- This is the story of a man, a mogul, and a whole lot of funeral homes. Meet Jeremiah O'Keefe, the man. Never intended to be a champion for independent funeral homes. He never intended to take down
a funeral mega conglomerate. - This is a kind of private fight between Mr. Ray Loewen and myself. - Raymond Loewen, the mogul, chief executive of the Loewen Group. In the 90's it was the second largest funeral home corporation in North America. The state of Mississippi, where Jeremiah O'Keefe's family has been burying people
since the civil war. It's also where O'Keefe
took Ray Loewen to court with his lawyer, this guy, Willie Gary, a personal injury attorney from Florida. Eight million Baptists. (record scratching) Okay, the eight million Baptists will make sense at some
point, just hold on. A yacht where Ray Loewen
underestimated Jeremiah o'Keefe, but I'm getting ahead of myself folks, let's start at the beginning. Jeremiah O'Keefe was not happy. For generations his family
had been burying the dead of Biloxi Mississippi. In addition to the funeral homes, he also owned Gulfport
National Insurance Company. If you know anything
about the funeral industry in the last half a century, you know it loves to sell you pre need. Essentially pre need is when
you pay a funeral home now for services you'll need later. Pre need, before you need it. Before you're dead is what I'm saying. - [Woman] Oh. - O'Keefe had agreements with other family run funeral homes in the area that they would sell
his pre-need insurance in their mortuaries as well. The O'Keefe family were
big old funeral fish in Biloxi's small death pond, but then the Loewen Group came to town. (dramatic music) all the way from Canada, ay, and Ray Loewen was not the friendly neighborhood Canadian we all envision. He was no Rick Moranis. - Good day, welcome to
the great white north. - He was no Mike Myers. He was certainly no Leslie Nielsen. - Nice beaver. - Ray Loewen had also been raised in the funeral business. Born in Manitoba, Canada, he learned the funeral
arts, embalming, burial and care of bodies from his father. - And water's the thing that'll ruin a perfectly good dead body it will. - And discovered that he had a flare for managing the funeral home's finances. He was ambitious, and had an entrepreneurial
talent for expansion. I started one small funeral home, and I'm like, look at my
entrepreneurial talent for expansion, but to put this in real perspective, let's do the numbers. The Kai Ryssdal reference, anyone? In 1988, the Loewen Group, as Loewen's ever expanding Group of funeral homes was called, had 98 funeral homes and five cemeteries in
both the U.S. and Canada. By 1989 that number rose to 120 funeral homes and 10 cemeteries. By early 1990, they had 300 funeral homes and 25 cemeteries. And by September of 1995, around when the Loewen Group made their way down to Mississippi, they had 764 funeral
homes and 172 cemeteries. Their revenue was in the
ballpark of $600 million. Where did they get all
of those funeral homes? Let's talk about the rise in corporate funeral
behemoths in the 1990s. (jazz music) There was the Loewen Group come down from the naughty north, there was Stewart
Enterprises out of Louisiana, and there was the biggest
and baddest of them all, Service Corporation International, or SCI outta Houston, Texas. Here's how it worked. These corporations would
come to your state, hi, hello, sorry for your loss, and offer to buy
independent funeral homes. If you were Frank Thompson of Thompson and son's mortuary, and you're getting on in age, and your loser son wants to be a librarian or firefighter instead of a mortician, getting bought out by a
corporation for Boku bucks sounds like an attractive proposition. As I said, SCI was the
biggest of these corporations, but the Loewen Group had
developed a reputation for being aggressive. Ray Loewen was determined to dominate the funeral
home and cemetery industry, and by the 90's he was well on his way. The Loewen Group would
target a geographic area and start buying up
independent funeral homes and cemeteries. I know what you're thinking, there aren't a bunch of
funeral homes called SCI or Loewen like McDonald's or Starbucks. Well, no, there wouldn't be would there? The real trick is when the
family-owned funeral home was bought the family name and the independent optics
were to remain intact. You would go to your local funeral home that your family had been
going to for decades, having no idea that it was now owned by a Canadian corporation with Ray Loewen behind the scenes enforcing corporate practices, or normalization as they called it. Normalization. Normalization meant making sure that every Loewen-owned funeral home was meeting financial
