it was happening—three legislators and a lobbyist.”43
“ROBBERY WITHOUT A PISTOL”
In Pastor Craigmiles’s home state of Tennessee, the restriction on casket sales likewise owed its genesis to a state legislator who was a longtime funeral director—Senator Fred O. Berry. In 1972, Berry—a second-generation funeral director—led a successful push to amend the Funeral Directors and Embalmers Act (FDEA), which Tennessee had passed in 1951, and to restrict the selling of funeral merchandise to licensed funeral directors. He was joined by other state senators and representatives who were also licensed funeral directors.44 Typical of bottleneckers, Berry supported his bill by appealing to the need to protect the public from “very unscrupulous people.” A funeral director colleague in the House, Representative Perry Coffey, was more candid about the bill, objecting to anyone being able to sell funeral merchandise, suggesting that “they are infringing on funeral directors, we think.”45
By the time Pastor Craigmiles began looking into the funeral industry, the anticompetitive measures like those advocated by Berry and his colleagues were already having their intended effects. One analysis estimated that funeral homes under a regime of licensure charged approximately 11 percent more than retailers not burdened by licensure.46 Another study found an even-greater disparity—68 percent—when comparing the prices of caskets sold in funeral homes to those available through Internet casket sellers.47
For Pastor Craigmiles, it was “robbery without a pistol,”48 especially for the modest-income parishioners he served. When he began pastoring in 1988, his congregation comprised just fourteen people. By the time he retired, his church had grown to more than four hundred members. The core of its membership included many poor and uneducated members of the community who came to the church off the street. In Pastor Craigmiles, the parishioners of Marble Top Missionary Baptist Church found not a man of inaccessible piety but one of their own who had turned away from his own life on the street in order to care for his family and heed a call to ministry, which might have surprised those who knew him before he settled down in Tennessee.
Although Craigmiles was born and raised in Chattanooga, he eventually left his hometown to serve in the military in Vietnam and then settled in Boston, where his life took a dark turn. He began associating with a criminal element in the city and over time began laundering money for the mafia. Making matters worse, a recreational drug habit turned into a gripping heroin addiction, and he tumbled out of control, finally landing in both state and federal prison. The man who emerged from prison was not the same as the one who entered it. Unlike many who grow hardened and embittered, Craigmiles gave his life over to God, resulting in a radically changed life and, unlike so many who leave incarceration, a successful transition back into society.
After his father died in 1983 and his mother became ill, he returned to Chattanooga to care for her. She died just a few years later, but by then he had decided to remain in Tennessee. There, he married, raised a family, and began pastoring a growing-yet-needy flock, caring for church members at the beginning of their lives and at the end. For a decade, he presided over the funerals of church members, unaware of what funeral directors were doing to their loved ones.
The course of his life changed again when it came time to help his wife bury her mother. Outraged by what he learned from this experience, he invested his life savings, took out a loan, and opened a business in May 1999 to help the people of his church by providing caskets at a much-less-expensive price than was offered at Chattanooga’s funeral homes.49 “I couldn’t stand any longer to see people having to mortgage their homes to pay for a decent burial,” he said.50 The caskets he sold in his store were priced anywhere from half to a quarter of what local funeral homes were charging.51 His caskets typically sold for $800. The exact-same caskets—bought from the exact-same manufacturers—sold for $2,000 in local funeral homes.
Although Pastor Craigmiles had secured city and county business licenses, no one had told him casket sellers required a funeral director’s license.52 For the pastor, getting one was simply not an option. Securing such a license would have required him to either enroll in a school approved by the state funeral board and participate in a one-year apprenticeship or to complete a two-year apprenticeship and assist with twenty-five funerals. At the time, the only Tennessee school approved by the funeral board was Gupton College, more than 130 miles away from his home, in Nashville. The most popular program took sixteen months to complete and cost between $10,000 and $12,000 in tuition and other expenses. Applicants also had to pass a funeral board exam.53
Even if he had had the time and resources to complete all those requirements, Pastor Craigmiles saw no point in doing it. Nothing about the selling of a casket—essentially an empty box—necessitated such requirements from his perspective. “You don’t have to buy a car from a mechanic,” he protested. “Why should you have to buy a casket from a funeral home?”54 Moreover, he rationalized that he would never be handling any human remains; he merely sought to sell a casket at a discount and then deliver it to a funeral home for the customer’s use.
On July 7, 1999, just months after Pastor Craigmiles opened for business, the state funeral board forced him to close.55 A cease-and-desist order was, in fact, delivered to him personally by the funeral board’s president. The pastor told the president to take his order back to where it came from and vowed to continue operating, but the next morning he found the store sealed by the sheriff “with the biggest padlock I’d ever seen.”56 Had he cut off the lock and opened the store, he would have been arrested.
His outrage over artificially inflated casket prices intensified following the funeral board’s actions, and on September 16, 1999, he and three other plaintiffs sued the board and the attorney general’s office, calling the licensing law an unconstitutional deprivation of their right to earn an honest living.57
Publicly, the funeral board—made up of six funeral directors and an attorney58—defended its actions by pointing to the law’s bureaucratic function: “Our responsibility is to enforce the law as passed by the legislature. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do,” said Arthur Giles, the board’s executive director.59 Reasons given by other funeral-industry representatives in support of the law ranged from the routine to the ridiculous. Citations of concern for public health and safety, such as safe disposal of bodies and consumer protection, were the most common,60 and the potential for the inaccuracy of death statistics unless only licensed funeral directors sold caskets was asserted by other industry insiders.61 Funeral-industry leaders stuck to such claims, even though residents could buy discount caskets over the Internet without the help of a representative or from other out-of-state third-party sellers, and funeral homes were required by law to accept them. Moreover, residents of Tennessee were legally permitted to use homemade caskets, and families or church groups could dispose of bodies without an undertaker or a funeral director.62
Months after filing the lawsuit, as the case was underway, the judge lifted the cease-and-desist order, and Pastor Craigmiles reopened his business. As attention to his case increased, he began receiving threatening calls and notes. Although he did not know their precise source, he suspected they were from funeral home competitors: “They said unless we shut down something was going to happen. This is big money, and we are just little people. I consider it a threat, and we’re taking this seriously and are thinking about repercussions.”63
As the legal proceedings wore on, the hooliganism continued. Caskets Pastor Craigmiles delivered to funeral homes in mint condition were intentionally scratched and damaged by funeral personnel to sully his reputation. His store windows were regularly smashed, and funeral-industry thugs threatened him with bodily harm.64 Unbowed, he continued to sell caskets to his clientele, who had grown to include not only poor members of the community in need of moderately priced caskets but also middle- and upper-income buyers who were becoming increasingly
