Stealing From the Dead

The Hartford Courant reports on the Conneticut funeral director who has confessed to stealing from the dead.  This story really attracts my attention because as you know, I suspect that this is one dirty industry and essentially unsupervised.  We saw recently the case of the Indiana funderal director who was plundering pre-paid funeral plans.  Here, we have a funeral director who was actually plundering the bodies, the personal possessions and the estates of the dead.  This is reporters: Dave Altimari and David Owens account:

A funeral home director accused of stealing assets of dead people as he removed their bodies from their homes was found guilty Thursday of a host of larceny charges and faces two years in prison at his sentencing. Kevin Riley (pic), owner of Hartford Trade Services, was accused by state investigators of using a contract to pick up bodies for the state Medical Examiner's Office as a way to steal from the dead.

Riley would have himself appointed administrator of the estates of people with no relatives, giving him access to money and property with little or no scrutiny. Riley and his co-conspirator Yolanda Faulkner would then steal money, jewelry and paintings and sell some of them through an auction house where Faulkner also was the bookkeeper. Faulkner was also found guilty Thursday and also faces a two-year prison sentence.

Faulkner pleaded guilty under the Alford Doctrine to two counts of first-degree larceny, two counts of second-degree larceny, attempted larceny, forgery and filing a false tax return. While not admitting guilty, she conceded the state had enough evidence to convict her at trial. With the plea agreement, she faces significantly less time in prison than if she'd gone to trial.

Riley pleaded guilty under the Alford Doctrine to first-degree larceny, second-degree larceny and conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny for crimes involving the taking of money and property from the homes of dead people and for providing an extravagant funeral for a man whose life insurance policy he'd cashed in.

He entered straight guilty pleas to charges that he double-billed the state and the families of dead people for whom he made arrangements at a facility in Meriden. The dead were cremated and the cost of a box in which their remains were placed was included in the cost of service. Riley admitted double-billing the state Department of Social Services and families of the dead for the boxes."
__________________________
A sharp-eyed magistrate caught discrepancies in one of the estates that the magistrate was supervising.  Inventories of personal property filed by Riley relating to decedents versus reports filed by others who were in the residence did not match. 

The question I have (which will doubtlessly remain unanswered), is how many times did this crook pull this routine?  The question I have is how widespread is this abuse of decedent property by funeral operators?  I'm guessing, very widespread.

Rental Car Rules--They Really Want You to Return the Car

Jonathan Oosting at MLive.com reports on the Ferndale, MI. driver who really, really, liked his rental car.  He liked his car so much that he didn't return it for 18 months.  The report:

Ferndale police say 45-year-old James Anderson was a bit late returning his rental car.

18 months to be exact.

The Daily Tribune reports Anderson rented a Toyota from Avis Rent-A-Car in Royal Oak back in early 2009 and was able to elude authorities until he made a rookie mistake on Thursday: Driving with expired tab[g]s. Police spotted the ta[g]s, and then Anderson made it worse.  The Ferndale officer followed Anderson but didn’t activate his overhead lights, police said. Anderson drove down East Bennett, a side street near Fair and Eight Mile, which is a dead end. 'He ended up driving through a yard between two houses and back out onto Eight Mile Road, (Ferndale police Detective John) Thull said.

olice said the suspect then drove back to Fair Street and onto East Chesterfield before stopping in a parking lot behind a factory building at 1111 E. Eight Mile Road where he got out of the Toyota and fled on foot.  The suspect was spotted running across Eight Mile to Detroit near a railroad bridge over the road and police said officers brought him to the ground and handcuffed him.

Authorities typically consider a rental car stolen if it is not returned within five days of the contract expiration, and this case was no exception. Royal Oak police had been on the lookout for the vehicle for months, and Anderson is likely to be charged there with felony larceny.  But by fleeing police, Anderson faces additional punishment. He was arraigned Thursday in Ferndale on misdemeanor counts of reckless driving and trespassing.

But Anderson fails to take the prize for the year's biggest local auto-related fail. We're saving that award for fellow Detroiter Abdur-Rashiid Ahmad, who tried to buy a 2010 Mercedes-Benz E350 from a Bloomfield Township dealership with a $62,000 money order from the U.S. Department of Treasury that he later admitted to producing.
________________________
When I first moved to OurTown to go to law school, with my then wife, "the Good Wife (GW)" a school teacher--we lived in a transitioning neighborhood on the edge of East OurTown.  We lived on the border of an area that had once been a middle class Jewish 'hood but had become fully-ghettoized.  The main drag from our our nice street to the downtown was through the urban landscape of beauty salons, wig stores, lounges, and food stamp retail.  If you think: East St. Louis, Detroit, Hough, Watts, circa 1979 you have the correct mental snapshot.

The GW worked a summer job as a cashier in what I now understand was poverty-related retail.  It prepared her to work at the in the East OurTown City Schools, where she taught what was then called "special ed."  After two years she became the president of the local teachers union.  We were a "union" household.  We were pretty happy, there, until we burglarized and we watched crime routinely happen from our dining room window that looked woefully out onto the main drag.  I'll never forget watching some poor man standing in "broad daylight" at the nearby Dairy Queen on a Memorial Day weekend morning openly crash through the plate glass window of the ice cream stand to steal nothing of value.

I've passed through that old neighborhood in recent years, it's only more degraded and pathetic.

This story reminds me of that time and the colorful people and things that seemed oddly normal, then.