It’s not just the stolen cash that is so troublesome; victims fear that their dreams of a final resting place may have been dashed. Mercedes Villada Gray, 80, and her husband, Blaine Wilson Gray, 84, planned to be buried side by side in Woodmere Cemetery, near their home in Detroit. Mercedes earned little as a hotel cook but 20 years ago managed to buy pre-needs contracts and cemetery plots. “I paid off our funerals so that our children wouldn’t have to think about it,’’ she says. “And then these folks come around and steal the money?’’

She pauses, then sighs. “I don’t even want an elaborate funeral. All I want is a place to be buried.’’

The roots of this scramble for buried treasure go back to the early 1990s, when Wall Street was swooning over corporate funeral-home chains. Combine enough of these assets, the reasoning went, and a few giant players would dominate a business that most Americans will use at least once.

One beneficiary of this enthusiasm was the Loewen Group, a publicly traded funeral-home behemoth outside Vancouver, British Columbia. Loewen went on a buying spree, snapping up smaller competitors across North America. A collection of 28 cemeteries in Michigan caught Loewen’s fancy in the mid-1990s, but state law presented a problem. To protect consumers from self-dealing firms, Michigan prohibited funeral-home owners from purchasing cemeteries, and Loewen already owned funeral homes in the state.

But this was an era of financial legerdemain, when ownership could be—and often was—hidden. So Loewen’s lawyers went to work, setting up three shell corporations. Loewen bought the 28 cemeteries for $90 million, then sold them to its shells for 10 percent of the purchase price, with the rest owed through a balloon note.

Things seemed to be going well until 1999, when years of overbuying (coupled with a $178 million settlement in an unfair-trade-practices suit) caught up with Loewen, putting its survival in question. With things looking bleak, one of the company’s in-house lawyers, Craig Bush, apparently spotted an opportunity: In January, he bought out the man Loewen was paying to run the three shells. Bush now owned cemeteries worth millions of dollars.

Five months later, Loewen filed for bankruptcy. When creditors demanded those Michigan cemeteries, Bush refused to hand them over. Loewen sued, but the law was on Bush’s side. Through its seemingly clever scheme to hide ownership, Loewen had outsmarted itself—or had been outsmarted by one of its own lawyers.

Not that Bush wanted to run the cemeteries. Once the lawsuit was resolved, he planned to sell them to a competitor, Cornerstone, and pocket millions.

In August 2001, Loewen struck a deal with Bush, who agreed to pay $22 million to sever any remaining financial obligations. With that, Bush was ready to sell.

Then, trouble. Loewen terminated its contract with the provider of the cemeteries’ accounting system, which left Bush blind; he had no means of assessing the financial performance of the cemeteries, and no access to information a buyer would want if the Cornerstone deal fell through. And fall through it did.

Bush’s dream of easy money turned into a nightmare. He was taking on debt. The cemeteries needed upkeep, and he also had to manage the millions in those pre-needs trust funds. What fool would ever take over this mess?

Clayton Smart was no stranger to trouble. His first high-profile run-in with the law was in 1981, when he beat up his son’s soccer coach, breaking the man’s jaw because he thought his 11-year-old deserved more playing time.

The altercation fit with Smart’s volatile personality, according to people in Oklahoma who know him. Whether on the playing field, in the oil field, or just over his regular breakfast at Little Cattleman’s Restaurant in nearby Morris, Smart was a man who, fellow residents said, smashed through all obstacles to get what he wanted.

The son of a shipbuilder, Smart first went into the oil business as a drilling engineer. Later, he set out on his own, forming numerous ventures, including Smart Drilling. None of those enterprises were particularly lucrative, though, and Smart soon demonstrated a willingness to walk away from his companies’ debts.