Jew World Order

Private carting companies have been part of the fabric of New York since the early 1900s. The carters handled trash in commercial areas, and municipal sanitation workers picked up the trash everywhere else, residential and business alike. That changed in 1957 when the city decided that commercial trash was too much trouble. Suddenly, all businesses had to pay for their trash collection. The Mafia quickly carved the city into territories. Under what was called the property-rights system, each stop was “owned” by a specified hauler. Attempting to underbid another carter was considered to be “stealing” his customer. Garbage haulers colluded, submitting uniformly high price estimates to a customer. Then the stop’s owner would offer a slightly lower estimate to win the contract — a practice better known as bid-rigging.

Controlled primarily by the Gambino and Genovese crime families, four trade waste associations enforced the property-rights system — the cartel — using extortion, threats and violence. Favored tactics involved baseball bats, firebombing garbage trucks and the occasional murder. When Browning-Ferris Industries, a major national waste company, tried to enter the market in 1993, an executive found the severed head of a dog on his doorstep one morning. A note was stuffed into its mouth: “Welcome to New York.”

“It was an open secret for four decades that the mob was in control of the commercial carting industry,” explained Daniel Castleman, former head of investigations in Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office. Castleman was a script advisor for “The Sopranos” and even played the federal prosecutor who tried to take down Junior Soprano. The show’s fictional universe was very much representative of reality, Castleman said. “There’s a reason that Tony Soprano was in the carting industry.”

In the early 1990s, Morgenthau’s office launched an undercover investigation of the industry. An NYPD agent posed as “cousin Danny” in a Brooklyn carting company, another posed as a building manager, and another as a Browning-Ferris Industries employee. Secret recordings confirmed the existence of the property-rights system and its control by mob members. The first of many rounds of indictments came down in 1995, and ultimately 72 defendants were charged: carting companies, owners, trade waste association leaders, the trade waste associations themselves, and the capos and soldiers they reported to.

In 1996, the city passed Local Law 42, aimed at cracking the cartel, and created the licensing agency that is now known as the Business Integrity Commission to root out organized crime. The waste industry fought the reforms, but its suit against Local Law 42 was unsuccessful.

The prosecutions brought down the cartel. Many leaders went to jail, had their assets seized and agreed to a lifetime ban, called a debarment, from the industry. Others were never prosecuted but still signed debarment agreements. Some people on BIC’s debarment list moved their companies out of town or sold them.

But many on the debarment list simply handed their companies over to their wives or sons, who continued in the industry. Being related to someone on the debarment list is not grounds for the denial of a BIC license. (Haulers must be of “good character, honesty, and integrity.”) More than one person told me the sins of the father should not be imputed to the son … but you might want to want to take a close look at anyone related to past cartel members.

To get a flavor of the sometimes dizzying ways in which families and entities intertwined, consider the Toscano family and its waste operations. In 1975, a company called TNT Carting was one of 55 haulers in New York that pleaded guilty to restraint of trade. TNT’s officers included Thomas J. Toscano and his brother Nicholas. Later Thomas J. Toscano founded Mr. T Carting. A nonagenarian, today he fills a more ceremonial role in the company (currently the fifth-largest hauler in New York), while his grandson Thomas N. Toscano is the company’s CFO.

For their parts, Nicholas Toscano and several other family members were debarred from the industry. They had started a spin-off company in the 1980s called Mr. N Carting on land purchased by a realty corporation based at the same address as Mr. T Carting. (“The companies were completely separate. It was strictly a tenant-landlord relationship,” explained Thomas N. Toscano. “There’s an old saying, ‘You can’t pick your family.’ So, you know, we had nothing to do with them.”)

For all the upheaval, many cartel-era companies survived the transition. For example, Liberty Ashes, Mr. T Carting and New Style Waste Removal Corp (now Boro-Wide Recycling) were all members of the trade waste associations in the days of the cartel, according to lists recovered from the associations’ offices during the execution of search warrants in 1995. “You couldn’t do business in this industry without being members of those associations,” explained Thomas N. Toscano. “Yes, we were members. Yes, we paid dues. And the only time they ever went there was every three years when the union negotiation came up.” The Brooklyn association pleaded guilty to criminal restraint of trade in 1997, and the Queens association pleaded guilty to a criminal antitrust violation in 1998.

