I'm the president and owner of Crime Scene Cleaners.
We clean up death scenes, like homicides. You know, the room where someone gets murdered. We also handle suicides, accidental deaths, meth labs, things like that. A lot of people have the assumption that police take care of the cleanup after a crime.
That's not true. It's never been true. If Johnny or Sally gets shot in your house, or your store, and there's brains everywhere, it's your problem. You have to do the cleaning. It's not the police's responsibility at all. You clean it. Or else you call my company or one of my competitors.
The idea to start this business came to me six years ago. I was twenty-five years old. I'd just been laid off from my job as division manager at a mortgage banking firm. There I was, wallowing for weeks in my unemployment misery, when one day, bam! I was watching the movie Pulp Fiction. And you know that scene where they blew the guy away in the back of the car and then had to bring in Harvey Keitel to clean the whole thing up? Well, I saw that scene and I thought, wow, that's intriguing. Are there people out there doing this kind of job in real life? I did some research and found out that the answer was yes. But there were only a few companies, and they weren't marketing themselves to a broad-based range of clients. They weren't selling effectively. Well, I knew I could sell, I just didn't know if I could do that kind of cleaning. So I made some phone calls.
I called every janitorial company, anyone who had anything to do with cleaning. I made literally thousands of calls. I'm a neat freak, typically, but I didn't know how professional companies carried out their work. So I took a job with Merry Maids for a couple of weeks. Merry Maids is a residential cleaning company, sort of the McDonald's of maids-really cheap, really shitty. But working there taught me a lot about technique.
Then, next, I started contacting coroners and police, because they were going to be my target audience. I was gonna give them a percentage to give me business referrals. You know, so like somebody dies, the cops show up, they're like, "Hey, we know a guy who'll clean this up." They send me the business, they get a cut of my fee. Good idea, right? No. Wrong. Because what I found out is that they're not allowed to give out referrals, due to liability. They can't give one, they have to offer a list of cleaning companies, so there's no issue of favoritism That was a bit discouraging, but whatever, I was into it by then. I just changed gears and I started targeting the people at mortuaries. They can give referrals.
My first job came on referral from a mortician. The victim's sister hired us. It was a lady down in the Marina Bay area of Richmond. She had terminal cancer and she' d blown her brains out-shot herself in the head with a .357. Experience-wise, it wasn't too messy-just enough to cut my teeth and kind of get an indicator of whether I could do this. And I learned I was capable of doing it. When the cleanup was done and I named my price, the client started cutting a check without any hesitation whatsoever. I knew immediately that this work was for me.
Of course, back then, I was totally inept. My partner and I-I used my wife as my partner on that job-we were there for three hours and I only charged two hundred and fifty dollars. Now, I'd be there an hour and we'd charge five seventy-five.
So I've learned. I've learned so much.
My second job was so hardcore - I'll never forget it. When I think. of how little I knew, doing a job like that, it just makes me laugh. It was at a fairly upscale condominium complex in Oakland. A hugely fat guy had died on his hide-a-bed.
Weeks, weeks, and weeks had gone by and no one had discovered him. He was a loner. No one knew he was dead until they smelled it outside, and by that rime, it was atrocious. My assistant and I - this time it was my sister - opened the door and this ungodly smell just slammed us, big rime. We hadn't learned about wearing respirators yet. We hadn't a clue. Well, the whole bottom of this guy' s bed was encased in plastic from the manufacturer, and the plastic had trapped all these fluids. So I was moving the bed around, and it started stirring up these juices. And when I tip the bed over, not realizing what's going on inside of it, this rushing torrent of maggot-filled liquid spews out all over the place - all over the carpet and all over my clothing. I vomited several rimes. My sister started gagging uncontrollably until she just couldn't take it anymore. So she ran out the door, and jumped over the deck, right into the pool! That one still rates as the worst "decomp" we've ever done. We knew so little about equipment, disposal techniques, the whole thing.
Disposal is a big issue in this business. And I just wasn't going about it in the best way back then. On my first few jobs, I would gather all this guts-soaked crap into the back of my pickup truck, haul it and burn it in a medical waste incinerator.
It was so disgusting, and somewhat hazardous, not to mention a huge hassle and monetary expense. Today, I would suck up that guy's waste - all those maggots and that fetid liquid - with an extractor. You're basically shampooing the waste out of the carpet or wherever, and then sucking it into a tank, where it gets hit with this enzyme that kills any body fluid you can imagine. After that chemical hits it, it can be flushed down the toilet. Any remaining solid waste-the affected area of.the carpet, for instance - goes to the dump and gets put into landfill. It' s totally legal. When I started using the extractor' my profits skyrocketed. Landfill costs two bucks a pound, and incineration is like six bucks a pound. That extractor tripled my returns, It also made the whole disposal operation much safer, which is seriously important. Because if I violate any of the rules, I could really get hammered.
