Free A Family Business by Ken Englade Page A

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.
    Another reason for secrecy was that Laurieanne, Jerry, and David feared that they would lose business if it became widely known that they were operating a tissue bank. Their clients—other funeral homes or cremation services, likely would quit sending cadavers for cremation if they thought those bodies were first being stripped for tissues and organs, even if authorized by the ATC form. Many of their customers were justifiably sensitive about having organs removed from the bodies of their loved ones. Also, the Sconces’ clients felt that before they could recommend organ and tissue donation, special counseling with the