Free In Death's Shadow by Marcia Talley Page B

York Times, U.S. News & World Report and the Wall Street Journal —that investing in viaticals was that rarest of animals—a no risk thing. The New York Times reported that with profits on investments averaging nearly twenty percent, it was a business that had become "too attractive to ignore."
    Indeed.
    And when celebrities like Phil Donahue and Morley Safer jumped on the bandwagon, the industry boomed like plywood sales during hurricane season. It was A Sure Thing! They said so on 60 Minutes ! Everyone wanted in. Investor demand rapidly outstripped the ability of brokers to supply viaticated policies for investors to buy.
    Some out-and-out crooks were raking in investor money so fast they didn't even bother buying policies with it, spending the money instead on beachfront homes, cigarette boats, fast cars, and airplanes, or squirreling it away in the Cayman Islands. But everyone else was scrambling. Pretty soon, brokers began stooping to just about anything, and I mean anything , to get their hands on policies they could resell.
    I sat back and sipped my tea, imagining the scenario.
    A guy's got AIDS and no life insurance policy. No insurance company in its right mind is going to sell him one. But his friends are selling their policies right and left, so he goes to a broker like Hooke, Lyne & Sinker and complains that he wants a policy to cash in on, too.
    "So apply," Hooke tells him. "Just don't tell them you have AIDS."
    "But what if they require a physical exam?" the guy might ask.
    "Easy," says Mr. H, smooth as silk and twice as slick. "We'll make the policy for $100,000, so you won't even need a physical."
    "But I need more money than that," the guy complains. "I can't work, and I gotta pay for my meds."
    "We have people who will take the physical for you."
    "Whoa," our guy says, "ain't that dishonest?"
    "Well, sure," Hooke says, "but who's it going to hurt? The insurance company's rolling in dough. They won't even miss it."
    So, our guy gets the policy, waits a decent amount of time, and then—ohmahgawd, what a surprise!—is diagnosed with AIDS and viaticates it.
    Clean-sheeting, they call it. Happens every day. Some AIDS-inflicted entrepreneurs had turned "wet ink" policies around so fast, they started calling them "jet" policies.
    The insurance companies were not amused. Tens of thousands of investors lost everything when the insurance companies discovered the fraud and rescinded the policies.
    On www.watchoutforthis.com there was a picture of Mrs. Mildred Page Belton, age seventy-five, dressed in her red vest, still greeting customers at a Wal-Mart outside of Sun City, Arizona. Mildred's life savings—her comfortable retirement—had vanished. I stared at her care-worn face and work-worn hands and swore that if some S.O.B. did that to my grandmother, I'd kill him. Something lingering, with boiling oil in it, I thought, paraphrasing a favorite line from Gilbert and Sullivan. Something humorous, but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead.
    Poor Mildred wasn't alone. Many millions of dollars more had to swirl down the toilet before lawmakers began to sit up and take notice.
    Congress could have done something, of course, by putting third-party viatical sales under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But, nooooh! They left it up to the states. And by the time individual states got around to exercising some control, the proverbial cows were well clear of the barn and had been dropping cow pies all over the country.
    I clicked around and found a table: Laws Governing the Viatical Services Industry. Nearly forty states had laws of some sort on the books.
    Maryland, unfortunately, didn't appear to be one of them.
    I found that hard to believe. A few screens back I'd read that one of the nation's biggest cases of viatical investment fraud had originated in Baltimore, with co-conspirators rounded up in Florida, Texas, California, Kentucky, and Ohio.
    Maybe the table was out of date. I