Worst funeral home scams of 2008
by Emily S. Gerson
While there are countless legitimate and respectable funeral homes open for business, there are also many unscrupulous people in the funeral industry who use the vulnerability of grieving people to commit crimes. Each year, dozens of funeral home scams hit the news and shock the world. In order to help avoid becoming a victim in funeral home scams, always be sure to carefully read the funeral contract and be wary of signing up for a pre-need, which is the sale of a funeral well in advance of the death. Here are some of 2008’s most egregious funeral home scams:
5) Livonia, Michigan: The Ziomek Funeral Home was investigated in 2008 for fraud after numerous complaints to the Livonia police. The funeral home closed without warning and left all of those who had bought pre-paid funerals out in the cold (police estimate it was anywhere from 20 to 100 people). Police say the funeral home shut down without honoring the existing contracts or refunding all the customers. The funeral home had been open for 16 years before it closed suddenly. As of December 2008, some of the customers have been repaid, but many are still out tens of thousands of dollars and are now without funeral plans.
4) La Crosse, Wisconsin: Darrell Dickinson of the Dickinson Family Funeral Home pled guilty in July 2008 to two felony fraud charges. He was making fraudulent claims for assistance from the state with funeral costs for indigent people and Medicaid recipients, and collected $55,000 of the state money for 27 funerals. At the same time, he was charging the families of the deceased the full cost of the funerals — they did not know he had obtained the state funds. Dickinson did this double-dipping from 2003 to 2006, and in August 2008, he was sentenced to three days in jail, six months of electronic monitoring, and his funeral director license was revoked.
3) Hammond, Indiana: Eunice Roper-Allen of Allen Funeral Home was indicted in November 2008 on six counts of fraud. Allen was in trouble the previous year for not paying $440,000 in taxes and penalties, and it turns out she filed for bankruptcy in 1990s, possibly to avoid the tax sale of the property. In the current indictment, she’s being accused of defrauding a customer by $44,000. She allegedly gave the customer fake receipts checks to justify the funeral expenses, and used the money to buy personal items and pay her bills.
2) Osceola, Indiana: Early in 2008, a man named Robert Nelms was discovered to be conducting a trust fund scheme that defrauded Indiana residents of $27 million. Nelms was the owner and president of Memory Gardens Management Corporation, a company that owns and operates funeral homes and cemetery property. By law, private cemetery owners in Indiana must create a perpetual care fund to permanently maintain the cemetery grounds. Nelms used fraudulent securities instruments to transfer $27 million of the fund, hid the money through several transfers, and then used it to pay for several business and personal expenses, such as his million-dollar residence. Even worse, prosecutors say Nelms and his wife may have stolen more than $200 million from cemetery trust funds in Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and Tennessee.
1) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Louis and Gerald Garzone, a pair of brothers who ran a funeral home in Philadelphia, pleaded guilty in September 2008 to selling corpses to a body parts trafficking company. The trafficking company obtained bodies from funeral homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, and without family permission or medical tests, dissembled the bodies. They sold the parts (some diseased) to businesses across the United States be used for knee and hip replacements, dental implants, and more. The mastermind of the trafficking ring, Michael Mastromarino, also pled guilty to his charges.
