Insurance investigators claim to uncover an elaborate fraud
Just past daybreak on July 27, 1981, Robert Granberg and two friends set out from his home in Staten Island, N.Y., on a fishing trip. At a dock in Atlantic Highlands, N.J., they bought bait and rented a weathered 15-foot rowboat with a small outboard engine. "I hope none of us falls overboard," one of the men laughingly told a deckhand as they headed out to sea. "None of us can swim."
The trio—made up of Granberg, a retired New York state investigator; Salvatore Rignola, a New York City fire marshal; and Julian Farriel, a house painter—were buffeted by bruising ocean tides. Rignola and Farriel would later tell the authorities that Granberg, 6 ft. 4 in. and 275 lbs., offered to change places with Rignola, who was perched precariously in the middle. As Granberg stood up, his friends said, his foot slipped on the wet seat, and he vanished overboard.
A frantic search with another fishing boat and a Coast Guard launch and helicopter turned up not a trace. Rignola and Farriel were left to break the news to Bob's wife and their two children, Lisa and Eric, then 12 and 9.
Granberg, at 49, was known in the neighborhood as a tough, swaggering man who was reportedly prone, during minor community disputes, to flash the gun he usually wore. He had quit his job as an investigator for the state's Division of Human Rights in 1979 after developing cardiac arrhythmia, a minor heart condition but serious enough for him to collect disability payments. On $18,000 a year, the family had been living a simple and secluded life in their middle-class neighborhood.
Judy Granberg was to inherit no financial worries. Her husband, it turned out, had insured himself over the years with six insurance companies for $750,000. Judy quickly shifted into a faster lane. Instead of the family's old Ford Granada, she began driving a gray $50,000 Mercedes. She enrolled her children in the New York Military Academy, a coed private school. The family traveled around the country in high style, staying at hotels and eating in chic restaurants. She changed their name to Brent, sold her home and rented a garden townhouse in Cornwall, N.Y.
Eight months after her husband's disappearance, Mrs. Granberg petitioned the court to have him declared legally dead. Although his body had never been found, the case seemed straightforward. He had a minor heart condition. There had been two witnesses. In March 1982, a judge ruled the death legal; by September, $208,000 in payments had poured in.