expectations and fast. There were shareholders to keep happy. (dramatic music) The best way to achieve
that goal was consolidation. The more market share a
funeral home corporation owns in a given area the more you can centralize operations. All embalming can be done in one large care center, and caskets can be bought
in bulk at a deep discount. So the corporation is
saving a ton of money, and they can pass that
savings on to the customer. - [Man] No Catlin. - Oh no? They don't do that? - [Man] We don't do that. - Instead of offering the
savings to the customer, they drive up the price. Ray Loewen called it revenue enhancement. Loewen funeral homes were expected to practice something called third unit target merchandising. Revenue enhancement. This is a technique that
they've been teaching for years. It's kind of a psychological
marketing game, banking on the fact that
when grieving families come into a casket showroom to pick out a casket for
their mom, let's say, they're going to feel pressure not to pick just the
cheapest one available. In fact, so the third unit postulates, the family is going to bypass the two least expensive choices and go for the next up on the
price ladder, the third unit. All Loewen funeral homes were expected to make the
two least expensive caskets sort of expensive to start with, so the third casket up in cost would be even more expensive. (cash register dinging) Revenue enhancement. A survey was done comparing
Loewen-owned funeral homes to still independent
funeral homes in Texas, it found that an independent funeral home might charge around
$863 for basic services, while a Loewen funeral home charged in the ballpark of $1,638, twice as much. Revenue enhancement. A local funeral home in Amarillo, Texas charged $185 for embalming services, whereas a Loewen Funeral Home charged $425 for the same service. Rev, rev, rev... Funeral home owners in Mississippi described Loewen selling a burial vault that wholesaled for $940 for as high as $2,860 in an area where Loewen funeral
homes held a monopoly. Revenue enhancement. Loewen was banking on
the fact that a family befuddled by grief wasn't
going to shop around to find the best price. The funeral industrial complex has been allowed to flourish for years due to that exact true perception. Most families will never
make more than one phone call to compare prices at
different funeral homes. Loewen's overall business model made funerals inaccessible
to a lot of people, and pushed generations of family funeral homes out of business through intimidation and threats to build new funeral homes right next door to theirs, and run them out of business. I am not saying that all
family owned funeral homes are bastions of perfect ethics. We know small businesses are
just as capable of malfeasance. David and his parents were also allegedly illegally selling
organs to medical schools and research centers, as
well as the black market. But for the little guys dealing with the Loewen Group was like going up against a juggernaut. - [Juggernaut] I'm the juggernaut, bitch. - But Jeremiah O'Keefe, he was no Podunk small town American funeral director ripe for exploitation
by the big bad Canadian. - Okay, who brought the dog? - O'Keefe was the father of 13, a World War II hero, the former mayor of Biloxi, former member of the Mississippi
House of Representatives, owner of eight funeral homes
and his insurance business, and he frankly didn't
like what he was seeing. Now long before the Loewen
Group arrived on the scene Jeremiah O'Keefe already had an enemy in the funeral business. If you think working with
the somber realities of death and dying makes funeral
home owners any less petty. - No ma'am, you would
be wrong, it does not. - O'Keefe's enemy was
the Raymond Funeral Home. Journalist and author Eric Larson described the O'Keefe's and Riemanns as the Hatfields and McCoys of funerals. If you died in Biloxi, you would be buried by Jeremiah O'Keefe. If you died in adjacent Gulfport, Bob Raymond would do the honors, but suddenly here comes
Ray Loewen into town, buying up Raymond funeral home,
keeping the name of course, and another funeral home, Wright & Ferguson. For 16 years Wright & Ferguson had used O'Keefe's pre-need
insurance for their clients, but suddenly they made the switcheroo and were using Raymond's
pre-need insurance instead, since both funeral homes
were now Loewen owned. O'Keefe felt this had unlawfully broken his business agreement, so he filed a lawsuit. Soon enough, the big maple leaf, Ray Loewen himself came a calling. (horse neighing) Remember the yacht? (yacht horn blowing) The 1990s in the
