Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte

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