Zeroing In on 9/11 ‘Vultures’

Cyril Kendall, father of 12, reported his youngest child dead -- a brown-eyed young man in a blue suit, last seen on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Gerard Rinaldi reported the death of his wife, last seen working in the Windows of the World restaurant in the North Tower.

Ricardo Frutos listed three dead relatives, killed as they toured the 42nd floor of the World Trade Center straight off a flight from France.

These were deeply disturbing tales -- not for the people who reported them, but for the police detectives who exposed them as frauds.

“Basically, these people were vultures,” said New York City Police Sgt. Daniel Heinz, whose Special Frauds Squad has spent longer than a year dismantling the elaborate edifice of lies built by people seeking to profit from the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

For all the heroics of the World Trade Center narrative, there is a sad and twisted coda in the bulging pink file folders of the frauds squad. Eighteen months after the towers collapsed, the squad’s nine detectives are still investigating suspicious claims of dead loved ones who, all too often, are either very much alive or never existed at all.

Kendall collected $190,867 from charities, Rinaldi collected $13,500 and Frutos got $47,000 before they were charged with filing false death claims for imaginary victims or, in Rinaldi’s case, for his unsuspecting estranged wife. For his nonexistent son “Wilfred,” Kendall allegedly provided a photo of himself as a young man. After entering guilty pleas, Rinaldi was sentenced to six months in jail, and Frutos got one to three years. Kendall pleaded not guilty and is free on bail awaiting a court hearing.

The frauds have a special resonance for Heinz and other detectives, all of whom lost colleagues or loved ones on Sept. 11. The squad spent the first weeks after the disaster collecting and identifying body parts at the city morgue, making wrenching phone calls to notify relatives of confirmed victims.

“This is an unbelievable responsibility to the people who perished,” Heinz said inside his bunker-like office in East Harlem, where mug shots of phony death case defendants hang near a sign reading, in part: These were not just names and numbers. They were Moms and Dads -- they were our brothers and sisters.

The squad has arrested 38 people who have been charged with filing false death claims. And 158 death reports have been investigated, with about three dozen cases still open and fresh cases still trickling in.

The investigations have helped whittle down what the detectives call “The List,” the roster of World Trade Center dead. The tally, which climbed past 6,000 in the first frantic days after the attacks, dropped to 2,801 by the first anniversary of the disaster. The List stood at 2,792 last week, with Heinz predicting that it will continue to contract with each new fraud conviction.

Phony death reports are perhaps the most ambitious frauds to emerge from the shock and confusion of the disaster, but other imaginative schemes have also siphoned cash from charities, insurance companies and disaster relief agencies. The collapse of the towers seemed to unleash at full throttle the breathtaking gall and creative perversity of the nation’s con artists.

A morgue manager was charged with selling coffins that had been donated by charities. A homeless man was charged with recruiting 13 fellow residents of a homeless shelter to help collect $100,000 from charities to cover losses from nonexistent vendor tables supposedly destroyed in the attacks. A wealthy businesswoman living at the Helmsley Carlton Hotel was charged with collecting $114,653 to cover phony damage to a luxury apartment that was in fact unaffected by the attacks but undergoing expensive renovations well before Sept. 11.

A sense of weary fatalism has settled over those who have spent the months since Sept. 11 attempting to separate truth from fiction in the thousands of claims of lost loved ones, lost jobs and lost possessions. Officials at charities and relief organizations know that every disaster brings out hustlers, but the persistence and audacity of the World Trade Center frauds have still been disillusioning.

“You’d think people wouldn’t try anything under these circumstances, but they do,” said Cindy Ramsey, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, part of a consortium of state and federal agencies intended to root out Sept. 11 fraud. At previous disasters, from floods to hurricanes, FEMA has encountered everything from phony charities to companies offering bogus “FEMA-approved” products.

Among the organizations victimized by fraud is the American Red Cross, which has paid claims ranging from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars to people whose reports later proved false. The agency says experience has taught it to be compassionate first and skeptical later.

“We are a humanitarian organization. We don’t expect people to defraud us,” said Devorah Goldburg, a Red Cross official. “People receive what they say they need.”

At the same time, Goldburg added, “We have to be careful to be good stewards of the donated dollar.”

Suspicious Red Cross workers have helped authorities arrest and charge a long list of people who received emergency cash after filing false loss claims. Walter Rhoden of Brooklyn, for instance, received $1,730 to compensate him for the downtown job he claimed to have lost because of the trade center collapse. In fact, police said, Rhoden had been fired from his law firm a week before the attacks. He has pleaded guilty to forgery and other charges.

The Red Cross says it has no estimate of its total Sept. 11 fraud losses, but Goldburg said they represent a tiny fraction of the $741 million the agency has paid to victims of the disaster.

