c. 1998 Religion News Service

LOS ANGELES _ In a handful of chic West Hollywood boutiques, artifacts that once graced New Orleans’ famous cemeteries are all the rage.

“A lot of New Orleans stuff winds up here,” said Phillip Leiaghat, owner of Pom-Pom. “People in L.A. die for this stuff.”

People in New Orleans, of course, have already died for the stuff _ the iron crosses, urns, gates and benches that bring a personal touch and rare beauty to the above-ground Cities of the Dead. Now they serve as expensive bric-a-brac, decorating Southern California gardens and homes.

Selling for thousands of dollars, New Orleans cemetery artifacts _ real or purported _ constitute a significant part of the offerings at a handful of Los Angeles stores recently listed by Buzz magazine as the city’s “hippest” antiques outlets.

Such wares sometimes are hot in more ways than one, though.

“Anyone who deals in architectural artifacts knows that at some point, at some time, this stuff was stolen,” said Carter Anderson, owner of Demolicious, one of the boutiques Angelenos scour for prime graveyard artifacts from New Orleans. “I mean, this stuff doesn’t just fall off buildings.”

Anderson and other dealers are quick to make clear they don’t traffic knowingly in stolen goods.

“That just brings on way too much trouble,” Leiaghat said. And, local police said, the dealers are doing nothing illegal if they buy in good faith from a seller who claims the goods are not stolen.

But when you see an inventory dominated by cemetery artifacts, “you know it’s got to be stolen,” said the owner of Company on LaBrea, a woman who goes only by the name Dusty.

Indeed, artifacts are vanishing from New Orleans cemeteries at an alarming rate, although there is no evidence California antiques dealers are responsible for what has long been a problem. Even a casual stroll reveals a plundered landscape. Jagged concrete discs mark the places where ceremonial urns once stood, and rusted hinges are all that remain of the intricate iron gates that guarded family tombs. Iron crosses have been sawed off at the base, and in some spots the posts of iron fences have been carted away.

Louise Fergusson of Save Our Cemeteries points to a gate at Odd Fellow’s Rest in New Orleans. Last year her organization paid to replace two intricate front pieces. Both are already missing.

At Cypress Grove, one iron fish remains as a downspout on a family tomb. Fergusson has a snapshot, taken last year, that shows three of them, and it’s clear the tomb, dating to 1844, was designed for as many as eight of the gargoyles.

The pilfering has become so widespread that earlier this year a Save Our Cemeteries officer bumped into two men trying to hoist an angel statue over the wall of Lafayette Cemetery, Fergusson said.

The California antiques dealers’ purchasing is complicated not only by uncertainty about whether artifacts were stolen but also by uncertainty over whether they are fakes.

Several New Orleans merchants said many of the urns and crosses are likely made in Mexico, then fobbed off as genuine New Orleans artifacts. It’s not hard to do, one Los Angeles salesman said: “I could show you a lot of stuff and tell you it’s from New Orleans, but that’s not my style.”

But the real stuff also wends its way west.

“A crackhead steals a cross from a cemetery and sells it to a store here for $25,” said a New Orleans dealer who gave his name only as Aaron. “That store puts the cross on sale for $125 and some L.A. dealer comes in, snatches it up, and sells it for $1,250.”

“That’s absolutely right,” Dusty said, confirming the route to market and the price inflation along the way. “That happens, no question.”

New Orleans police spokesman Lt. Marlon Defillo said cemetery vandalism is rarely reported, making it difficult for police to keep on top of thefts from grave sites. Unless a family member notices something missing, it’s unlikely to come to the police department’s attention, he said.

Adding to the underreporting of these crimes is the reluctance of cemeteries themselves to go public about ripoffs for fear of inspiring copycat crimes, said Susan Olson of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. But the looting is so severe the trust has added cemeteries to its “most endangered” lists, with or without the cemeteries’ cooperation, she said.

With the market for cemetery memorabilia growing, families around the country have to be on guard, experts said.

In October, four iron gates stolen from the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., turned up in a Cape Cod antiques store; three other gates are still missing. In 1996, a couple was arrested in Elizabethtown, N.Y., with a U-Haul crammed with cemetery items, including a $30,000 statue stolen from a resting spot in Missouri. And last month, officials at the Thomas Heyward Jr. cemetery in Charleston, S.C., announced the theft of a $10,000 iron gate.

“It’s like raping a national forest,” said Sheila Riley, assistant director of the South Carolina State Museum.

Riley is furious at the hypocrisy of dealers who traffic in cemetery goods without acknowledging the likelihood that the stuff is stolen.

“When you’re showing up with large iron gates that have angels on them, where do you think they came from?” she said. “They get around it by pleading ignorance and talking about garden sculpture. They think it’s free stuff, and people just don’t perceive the cemeteries as outdoor museums, which of course is exactly what they are.”

In Hollywood, however, Riley’s protestations carried little weight.

“Look, I just sell nice things. It doesn’t mean I am,” said Vivian Levy, a co-owner Demolicious.

JL END VARNEY