Massive coverup.

• Author: Brantley, Michael
• Position: Waste Management Industries Inc.

If you dig deep enough into Lonnie Poole's business, you'll find the smell of success is anything but sweet.

In 1970, Lonnie Craven Poole Jr. chucked his job in Springfield, Ill., selling heavy construction equipment and moved back home to get into garbage. Within a year, the landfill business he was trying to get off the ground was close to going under.

"It was such a struggle in '71, it appeared we just weren't going to make it," he recalls. Things were so tight, he had to take a second job as general manager of MacGregor Downs, a country-club development near Cary. Part of the week, he showed building lots and catered weddings. The rest, he toured dumps and scouted out landfill sites for his own company. "Which," he says, "gives one a lot of trouble dressing: I never knew whether to wear a pair of Levi's or a suit."

Now, as CEO of Waste Management Industries, a $72.4 million company based in Raleigh, he wears what he wants. With 1,000 full-time employees and 38,000 customers (most of them in the eastern half of the state), Lonnie Poole is king of the heap in the Tar Heel trash trade.

"His company is the premier waste-management company in North Carolina and one of the largest independents in the United States. They have quite a reputation," says Bruce Parker, general counsel and executive vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Industry Associations.

Poole had the smarts to figure out early on there were mounds of money to be made in piles of rubbish. But don't make him out as some sort of genius, he cautions. He built Waste Industries the old-fashioned way, one customer at a time. "It was very day-to-day, month-to-month," he says. "I used to tell people my short-range plan was six blocks a day and my long-range plan was Friday. It's hard to be visionary when you're up to your ass in garbage."

Poole, 58, grew up on a farm between Garner and Clayton. His father raised tobacco and ran a country store - seven days a week from 6 in the morning until 10 at night. "In order for [my father] to eat supper at home," he recalls, "at a very early age I tended the store."

As a kid, he was always looking for ways to turn a dollar - farming tobacco, going halves on a pecan grove, carrying newspapers, even running his own vegetable stand one summer. Deciding he wanted to take piano lessons, he saved enough money to buy himself a piano. His parents weren't keen on having a TV, so he bought one himself. When he went to college, he'd saved too much to get a grant-in-aid or a scholarship. "I had almost the entire $4,000 in a shoe box," he says.

At N.C. State, he studied civil engineering mostly because he was good in science and math. He enrolled in ROTC and went into the Army when he graduated in 1959. The Army taught him to fly a helicopter, and, as the Vietnam War would later prove, there was going to be a lot of opportunity for chopper jockeys. "Everybody said, 'You're going to do well, but you need combat experience,'"...