Ex-Cemetery Chief Took Endowment Funds, State Alleges

The former chief of the state Cemetery Board, a crusading reformer who brought to light the dark side of a troubled California burial industry, illegally accepted more than $10,000 of a cemetery’s endowment fund and used some of the money for personal expenditures, according to a state auditor’s report.

Raymond Giunta, who lost his post when the state Department of Consumer Affairs took over the duties of the Cemetery Board on Jan. 1, is the primary subject of a scathing report released Wednesday.

The 26-page document alleges that Giunta violated state “incompatible activity” laws by accepting money from a cemetery under his control, establishing savings and checking accounts with the money and then writing checks using those funds to himself, his wife, a charity he oversees and others. The report also accuses Giunta of mismanaging the Cemetery Board during his 1 1/2 years as executive director.

A part-time employee of the Cemetery Board, whose name was not released, also is accused of illegally writing $3,840 worth of checks to himself from the account of a cemetery that was under state control.

Both could face criminal and civil charges if the Sacramento district attorney’s office decides to prosecute, said Consumer Affairs spokeswoman Maria Chacon Kniestedt.

Giunta, a 33-year-old ordained minister who conducts occasional funerals and does counseling, said Wednesday that the cemetery had never been seized by the state and did not even fall within the Cemetery Board’s jurisdiction. The cemetery was too small and too old to fall under state regulation, he said, and never had an endowment fund. The money, he said, was in a savings-type account, not a trust fund, that was temporarily in the state’s keeping.

The investigation began in April 1995--months before Giunta and his staff raided two Southern California cemeteries and accused them of macabre misdeeds--after an anonymous tipster called the state’s “whistle-blower” hotline, said state Auditor Kurt R. Sjoberg.

The most potentially damaging accusation in the report involves the murky transfer of endowment care funds, sacrosanct accounts to be used only for a cemetery’s upkeep. The funds in question once belonged to Arlington Cemetery in Sacramento County and allegedly wound up in the hands of Giunta.

According to state investigators, Arlington Cemetery, whose bank accounts had for years been under state control, was purchased in November 1994 by a private party. On Dec. 29, 1994, Giunta--who as executive director of the Cemetery Board had control of trust funds from all cemeteries taken over by the state--mailed the new owner a bank check for $10,237.66, the amount in Arlington’s endowment account at the time of the sale.

After the new owner received the check, according to investigators, he endorsed it back to Giunta.

Giunta agrees that he signed the check over to the new owner, who then signed it back to him, hiring him to help fix up and modernize the cemetery. But he said investigators know that the money was not in restricted accounts, and that the owner also set up a separate endowment fund that now has $25,000 in it.

On Jan. 17, 1995, investigators allege, Giunta opened checking and savings accounts with the money. Although the accounts were in the name of the cemetery, according to the report, the signatory card lists only Giunta’s name, and the taxpayer identification number on the accounts is Giunta’s Social Security number.

Giunta went on to write $6,426 worth of checks using the accounts’ money to his wife, his dry cleaner, his child care provider, other personal creditors and a religious charity--called We Care Ministries--of which Giunta is the president, according to the report.

The report agrees that Giunta told investigators he believed the funds were simply left over from the previous owner, and not protected endowment money.

But state officials contend that not only did the payment violate state laws that prohibit state employees from receiving compensation from people whose businesses they regulate, but also laws that prohibit anyone from touching the principal from cemetery trust funds.

In addition to accepting the illegal payment, investigators allege that Giunta did such a poor job of managing the trust funds of other cemeteries under his control as to constitute a “breach of duty.” Of 11 cemetery trusts in his care in 1995, investigators contend, seven--worth a total of $44,000--earned no interest.

Also in the report, another unnamed employee of the Cemetery Board is accused of illegally writing $3,840 worth of checks to himself on an endowment account at Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs. Although the employee reported he had permission from Paradise officials to write the checks shortly after the state seized the graveyard last summer, the report states, the act violated “incompatible activity” laws.

Giunta and his staff of four were heralded last year for uncovering abuses at Paradise, Lincoln Memorial Park in Carson and Sunnyside Cemetery in Long Beach.

A pile of bones was discovered at Paradise, where graves had allegedly been dug up and resold, and the cemetery’s trust fund was raided. At Lincoln, headstones were found tossed into trash bins, some caskets were buried just two or three inches below the surface, and endowment money was again missing.

Dean A. Dempsey, 43, the former owner of Sunnyside, was arrested Jan. 5 and charged with stealing $500,000 from that graveyard’s trust fund.

Giunta said he could only speculate that the state was exacting revenge on him for exposing the problems in the state’s cemeteries and officials’ failure to do anything about those troubles. “People had to shoot the messenger, I guess,” he said.