corporate funeral industry was the time of whining and dining. Flights to Cancun, golf
retreats on private planes, salmon fishing trips to Alaska, all activities beloved by older
gentleman of retirement age with funeral homes to sell. Especially flattering was
when Bob Walter of SCI or Ray Loewen of the Loewen Group would take you on these trips themselves. You, their very important death friend. Ray Loewen was known for taking out and then
bullying funeral home owners on his yacht. (Yacht horn blowing) This was also his plan
for Jeremiah O'Keefe. O'Keefe had dinner with
Loewen on the yacht, and during that dinner Loewen
attempted to charm O'Keefe away from the silly lawsuit, and get him to sell some
of his funeral homes. He railed O'Keefe with stories about his prowess as a business man. - Gee, I get 600 tablets of that for the same price as
300 of the name brand. - Including how he had
intimated John Wright of Wright & Ferguson into
selling his funeral home. - To brag about being able
to intimidate somebody is not evidence of a
gentlemanly sensibility. - O'Keefe says. - It told me he's an arrogant guy, that he's a hard pusher. - O'Keefe was not impressed, and he was not interested in selling, but he agreed to terms that explicitly included
restoring his insurance agreement with the funeral homes
now owned by Loewen. O'Keefe left the yacht, disembarked, disembarked from the yacht thinking that things had been resolved. - Shock me, shock me, shock me with that deviant behavior. - But surprise, surprise nothing changed. Loewen continued selling pre-need, and O'Keefe was still out the business, so he went forward with his lawsuit. At this point Loewen's
executives got involved. (dramatic music) Negotiating a settlement where O'Keefe would sell Loewen three
of his funeral homes, and in exchange O'Keefe
would actually acquire Loewen's pre-need insurance business. But then months passed, and Loewen never completed the deal. As it hung in limbo, O'Keefe was losing money fast, and had to sell off funeral homes. O'Keefe began to realize
that Loewen had never meant to honor their agreement. He was just gonna wait
for O'Keefe to go under, and then buy up the fragments for nothing. Jeremiah O'Keefe was incensed with these- - Predatory trade practices. - He wanted $5 million in damages. (dramatic music) Five million, seems like a
lot of money, doesn't it? What an innocent time that was. But O'Keefe would need a
sharp, unflappable lawyer to go up against Ray Loewen and his legal council. No stuffed shirt funeral
industry lawyer would do. Oh no, he needed Willie Gary. - [Narrator] Meet Willie Gary. - Oh, I've just been
waiting members of the jury to speak my peace. - Willie Gary was a personal
injury lawyer based in Florida, but with offices around the country, including Mississippi. He was a charismatic guy, and drawn to cases where he could go up against impossible odds and win. - Disney, Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak may well with they'd never
heard of the name Willie Gary. He's asking for a mere $5 billion dollars, and he's already taking heat for his (speaking in foreign language), his shear nerve. - Born in Georgia in 1947, the Gary family were migrant farm workers. Despite those beginnings, and despite being a small man, Gary fought his way to
a football scholarship in order to go to college, parlaying that tenacity into a law degree, work as a lawyer, and eventually his own law firm. To say Willie Gary was
successful was putting it mildly. - [Man] The only thing
better than a dream home is another one. Willie's building a 22,000
square foot weekend retreat. When completed the bottom
of the swimming pool will be emblazoned with a letter W. - He was listed as one of Ebony Magazine's 100 most influential black Americans. He had luxury cars, boats, multiple homes, his own custom Boeing 737 plane. Let's just say Willie Gary had his pick of legal work. So when Jeremiah O'Keefe first sent his lawyers to ask Gary
to take lead on this case, he said no. - No. - There's not a lot of style and glamor in corporate
funeral home lawsuits, let's be honest. It wasn't until O'Keefe
himself went to Gary and asked him to take the case that he agreed. - I flat out liked him. - Even Gary's wife loved O'Keefe and said- - You've got to help him. - So Willie Gary took the case. Years later he would tell
Buzz Feed News his strategy on this case. - Legally I tried to crush. - Initially Gary went to
Loewen's people directly, offering to settle for
