He was eligible for extra life insurance in the amount of $150,000 but his employer would receive $4.7 million and according to his wife, her husband couldn't buy life insurance to protect his own family once he found out about his cancer yet his employer could.
Source: chron.com
9 Jan 2010—by L.M. Sixel, Houston Chronicle
Irma Johnson never really thought of herself as a crusader.But the quiet widow from The Woodlands (TX) has been featured in a Michael Moore movie, watched her story retold on Good Morning America and is trying to let others know that their employers may have purchased secret insurance policies on their lives and stand to profit handsomely when they die.
The industry darkly refers to the policies as "dead peasant" life insurance.
And but for a post office error, Johnson might not have learned that when her husband, Dan Johnson, died of brain cancer in 2008, the bank that had fired him years earlier got $4.7 million in insurance proceeds on his life.
After accidentally destroying an envelope containing a check for nearly $1.6 million made out to Amegy Bank, the post office misdirected it to Johnson's home because Dan Johnson's name also was on the check.
Her attorney, Mike Myers of McClanahan Myers Espey in Houston, said she wasn't supposed to know Amegy had the insurance policy on her husband, a project manager whose annual salary had been about $70,000.
"How could they be profiting off my husband?" Johnson asked recently during an interview with the Houston Chronicle.
Friday, Johnson settled a lawsuit she filed to force the bank to reveal it bought policies in 2001 on more than 40 bankers, including coverage on Johnson, who'd been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer about 18 months earlier and been out sick for several months.
In Amegy's formal response in the lawsuit, the bank said it purchased life insurance policies on a group of vice presidents and other officers to offset the cost of providing employee benefits.
Amegy said taking out such policies is a "common practice among banks and other industries and is recognized and permitted by the applicable banking regulatory authorities."




