The four defendants allegedly made millions of dollars selling unscreened body tissue taken from the bodies of people who never consented to be donors.
The bodies included that of veteran BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke.
The team forged death certificates and donor consent forms to create the appearance that the tissue was harvested legally according to the idictment documents.
"The amount of callousness involved here is incalculable," said
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes as he detailed how the men allegedly replaced the bones of their victims with PVC piping so that their theft would not be noticed at a funeral.
Though transplant guidelines set age limits and health requirements for donors, the defendants falsified the records so that, in the case of Cooke for example, the stolen parts were listed as coming from a healthy 85-year-old who died of heart failure.
Cooke was 95 when he died in New York in March 2004 from lung cancer.
At the same time, the accused would regularly toss gloves, aprons, and other evidence of their criminal handiwork into the bodies before sewing them back up, prosecutors said.
"What happened here ... is like something out of a cheap horror movie," District Attorney Hynes said.
"But for the thousands of relatives of the deceased whose body parts were used for profit and the recipients of the suspect parts, this was no bad movie. This was for real," he added.
Among those named in the charge sheet was Michael Customariness, a former dentist who ran a company in New Jersey that sold human tissue for medical implants.
Also charged were a Brooklyn embalmer Joseph Nicelli and two other men who worked for Mastromarino.
Parts not screened
The charges included enterprise corruption, body stealing and opening graves, as well as unlawful dissection.
Over a five-year period, the defendants allegedly harvested bones and organs from 1,077 corpses and then sold them on to transplant companies for use in surgical procedures around the world.
On the open market, one body can bring in as much as 250,000 dollars for harvesting and transplant companies, Mr Hynes said.
Because the body parts were not properly screened, prosecutors said there was a serious risk of infection for transplant recipients.
Cooke, a nationally recognised broadcaster in Britain, was best known for his "Letter From America" program, which aired weekly on BBC domestic and World Service radio for over 50 years.
He was also well known in his adopted United States where he hosted the cultural television programs Omnibus and Masterpiece Theatre.