“Considering the amount of money involved, I think the level of fraud has been remarkably low,” said Barbara Thompson, spokeswoman for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which has prosecuted almost 400 Sept. 11 fraud cases.

The magnitude of the World Trade Center collapse provided a unique opportunity for fraud. Because the remains of many victims were unlikely to be recovered or identified, authorities sped up the process of issuing death certificates -- cutting waiting time from several years to a matter or days or weeks. Predictably, insurance companies and charities were peppered with falsified documents and phony affidavits.

Many people walked away with thousands of dollars after filing death claims for nonexistent loved ones, at least until investigators had time later to re-examine their cases.

Most insurance companies decided “to pay now and ask questions later,” said James Quiggle of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. “Some insurers deliberately erred on the side of compassion, but they weren’t willing to roll over and be a personal ATM for everyone who claimed they lost a relative.”

The industry has processed an estimated $5 million to $10 million in phony death claims, Quiggle said. In most cases, it did not take long to spot holes in the elaborate facades constructed by claimants.

A Georgia man, Charles Gavett, told New York City police that his wife, Cynthia, never returned from an appointment at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. He collected $273,000 from four insurance companies. But an insurance investigator, noticing that no obituary for the woman was ever published, checked with the local sheriff, who said he had seen Cynthia Gavett alive and well weeks after Sept. 11. The Gavetts were sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The Red Cross flew Daniel Djoro from Michigan, put him up in a Manhattan hotel and gave him $268,000 in emergency relief funds after he claimed to have lost a brother in the Sept. 11 attacks. Investigators later discovered that Djoro didn’t have a brother, and that the name he provided was actually an alias Djoro had used. Djoro pleaded guilty to fraud charges.

Tyrone Darks filed a death claim for his wife from a unique location -- death row at an Oklahoma prison. Darks mailed a death claim saying his wife, Sherry Goodlow, died in the trade center collapse. Authorities knew Goodlow had died in 1994, for Darks was convicted of murdering her.

Some defendants actually did lose loved ones -- but not on Sept. 11. Police said the mother of Rowena West of the Bronx died in 1998 and not, as West claimed, during a World Trade Center visit on Sept. 11. West had collected $31,000. And detectives found a 12-year-old death certificate in Colombia for the father of Rosalba Wild of Manhattan, who had received $75,000 after claiming her father had died at the trade center.

West pleaded guilty to grand larceny charges and was sentenced to six months in jail and five years’ probation. Wild pleaded guilty to filing a false report to a charity. In many cases, defendants have returned all or part of the money, which was taken into consideration at sentencing. Charities also are attempting to recover funds.

In some cases, people had opportunity smack them in the faces, and they apparently could not resist.

More than 100 members of the Municipal Credit Union in New York City have been charged with stealing at least $7,500 each from the union after its banking system was disabled by the trade center collapse. Concerned that members would need emergency cash, the union decided to keep the system operating despite its inability to monitor account balances. Police say members withdrew thousands of dollars more than their accounts actually held.

In other fraud cases, defendants apparently believed that in the chaos and confusion following the attacks, no one would bother checking dubious claims. It was not difficult, however, for investigators to verify claims by people who said they lost jobs at prominent law firms and insurance companies -- and with the local government.

Twelve men and women, for instance, were charged with stealing a total of $19,581 from charities by falsely claiming to have lost jobs. They filed the claims on their days off -- from the Port Authority, the agency that operated the World Trade Center. The workers did not lose their jobs, but were merely reassigned to different Port Authority locations after Sept. 11.

At the Special Frauds Squad, Heinz and the other detectives had been warned by investigators who had worked the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to brace themselves. The detectives had been hardened by years of investigating mail fraud, check fraud, pickpockets and other scams and hustles of urban life. Even so, they have struggled to contain their emotions when confronted with the sacrilege of phony death claims.

“It has tested our professionalism,” Heinz said. “I mean, we have to deal with people who are mixed in with all those people who really did perish, including our fellow police officers.”

The detectives assume people are telling the truth until proven otherwise, Heinz said. Claimants are treated as if they really had lost a loved one -- until they become evasive or begin to contradict themselves.

Inside the squad’s windowless offices, a sign on a wall quotes Ernest Hemingway: “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man.... “

“So much of this stuff is easily checkable,” Heinz said. “My detectives are pretty good. Once they get the scent, they’re on it.”

As a third-generation New York City cop, Heinz has developed a profound understanding of human nature. He knows the limits of deceit, and the natural tendency to dissemble when pressed. He knows, too, that the cardboard boxes stuffed with death fraud case files will continue to fill up.

All around Heinz last week, detectives worked the phones and poked through files. He watched them and said: “We’re liable to be at this for a good long while.”