A Family Business (7 page)

6

Over the next few months, David began putting the plan into operation. The first thing he had to do, he reasoned, was gather around him a group of young men who were not too particular about what they did or, like him, did not care. This had to be a totally separate crew than the one working for Laurieanne. Although he could use Lamb Funeral Home as a base, the bulk of the work would be done in the crematorium, which was several miles away in Altadena. It was, nevertheless, imperative that his workers know better than to go around shooting off their mouths about what was going on inside the small building in Mountain View Cemetery.

One of the first people he hired was John Pollerana, who, at twenty-three, was only three years younger than David. Pollerana showed up at the crematorium just before Christmas in 1982 looking for work. But his education did not really begin until he started drawing a paycheck from Pasadena Crematorium.

Pollerana found it confusing at first to understand what David was talking about; most of the time it seemed as if his new boss was speaking a foreign language. However, he quickly determined that “cases” were cadavers collected for cremation; that the “cold room” was the refrigerated compartment where cadavers were kept pending disposition; that “take-backs” were remains that had to be returned, sometimes as “twenty-four-hour turnarounds”; that the “ash palace” was the room behind the mortuary where remains were processed; that a “single-burn”—a rare event at Pasadena Crematorium—was the cremation of a single individual; and that the containers in which “cases” were cremated were not ovens, but “retorts.”

Pollerana’s first job was taking care of the retorts. He quickly discovered that even though remains were often referred to as “ashes,” there actually was very little ash in the residue from a cremation. When a body is incinerated at 1600 degrees Fahrenheit, all of the soft tissue—the fat, muscles, and tendons—dissipates as a gas. What is left are primarily chunks of bone that have to be pulverized until they are reduced to a consistency somewhat finer than rock salt. At Pasadena Crematorium they did the job with a small cement mixer and two shot puts. Sometimes white powder was added to the take-backs to make the mixture “more attractive” in case anyone wanted to examine what was in the “take-back” container.

The crematorium routine was amazingly easy to learn. David had one commandment: cram as many bodies as possible into the retorts, each of which was only three and a half feet tall, four feet wide, and eight feet long—about the size of the interior of an American sedan. The workers, carefully picked by David, made a game of it, holding a running contest to see who could jam in the most. Normally, Pollerana learned, it was only about nine bodies per retort, but much depended on the sizes of the cadavers. Once, with effort, he got fifteen bodies inside one of the ovens.

When bodies first came in, they were held in the cold room until there were enough to fill the retorts. Then they were stacked one atop another, like dishes on a shelf, until the retort could hold no more. When space started getting tight, a worker would go to the opposite end of the retort, which also could be opened, and use a pole with a large hook on the end, similar to a fisherman’s gaff, to snag the cadavers and pull them inside. Usually the workers were not particular about where the hook went. Sometimes it went through the cheek, sometimes through the neck, and sometimes through the shoulder. When space really got tight, a worker used a two-by-four as a pusher, usually inserting the end of the board in the armpit or groin. After a while, like soldiers in a war, the bodies ceased being bodies and became merely large, heavy mounds of material to be treated with the same sensitivity they would use if they were loading bags of cement or sacks of grain.

Pollerana worked for David from December 1982 until the raid on Oscar’s Ceramics in January 1987. During that time, he could recall performing a single-burn only one time. In that instance, the mother of a local lawyer had died and the attorney insisted on being present for the cremation. Every other cremation he witnessed or participated in, he said, involved at least two cadavers.

About two hours after the retorts were fired up, they were cleaned out. The process then was to rake out the remains and put them in large drums for storage or until they were cool enough for sifting. This involved spreading them across a large table and separating large bones and pieces of prosthetic devices from the smaller residue. Often, the sifters would find pieces of metal, such as pins that had been surgically inserted. One thing all of David’s workers had been warned to be careful about was removing pacemakers before the body was cremated: they could explode in the heat. Sifters threw the bits of metal into the trash and put the larger pieces of bone into the pulverizer. Once they were ground up, they too went into the drums. When they had to return remains to the next of kin, Pollerana or one of the other workers used an empty coffee can to scoop an appropriate amount of residue out of the barrels. The rule of thumb was three and a half pounds if the remains were to represent those of a woman, and five to seven pounds for a man.