Lupe Todd-Medina, a spokesperson for New Yorkers for Responsible Waste Management, an industry group, responded to questions sent to multiple companies, including Liberty Ashes, New Style Recycling, Viking Sanitation and Boro-Wide Recycling. Todd-Medina did not address the detailed questions regarding the individual companies, but did provide a general statement: “The companies addressed in your story are all privately-held businesses — many of which are multi-generational,” she wrote. “For more than twenty years, the city’s Business Integrity Commission regulates [sic] the industry’s operations, and granted licenses to these companies following an intensive review process that independent observers agree has restored the industry’s competitiveness and high level of service to its customers.”

Still, the industry has its fair share of eyebrow-raising episodes. In late 2012, the BIC told Mr. T Carting that it couldn’t hire a convicted drug trafficker with ties to the Gambino and Lucchese crime families as a sales representative. Thomas N. Toscano, the CFO of Mr. T Carting, then sued the BIC in an attempt to keep the employee, which proved unsuccessful. (“They literally put the poor guy on ice after he had quit his other job,” said Toscano of the employee, who the BIC had previously approved to work for another carting company.)

In August 2016, the de Blasio administration released a study that recommended reining in the chaos of New York’s waste and recycling industry by dividing the city into zones. A company would make a bid to collect the garbage from all of the businesses in a given zone, and the city would pick the winner. According to the study, which was done by the Department of Sanitation and the BIC, zoning could reduce truck traffic by up to 68 percent and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 64 percent, leading to “cleaner air” and “safer streets,” as well as improve recycling rates, customer service and worker safety. A handful of cities, including Seattle, San Jose and Los Angeles, have introduced zoning. The efforts in Seattle and San Jose have yielded improved recycling rates and higher wages; the changes in Los Angeles are still being implemented.

One block, many trucks: One high-traffic block is 32nd Street between 5th Avenue and Broadway in Manhattan’s Koreatown. From top: Waste Connections, 1:02 a.m; Crown Waste, 2:21 a.m.; Action Carting, 3:27 a.m.

Past city administrations have periodically attempted to adopt zoned waste collection, but industry resistance proved insurmountable. Today, again, zoning has the support of the de Blasio administration but legislation has yet to be introduced in the City Council — and the industry is still resisting. In 2016, the haulers launched NYRWM, which has spent $298,000 lobbying city officials. In her statement, Todd-Medina blasted zoning as “an arbitrary system,” arguing that it would “eliminate customer choice, decrease industry employment, and increase costs to businesses …”

On the NYRWM website, prospective members are invited to contact the group’s general counsel/secretary-treasurer, a lawyer named Ray Shain who was disbarred from practicing law in New York in 2003 after pleading guilty to a criminal bid-rigging, bribery and kickback scheme that defrauded Queens public schools out of an estimated $6.3 million. (“Ray Shain is engaged as counsel to NYRWM, and provides administrative support for its operations,” said Todd-Medina in her written statement. She pointed out that he was re-instated to the bar several years ago and “does not own or operate a waste services business.”)

Industry opposition notwithstanding, the de Blasio administration is pressing forward with its reform efforts. The Department of Sanitation has hired consultants who are developing a proposal for what zoning might look like in New York. The exact number of zones is to be determined — Los Angeles has 11, for example — but only one company would operate in each. That suggests most of the city’s 250 private carters would have no chance at winning a bid. Even as it stands, the smaller companies tend not to last long; bigger companies snap them up. The 20 biggest companies in New York currently generate 80 percent of the revenue, according to the 2016 study, with the other roughly 200 operators fighting over the rest.

