Word: neale
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Nobody forced Alan Emmins to clean up a crime scene. The British journalist had never written about crime and had no experience with anything involving blood. But there was something about Neal Smithers, owner of San Francisco-based Crime Scene Cleaners, that made Emmins want to find out what he was missing. His book Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners follows Smithers - who started his company after watching Pulp Fiction - from a double murder to a slit-wrist suicide, and all the gruesome, partially decomposed scenes in-between...
Were there any aspects of death that you were surprised to learn, that you hadn't heard of or thought of before? I think the actions of the people surrounding the victims are what surprised me the most. When I was working with Neal, there was one elderly man we were cleaning up who had decomposed for almost a month. Standing in the driveway was this guy's daughter and grandchild, and they lived within 5 miles of this man. They never even checked in on him. And that's the stuff that's really staggering - the people who stand...
...many jobs did Neal do a day? I think at the time we were averaging 150 jobs a month, but they weren't all deaths. Neal has a lot of deals with hotels and motels, which are a common place to commit suicide. But he also cleaned up vomit in police cars. There are really strict laws about who can clean up fluids in a prison or a police car. I think they stem from this one time when an officer cleaned blood out of the police car and contracted hepatitis, and so he sued the state...
...there any point where you thought, This is too much. I can't take this - I'm gonna go write about something nicer? Oh yep. I remember going out there and thinking Neal was this ghastly person. His slogan was "Praying for Death." He'd say that every morning he'd wake up and pray for death, and it would just keep coming. He'd get delighted when he received a phone call about a shotgun suicide. I remember thinking he was this mean, horrible character. And then the same thing happened to me. I was trying to write...
...fail and the resulting cascade has been breathtaking. Until Madoff admitted to his family that his entire career as one of the most successful money managers in the world was a fraud, the global economic collapse did not have a face. Men like Chuck Prince and Stan O'Neal were too bland and their sins were based on greed and stupidity not genius and deception...