He hopes to open sales from the crypt.

• Position: Marketing of mausoleums by memorial park and construction firm owner Jyles Coggins

In 72 years, Jyles Coggins has been a Marine, state representative, state senator, Raleigh mayor and general contractor. But that hasn't kept him from dreaming up the mausoleum to end all mausoleums.

"It's something I've had in the back of my mind for 30 years," says Coggins, whose Parthenonesque creation on a hilltop in 100-acre Raleigh Memorial Park will open in March. It will have 3,000 reinforced-concrete crypts at first, but it's expandable to 15,000. "So far as I know, it's the largest one ever built in North Carolina."

Coggins, once depicted by a Raleigh political cartoonist as a hip-shooting cowpoke, sees nothing unusual about building on "spec," as contractors say, a multimillion-dollar mausoleum of Italian marble, fronted by massive 18-foot columns.

"It just seemed to be something else to do," says the Iredell County native, who flies his own Piper Aztec and harbors a fantasy to sky-drive. And after all, this is his third mausoleum.

His Coggins Construction Co. built commercial, military and residential projects before Coggins turned to real-estate investment in recent years. "I've always liked to try different things," says Coggins, who attended Carolina, N.C. State and Duke but "never did graduate. I would have tried Wake Forest, but they didn't allow dancing."

"Mausoleums seem to be quite successful, but typically they're in the 160- to 500-crypt range," says Bill Gladden, a longtime Raleigh acquaintance of Coggins. "Three thousand is large. Quite large."

The world of the above-ground dead is, after all, a strange turf -- the consummate niche...