| In the 1990’s, Neil Smither was making a killing from his job as a loan originator brokering loans through Countrywide Home Loans. But a scene from the movie Pulp Fiction involving the grizzly cleanup of a dead body would inspire him to find a new career.
Smither worked as an originator at Premium Mortgage, a company run by his father and his uncle. Eventually, he moved into retail management. “Times were good back then,” Smither said in a telephone interview. “I made quite a bit. I was … a young kid. I was about 26. I was pulling in a hundred grand a year.” But after three years on the job, his father and uncle decided it was time to retire — and Premium Mortgage was closed down.
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Crime Scene Cleaners photo of Neil Smither |
Smither said that despite his success as a mortgage salesperson, he didn’t enjoy the business. Among the biggest drawbacks was the 30-plus days it took to close a transaction.
“I was looking for something that fit my personality, that I didn’t have to compromise on,” he explained.
He also wanted to be self-employed.
Smither found his calling after seeing Pulp Fiction around 1996.
In one scene, John Travolta’s character, Vincent Vega, accidentally shoots a criminal accomplice in the face — leaving the interior of the car they were driving in covered in blood, brain matter and skull fragments. So another character played by Harvey Keitel, Winston “The Wolf” Wolf, was called in to clean up the mess.
Within eight months of seeing the movie, Smither decided he wanted to clean up dead bodies for a living and started Crime Scene Cleaners Inc.
It wasn’t his first taste of cleaning up dead bodies.
“As a kid, I scrubbed a suicide of a next-door neighbor,” he explained.
He said he’ll never forget his first assignment, when he was contacted by a woman whose sister had committed suicide. After quoting a “very reasonable price,” the woman almost “threw her checkbook at me” and “couldn’t write the check fast enough.”
“I knew right then, ‘oh man, I’ve got something here.'”
Smither can come across as quite crass, and his vernacular might offend many people. But in dealing with potential clients, he acknowledges the need to be polite without necessarily being too sympathetic.
However, it’s not a fascination with the morbid that drew him into the business. It’s the ability to make money.
“I liken it, quite a bit actually, to … charging points to … my retail loan customers,” Smither said. “It’s really the same thing. It’s a commission gig.
“I mean it really is. If you’re not selling, you’re dying.”
Smither explained that he learned to make money on a commission basis while in the mortgage business at a time when there was very little regulation. He knocked on doors and made cold calls. He said that he looked like he was only 12 years old, and the telephone helped him overcome that obstacle.
So he became an expert at selling on the phone.
Clients generally pay Smither between $500 and $1,500 per job. The company’s revenues were more than $4 million last year, and “it was probably the worst year we’ve ever had” other than his first five years in business.
While Smither and his Orinda, Calif., company have been featured in This American Life, the San Francisco Chronicle and other news publications, he says that he has never been contacted by anyone associated with the movie.
When asked whether he has a nickname like “The Wolf,” Smither replied, “No, mainly they just call me ‘the jerk.'”
Smither said he has never had to do a job on a mortgage broker, though he joked that “there are some mortgage brokers I’d like to do a job on.”
He added that he recently refinanced his own $1.1 million mortgage with a full-documentation loan through Wells Fargo, and “they closed that sucker within three weeks.”
