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THEY GOT CAPONE ON TAX CHARGES

February 29, 2008

Another serious criminal has been brought to justice on tax charges, reports UnionLeader.com:

The man who operated a Seabrook crematorium where bodies were mishandled and ashes were left unlabeled was sentenced to prison yesterday for tax evasion.

Derek Wallace, 37, of Salisbury, Mass., was sentenced to 1 1/2 to three years in jail and ordered to pay $240,000 in restitution for failing to pay taxes on what prosecutors described as massive amounts of money, much of it cash, that flowed through his Bayview Crematorium and other funeral related businesses. Bayview was raided in 2005 by state police, who discovered unlabeled ashes, two bodies in one oven and a body decomposing in a broken freezer.

I suppose they had them in the oven because there was no room in the broken freezer.

Speaking of Al Capone, the IRS has realeased the records of the criminal tax investigation of Al Capone (hat tip:The Tax Prof). This one is fun - it reads like it was written by an IRS agent who read too much Dashiell Hammett, but who was a skilled typist:

It's rare for the IRS to release historical documents because of the blanket statutory prohibition against releasing tax return information. The IRS said this could only be released because Capone never filed a return. A rule that would allow the release of historical tax information - maybe after 50 years - is long overdue. Instead, the tax returns of, say, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, which would be of great historical interest, are guarded like an illicit gospel in the Vatican. It's a shame.

Tags: tax crime.tax history.

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