NEW YORK — 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.
