If anything is more certain than taxes, it is death. Upon this truth, slick promoters work a swindle that year after year takes millions from unwary investors, states the "Kiwanis Magazine." Ohioans alone have lost $25,000,000 this way in the past few years. A score of persons were sentenced in Cincinnati last February for mail fraud in the sale of lots in Arlington Memorial Park. Morton Gilbert, the promoter, got five years. Previously he had been sentenced te fifteen years for promoting Hope-well Memorial Park. The Government asserted lot purchasers lost $2393375 in these two swindles. Change the names and the figures, and the story of the Ohio memorial parks can be duplicated in almost every state.
The idea of burying the dead in spacious parks, using uniform markers set flush with grass instead of tombstones of every description, is appealing and comparatively new. A prospectus plays up the few outstandingly successful memorial parks, making the project sound equally exclusive and expensive.
The pattern is standard: The promoter buys a cheap farm on a highway near a city. He cuts each acre into 1,000 burial lots and sells them for high prices—sometimes $150 each, which works out at $150,000 per acre.
Two corporations are set up, the first being the cemetery company. Substantial citizens innocently agree to serve as trustees, their names lending atmosphere to the set-up. In most states, a cemetery must be a non-profit organization. The second corporation is an entirely legal sales company of which the promoter keeps control; it contracts with the cemetery company to sell the lots. But its commission frequently amounts to 90 per cent. of the money taken in. Not content with that, the promoter may take the remaining 10 per cent. theoretically set aside as a perpetual care fund, and invest it in the stock of the sales company!
Salesmen persuade victims that they are getting in on the ground floor—"when the general public hears about this beautiful burial place, the demand for lots is going to double prices." There are "unusual profit possibilities" in an investment which "will not be affected by depressions or stock market slumps" because it is "based on the surest thing in the world."
Salesmen offer cemetery lots in exchange for stocks that have ceased to pay dividends, or unprofitable real estate. Persons tired of such sour investments are easily talked into the swap, and realize only too late that they have let go something that had real if shrunken, value for a worthless piece of ground on a remote hillside.
Legitimate cemetery operators offer lots for the use of the purchaser. No one should buy cemetery lots hoping to make money. The racketeering salesman will argue the lots can always be resold. They seldom can be. The corporation is not interested in resales.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.