

“I would say this investigation is going to take a rather long period of time,” Ross said.

Nelson’s Claremont-based lawyer, Greg Hafif, said that the accusations against his client are “outrageous,” and that the invoices show UCLA was aware of his dealings and condoned them. In addition, he said, Nelson did not violate the law because he did not sell the parts for a profit, but billed only for his labor, handling and storage costs.

“It was Reid that assured Mr. Nelson that what he was doing was legal, as long as it was for medical research,” Hafif said.

Nelson did not work with any other willed body programs and has gone out of business, Hafif said.

In addition to the invoices, Hafif showed The Times cashiers’ checks indicating that Nelson paid Reid a total of $30,000 from May to September 1999. He said Nelson had not given him any other cashiers’ checks or proof of payments for the other amounts noted on the invoices. The cashiers’ checks from 1999 match the amounts on the invoices from the same period.

Nelson told The Times on Sunday that he had been allowed to enter UCLA’s seventh-floor freezer regularly with a saw and cut up about 800 bodies over six years.

Nelson declined to comment further on Monday, but Hafif said UCLA staff members other than Reid helped Nelson carry bags of bodies out to his van

“Where was UCLA when my client was in their facility two times a week for six years cutting up cadavers and hauling them back to his office in broad daylight?” Hafif asked.

Court records submitted by UCLA show that Reid met regularly with top medical school officials and faculty to discuss the policies and operations of the willed body program.

But Marlin, the outside attorney for UCLA, adamantly denied that anyone other than Reid and one of his associates knew about the scheme.

The documents reviewed at Hafif’s office show that Reid sent nearly 70 invoices to Nelson from 1998 to 2003. In them, Reid asked Nelson to pay for “preparation fees for unembalmed human cadavers, as per prearranged agreement.”

The fee for each cadaver was about $1,400, and Nelson was typically billed for eight at a time, the records showed. The annual invoice totals ranged from $42,600 for 30 cadavers in 2001 and 2002, to $246,200 for 175 in 1999.

The invoices bear Reid’s typed name at the bottom but are not signed by him.

Ironically, it was correspondence from Hafif’s firm to a lawyer for the University of California that led to the investigation and arrest of Nelson.

The letter, obtained by The Times from UCLA, demanded a payment of $241,000, which the firm claimed UCLA owed Nelson for body parts that he had returned to the medical school last year. The firm threatened to sue, and its proposed complaint names Johnson & Johnson as one of Nelson’s customers. It does not mention any other companies by name but said some parts were shipped overseas.

People seeking information about relatives who have donated their bodies to UCLA can call (866) 317-6374.

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Times staff writers Anna Gorman, Caitlin Liu and Alan Zarembo contributed to this report.