Not surprisingly, there were occasions when things got confused. Once, Pollerana accidentally cremated a body that was supposed to have been buried instead. When he told David about the mistake, David said not to worry. He replaced the incinerated cadaver with another that had been scheduled for the retort. The coffin was sealed. On another occasion, when there had been a rush order to have remains returned, ashes were packaged and taken to the funeral home before the body had actually been cremated.

David’s cremation methods were profitable. Although he did not take over operation of the crematorium until 1982 was more than half over, the number of cremations he performed that year went up almost 1000 percent. In 1981, Lamb Funeral Home had cremated only 194 bodies; in 1982, David recorded 1675 cremations. And that was only the beginning. In 1983 the number doubled, then doubled again in 1984. In 1985, David cremated 8173 bodies, over a 4000 percent increase from the day he took over the operation. In 1986 he reported another 8000-plus cremations. It amounted to more than twenty-two cadavers a day, day in and day out, Sundays and holidays included, for 1985 and 1986—almost all in the two small retorts in the Altadena cemetery.

To keep up with the backlog, David kept the retorts running sixteen to eighteen hours a day, three full shifts for four workers. But it was worth it. At $55 a body, his gross income from cremations alone in 1985 and 1986 would be roughly $1 million.

Business was so good, in fact, that David had to struggle to keep up. He bought a fleet of vehicles and hired drivers to make calls all along the Southern California coast, picking up bodies. By 1985 he was servicing more than 100 mortuaries, retirement homes, hospitals, and cremation services. Eventually his empire stretched from Santa Barbara on the north to the Mexican border on the south and inland to the foothills, an area of roughly 14,000 square miles of heavily populated country. With only two retorts, he was cremating considerably more bodies than any other facility in the state. He could justifiably be crowned the Cremation King of California.

Although his college and high school jock days were far behind him, David still moved in the macho world of athletics as extensively as he could. One of his favorite pastimes in that period was attending the games of the Los Angeles Kings, the local ice hockey team. Hardly a more macho sport could be found, and David revelled in it. In fact, he even worked as an usher at the Forum, the Kings’ home arena, for a period when he was floundering about looking for direction.

He had season tickets to the Kings games, and he and several other regulars formed an exceptionally vocal cheering squad in their own section of the arena. One of the group was a hulking weightlifter and former football player named Daniel Galambos. It was only natural that Galambos and David would strike up a friendship.

At one of the hockey games, Galambos introduced David to his friend, David Edwards. Galambos and Edwards had played football together, first at Pierce College in Los Angeles and later at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. Over the years, they continued to be friends, frequently partying and playing together.

Edwards was introduced to David in 1981, well before David was involved in the crematorium. From the beginning, it was clear that Edwards was exactly the kind of guy David would seek out as a friend. When they met, Edwards was twenty-four and David was one year older. Edwards was six feet tall, weighed more than 200 pounds, and had been a minor star in football. He had been captain of the football team in his second year at Pierce and was voted the MVP. That year, as a running back, he had amassed 750 yards on the ground and another 114 in receptions. Before that, during his senior year at Culver City High School, he had rushed for 1000 yards and scored nine touchdowns, although injuries limited him to only six and a half games. As a high schooler, Edwards had been named to the first team All-Ocean League all-stars.

Throughout the 1981 and part of the 1982 Kings season, Edwards and David cemented their friendship. Early in 1983, when Edwards mentioned to David that he was looking for work, David quickly offered him a job.

“What would I do?” he asked.

“Not much,” David replied. “Just drive a van for me, picking up bodies.”

