Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (10 page)

“Geez,” I said, frustrated. “I mean, what have they got to hide?”

“Look,” Wurth said significantly. “This isn’t goods they’re transferring from place to place. This is bads.”

I knew the Bethlehem landfill wasn’t permitted to accept hazardous waste. So maybe the issue wasn’t what they handled so much as who was doing the handling. According to a June 1986 federal report entitled “Organized Crime’s Involvement in the Waste Hauling Industry,” “there is a substantial body of evidence that organized crime controls much of the solid waste disposal industry in New York State and elsewhere.” Of the $1.5 billion taken in each year by New York carters, estimated Peter Reuter, author of the 1987 report
Racketeering in Legitimate Industries,
commissioned by the Rand Corporation, “about 35 percent was excess sucked out of the customers by illegal activities.”

Still, Benjamin Miller’s
Fat of the Land,
a rich history of garbage in New York City, runs for nearly four hundred pages without mention of organized crime. William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, in
Rubbish!,
also ignore the topic, as did Robin Nagle when she taught a class called “Garbage in Gotham” to her anthropology students at New York University. “I didn’t want to bog down in it,” she told me. “I thought it might be a distraction.”

I felt the same way. What, after all, did the Mafia have to do with my trash, my san men, and the goings-on at the Brooklyn South 6 garage? My understanding was that the mob stuck its pinky-ringed fingers into commercial hauling but left residential refuse—the province of uniformed, unionized civil servants—alone. What I hadn’t fully realized is that even before Fresh Kills had closed, some of the city’s recyclables had ended up in the same place as commercial waste: in transfer stations run by a local carting company whose principals were later convicted of organized-crime activities.

In the early nineties, Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, who had been investigating organized crime in the garment industry, began poking around the private carting business. His investigations coincided with the rocky entry into the New York market of Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI), whose main business strategy was to undercut the going rate. Angered by this tactic, mobsters began harassing BFI clients, sending their own trucks to pick up the garbage from office buildings and restaurants before BFI could get there, then returning the clients’ garbage. The mess would bring hefty city fines. Mob drivers yelled insults at BFI drivers. Goons stole and vandalized BFI equipment. Once, a mob-operated truck tried to run a BFI truck off the road. Two-thirds of the customers that signed up with BFI backed out of their deals after visits from representatives of their former haulers. One morning a BFI supervisor got a call from his wife reporting that someone had dumped the head of a large German shepherd on the lawn near their mailbox. Taped in the dog’s mouth was a note that read, “Welcome to New York.”

Enough was enough, and Browning-Ferris agreed to work undercover for Morgenthau as it trolled for new clients. Using bugs and wiretaps, the DA had by June of 1995 collected enough evidence to hand down a 114-count indictment against twenty-three carting companies, seventeen individuals, and four trade associations for antitrust violations, enterprise corruption, grand larceny, arson, assault (including a nearly fatal beating of a driver), and criminal conspiracy under the Organized Crime Control Act. The indictments also accused the companies of improperly disposing of contaminated waste.

While the indictments wound their way through the courts, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor who had campaigned on a vow to run the mob out of town, formed a new city agency called the Trade Waste Commission. Its mission was to overhaul the commercial carting system and squeeze out mob-connected local companies. The Trade Waste Commission told private businesses they had the right to freely choose a carter and to cancel their contracts with thirty days’ notice. It required carters to be licensed by the commission and forbade them from charging more than the set rate.

The local carting industry immediately challenged the legality of the commission. Hearing the complaint in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Judge Richard J. Cardamone was moved to reference Stephen W. Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time:

Like those dense stars found in the firmament, the cartel cannot be seen and its existence can only be shown by its effect on the conduct of those falling within its ambit. Because of its strong gravitational field, no light escapes very far from a “black hole” before it is dragged back. . . . [T]he record before us reveals that from the cartel’s domination of the commercial waste industry, no carter escapes.

The complaint was overturned.

