A Family Business (8 page)

7

Ever on the lookout for a way to make a buck, David hit upon another idea in the summer of 1985—a scheme that was ambitious, but one that would, in the end, be a major contributor to his downfall. Just as he had astutely noted the increasing demand for cremations three years earlier, and had moved quickly to capitalize on the development, he soon picked up on another trend as well: the quiet proliferation of facilities known as tissue banks.

At the time, sophisticated tissue banking was a comparatively recent phenomenon in California, although some banks had been around for years. In fact, tissue transplantation, in one form or another, dated to the Middle Ages. But up until the seventies, it had been a hit-or-miss kind of business. There were eye banks, which of course provided eyes, and there were joint banks, which specialized in supplying parts like hip joints, and there were bone banks. But until techniques and drugs were developed to make transplantation of tissue and organs a relatively risk-free procedure, there had been little demand for large-volume providers.

David wanted to be large-volume. And why not? After all, he had access to the tissues and organs from thousands of bodies, bodies that were going to be incinerated anyway. He figured that he might as well take what he could from them before he shoved them into the retorts, since after that they were of no financial benefit to anyone. David’s plan was to strip the bodies brought to him to be cremated for usable parts—“harvesting” them, as it were, much as a California junk car dealer might strip a wrecked vehicle of its usable parts. However, he was soon to discover that harvesting body parts was a little more delicate than removing auto parts.

To be transplantable, tissue and organs have to be fresh. Very fresh. This crossed off a lot of David’s bodies immediately, because by the time he was called to pick up a cadaver, the person’s organs had usually begun deteriorating. Although he could shelve bodies in the cold room to keep them from decaying too rapidly, that was far from adequate as a place to store tissue that might be suitable for transplantation.

But that did not mean the idea was a write-off. Eyes were fairly durable, and if a few simple precautions were taken immediately—such as keeping them moist with wet cloths—they could be salvaged hours after death. And just because organs were not suitable for transplantation did not mean they were not valuable. Medical schools across the country were screaming for organs they could use in their research labs or in the classrooms. But it did not necessarily follow that the operation would be profitable. There is a federal law prohibiting organs from being bought or sold, which is why up until then the tissue banks that did exist tended to be nonprofit organizations.

However, as with most laws, there was a loophole. While an organization might be prohibited from charging for an actual organ, say a heart, there was nothing to prohibit the provider from charging a fee to recoup his costs in collecting the organ. Since these fees were fairly standard, David could predict what his rate of return would be. Besides, whatever money came in would be gravy; the raw material was not only free, it was already revenue-producing. So if he could make a little more money off the same product, it was a good plan.

That was the basic idea. In theory it was simple enough, but in practice it proved considerably more complicated. For one thing, David discovered that he would need a certain amount of specialized equipment. He also would need someone who knew what he was doing. Although, technically speaking, stripping organs from a cadaver is not a particularly delicate procedure—surgery it is not—it does nevertheless require a certain amount of expertise. Most nonmedical people don’t realize it, but human organs are not difficult to remove. If someone wants to take out a heart, for instance, all that is required is snipping the connectors. The organ doesn’t even have to be lifted out, it literally falls into the hand. But getting to the heart is another matter. Opening the chest is not an effortless procedure, certainly not without the proper equipment. Then removing the organ without damaging it, and knowing which connectors to snip while retaining the organ’s usefulness to a potential buyer, requires some basic knowledge of human anatomy that neither David nor his co-workers at the funeral home/crematorium possessed.

Plus there was the legal process to consider. Yanking gold-filled teeth from the mouths of about-to-be-cremated cadavers was one thing, yanking hearts and brains was another. The odds were very great that no one was going to miss a cremated cadaver’s gold teeth. But the sale of organs was a much more regulated procedure; for organs, there had to be a paper trail. The buyer, who was a legitimate supplier, wanted to know where the material came from and be assured that it had been removed with permission. A major reason for this was a very practical one: Organs could spread disease. At the time David launched his business, AIDS was not the issue it would become later, but there were still risks from disease in organ transplants, and buyers were very aware of these hazards. Hepatitis was always a worry, for example, as were some of the rarer illnesses, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal, degenerative, neurological ailment spread through corneal transplants. As a result, those in the organ industry were very concerned about the history of the organs for sale.

To comply with state regulations in the normal operation of his business, David already had to produce a certain amount of paperwork. Every time he cremated a body, for instance, someone had to sign a document called an Authority to Cremate, or ATC, form. In its most common incarnation, the form was a simple legal instrument that transferred authority to the crematorium to incinerate that particular cadaver. The form being used at the time by David was only two paragraphs long. What it did was set down the ground rules for the crematorium to follow in performing its service. It specified that prostheses—such as artificial hip joints, surgical pins, and artificial limbs—would be discarded. Also to be tossed out, at least according to the form, was whatever remained of gold inlays and fillings that survived the incineration. (Lamb Funeral Home employees were instructed to tell anyone who asked that the heat in the retort was so intense that the gold was either vaporized or so affected by the process that it was unrecoverable or unusable.) Additionally, the form promised that the “bulk” of the ashes would be returned. It also—and this would be the crucial part—gave David authorization “to remove tissues, remove pacemakers…” If anyone asked about this phrase, Jerry had coached the workers to respond that it was virtually impossible to remove a pacemaker without removing a small amount of tissue as well, and that the phrase had been inserted to keep the lawyers happy. Later, the Sconces would claim that this phrasing gave them permission to remove “tissue” such as hearts, lungs, and brains.

