The guy Cheney shot was involved in Funeralgate (gravedumping by Bush pal)

[StefanX]

In 1999, Bush named Austin lawyer Harry Whittington (shot this weekend by Dick Cheney) to be the new director of Texas State Funeral Commission after a major shakeup in which the former director, Eliza May, was fired while investigating accusations of grave-dumping by SCI, the largest funeral-home operator in the world, headed by Robert Waltrip, a longtime Bush friend and major campaign contributor.

In 1999, while Bush was still Governor of Texas, he appointed Austin lawyer Harry Whittington to replace Eliza May as head of the Texas State Funeral Commission (TSFC) after a major shakeup in which she was fired while investigating accusations of grave desecration by a cemetery company owned by a longtime Bush friend. Ms. May later filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit alleging that she had been fired because her agency had been investigating allegations that a major Bush contributor, Houston-based SCI (Service Corporation International, the largest funeral-home operator in the world, burying 1 in every 9 Americans) had been desecrating graves to save money. Bush, under oath, denied ordering his aides (including his chief of staff and campaign manager Joe Allbaugh, who Bush would later appoint as head of FEMA) to pressure Ms. May to drop the investigation into his friends at SCI, but his testimony was contradicted by four other sworn witnesses. She later received a $210,000 out-of-court settlement.

The problems with SCI included a big lawsuit accusing the company of "recycling" bodies in several Jewish cemeteries it owned in the Palm Beach, Florida area, cramming new cadavers into existing graves, or digging up the dead and tossing their bones into the woods nearby. In late 2001 the media briefly reported on "Funeralgate" when Peter Hartmann, an SCI funeral operator from Boca Raton who had been brought in to clean up the funeral scandal, was found dead in his garage of carbon monoxide poisoning. Hartmann was a devout Catholic and devoted family man who was described by a co-worker as a very upright person who "always tried to do the right thing". His death was ruled suicide by the local police department.

In a separate story, last week Whittington won round three of a legal battle against the city of Austin, Texas, which had recently used the new "eminent domain" laws to seize a block his family has owned since 1980 in downtown Austin and build a garage on it.

A longer version of this thread, complete with links and photos, is here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x403342