"I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa

by Charles Brandt

I learned how breathtakingly easy it was in Michigan in 1975 to legally cremate a body without any paper trail. All that was needed was something called a “transit permit,” and in practice it really wasn’t needed. These were slips of paper the size of a dollar bill. There were no duplicates, just an original. It would be supplied to a driver by a funeral director, who typically kept a pad of them in his desk drawer. They would get filed nowhere. They would not be given to the crematorium. It was simply a licensed funeral director giving any driver who possessed a “transit permit” permission to drive around with a body. This phrase reminded me of the “letters of transit” in the Michael Curtiz classic film Casablanca. The driver would pull up and hand a groundskeeper ninety-five dollars, often in cash. The body would be in a body bag or cheap pine cremation coffin. The bag or coffin would never be opened. The driver and his helper, or a cemetery groundskeeper if the driver came alone, would lift the body and slide it into the retort, or oven. One of them would flip what looked like an ordinary light switch. In an hour everything, including the body bag or flimsy pine box, would be reduced to cremains, an ash residue in the shape of a body. The groundskeeper would come back in an hour and using a window squeegee he’d push the cremains into a small cream-colored plastic box for pickup by the driver. The ash would have no scientific or other means of identification. Very often ...