These days, there are a lot of companies that do what I do. Everything's regulated by the Department of Health Services and OSHA, which is Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA regulates the cleaning, and DHS oversees the disposal. So we're doubly regulated. If your operation's not right, you're dead, The first-time fine for illegality cleaning and disposing is twenty thousand dollars. But that's actually great for business, because these rules are imposed on everyone - even relatives of homicide, suicide, and accident victims. If they decide to do the cleanup themselves, they have to abide by these regulations, just like we do. And officially, these unlicensed parties are supposed to file for a "cleaning pass" before they do the job. But there's a three- to four-day turnaround to get that pass from the state. And, I mean, if you have your son's brains dripping from your ceiling, you 'want it taken care of yesterday. You're not gonna wanna wait for that pass. You don't want to deal with it, you want it cleaned and you want to be charged a fair price. That's why it makes obvious sense to hire a company like mine. We usually arrive in a matter of hours, we do the job quickly, with a smile on our face, one-stop and then we're out of there. And unless it's a really severe job, we try to keep our prices down. We rarely charge more than two grand for a job - much cheaper than the fine.
It's a very good business. Very, very good. That's not saying it's easy, though.
There are definitely jobs that wear on you. We did this one recently out in Crow' County, off the 680 freeway corridor, rural as hell. Some guy breaks into his ex.
wife's house - she's away on business, works half the year in Japan for Chevron or something. So he doesn't like her, so he gets into her bed and shoots himself in the head, and then just sits there for three months until she comes home and finds him.
No joke. By the time we got there, there was a foot of rat shit in the bedroom. The rats had been eating the corpse. The guy had totally decomposed, and I swear to God, you could see minute details of his body and flesh imprinted on the bed, down to his hair. His spinal fluids, cerebral cranium fluids, everything, had purged from his body. And with every step you take, you're crunching, and I mean crunching like Wheaties, on dead flies, because they've been feasting and laying their eggs near the body.
And we're standing there, drenched in sweat. Tyvex suits don't breathe, nor do respirators, so you're just drenched. Meanwhile, the radio is still playing. I guess when the guy killed himself he had this radio strapped around the brass bed frame behind him, so his head is between the railings and he has a radio earpiece in his ear, blasting KGO. Very creepy. Very surreal.
So it goes without saying that this is some nasty shit that I deal with. Fortunately, for me, as the owner, these individual jobs are not that important to my business anymore. My real bread and butter now comes from the corporate clients I've got under contract, nationwide. That's where I'm making the real money. And that's also where I'm focusing my energy.
I think of big corporate clients as gems. I targeted them all specifically. We do the Denny's and Coco's chains. And right now I have two of the largest grocery store chains-Safeway and Von's - under contract. We do everything for them. If the butcher cuts a thumb off and bleeds all over the goddamn store, we clean it up. If an old lady becomes incontinent and does her thing all over the store, we clean it.
li there's a murder in a store, we do it.
I also do all of Motel 6, and yesterday, I signed the Westin St. Francis Hotels, which is another major contract. Most hotel jobs all homicides or suicides. Every single hotel in this country has had at least one. I also clean up meth labs, which all very prevalent in the low-end places. We do about thirteen a month, average. Motel 6 gets by far the most. It's that thirty-three-dollar a night clientele.
These people - tweakers, we call them - rent a room, and then use it to manufacture methamphetamine. It's easy to make, and very profitable. But you cook up fifty pounds and it leaves up to like five, six hundred pounds of by-product waste, which is highly toxic. When we walk into those labs, they smell like jet fuel - extremely noxious. And the walls are yellow with residue. There's red phosphorus in the carpets. No hotel wants to deal with that themselves.
So we do it. And then we turn around and - and this is our real value to our corporate clients - when we take on a job we become responsible for that site's sanitary condition. All liability gets shifted to us The hotel's not legally responsible anymore. Let's say we don't do a good cleaning job: Let's say a scumbag in there has hepatitis, and he expires, let's say of liver failure, and it leaks out. Let's say we miss some blood, and there's hepatitis-tainted blood under the baseboard, and it goes airborne and the next guest inhales it and gets hepatitis and can prove where it came from. Then the hotel can get sued. But with the release of liability., they don't get sued. I get sued. I have a fìve-million-dollar insurance policy. But I don't need it - because I don't make those mistakes. I can't afford to. I have a serious reputation to protect.
My business has grown enormously over the past six years. We're at the top of this game. We've got the hotels, the grocery stores, contacts with Santa Clara, Alameda, Santa Cruz, and Contra Costa counties for outdoor public incidents.
We've done all the big jobs in California for the past few years: Heaven's Gate, Phil Hartman, the Lafayette murder. If something happens in the Bay Area, we've got the job. We do about one-point-three jobs a day in this county alone.
