Feds say 2 LA-area women staged funerals for money

0 Comments | San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Apr 9, 2009

LOS ANGELES – Two Southern California women have been charged with staging sham funerals to collect life insurance payments and other money totaling an estimated $1 million.

Hawthorne phlebotomist Faye Schilling, 60, and Los Angeles mortuary worker Jean Crump, 66, were arrested Wednesday on a federal grand jury indictment.

The indictment said the two women bought insurance policies, waited for them to mature, then held bogus burials or cremations and arranged for phony death certificates.

“The level of deception is shocking,” said Anthony Montero, a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles.

Montero said the “dead” were likely fictitious people, but said identities of real people may have been stolen.

In one funeral at a Long Beach mortuary, authorities alleged that the women loaded a casket with various items to simulate the weight of a corpse they called “Jim Davis.” They purchased a plot in a Compton graveyard, had a funeral and had the casket buried.

Fearing the body-less coffin would be discovered in an investigation, the women then had the coffin exhumed and filed false paperwork with the county saying the remains had been cremated and scattered at sea, the indictment said.

Both women were released after posting $10,000 bail. They are scheduled to be arraigned April 23.

Reached Wednesday night by the Los Angeles Times, Schilling said, “That’s a lie,” in response to the indictment. “That’s not my line of work, that’s not something I do.” She declined to comment further.

Phone numbers listed under Crump’s name were disconnected, and an attorney could not be reached.

In addition to the life insurance claims, which included a $250,000 policy, prosecutors said the women secured payments from financing companies to pay for inflated funeral costs.

The indictment said Crump offered one doctor $50,000 to lie on medical records to support the cause of death listed on a phony death certificate.

Two other women, Lydia Eileen Pearce, 37, owner of a mortuary in Long Beach, and Barbara Lynn, 54, a notary from Los Angeles, previously pleaded guilty in the alleged scam, said Montero, and he believed that more arrests were likely.

Montero said federal agents became involved after people approached to join the scam reported it to authorities.

Mohamed El-Erian, CEO/CO-CIO, PIMCO

0 Comments | CEO Wire, Jul 27, 2010

(This is not a legal transcript. Bloomberg LP cannot guarantee its accuracy.)

MOHAMED EL-ERIAN, CEO AND CO-CIO OF PIMCO, TALKS ABOUT THE LINK BETWEEN THE U.S. ECONOMY AND EMERGING MARKETS ON BLOOMBERG SURVEILLANCE

JULY 27, 2010

SPEAKERS:

MOHAMED EL-ERIAN, CEO AND CO-CIO, PIMCO

TOM KEENE, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, BLOOMBERG NEWS

KEN PREWITT, HOST, BLOOMBERG NEWS

9:02

TOM KEENE, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, BLOOMBERG NEWS: We bring in now for global perspective, he is Chief Investment Officer, Chief Executive, PIMCO, Mohamed El-Erian. Dr. El-Erian, good morning.

MOHAMED EL-ERIAN, CEO AND CO-CIO, PIMCO: Good morning, Tom.

KEENE: We see another good day to point there. What a mixed picture. Some day’s good data, we see futures advancing here off of Case-Shiller. The worries, the angst that so many of our listeners have, should we at the margin push those worries aside and look at these optimistic statistics, or are they backward looking?

EL-ERIAN: You know, Tom, all this speaks to what Ben Bernanke coined last week as the unusually uncertain outlook. Whether you look at the data, which is pointing in all sorts of directions, whether you look at the earnings, what we’re getting right now is very, very noisy picture. And it points to an uncertain outlook. Now, there’s two ways to think about this. One is, as you mentioned, certain data of backward looking, others are forward looking. The other thing – way to think about it is the reality that during regime shifts, data gets very noisy because you’re shifting from one regime to another and our inclination is the latter. Our inclination is to think of this as natural for a regime shift and we’re moving from a regime of high growth, leveraging, debt and credit entitlement to a more delivered, slower-growing, higher unemployment world.

KEENE: We’re going to come back with the half hour here with Dr. El- Erian. Minneapolis, San Francisco, San Diego and Washington, 3-month annualized doing quite well, New York quite calm, folks, 3-month annualized 1.79 percent is just very difficult. So we’re going to come back with Dr. El-Erian. He’s just back from Brazil, so perfect timing to speak to him about this linkage of our economy to these, to be kind, very, very good emerging markets.

9:04

(BREAK)

9:07

KEENE: Mohamed El-Erian with us, just off an airplane from Brazil. Mohamed, my colleague Simon Kennedy in London calls it South-South Trade. Are you seeing in Brazil, it in the Southern Hemisphere countries, these commodity-based emerging markets? Are we beginning to see them feed on themselves and generate demand off themselves rather than the original colonial nations?

EL-ERIAN: Yes, Tom, we’re seeing them rely more on domestic demand and on regional demand. And that speaks to the fact, and I would call it the fact, that countries like Brazil are in a developmental breakout phase. They’re able to sustain high growth, wealth accumulation and greater resilience to external shock. It’s pretty impressive what’s going on in some of these countries.

KEENE: When you see these countries, we worry about best practices of law and of contract and financial systems. Do you see improving and deeper financial systems to go along with the prosperity?

EL-ERIAN: You do. It’s a development process, so it takes time.

KEENE: Yes.

EL-ERIAN: And you’re seeing a maturation of institutions, both under private and public sector. So on the public sector you’re seeing much more fiscal responsibility, more respect for the rule of law. It’s not perfect, but it’s making progress. And on the private sector side, you’re starting to see Brazilian companies becoming big multilaterals and being able to compete on the global stage.

KEN PREWITT, HOST, BLOOMBERG NEWS: One of our stories this morning, Mohamed, is that high-yield, high-risk bond junk bonds are rallying by the most in four months. Do we want to go ahead and take this as a sign that risk aversion is off and people are desperate for yield after all this time?

EL-ERIAN: Yes, you know the market will always look for return. The market will worry mostly about the return on capital rather than the return of capital. So the minute someone puts out a green light and earnings constituted the green light, you’ll see people rushing back into risk markets, be it the equity market or the high-yield market and the issue, Ken, is will it be sustained? And for that to be sustained, we need continued improvement in data and continued improvement in top-line revenue.

PREWITT: And are we going to get that?

EL-ERIAN: I think it’s uncertain. The indicators we look at, and I know that there’s disagreement on this, but the indicators that we look at suggest that the economy continues to lose momentum. So we are more worried than some of the other people you’ve had on your show recently.

KEENE: Well, there’s a mix here. Mohamed, I see the Spanish spreads come in. You see Spain minus the German 10-year spread come in. I mean it’s essentially all success on the stress tests
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