Giuliani assigned thirty police detectives to investigate corruption, inspectors to root out suspected overcharging, and auditors to examine the financial dealings of the carting companies. During its first year, the Trade Waste Commission oversaw the shutdown or sale of nearly two hundred garbage-hauling companies and denied licenses to many others. The commission claimed to have saved city businesses more than $500 million in inflated trash bills a year. According to Detective Rick Cowan, in
Takedown: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire,
about his undercover role in the BFI sting, the bill for the Empire Blue Cross / Blue Shield building on Third Avenue fell from $650,000 a year to less than $80,000; the World Trade Center’s bill dropped from $3 million to $600,000; the bill for an office building on Water Street plummeted from $1.2 million a year to $150,000. Eventually, all of the individuals, corporate entities, and trade associations indicted by Morgenthau either pleaded guilty or were convicted by trial jury. The defendants paid a total of $43 million in fines.

The cleanup of the private carting companies created a vacuum quickly filled by the large national waste-hauling companies (including IESI, Waste Management, and Allied, which soon acquired BFI), many of which already operated local transfer stations, area landfills, and materials recovery facilities (known as MRFs, pronounced “murfs”), and at least one of which, Waste Management, had a history of price fixing, bid rigging, insider trading, fraud, and environmental violations. By the late nineties, though, the companies started complaining of big losses: they wanted to charge more for their services. Giuliani refused to raise carting rates significantly, but toward the end of his term it became obvious that for the MRFs, at least, to operate efficiently, they had to raise rates high enough to make the capital improvements that would let them capture and process more recyclables, to say nothing of bringing their facilities up to city and state standards. (The MRFs were notoriously dirty, dangerous places. The
New York Daily News
reported three accidental deaths in 1996 at Waste Management’s transfer and recycling facility in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. In 1999, a severed human head—badly damaged—showed up on a conveyor belt in the same sorting center, though it probably had nothing to do with a workplace accident.) Among the reasons Mayor Bloomberg cited for suspending plastic and glass recycling in 2002 was to avoid paying the huge rate increases that Waste Management and Allied insisted upon. The city had been paying roughly $58 a ton to drop recyclables at their MRFs; the new rate would be $120.

“There was a lot of consolidation after Giuliani ran the mob out,” Robert Lange, of DSNY’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling, told me. “And lots of buyouts, and now we have a monopolistic system and skyrocketing costs to export garbage.” Between 1996 and 2002, the Department of Sanitation budget nearly doubled, from $631 million to about $1 billion. Meanwhile, back in the realm of private carting, the national companies’ prices inched up and up until they reached historic Mafia levels. Now, according to private carter Sal Benedetto, “the only difference between the majors”—the nationals—“and the boys”—the mob—“is that the majors don’t actually kill you.”

I called Flood three more times and left messages with Suzy, his extrafriendly secretary. Eventually she suggested I call Ed Apuzzi, my old transfer station friend. I’d already left him several messages, but just for sport, and using Suzy’s name, I left one more. While waiting for my phone to ring, I biked down to the transfer station to take a look at the drivers waiting in the tractor-trailer queue. Might one of them let me ride with him into the landfill? I spent some minutes shopping for a trustworthy face and a clean-looking cab, then performed a reality check and went back home.

And then one day, Apuzzi called. My heart skipped a beat. I told him the troubles I’d been having, and he told me Bethlehem had just gotten a permit to expand operations. Maybe that explained why Donato hadn’t wanted visitors earlier.

“So it’s okay for me to see it now?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Apuzzi said. “For insurance purposes, you can’t walk around on the landfill. It’s just not our policy.”

“I don’t want to walk around on the landfill,” I said. “I just want to see it, from the front seat of a truck or something.” I told him I’d stay put in the vehicle and sign any waivers he wanted.

He paused. “Let me check with some lawyers. I’ll get back to you.” I said thanks and hung up, knowing I’d never speak to him again.