the mere five million O'Keefe originally asked for. (laughing) No, no, I'm kidding, you snooze, you lose. Willie Gary's in town, and the offer to settle
was now $125 million. The Loewen Group basically
ignored the offer, and quietly hired an experienced
trial lawyer of their own, Richard Sinkfield. I'm gonna note here that both
Sinkfield and Gary are black, as were eight of the 12 jurors, as was the judge, James E. Graves. (dramatic music) Graves. The judge's name was Graves, you can't make this stuff up. It was two black men
representing two white men in 1990's Mississippi. It's an interesting
thing to note on its own, but I'm not making this
a thing for no reason. Race would become a
large part of this trial. From the onset Willie Gary had a vision for how to present this case. When speaking to potential jurors in September of 1995, Gary had a framed photo of O'Keefe's entire family on display. He made sure O'Keefe's
wife Annette was present, as well as as many of their
13 adult children as possible. Each adult child stood up and was introduced to the jurors like a bunch of Mississippi Von Trapps. David. Kenneth. David. Kenneth. I don't know the kids' names. Gary portrayed O'Keefe as a family man, a throwback to a kinder, simpler society. The same little voice that told O'Keefe to go fight for America after Pearl Harbor was the same little voice that told him to fight against the mean Canadian who
lied and cheated him. - You see, that little voice, members of the jury, has a name, and it's called faith. Faith in God. It's called pride, pride in America. - O'Keefe was also portrayed as a longtime funeral professional who had served black families just as readily as white families. At the trial Gary even
brought in black politicians to endorse his not racist at all, totally one of the good
white guys character. We've talked about this before, but the funeral business, even now can be extremely segregated. Black funeral homes and
white funeral homes. So explaining that O'Keefe was a man who was, quote, a friend
of the black community, both as a funeral director, and politician, was a pivotal argument in front of a mixed jury in Mississippi. Furthermore, Willie
Gary painted Ray Loewen, who wasn't even present at the beginning of the trial, and was frankly unentered as a big bad foreign monopoly man coming in and making it impossible for
average hard working folks to have a decent funeral. - This case is about gouging moms and pops who saved their life savings just to be able to be put away nicely. - The two teams of lawyers
went back and forth. Loewen were like we didn't
breach any contract, and Gary was like if you
didn't breech any contract, why are you trying to settle? Loewen's council were like well, it wasn't really a contract, it was a, quote, an agreement to agree, which opened the door for Gary to argue that from the beginning the Loewen Group just wanted to destroy O'Keefe's business, and eat up the pieces. Loewen intended to monopolize
the funeral home market, and push families out of business, and drive up prices. Revenue enhancement. Ray Loewen finally was forced to pay attention to this little
lawsuit down in Mississippi. In October he flew to Mississippi. His private plane actually
ended up parked next to Willie Gary's private plane, which was named the Wings of Justice. It was factors like Loewen's plane, his infamous yacht, his helicopter that would cause problems for the mogul in the eyes of the jury, especially when compared
to good old boy O'Keefe. It's hard to hide one's net worth when you can land your
helicopter on your yacht. - What, you can't? Oh my God, sad for you. - So forcefully was
this point made at trial that apparently even
the judge at some point was like enough with the yacht, Mr. Gary. But Loewen's true fatal mistake, the nail in the coffin, if you will, and I think you will, was choosing to introduce
Ray Loewen's relationship with the National Baptist Convention USA as a, quote, bid by Loewen
to ingratiate itself with black jurors. Founded in 1886, the National Baptist Convention is the nation's oldest and
largest African American religious convention. And at the time of the trial they boosted 8.2 million members. The National Baptist Convention held considerable sway over
black American churches, and cemeteries. Just as the trial had
begun in September of 1995, the Loewen Group had finalized a deal to make Loewen the convention's death care provider of choice. The Loewen Group would trained members of the National Baptist
Convention Churches to sell burial plots, vaults and headstones in Loewen's cemeteries. The sellers would earn a small commission, and Loewen would potentially