In Caban’s view, the old days were the golden era of garbage. If a man worked himself to the bone, he could earn enough to buy a house and a car and send a kid to college. Working the night shift at a garbage company in New York basically had all the perks of working the day shift at the Sanitation Department. Almost every garbage company in the city was in the same union, Teamsters Local 813, and every three years, the union would rent out the ballroom at the Sheraton Hotel so garbage men could ratify the contract, which achieved routine raises, triple-time pay for snow duty, as well as paid holidays, vacations and a pension.

That changed after the sweeping prosecutions of the 1990s. The gates were opened for a flood of non-union companies, and citywide collective bargaining became a thing of the past. “They got the mob out. But the workers got screwed royally,” said Teamsters organizer Allan Henry.

Powerful AFL-CIO-affiliated unions like the Laborers and the Teamsters were edged out of private garbage operators. They were replaced by “independent unions” that cut sweetheart deals with employers, locking employees into jobs with low wages and poor benefits. One example is a union called LIFE 890, which represents workers at major New York City garbage companies including Boro-Wide Recycling, Liberty Ashes and Five Star Carting.

A man named John N. Mongello runs the union and its health care benefit plan out of a residential townhouse in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that he and his wife Kathy purchased in 1988. In 2016, LIFE’s benefit plan paid John Mongello $199,000 and his daughter Jessica Mongello Gambino took home $103,000. The union pays an LLC owned by Kathy $90,000 per year in rent, and the whole family — his wife, two daughters and a son — has been on the payroll in various capacities, off and on, since 2000. Filings with the Department of Labor show that administrative expenses have consumed as much as 45 percent of the health care fund’s expenses. Mongello was indicted in 1978, when he was president of a different union, on federal charges of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of labor hearings. In 1985, he resolved the case, pleading guilty to making false claims; he was sentenced to 360 months’ probation and a small fine. (LIFE 890 and John Mongello did not respond to a detailed list of questions.)

Workers at several LIFE 890 shops, meanwhile, have said they’ve either never heard of the union or rarely see its representatives. And to the extent that the union plays a role, it hardly seems like a champion for its workers’ wages. At Liberty Ashes, the LIFE 890 contract sets starting pay at $.25 per hour above minimum wage in perpetuity.

Perhaps as a result of such stances, companies seem more enthusiastic about LIFE 890 than workers do. When LIFE 890 attempted to replace the Teamsters as the union at Planet Waste last year, company owner Tom Tolentino told the Daily News he favored LIFE 890, claiming the Teamsters pension plan could bankrupt the company. The workers then voted to join LIFE 890. (Tolentino declined to comment.)

In a wage-related class action lawsuit filed against Five Star in 2014, LIFE’s representative submitted an affidavit that supported the company rather than the workers the union ostensibly represents. “Nino [Tristani] is very quick to respond to my emails and address the grievances,” the union rep said of Five Star’s cofounder, “and is open to discussing the best way to resolve the issue.” Five Star settled with 61 workers in 2016 for $400,000 without admitting liability; LIFE 890 members were excluded from the settlement because the union’s contract mandates arbitration for grievances.

LIFE 890’s role is at issue in a current suit in Manhattan federal court, in which former Liberty Ashes workers are suing over unpaid overtime wages. The company argues that the plaintiffs lack legal standing to bring the case on the grounds that all pay disputes must be addressed in arbitration proceedings. As it happens, LIFE 890 added a mandatory arbitration clause to the Liberty Ashes contract in December 2016 — just weeks before the company submitted it as evidence — which lawyers for Liberty Ashes maintain should be applied retroactively.

A federal judge expressed skepticism about that position. “It seems to me at least counterintuitive that an employer and current employees through their union would be able to negotiate away rights of former employees,” said the judge, Richard Sullivan, in a hearing in February 2017.

When I described LIFE 890 to Ronald Goldstock, the former director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, he emailed me a law review article on labor racketeering, defined as “the use of union power for personal benefit.” Goldstock said, “This is right out of the playbook. I think a DA’s office would be very interested.”

Independent unions have helped lower wages across the industry. In 1985, a helper started out making $16 an hour. At #1 Waste in 2016, Caban — a driver — made less.