In Las Vegas, a strip mall corpse salesman's shady dealings are drawing controversy.
As NBC News reports, the near-complete lack of regulations surrounding the educational body broker business provided ample room for Obteen Nassiri, the manager of Vegas' Med Ed Labs, to sell human bodies in a shop located between a tattoo parlor and a psychic.
Nearly a decade ago, Nassiri opened Med Ed as a nonprofit corporation after losing his chiropractor's license and being found guilty of fraud. Though his brother-in-law, a construction worker named Joshua Jackson, was listed as the company's sole owner, documents viewed by NBC showed that the Iranian-born ex-chiropractor was in charge of running the company.
The venture obtained bodies from funeral homes and medical schools, then sold or leased them — sometimes for above-board medical training to the US military and other clients, and sometimes for more shadowy purposes.
Though its nonprofit status was eventually revoked by the Internal Revenue Service after three years of failing to disclose its finances, Med Ed powered on.
One of its biggest suppliers, the University of North Texas Health Science Center, made at least $82,000 leasing unclaimed or donated bodies to Med Ed over the years, NBC found. The bodies and parts seemed primarily to be used for legitimate medical training purposes, but the way Nassiri allegedly mishandled the remains — which Med Ed was supposed to ship back to the school, generally after cremation — sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
Though a state official urged the Center to stop doing business with the company in 2021, it continued doing so for two more years, even after audits revealed that nine pairs of ankles and feet had gone missing. When NBC asked about the missing feet, the Center refused to comment, and Nassiri claimed he couldn't recall the incident.
Med Ed also kept operating after a deceased Louisiana man's body was used without his family's consent in a live pay-per-view autopsy event held in Portland, Oregon in 2021. After the event garnered international headlines, Nassiri claimed the organization behind the live autopsy, Death Science, misled him about what it planned to use the body for.
Nassiri denied wrongdoing to NBC and blamed his troubles on bad lawyers.
"We treasure, we respect our donors," Nassiri told the broadcaster. "It’s a precious gift."
As of October of this year, when NBC contacted Nassiri for its story, the cadaver flipper said that Med Ed had been shuttered. The firm filed for bankruptcy in March days before it was set to go to trial after being sued by the insurance company Allstate for medical fraud.
Now a new body broker business, Surgil & Medical Training, has taken Med Ed's place in the Vegas strip mall. Although the brother-in-law is listed on registration documents as its sole owner, NBC found that social media icons on the company website link directly to pages associated with Nassiri's new venture — as a self-help guru.
More on cadavers: Man Pleads Guilty to Selling Body Parts From Harvard Morgue
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