Since he needed the money, Edwards agreed. But, like Pollerana, he quickly got an education in the inside operations of a funeral home and crematorium, Sconce-style.

Perhaps more than Pollerana, Edwards was shocked when he learned that multiple burns were the rule at Pasadena Crematorium. But since his job kept him on the road, he did not have to spend much time either at the crematorium at Altadena or the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena. Usually he was there only to unload bodies and get pickup orders for the next run. That was sufficient for him, since he had seen enough.

If Edwards had to rank his degree of revulsion to the events he witnessed, the multiple cremations would have come in second. In first place would have been David’s other primary moneymaking scheme: yanking gold teeth. As Pollerana and others had already learned, and still others would learn later, when David talked about “making the pliers sing,” “popping chops,” or “going to the mine,” he meant extracting gold-filled teeth from cadavers.

At Pasadena Crematorium it was standard operating procedure to examine the incoming bodies for gold. Normally David did the job himself. As the bodies came in, he would take a screwdriver and pry open the mouths, searching for a gleaming molar. If he spotted the precious metal, he whipped out a pair of pliers and extracted the tooth or teeth, placing them in any handy container. A styrofoam cup or an empty soda can would do, although he sometimes used an empty coffee can or just a paper napkin.

Occasionally the cadaver’s jaws would be locked shut so tightly that it would require a real effort to get inside. Edwards watched in horror one day as David, frustrated in being unable to force a cadaver’s mouth open with a screwdriver, cursed and went for a crowbar. Apparently that was the right tool; it worked. Edwards said he could hear the dead man’s jaws crack all the way across the room.

Sometimes the other workers would screen the bodies before David came in. When they discovered a body with dental gold, they would call it to David’s attention by drawing a happy face on the cardboard sheet all bodies destined for cremation were wrapped in, along with the letters AU. The symbol for gold on the Periodic Table of Elements used almost exclusively by scientists was the way David preferred to refer to the precious metal.

The fact that David was extracting the teeth was far from secret around the funeral home and crematorium. He frequently joked about it. On more than one occasion he was seen whistling while leaving the cold room, shaking a cup or can containing gold-filled teeth. On time, as worker Steve Strunk recalled, Laurieanne looked up from her paperwork and smiled at David’s good humor.

“How much AU did you get today, honey?” she asked sweetly.

David grinned and showed her the cup he was carrying. It was half full of teeth.

Exactly how much money David made off the teeth probably never will be precisely determined. As the number of bodies he handled went up, so did the number of teeth he extracted, but investigators were never able to get a firm handle on exactly what the volume was. It must have been considerable, though, at least well into tens of thousands of dollars. David himself bragged that in 1985 and 1986 he was making five to six thousand a month from the enterprise. It was so productive that the employees at the Burbank gold exchange company he usually dealt with called him “Digger.”

Although David later tried to claim that dental gold was valueless because it contained so many other metals, that statement was patently false. Dental gold, rather than being
less
pure, is actually
more
pure than that used in everyday objects such as rings, bracelets, and necklaces. Usually, dentists use 18k gold, compared to 14k used in most jewelry. It is not unusual for a man, particularly, to wear more gold in his mouth than he does on his fingers. A typical gold crown weighs two pennyweight, one-tenth of an ounce. With gold selling at upwards of $350 an ounce, a single crown would contain $35 worth of the precious metal, not a lot on its own, but in volume the value could be substantial. Very few people who have gold crowns limit themselves to one. Also, more elderly people have crowns than younger people, and David was cremating a lot of elderly people.

If half of the bodies David cremated in 1985 and 1986 contained just one gold crown, he could have reaped as much as $280,000 from his extraction program. Although no one probably will ever know, the figure could have been much higher because David was relentless in seeing that the gold was collected. It was a rare body that went into one of his retorts with the gold-filled teeth still in place. And even if some occasionally did slip by him and his workers, the sifters were under standing instructions to be particularly watchful for chunks of gold among the remains.