“Well, BioSci used them, primarily for corneas and long bones. That side of the business appeared to be mostly legit.” Mostly. “But it was enough to get a subpoena for records.”
Kristy was looking at tax records now. LifeCore’s revenue in 1998 was $3 million. In 2001, it was $17 million. “What happened between 1998 and 2001 that they started making so much money?”
“The only substantial difference in LifeCore’s business since 1999,” Poremba said, “is that they started using the Kales Home of Peace in Summerlin as a harvester.”
“How much would the funeral home take on that?”
“Looks like they’ve paid Kales Home of Peace between 15 and 20 percent of their total revenues,” he said. “At least according to what they’re putting out on actual invoices. But I think there’s work happening off book.”
“What’s the official number?”
“Four million dollars.”
“Since 1999?”
“No,” Poremba said, “per year.”
That couldn’t be right. Kristy took out a pen, started scratching numbers on her napkin. They’d need to be moving about a thousand bodies per year to be making that kind of money. That seemed impossible. Particularly for a Jewish funeral home and cemetery.
“How many Jews die in Las Vegas every year?”
“Five hundred, give or take,” Poremba said. “We’ll be overly generous and say maybe 60 percent are donors.”
“So we’re at three hundred,” Kristy says. “And then they’d all need to come through this one particular funeral home. Plus whatever overflow work LifeCore is bringing them from the hospitals.”
“If it’s high value,” Poremba said, “hearts, livers, lungs, hospital is doing it right there; they’re not sending a bus to Summerlin. So we’re talking low-priority work. No one is clamoring for a seventy-five-year-old hip bone.”
There was no way those numbers would line up. No matter how inflated the cost of corneas. Something was absolutely amiss. Kristy clicked a file on her computer, opened up a copy of her life insurance policy. She crossed out a line for secondary beneficiaries, right where it said Temple Beth Israel, her synagogue. She scrolled back through Poremba’s file. All the way to the first page again. Why wasn’t this official business yet? Or, moreover, why was it unofficial?
“What am I missing, Lee?” she asked. “How does this tie in to Sal Cupertine?”
“Ask me who owns LifeCore.”
“Who owns LifeCore?”
“Local paperwork shows the CEO to be Jerry L. Ford,” Poremba said. “Who, I should note, belongs to Temple Beth Israel.”
“Tenuous,” Kristy said.
“Hold on,” Poremba said. “Do you know what the L stands for in Mr. Ford’s name?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“He is Jerry Lopiparno Ford.”
“That doesn’t sound Jewish,” Kristy said.
“It’s not,” Poremba said. “He’s 100 percent Italian. Doesn’t mean he couldn’t have converted for his wife, the former Stephanie Katz, but Lopiparnos came over on a boat in the 1880s. Settled in Chicago.”
A tingle began to work its way up Kristy’s spine.
“Same boat as the Cupertines, in fact,” Poremba said. “One hundred and twenty years, Cupertines and Lopiparnos were so close, they’re cousins now. Jerry Ford’s mother, the late Giovana Lopiparno, second cousin to Thomas Cupertine, Ronald Cupertine’s father.”
Kristy was shit with ancestry, but she understood what this meant. They were all family. They were all The Family. Just like how the Mafia had infiltrated food service by creating companies that became vendors for restaurants, they’d created a company that became a vendor for a source they were uniquely qualified in supplying: bodies.
“You think Ronnie Cupertine owns LifeCore?”
“I know it,” Poremba said. “Now I just need to prove it. Somewhere, there’s the movement of money between the two. We’ll find it.”
“How long have you been working off book, Lee?”
“Since the FBI let Sal Cupertine kill Jeff Hopper and get away with it,” Poremba said.
“Did you think Matthew Drew would find Sal and make this right for you? Because you’ve got no probable cause for any of this shit. Not even with what happened today.”
“Where do you think the funeral home is getting all their bodies, Agent?” Poremba asked.
“Las Vegas mobsters aren’t disappearing people on this scale, I can tell you that,” she said. Since coming back, she’d been working on the Eastern Europeans and Chinese, a few Russians, and their game was all tech shit and mortgage fraud. Bloodless, since their victims weren’t in the game, for the first time ever. These were civilians they’d never meet, stealing their money one pixel at a time.
“What do you know about Bennie Savone and his crew?” Poremba asked.
“Not enough,” Kristy said.
“We’re not talking about nice guys,” Poremba said. “They don’t care if someone is in the game or not. They’ll beat down a tourist. Savone is a thug pretending to be a legit businessman, using his wife’s Judaism to get straight looking. Same with Jerry Ford. He’s using Temple Beth Israel; he’s using the mortuary and the funeral home, I promise you.”
There was a pause on the line and Kristy heard barking. “Are you walking your dog?” she asked.
“Yes.”
