Environmental crime and pollution: wasteful reflections (1).

• Date: 22 March 2002
• Author: Block, Alan A.
• Published date: 22 March 2002
• Author: Block, Alan A.

The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.... Crime, intelligence, social protest, freedom of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws prosecuted or have prosecuted was hidden in this pit. -- Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Introduction

IN THE 1970s, A NEW MENACE BECAME THE CENTERPIECE FOR A NEW GENERATION OF environmentally minded reformers. Organized crime, which controlled the private sanitation industry in the Northeast, moved center stage. This took place at approximately the same time that the U.S. government passed the first important toxic waste legislation in its history. The most significant legislation passed was the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act that mandated special handling of the newly recognized category of waste called either toxic or hazardous. Interestingly enough, the legislation was designed to patrol and discipline the waste disposers, not the producers. It was based on the premise that once the waste passed from its producers -- chemical companies and other industrial firms -- into the hands of the disposers, it ceased to be the producers' property. In any case, a great deal of needed attention was focused on the mob firms and their practices. There was some rectification of this when Superfund legislation was passed in the early 1980s. It mandated that all responsible parties (prod ucers and disposers) would have to clean up polluted sites. It has not always worked very well. I will discuss this issue at some length using a particularly egregious organized crime waste group as a template. Concentration on waste disposers had another significant side. Around 1970, several private carting firms began a rapid process of expansion, buying dozens and dozens of small carting companies and landfills across the country. In a relatively short period, they became the waste industry's most important companies. I will spend some time explaining the methodology of expansion, for it bears a striking resemblance to the methods employed by organized criminals. Reformers particularly watched the giants, if for no other reason than their sheer size and, as I will show, their penchant to behave improperly.

By the 1990s, the giants had finally moved into the New York market on the heels of the government finally doing something significant about mob control. Once New York was gained, another period of intense consolidation took place. Two firms ended up controlling most of the New York market. This was a somewhat unexpected development, I suppose, for one of the charges against organized crime was that it had constructed a monopoly in New York. Thus, the criminal cartel monopoly was replaced with a two-firm oligopoly. I shall argue that the variance between the mob cartel and the giants when it comes to legal issues such as antitrust and pollution was not very large. I will take an in-depth look at the past practices of two large firms that were gobbled up in the last phase of consolidation in New York, for they were involved to one degree or another with illicit plans and actions to dump toxic waste in Third World countries. Finally, in the last section of the article, I will discuss other kinds of companies t hat routinely pollute.

Criminal Cartels in Waste

In 1957, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, chaired by Senator John McClellan, showed that organized crime had built "business empires in the private carting industry through a system of monopoly enforced by trade associations and cooperative labor unions." (2) This was another instance of organized crime's domination of certain working-class trades in New York, which included, at one time or another, cinders, cloth shrinking, construction, flower shops, the Fulton fish market, funeral homes, hod carrying, ice, kosher butchers, laundry services, newsstands, overall makers, paper hangers, taxicabs, waterfront workers, and window cleaners. (3) Among the McClellan Committee's findings after two investigations, one in Los Angeles, was the degree of ethnicity and kinship that bound racketeers in waste together. In Los Angeles, Armenian heritage appeared to be the primary connecting link, while in New York Italian roots were most significant. Among the owners of garbage firms who were identified as racketeers in the Greater New York area were Antony Ricci, Carmine Tramunti, Anthony Corallo, Nunzio and Vincent Squillante, Nicholas Ratteni, James Licari, Gennaro Mancuso, Alfred Toriello, Frank Caruso, Joseph Feola, and Anthony Carfano. Several had already acquired major reputations as organized crime felons.

It is not unusual to find a common heritage supported by sometimes-complicated kinship patterns in trades, including those associated with waste. A survey of Paris sewermen in 1979, for example, found a persistence of "hereditary endogamy." Parisian sewer workers were "more commonly introduced into the service by another relative who had been or was a sewerman--nephew, uncle, cousin, brother-in-law, and so on." (4) Of course, Parisian sewermen did not go on to own private sewer businesses and create monopolies based on criminally coercive practices.