rake in millions. Loewen saw this deal as evidence that he too was a friend
to the black community. But critics like Willie Gary, and the jury, and pretty much everyone else saw it as Ray Loewen
making even more money off the black Baptist community. The only person really winning was Loewen by finding an angle into the
powerful black funeral market. But to be fair, went the counter argument, it was a chance for the
sales people, pastors and the Baptist Convention to make money, and surely they would also
be able to sell things like viewings and embalming and final care at
Loewen-owned funeral homes. Oh, you're saying access to funerals at Loewen Funeral Homes was a deal he only cut with white funeral homes? The black community just got access to the cemeteries, oh dear. - What are you going to do put grandma in a casket
on your flatbed truck and drive around looking
for a funeral home? - Actually, Counselor Gary, yes, it's called a family involved or home funeral, and... Okay, not the time. He continued. - Loewen was going to
make 750 million a year off these folks, and they would be making peanuts, and they couldn't even
go to his funeral home to have a funeral. - As the trial came to a close, thanks to Willie Gary's
unrelenting examination of Loewen and his practices, the jury awarded Jeremiah
O'Keefe $260 million. (dramatic music) Said Ray Loewen about the verdict, "I was absolutely stunned. "I thought this can't be happening." But wait, there is more. Yet to come was the punitive
damages phase of the trial. Punitive damages being awarded when you can show the dependent acted with malice or fraud. During this phase Loewen's net worth would be evaluated. It was a sloppy affair, with Loewen's people making mistakes, like over the course of half an hour claiming net worth amounts for Loewen that swung by hundreds
of millions of dollars. The economists Willie Gary brought in claimed the Loewen Group
was worth $3 billion. In a bold move, and he was nothing if not bold, Gary asked the jury to award O'Keefe $1 billion dollars in punitive damages. It took less than an hour for the jury to come back. They didn't award him $1 billion, but they did award Jeremiah O'Keefe $500 million dollars, the highest number ever
awarded in the state. By the way, they were one juror short of awarding the full one billion. The jury foeman would later say "Loewen was a rich, dumb,
Canadian politician, "who thought he could come down "and pull the wool over the eyes "of a good ol' Mississippi boy. "It didn't work." Obviously the Loewen Group wanted to appeal this decision right away, but the state of Mississippi required an appeal bond, basically money kept in safe holding while the appeal is being decided. That appeal bond has to be 125% of the amount of the
judgment against Loewen. So backs against the
wall they didn't appeal, and settled with O'Keefe for $175 million. (dramatic music) All O'Keefe wanted was $5 million, and that was a first offer. I bet he would have taken $1,587,000.62. The trial and settlement payout marked the beginning of
the end for Ray Loewen. During the trial, the Loewen Group, former darlings of the Canadian stock market saw their stock prices suffer. At first Ray Loewen just seemed in denial about the whole thing, and kept aggressively
buying all the funeral homes he could get his hands on. - [Juggernaut] I'm the juggernaut, bitch. - Still, the Loewen Group
stock prices were not thriving. SCI, remember the biggest corporate funeral conglomerate ever, smelled blood in the water. SCI made several offers to
buy the Loewen Group outright and assume all their debt, but Ray Loewen asked the
board to reject these offers, calling it a hostile takeover. Loewen seemed to genuinely believe that if he just kept buying
all the funeral homes everything and the
company would all be fine. By 1998, Ray Loewen
was forced to step down as CEO. Burdened with $2.3 billion in debt. - You bought too many funeral homes, Ray. The piper must be paid. These were funeral
homes, not beanie babies. - Burdened with billions in debt, the filed to reorganize under the chapter 11 bankruptcy code, and the Loewen Group emerged like a Phoenix from the ashes as the Alderwoods Group, and in just a few years
the Alderwoods Group was acquired by SCI. ♪ SCI will get ya. ♪ - SCI will get ya. They will, they will get ya. They'll get ya. And that my friends is how
Jeremiah O'Keefe, Willie Gary, and 8.2 million Baptists
took down Ray Loewen. (dramatic music) I'll tell you when we first started researching this video
