Raising a Man from the Dead

By Maureen Dowd

Insurance investigators claim to uncover an elaborate fraud

Just past daybreak on July 27, 1981, Robert Granberg and two friends set out from his home in Staten Island, N.Y., on a fishing trip. At a dock in Atlantic Highlands, N.J., they bought bait and rented a weathered 15-foot rowboat with a small outboard engine. "I hope none of us falls overboard," one of the men laughingly told a deckhand as they headed out to sea. "None of us can swim."

The trio--made up of Granberg, a retired New York state investigator; Salvatore Rignola, a New York City fire marshal; and Julian Farriel, a house painter--were buffeted by bruising ocean tides. Rignola and Farriel would later tell the authorities that Granberg, 6 ft. 4 in. and 275 lbs., offered to change places with Rignola, who was perched precariously in the middle. As Granberg stood up, his friends said, his foot slipped on the wet seat, and he vanished overboard.

A frantic search with another fishing boat and a Coast Guard launch and helicopter turned up not a trace. Rignola and Farriel were left to break the news to Bob's wife and their two children, Lisa and Eric, then 12 and 9.

Granberg, at 49, was known in the neighborhood as a tough, swaggering man who was reportedly prone, during minor community disputes, to flash the gun he usually wore. He had quit his job as an investigator for the state's Division of Human Rights in 1979 after developing cardiac arrhythmia, a minor heart condition but serious enough for him to collect disability payments. On $18,000 a year, the family had been living a simple and secluded life in their middle-class neighborhood.

Judy Granberg was to inherit no financial worries. Her husband, it turned out, had insured himself over the years with six insurance companies for $750,000. Judy quickly shifted into a faster lane. Instead of the family's old Ford Granada, she began driving a gray $50,000 Mercedes. She enrolled her children in the New York Military Academy, a coed private school. The family traveled around the country in high style, staying at hotels and eating in chic restaurants. She changed their name to Brent, sold her home and rented a garden townhouse in Cornwall, N.Y.

Eight months after her husband's disappearance, Mrs. Granberg petitioned the court to have him declared legally dead. Although his body had never been found, the case seemed straightforward. He had a minor heart condition. There had been two witnesses. In March 1982, a judge ruled the death legal; by September, $208,000 in payments had poured in.

Only Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York (MONY) balked at paying, claiming Granberg was still alive. Although phony death claims are extremely rare--less than one-tenth of 1% of all death claims are found to be fraudulent--MONY's chief litigation counsel, Jerry Alan Marr, was suspicious about Granberg. He "was overinsured for a man of his means," says Marr. A year ago, two other insurance companies, conceding Granberg's death, told his wife they would not pay double indemnity, or extra accident benefits, because they thought Granberg had died of a heart attack, not drowning. Mrs. Granberg sued them, along with MONY. At stake was another $500,000 in benefits and interest. Last February, Marr decided to act on his suspicions. He assigned MONY Investigator Paul Bird to the case, and the two embarked on a dogged, six-month odyssey to prove Granberg had faked his own death. "It was his wits against ours," Marr recalls. "I just knew he wasn't dead."

In May, Bird found a man in a Staten Island bar who claimed that Granberg, a week before his accident, had offered $10,000 to take him out in a boat and come back alone with a tale of drowning. In July, Bird found another source, a relative of Granberg's, who revealed that three months before the accident, Granberg had visited his brother Richard, an ex-convict who lived in Puerto Rico. The relative said Granberg told his brother about the bogus death plot and borrowed his passport. Says Marr: "We believe now that they started planning this almost two years before he disappeared."

Piecing together the scam, the investigators speculate that the scenario unfolded this way: Rignola and Farriel let Granberg off the boat shortly after they left shore, where he was picked up by his wife and driven to the airport to board a flight to London, using his brother's passport. He had friends and contacts in London, where he sometimes used his brother's name and sometimes used the name James Kelly. Six months later, Judy Granberg met her husband in London and stayed with him at an elegant hotel. Then Granberg, investigators believe, returned to New York with his wife. Deftly drawing on the skills he learned as an investigator, Granberg remained incognito by moving periodically and using a series of assumed names and different cars. He would live for weeks or months at a time in various motels in New York, Texas and Florida, joined for stints by his wife and children, who would register under the name of Brent and stay in another room.

On Aug. 20, Marr and Bird, now only hours behind the trail of the Granbergs, staked out one of the family's favorite hiding spots, the Temple Hills Motel in New Windsor, N.Y. The investigators now had enough evidence to bring in state police and federal inspectors for an arrest, and when Granberg walked unsuspectingly out of his motel room, they pounced. Granberg was indicted the following week by a federal grand jury on four counts of fraud and is now in jail in Manhattan, awaiting trial. Judy Granberg, Rignola and Farriel were also arrested on charges of fraud. Says Marr: "The Granbergs were just trying to beat the system, and they almost made it."

--By Maureen Dowd.

Reported by Jonathan Beaty /New York

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.