At the base of the private sanitation criminal domains was the principle of "territorial rights," later called "property rights." This meant that whatever garbage firm first contracted with a business to pick up its rubbish had a right to that business forever. Indeed, the right extended to the location itself, no matter what happened to the original contracting party. Naturally, it was a method of dimming competition, although sometimes it was honored more in the breach than otherwise, especially given racketeers' propensity to cheat and steal from one another.

Following the McClellan Committee's work in 1957, local, state, and federal authorities pursued garbage racketeering decade after decade. Numerous investigations took place chiefly in the five boroughs of New York City, in Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, in Westchester, Putnam, Orange, and Rockland Counties, just north and north west of the city, in Northern and Central New Jersey, and at times in Philadelphia. Each investigation and prosecution revealed organized crime's monopolies in private sanitation work.

The Routine Activities of Criminal Waste Enterprises

All County Environmental Service Corporation and its related firms is a template for the mob-related solid and hazardous waste companies investigated over several decades in the New York Metropolitan Area. It was a transporter of septic and hazardous wastes, a hazardous waste facility, and a devotee of illegal hazardous waste disposal. The New York State Assembly Environmental Conservation Committee offered an historical account of All Country, its crimes, and corporate permutations from 1977 through most of 1984. (5)

For almost a decade, John, Robert, and Joseph Mongelli, together with brothers Frank and John Coppola, owned and operated the Warwick, New York, headquartered All County. (6) In addition, the Mongellis owned several waste disposal companies--I.S.A. of New Jersey, Inc., (7) Tri-State Carting, Inc., (8) Grace Disposal and Leasing, Ltd., (9) Orange County Sanitation, Inc., (10) and Round Lake Sanitation Corporation. (11) In testimony before the U.S. Congressional Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in 1980, two detective sergeants with the New Jersey State Police, Dirk Ottens and Jack Penny, presented evidence tying the Mongelli family to Mario Giganti, one of the important leaders of a major organized crime syndicate known as the "Genovese family." (12) Giganti, the Mongellis' ultimate boss, was somewhat foolishly listed on the payroll of Round Lake Sanitation in New York as a solicitor. By 1986, Louis Mongelli was described as a "reputed...Genovese crime family member." (13) In 1989, John Coppola bec ame a valued member of a New Jersey gubernatorial campaign team. (14)

The Mongellis and their associates were primarily engaged in the illicit disposal of hazardous waste. In 1977, they took over the Penaluna Road landfill in Warwick, New York, and dumped toxic waste at will, thereby threatening Greenwood Lake, a source of drinking water for around one million northern New Jersey and New York inhabitants. I.S.A. trailers were spotted unloading drums of sludge composed of oil, grease, and degreasers, while a Grace Disposal worker was on hand to flatten the empty drums. Other information clearly showed industrial waste from a nearby Ford plant was also disposed of at the landfill. Finally, the Newark Star Ledger reported that "thousands of gallons of 'solvents...paint and pigment residues...dirty thinners...still bottoms...glue residue' and other organic, toxic compounds were picked up from industries in New Jersey and slated for disposal at Warwick."(15) To cover their tracks, the criminals created phony records indicating some of these wastes went to a "safe" landfill that did not actually exist, and to another that had no record of receiving any of the toxic products, even though it probably did.

The New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) ordered the Penaluna landfill closed in 1980. Grace Disposal went out of business and the site, reported Assemblyman Hinchey, "which is 36 acres in size and 50 feet deep, is now leaching organic chemicals and the toxic metals--cadmium, lead, and mercury--into a stream and wetland that feed Greenwood Lake." The estimated toxic leachate, according to the DEC, was 7,200 gallons per day.

In the summer of 1979, All County moved some of its operations to New Jersey, though it still maintained a significant presence in New York. It bought several storage facilities in the town of Edgewater, on the shore of the Hudson River, and another in Newark. It did not inform New Jersey authorities about the Edgewater facilities. They were discovered by New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) over a year later. By...