Fresh criticism for the funeral industry

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Posted 8:08AM on Sunday, April 28, 2002

WASHINGTON - "Some people like to drive Volkswagens, and some people like to drive Mercedes," the funeral director told Barbara Osborne when she sent her Mercedes-driving father off in style, in a top-of-the-line copper casket, when he died of a stroke. But Osborne found she had bought a junker instead when the Father's Day flowers couldn't cover the odor coming from Billy Mitchell's coffin at a Brookhaven, Miss., mortuary that was keeping him until his mausoleum was prepared. Five years and many lawyers and counselors later, Osborne told a congressional hearing Friday that she is a sadder but wiser consumer. Grisly discoveries of hundreds of bodies scattered at a Georgia crematory and reports of irregularities and illegalities elsewhere have Congress looking into whether to expand the federal role overseeing the $14 billion-a-year funeral business. The average funeral cost $6,130 for each of the 2.5 million Americans who died last year. Rev. Henry Wasielewski is a Catholic priest who founded the nonprofit Interfaith Funeral Information Committee, in Phoenix, Ariz., to let families comparison shop. Wasielewski's Web site, Funerals and Ripoffs, lists wholesale prices and profit margins on caskets and other death-industry wares. Not since Jessica Mitford's "American Way of Death," a 1960s best seller that exposed U.S. burial practices as an "expensive practical joke" on the public, has the industry come under such intense attack. In recent months: - Georgia officials brought 266 criminal charges against Brent Marsh in connection with the discovery of 339 corpses at his Tri-State Crematory in Noble. - California prosecutors charged Riverside crematory operator Michael Francis Brown with 156 counts for unauthorized sale of body parts for medical research through another Brown-owned business, Bio-Tech Anatomical. - Tennessee authorities investigated complaints that bone fragments and casket parts were found at a fresh grave at Mount Carmel-Hollywood Cemetery in Memphis. - Florida authorities probed charges that mortuary students at Lynn University in Boca Raton embalmed people in violation of family preferences and religious practices. - Reports of bodies buried in the wrong graves and scattered in nearby woods at two Menorah Gardens & Funeral Cemeteries in Florida brought in state investigators atop class-action suits against cemetery owner Service Corp. International. The $1.6 billion Texas firm has 3,188 mortuaries and 485 cemeteries in the United States and abroad. "These atrocities must end now," says Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., whose district includes the Menorah Gardens sites. Foley has launched a congressional General Accounting Office investigation into whether states' laws are sufficient to bring funeral industry malefactors to justice and - if not - what the federal role should be. Eileen Harrington oversees the Federal Trade Commission's funeral rule. She says state criminal charges are the appropriate course in "outrageous incidents," not the cease-and-desist orders and other civil sanctions that the FTC can issue. Still, her agency has spent the last three years studying whether to update the funeral rule to reach the one-stop shopping services, for everything from burial insurance to gravestones, sold by Service Corp. International and other global players. The funeral rule - an object of intense controversy and tight congressional control since it took effect in 1984 - requires funeral homes to give customers detailed pricing on products and services. But it doesn't cover cemeteries, crematories or other funeral merchandisers, including firms that sell caskets and cemetery plots. Harrington says the industry and its congressional allies fought expanded FTC oversight "pretty much every step of the way," leaving the agency with few resources to police an industry that people turn to at their most vulnerable time. Robert Vandenbergh, the Clinton Township, Mich., funeral director who heads the 14,000-member National Funeral Directors Association, sees a need for tighter federal and state rules and licensing requirements when many states have none. "We have to restore the public's trust," he says. But Osborne, who finally got admissions that top-of-the-line sealed metal caskets don't protect loved ones against nature, says consumers can't be too trusting. She counsels: Buriers, beware.