I was so proud of us. Who else would tell this story? Who else would bring you... (dramatic music) You should have seen my face when I learned the
video we were working on was going to be a movie
being made right now starring Jamie Foxx as Willie Gary, and Tommy Lee Jones as Jeremiah O'Keefe. Of every video we've done, I mean every single video, this is the least likely to be made into a big Hollywood film. Well, I guess the industry
has finally caught up, and realizes the true entertainment value in 1990's courtroom dramas on the topic of corporate
funeral home monopolies, something we have known all along, you and I. May I come to the premiere? - No. - And a final thank you to Patrons for as always letting
me live my weird dreams. If you're a Patron and
you haven't been visiting the Patreon, there's a lot of really good. (yelling) Well, really good content. It's me just talking,. What it truly be ethical to not tell you that I am in a bathroom? (dramatic music) ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue ♪ ♪ revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement,
revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement,
revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement,
revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue, revenue, revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue, revenue, revenue,
revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement,
revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue, revenue, revenue,
revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ revenue enhancement,
revenue enhancement, ♪ ♪ revenue enhancement,
revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue, revenue ♪ ♪ Revenue ♪ ♪ Revenue, revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ revenue, revenue ♪ ♪ revenue ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪ ♪ Revenue enhancement ♪
I love seeing Caitlin hit the front page, Ask a Mortician has been a staple channel for me for over a decade. Her books are fantastic, and I am grateful for her sharing her experiences and knowledge around death rituals, the funeral industry, and culture. Her channel is great for learning about death acceptance, how to make a death plan, and of course historically significant deaths (and corpses!)! The middle ages were magic~*
these schemes are not gone. they still thrive. my mom's funeral last year in NYC cost over $16,000, and thats not including the cemetery plot and stone.
Are we going to just act like the hit song "Revenue Enhancement" never happened?
Kroehner Funeral Services? I thought the Fisher Family put them under.
Speaking of SCI, I had a run in with them when my mom died, and it was so scummy and scammy. When I tried to call around to other homes, they were all "family" named, but would start the same sales pitches, verbatim; so I didn't really have a choice. Even going in as an educated consumer in a somewhat non-existent emotional state (on the spectrum, ya'll), and even as a former real estate salesman/mortgage broker myself, it was convoluted and intentionally confusing.
Ultimately, I just stood my ground on everything and got it done for around $3000 (down from a starting point of $10k, which was initially "as low as they could" go lol). Thirteen years later, I made sure my kid and family know to just throw me in a dumpster behind a taco bell somewhere.
Over a decade later, and I still get junk mail from SCI, addressed to my dead mother, advertising for pre-need bullshit. I hate it here.
Also, why did 4 different funeral directors from 4 different homes have the most gaudy gold and diamond pinky ring? Is that like a funeral home status symbol or a gang sign?
As a petty funeral home employee in the 90’s I grew sick of the corporate takeover and opened my own funeral home. I was able to price services at 2/3 what the corporation shops were charging. I grew the biz to half the marketshare and sold. It has been running 22 years now and I figure it has taken millions from the big guys while allowing one community to avoid their trap. Others did the same back then. Corporations made it easy.
This sounds very similar to what’s happening to the dental industry now. Private equity firms buying up private practices and keeping the names as if they’re still independently run. They’re over diagnosing patients as they put pressure on their dentists to hit targets. I’d never go to a corporate owned dental practice.
In Philippines, the dead live in a house bigger than their current houses
I love her channel I can binge watch her for days, very talented and entertaining :) The vampire one is great if you haven't seen it