November 26, 1999
Houston-based Service Corporation International (SCI), which describes itself as "world's largest death care provider".
what the mainstream press has yet to disclose is that Al Gore's campaign chairman, Tony Coelho, sits on the board of SCI and serves as one of the company's strategic advisers.
The funeral industry has long been one of the least regulated and most corrupt enterprises in the United States. In Texas, mortuary operations are overseen by the Funeral Commission, an indulgent board appointed by the governor and largely composed of funeral home executives and their lawyers. In 1996 the Commission's director, Eliza May, began receiving complaints that SCI funeral homes were employing unlicensed embalmers, many of them low-paid Mexican immigrants. May launched an investigation of SCI, which disclosed numerous violations in embalming practices. May and her investigators recommended that SCI be fined $450,000.
Tony Coelho, who has served as a director of SCI since 1991.
the former California congressman and House whip was paid $21,000 a year in director's fees and another $18,000 for serving on the executive committee. SCI also contributes $42,000 a year to Coelho's retirement fund and gave him 3,000 shares of stock valued at $135,000. Total annual compensation for attending 12 meetings: $176,000. Moreover, according to documents filed with the SEC, the company gave Coelho a loan for $418,922. According to Coelho's financial disclosure forms, he owns million shares of SCI stock worth $1.2 million.
In a 1993 survey, the Teamsters Union ranked Coelho as the nation's most over-rated corporate board member. The Teamsters based the rating on the number of boards Coelho sits on: AutoLend Group, Cyberonics, ICF Kaiser (the international construction firm), Intl. Thoroughbred Groups, ITT Educational Services and Pinacle Global Group. The union assumed that Coelho couldn't possibly devote enough time to each slot. But that calculation vastly underestimates Coelho's expertise as a political fixer, an invaluable commodity to companies like SCI which find themselves butting heads with regulators, trade agreements, class action suits and foreign governments.
Tony Coelho, according to company documents, has played a major role in charting the company's international strategy. SCI now has operations in more than 20 countries. While SCI controls about 11 percent of the US "funeral market", it has done much better overseas. The company's most recent annual report notes that SCI performs 14 percent of the funerals in the United Kingdom, 25 percent in Australia and 28 percent in France. In 1998, Coelho, of Portugese descent, helped to guide the company's entrance into Portugal, Spain and Argentina.
Coelho and his cohorts at SCI have worked their magic in France, where SCI does more than $524 million a year in business. Until last year French law gave local municipalities the authority to provide local moturaries with a monopoly on funeral services. SCI fought to have the law overturned as an unfair trade barrier. The company prevailed in 1998. France, SCI boasts, now has "an open market in funeral services". Still, there's more work for Coelho and company to do. In its latest quarterly filing with the SEC, SCI notes mournfully that "cemeteries in France, however, are and will continue to be controlled by municipalities and religious organizations, with third parties, such as SCI, providing cemetery merchandise such as markers and monuments".