May's lawsuit, filed March 23, alleges that state officials and SCI's Waltrip worked to thwart an investigation by the Funeral Service Commission into SCI's embalming practices. It also alleges May was fired in February because she reported violations of the law. Last year, under May's direction, the agency began investigating two of SCI's Dallas-area funeral homes, which were allegedly operating without proper licenses. The investigation ultimately led the agency to recommend a fine of $445,000 be levied against SCI, the world's largest funeral company. So far, the company hasn't been required to pay a dime and the matter is still pending.
Adding intrigue to the lawsuit are a conflicting set of documents recently issued by SCI's lawyers. On June 11, Waltrip's lawyers issued documents that say Waltrip talked with Bush on April 15, 1998, in the governor's office about SCI's problems with the state investigators. Five days later, Waltrip's lawyers changed their story.
In a highly unusual "supplemental" response to the interrogatories, the lawyers said Waltrip did not talk to Bush about his problems with state investigators. The supplemental document says that while Waltrip was in Bush's office waiting to talk with Allbaugh, the governor "passed by on the way to a press conference or other appointment," and although Bush "exchanged pleasantries" with Waltrip, their discussion was "not substantive; they did not discuss the content" of a letter Waltrip wrote complaining about the investigation.
Perhaps that's true. But why, then, did SCI's in-house lawyer, Daniel Reat, swear that Waltrip talked to Bush? In a sworn, notarized court statement that accompanied the June 11 interrogatory, Reat said that Waltrip's answers "are either within his personal knowledge or based on information obtained from other persons, and are true and correct."
salon.com
In recent months, SCI stumbled into the national media spotlight thanks to the presidential race. In March, Waltrip and SCI were named as defendants in a whistleblower lawsuit in Texas that involves allegations that presidential front-runner George W. Bush intervened on SCI's behalf to help stop an investigation by the state's regulatory agency. Waltrip and SCI are big financial contributors to Bush, and Waltrip is also a personal friend of former President Bush, endowing the Bush library with $100,000.
SCI has powerful friends in both political parties. Former Rep. Tony Coelho, chairman of Al Gore's presidential campaign, sits on SCI's board of directors. It's a lucrative job. According to the company's proxy statement, SCI pays Coelho $21,000 per year just to sit on the board and an additional $6,000 for each meeting he attends. Coelho also owns more than $450,000 worth of SCI stock.
Despite those influential friends, a number of troubling specters are creeping up on the company. Tort lawyers, consumer advocates and regulators are all taking aim at the Houston-based death care giant. Plaintiff's lawyers in Florida are suing SCI, claiming the company sold an exorbitantly expensive funeral to an elderly, mentally incompetent widow. In Washington state and Texas, lawyers are suing the firm, maintaining it has mishandled corpses. Company shareholders have filed a class-action lawsuit, alleging SCI officials withheld troubling earnings data that caused the stock price to dip.
Consumer advocates are constantly taking swipes at the company. Karen Leonard, the head of the Sebastopol, Calif.-based Redwood Funeral Society, who worked as the late Jessica Mitford's research assistant on her last book, "The American Way of Death Revisited," has become one of the country's leading critics of SCI. She claims SCI has "made price gouging state of the art.
"They've been able to take the emotions that make people spend more -- guilt and fear of death -- and have played those like an orchestra and have made tremendous amounts of money. They are taking advantage of consumers on all fronts, by secrecy, by their ability to control regulations and their ability to give money to politicians."
Lamar Hankins, the president of the Funeral & Memorial Societies of America, says the company routinely engages in "price gouging." Pierson Ralph, the president and director of the Memorial Society of the Southwest says "SCI's prices, generally, are obscene. They are clustered at the very top of the comparative prices. They are exorbitant everywhere you look."
salon.com |