After David got into the tissue bank business, his crematorium’s ATC form underwent several subtle revisions, most notably in the section that referred to the removal of tissue. On one version of the form the phrase was capitalized so it would draw a casual reader’s attention. In a later one it was not, perhaps on the theory that he did not
want
the reader to notice the wording. And in one of the early forms, tissue removal was not mentioned at all. Furthermore, the phraseology and typography used in the forms would prove to be a very contentious point among the people David brought in to help in the tissue bank operation; they had more scruples than David or the laborers who jammed the retorts and extracted gold teeth. Eventually the forms would play a major role in David’s undoing. But in the beginning he was blind to potential problems; he saw nothing but dollar signs.

The more David studied the possibility of creating a tissue bank, the better the idea looked. If a serious harvester went to work on a human body, it was possible to collect organs and tissue—parts ranging from bone and ligaments to valves and the organs themselves—worth a considerable amount of money. According to a fee list used by the University of California at San Diego, organs, bone, skin, corneas, and other parts could easily bring in $25,000 per body. That included $2600 for a knee joint and $750 for a set of three tiny bones from the ear. A single heart valve, according to the list, was worth $2300.

But David did not envision an operation as sophisticated as would be required to thoroughly mine the cadavers that passed through his crematorium. Even if he could not reap the really big bucks, like those paid for transplantable organs, he could nevertheless realize a quite tidy profit just by stripping bodies of the more obvious and easiest to obtain organs and selling them for research purposes. At the time, a brain that could be used by a tissue supply house would bring $80. A heart fetched $95; a pair of lungs $60. Corneas started at about $525, and whole eyes—called “globes” in the industry—could be sold separately at fluctuating prices depending on the market. This was not
big
money, but it could add up. David confided to one co-worker that he hoped to make as much as $500,000 a year from just one supply house. If he was processing 8000 or more bodies a year and he could salvage one usable body part—a brain, heart, lung, cornea, globe, or spinal column—from each cadaver, plus an average of one gold crown, he could easily double the fee he was getting for a cremation. If he were cremating a minimum of 8000 bodies a year, he could, even figuring conservatively, increase his gross annual income to more than $1.25 million, plus an unknown amount, maybe as much as $75,000 a year, from the surreptitious sale of dental gold. And this was exclusive of any fees being brought in by Jerry and Laurieanne through the Lamb Funeral Home.

Again moving swiftly, like any businessman seeking advice in a field outside his own area of expertise, David zeroed in on someone who could help him turn his tissue bank idea into cash. The person he picked was a Japanese exchange student barely out of his teens, a shy youth named Joyji Bristol, nicknamed “George.”

On the surface there was nothing exceptional about Bristol. He was about twenty years old, of average height and build, with dark hair and dark eyes, and a fairly poor working knowledge of the English language. In short, he could have disappeared without a trace in Southern California’s large Asian community. But there was one thing about him that attracted David, one quality in particular that prompted David to court him as avidly as a sought-after lover: Bristol
knew
about tissue banks; not only how to remove organs, but how to maneuver through the laborious record-keeping and inspection processes. He was, in fact, knowledgeable enough about such operations for David to begin what proved to be a successful campaign to lure him away from his then current employer, the Medical Eye Bank of Orange County. It was a change that Bristol would later come to regret in the worst possible way.

In June 1985, David invited Bristol to lunch. Over hamburgers he explained that he was interested in setting up a tissue bank and he wanted Bristol to help him. The bait for Bristol was the promise of a fifty-fifty partnership in the operation.

As David laid it out, the new business, which he was going to call the Coastal International Eye and Tissue Bank (CIE&TB) would operate temporarily out of Lamb Funeral Home. But after revenue started flowing in, David would be able to build a separate facility. David told Bristol he would take care of raising money for the start-up. What he needed from Bristol, he said, was his knowledge of the industry, including his contacts with potential buyers, and his expertise, both in removing tissue and in taking care of the paperwork. Even though tissue banks were comparatively new, they still fell under state regulation, albeit rather ineffective. Bristol would be responsible, David told him, for applying for the proper licenses, for supervising the removal of tissue and organs, and for helping to find sources for sale of the material. On the papers of incorporation, David promised, Bristol would be listed as a director.

Naturally, David had not mentioned the multiple cremations or the stealing of gold teeth. To Bristol, David appeared to be an enterprising young businessman, and his offer sounded like too good a deal to pass up. Late that summer, Bristol quit his job with the Orange County firm and joined David in Pasadena. He did not know—in fact he did not
need
to know—about some of the other internal changes that were going on at the funeral home at roughly the same time.

For more than a year David had been operating what had previously been called the Pasadena Crematorium under a new name: Coastal Cremation Inc. For all intents and purposes, Pasadena Crematorium was defunct, although that was not generally known. Also, even though Laurieanne had been operating Lamb Funeral Home for quite some time, she did not technically own it. On September 30, not long after Bristol came aboard, she took care of that detail by formally buying the operation from her father. She apparently did not feel it was necessary to explain to Lawrence the full extent of what was going on at the East Orange Grove Boulevard parlor, because in the purchase agreement she claimed that Pasadena Crematorium was performing only a small number of cremations every year. Evidently she did not want to tell her father that David was performing
thousands
of cremations, and that most of the customers thought they were dealing all the while with Lamb Funeral Home’s Pasadena Crematorium, an organization whose good reputation Lawrence Lamb had worked hard to build.

By this time the entire operation had undergone a major reorganization. Where before there had been two entities, Lamb Funeral Home and Pasadena Crematorium, there became three: Lamb Funeral Home, Coastal Cremation, and CIE&TB. All of the entities operated out of the funeral home location, and to most of their customers and the public they were indistinguishable
from
the funeral home. What was happening internally was not for public consumption. The Sconces were perfectly content to let their customers believe that they were dealing with the venerable institution with an unsmirchable reputation.