Don’t forget about THIS gem, in all of the Enron hooplah:
Moscow Times
global eye -- Tomb Raiders
By Chris Floyd
January 12, 2002
It was the night after Christmas on Florida's eastern shore. A tepid rain was falling as a couple of county
lawmen pushed up the garage door at a ranch house on Sugar Pine Drive, just outside Boca Raton. They
stood back for a minute to let the fumes spill out, a few remaining shreds of the poison cloud that had
done its work hours ago. The car was no longer running. Behind the wheel -- just as they'd expected after
getting the wife's frantic phone call half an hour before -- was the body of Peter K. Hartmann, regional
manager for Service Corporation International, or SCI.
"The funeral guy," said one of the deputies, then went to call for the meat wagon.
SCI, based in Houston, is one of a handful of international corporations that have gobbled up the funeral
industry in recent years, squeezing out independent operators in hardball takeovers. It's been a sweet deal
for the Texas boys: the only business in the world with a guaranteed, never-ending supply of
"customers."…
The company had been all over the local news recently: It had just been hit with a big lawsuit, accusing it
of "recycling" bodies in several Jewish cemeteries it owned in the Palm Beach area -- cramming new
cadavers into existing graves, or digging up the dead and tossing their bones and tattered burial shrouds
into the woods nearby. A few outraged mourners brought the initial suit, but there were hundreds more
getting ready to join it.
The funny thing was, Hartmann had not been directly implicated in the scandal…
Just a few weeks before, SCI had settled a potentially explosive lawsuit that could have meant major
trouble for the company and its co-defendant -- a certain George W. Bush. That case began in 1998, with
the Texas State Funeral Commission investigating some "shortcuts" used by the company to maximize
profits. Grieving families had reported noxious fluids leaking from their loved ones' crypts; word was that
SCI was using unlicensed embalmers to churn out corpses on the cheap…
[It’s a real old fashioned mystery. Be sure to click through and read the entire article.—Caro] |