Why was it so hard to look at garbage? To me, the secrecy of waste managers—which was surely based on an aversion to accountability—was only feeding the culture of shame that had come to surround an ordinary fact of life: throwing things away. Sure, the volume was shameful (especially the volume of stuff that could have been reused or should never have been acquired in the first place), but the volume wasn’t Ed Apuzzi’s or Mickey Flood’s, it was ours. And yes, garbage wasn’t a pretty sight, but so what? The sewage treatment plant gave tours, after all. Sanitation workers wanted civilians to own up to their mess, to take responsibility for their discards, to show some respect for those who dealt with their waste on a daily basis. I was in complete concordance. But I found that from the moment my trash left my house and entered the public domain—where no higher authority than the US Supreme Court had determined it was open for general inspection—it became terra incognita, forbidden fruit, a mystery that I lacked the talent or credentials to solve. I was left to imagine the worst: that the Bethlehem landfill was casually strewing the waterways and roadways with litter, or commingling municipal solid waste with leaking barrels of hazardous chemicals, or disposing of second-rate starlets. (Bodies did show up in landfills from time to time, and they weren’t necessarily mob whack jobs. Seeking warmth and safety, the homeless sometimes slept in Dumpsters, and they sometimes got crushed by garbage trucks.)

By now, I was asking everyone I knew in the waste business if they could get me into a landfill: the folks at the company that handled the city’s metal recyling; my contacts at DSNY; the manager of my former recycling facility; my Gowanus paddling partner, who knew someone whose family ran tugs in the harbor. In my desperate state, even that seemed promising. But nothing came of these probes.

I continued to cogitate. The popular conception of “bads” aside, I knew that the ordinary discards of residential life were hardly inert, that burying things under several feet of dirt didn’t bring their influence on the environment to a screeching halt. When organic matter decomposes, it creates methane and carbon dioxide, both greenhouse gases. As it filters up through layers of buried garbage, methane can pick up carcinogens like acetone, benzene and ethyl benzene, xylenes, trichloroethylene, and vinyl chloride. These compounds are borne on the breeze into nearby homes and offices.

Just as jurisdiction over trash moved from the public realm to the private, its environmental impact moved from the local—right here in my kitchen—to the general. On its own, my trash might be harmless to me, but combined with the output of several million others, it could be lethal to many. A 1998 New York State Department of Health study found that escaping landfill gases contributed to an estimated fourfold increase in bladder cancer and leukemia rates in women who lived within 250 feet of thirty-eight upstate landfills. Researchers at Imperial College in London reported in 2001 that children of parents living near landfills in England tended to have a higher rate of birth defects than the general population. (Neither study could prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between exposure and disease or defects, though both called for further study.)

In a few months I’d visit a medium-size landfill in Dixon, California, and study a schematic of its man-made stratigraphy. Directly underneath the “operations layer”—a foot-deep blend of soil and dried sewage sludge that underlay the trash—was six inches of gravel, followed by a layer of geotextile fabric, and then another bed of gravel (to collect and remove leachate). Next came a high-density polyethylene geomembrane, a geosynthetic clay liner backed with another layer of high-density polyethylene geomembrane (forty millimeters thick—the height of forty stacked dimes), a twelve-inch layer of compacted clay, six inches of compacted soil, a six-inch capillary break, and then, at the superbottom, a compacted subgrade of sand. The liners had tough-sounding trade names like Bentomat, Bentofix, Claymax, Geolock, and Geoflex. I’d asked Greg Pryor, who was giving me the blackboard tour, if the whole shebang keep the groundwater and soil safe.

“We get 99.3 percent protection,” he said with pride.

“Do you aim for 100 percent?” I asked.

“You’ve got to look at cost. We pay $210,000 per acre to build landfills now.” (Pryor wasn’t counting all the expenses: according to Waste Management’s Judy Archibald, permitting and construction costs for landfills, in 2002, ran $500,000 an acre.) In short, he didn’t think the ratepayers would make 100 percent containment possible.

Groundwater contamination is a serious issue, but landfills are a nuisance in a myriad of other ways. Trucks drop litter and drip leachate on feeder roads, tugs pushing garbage barges pollute waterways, and clouds of scavenging birds darken the dump’s dust-filled skies. Some landfill messes are relatively benign, some aren’t: dumps seem to attract environmental lawsuits like flies. As of June 2003, 413 of the 1,571 sites on the EPA’s National Priorities List, representing the worst of the worst Superfund sites (which by definition contain hazardous waste) were landfills, a ratio of just over one in four.