I have three hundred and seventeen employees, nationwide. All of them are trained personally by me, here in California. And except for my four managers, every one of them is a freelancer, ready to work at a moment's notice. Because, you see, I have guaranteed our response time across the country, which is no joke. I mean, in my contract with these companies like Motel 6, I'm guaranteeing a response time. So somebody blows their brains out of a Motel 6 in wherever - the middle of Montana - I have to have somebody in there within a fixed window of time to earn my full fee. But it would be ridiculous for me to keep a guy on payroll someplace like that where I might get two calls a year, right? So what I've done is I've developed a dependable roster of freelance employees throughout the country.
I've hired people who're already working in related areas full-time and they do my stuff part-time. Usually they're coronary staff, mortuary staff, or property management staff. They're professionals in the field. I've trained them, and they're ready to go whenever. But I don't pay them unless they're working. They just get commission. So we get that call from the middle of Montana, well, we've got a guy working in a mortuary near there. So bam! We call him. It's two in the morning, whenever, he's out of bed. He's on-site. He does the job and makes a hundred and fifty bucks, which is a nice wage for a few hours of work. And, if he brings me the business himself, he gets a thirty percent commission of every referral. So, let's say one of my reps works at a property where there's been a suicide, and he refers the job to me and does the cleanup. Not only is he going to get one-fifty for the on-site work, he'll also thirty percent of the gross. If we do a two-thousand-dollar job, then he's getting a big chunk of change.
But, if you work for me, and I call you at two in the morning and tell you to go to work and you hesitate, that's it. Never mind. You're not working for me anymore. I hang up. I call my next rep. Because I'm under the gun. I don't give second chances. I don't have to, I have too many people asking for work. I don't care if you don't like me. I don't care if I'm gruff. I have a goal and I have a plan to achieve the goal and if you're m my way, get out of the way. That's it. You work for me, I don't work for you. Start your own company and hire me, and then you can tell me what to do.
Because, you know, I talk about these commissions and referrals and all that, but the person bringing most of these jobs to the table is me. I'm out in the field, getting nasty, maybe four out of seven days a week. The rest of the time I'm making sales calls to all these different companies. It's a constant sell because every mortuary, every hotel, every condominium complex, every grocery stare and restaurant chain across the country is a potential client. And the sale itself is the most important aspect of my work. You can always fix the cleaning. If you screw the sale, you can't fix it. You only get one shot.
I am the only person who does sales for my company. All sales and marketing is done by me. It's my strength. I go out and sell, get in people's faces. If it has anything to do with death, I go. I'm extremely aggressive. I hound people, mercilessly , I get on people like stink. They're going to meet with me or they're going to tell me to fuck off. And generally they're going to meet with me. And because of that, my business has taken off. I work a good fourteen to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. I love what I do. I'm always on call. I could get a job right now, and I'd go. My truck's right outside. The only reason I'm even home right now is because I'm waiting for the movers to come. My wife can't take my lifestyle, so today, I'm out of here. I'm leaving her. She says we don't have enough time to spend together and she's right. I mean, we did seven hundred jobs last year. We've done over three hundred this year and it's only April. I don't really have time for a relationship and I don't really care.
I have no life outside of this. Because the company is my girl, my dope.
And this is the moment. This is the time to be in this business. America is violent as shit right now and it's not gonna stop. The baby boomers are going to be dropping dead, the largest population m history. I think the next five to ten years are going to be our record years.
I'm thirty-one now. My goal is wealth, bottom line. I want to be fucking wealthy. I want to be bodyguard rich-so rich that I need a bodyguard wherever I go. I would like to be able to do whatever I want, at any time. If I use a helicopter to go somewhere, I want to be able to buy that fucking helicopter. That' s the kind of wealth I'm talking about And I'm going to achieve it or die trying.
Of course, I'd also like the more typical things. Like kids, you know? In a few years, I'd like some kids of my own - a couple of kids. I believe there's nothing you can't have; it's just a matter of how much do you want to sacrifice, to lose, to get it.
Now I have no life, I have no marriage. I didn't devote time to it, to nourish it. But believe me, if I have kids I'm not going to just disappear on them. I will be there for my kids. They will be my priority. And just having kids - that'll make me want to come home at night. It'll give me a reason.
I may even quit this job one day. I doubt it, because I like it too much, but I might quit. More likely, eventually I'll sell, and I'll make a mint. And then I'll start another company. I've been thinking about that. I'd maybe like to do something with the hanta virus -cleaning up roads and excrement. Have you heard of the hanta virus? It's a communicable disease. I'd really like to deve1op a communicable disease mitigation company. The challenge of that business would be the danger. It's just much more dangerous than this. Here - I'm risking maybe contracting hepatitis. That's a fear. But there's a vaccine for that. What I want to - this communicable disease stuff - let's say there's a neighborhood full of hot tuberculosis, I want to be the company to come in and deal with it. Have you seen the movie The Hot Zone, or read the book? That's what I'd like to be doing. It's definitely more dangerous. It could kill you right now. That excites me. And the money involved in that - that's the real deal.
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