Death and taxes aside, two things were long a certainty on the gulf coast of Mississippi: if you died in Biloxi, you would be buried by Jeremiah O'Keefe; if you died in adjacent Gulfport, Bob Riemann would do the honors. A sometimes bitter rivalry existed between their families, but both names remained beacons in the fog of surprise and grief that overcame people upon the death of parents, spouses, siblings and children. Then something happened to Riemann's empire. His mortuaries still bore the name Riemann, and his sons Mike and David still managed the business. Hearses came and went trailing the usual plumes of sorrow. Outwardly, in fact, nothing seemed to have changed at all, except the Riemanns' announcement that they had taken on a new "partner," the Loewen Group, a "death-care" corporation based just outside Vancouver, Canada.
Not many lay people would have recognized the name, since relatively few ordinary citizens read the publications of the funeral industry--with their ads for Eterna-Cribs, Frigid Fluid body bags, Velvetone Arterial solution and Hydrol Tissue Builder--in which Loewen and its competitors had long been subjects of debate. O'Keefe, however, knew Loewen and knew full well it was no mere partner. "That was a lie and a subterfuge," he says. When Loewen went on to buy another nearby funeral home and in the process intruded on a long-standing contract between that home and O'Keefe, O'Keefe filed a lawsuit alleging breach of contract. It was the kind of innocuous business dispute that flares daily in thousands of courthouses throughout America. No one foresaw that this lawsuit would swell into a five-year battle and, as a by-product, bring to light a vast but quiet transformation in the way America buries its dead.
With little fanfare, the Loewen Group and a handful of other large death-care companies are racing to buy up as many independent funeral homes as possible--not out of any desire to share the resulting economies of scale and cut the cost of funerals but rather to boost prices still higher. The death-care companies seek to ready themselves for what stock-market analyst Steve Saltzman of the Chicago Corp. calls the "golden era" of death, the fast-approaching epoch when baby boomers begin dropping like flies. The Loewen Group is the second largest of the "consolidators," and over the past few years, the company has gained a reputation as one of the most aggressive. It bought its first U.S. funeral home in 1987 but as of mid-September owned 814 homes and 265 cemeteries, and has been driving hard to catch up to the industry leader, Service Corp. International of Houston (2,832 homes, 331 cemeteries). This year the Loewen Group has acquired almost $1 billion worth of additional funeral homes and cemeteries, including a stake in Rose Hills Memorial Park outside Los Angeles, the largest cemetery in North America, which Loewen acquired after outbidding SCI. The company's expansion may thrill investors but probably doesn't bode well for consumers, despite founder and ceo Raymond Loewen's penchant for describing the Loewen Group as the industry "leader in consumerism."