Toms River (77 page)

2.
Charles J. Trautman, environmental specialist, New Jersey Department of
Environmental Protection, “Toms River Chemical—Ciba-Geigy Chronology of Inspections from May 22, 1979 to May 14, 1984.”

3.
Burying a drum on site cost Ciba-Geigy just $33, compared to $136 to ship it to a hazardous waste landfill elsewhere.

4.
Although the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection allowed Ciba-Geigy to keep operating problem-plagued Cell Two of the factory landfill in the early 1980s, the DEP did negotiate a March 1981 consent order requiring the company to put a rainproof cap on Cell One after closing it and giving the state the right to close Cell Two if both the inner and outer liners were ever discovered to have leaked. The consent order also established a schedule of stepped-up state inspections of Cell Two.

5.
John Cooney, the author of the
Environmental Crimes Deskbook
(Environmental Law Institute, 2004), bluntly describes the dilemma on page 9: “The reality is that environmental agencies cannot police the field alone; they must rely on corporations to regulate themselves.”

6.
David B. Spence, “The Shadow of the Rational Polluter: Rethinking the Role of Rational Actor Models in Environmental Law,”
California Law Review
(July 2001): 917–98. See pages 924 and 925 for charts on federal environmental enforcement over the years.

7.
In one infamous case, Kentucky health inspectors investigating a 1967 fire at a toxic dump there told the owner, A. L. Taylor, that he was operating illegally and needed a state permit. Taylor ignored them, and eleven years passed before a hearing officer finally recommended that he be fined three thousand dollars. By that time, in 1977, Taylor was dead and had left behind a toxic legacy of seventeen thousand half-buried drums and a web of contaminated waterways. The EPA-managed cleanup of the site, which came to be known as the “Valley of the Drums,” cost more than $2 million. See
Superfund Third Five-Year Review Report for A.L. Taylor (Valley of the Drums)
(U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2003), 4.

8.
The extent of organized crime’s involvement in hazardous waste disposal has been the subject of heated debate, including before congressional committees. There is no doubt that some important people involved in waste-related crimes in New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s had connections to crime syndicates, including the Lucchese, Genovese, and Gambino crime families. Several were even found murdered. But the authors of the most famous account of those connections, Alan A. Block and Frank R. Scarpitti, in the book
Poisoning for Profit: The Mafia and Toxic Waste in America
(William Morrow, 1985), were sued for libel and forced to acknowledge that some of their allegations were erroneous. In contrast, a later assessment of hazardous waste crimes in New Jersey and three other states found that “most commonly, the criminal dumper is an ordinary, profit-motivated businessman who operates in a business where syndicate crime activity may be present but [is] by no means pervasive.” See Donald J. Rebovich,
Dangerous Ground: The World of Hazardous Waste Crime
(Transaction Publishers, 1992), xiv.

9.
When New Jersey prosecutors did manage to get an environmental conviction, it was often because they resorted to using laws written for other purposes, such as mail fraud or creating a public nuisance. For example, on April 21, 1980, a suspicious fire at the Chemical Control Corporation in Elizabeth torched more than
five thousand drums of toxic waste, all of it stored illegally. Seven months later, the three owners of Chemical Control were indicted for storing the waste illegally and allowing it to seep into the Elizabeth River. They were also charged with mail fraud and conspiracy for falsely promising manufacturers to dispose of their waste legally. Two of the three men ended up going to prison for mail fraud and conspiracy, but the pollution charges mostly fizzled out. Two were acquitted, and the third was fined five thousand dollars and sentenced to three years’ probation. The company, meanwhile, was fined just $23,500 for violating the state’s water pollution control act and maintaining a public nuisance.

10.
This account of the life and work of Wilhelm Hueper is based largely on an unpublished autobiography he completed in 1976 when he was eighty-two years old, three years before his death. He called it
Adventures of a Physician in Occupational Cancer: A Medical Cassandra’s Tale
. The National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, provided the author with a copy of the typewritten manuscript. The reference to the “stupid adventures” of war appears on page 44. The reference to the “orgy of mass murder” is on page 60. Two other important sources on Hueper’s career are journal articles by David Michaels, an epidemiologist and author who in 2009 was appointed director of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration: “Waiting for the Body Count: Corporate Decision Making and Bladder Cancer in the U.S. Dye Industry,”
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
2:3 (September 1988): 215–32; and “When Science Isn’t Enough: Wilhelm Hueper, Robert A. M. Case, and the Limits of Scientific Evidence in Preventing Occupational Bladder Cancer,”
International Journal of Occupational Health
1:3 (1995): 278–88.

11.
In addition to aniline dyes, leaded gasoline was also manufactured at DuPont’s Chambers Works complex starting in the 1920s. Tetraethyl lead was added to gas to reduce engine “knocking,” but hundreds of workers suffered brain damage as a result of exposure to fumes. The poisonings were heavily publicized in the late 1920s, and the portion of the Chambers complex where the leaded gas was made came to be known as the “House of Butterflies” due to the insect hallucinations of its workers.

12.
As Hueper put it on page 152 of his unpublished memoirs: “These and many other similar experiences with the often much delayed demonstration and admission of carcinogenic properties in industrial chemicals and wastes provide adequate and valid documentation incriminating industrial and commercial private parties as unsuitable media to be entrusted with safeguarding the health of their employees and of the general population.”

13.
Inserted into the urethra to examine the interior of the bladder, a cystoscope utilizes a thin tube equipped with lenses.

14.
Hueper,
Adventures of a Physician in Occupational Cancer
, 156–57.

15.
Michaels, “When Science Isn’t Enough,” 279.

16.
Bailus Walker Jr. and Abbie Gerber, “Occupational Exposure to Aromatic Amines: Benzidine and Benzidine-Based Dyes,”
National Cancer Institute Monograph
58 (1981): 11–13, 11.

17.
The true extent of bladder cancer at the Chambers Works—more than four hundred cases—would not be revealed until the 1980s. See Michaels, “When Science Isn’t Enough,” 280–81.

18.
Wilhelm Hueper, “ ‘Aniline Tumors’ of the Bladder,”
Archives of Pathology
25 (1938): 855–99. See also W. C. Hueper, F. H. Wiley, and H. D. Wolfe, “Experimental Production of Bladder Tumors in Dogs with Beta-Naphthylamine,”
Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology
20 (1938): 46–84.

19.
The headlines appeared in the
Ocean County Observer
on August 30, September 16, September 30, October 7, October 11, October 12, and October 17, 1984.

20.
Don Bennett, “What’s in Ciba’s Waste?”
Ocean County Observer
, September 30, 1984.

21.
Linda Gillick, “Help Fight for the Health of Our Families,” letter to the editor,
Ocean County Observer
, October 25, 1984.

22.
Bonnie Zukofski, “Ciba-Geigy Says Deadly Phosgene Gas Under Control,”
Asbury Park Press
, December 16, 1984.

23.
The men who led Greenpeace’s campaigns in Ocean County in the summers of 1984 and 1985 moved on to colorful careers elsewhere. Jon Hinck became an environmental lawyer, with a client list that included Alaska fishermen harmed by the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill. He even briefly served as the acting attorney general of the newly independent South Pacific island of Palau. Hinck later became a member of the Maine House of Representatives and ran for Congress in 2012. His predecessor as Greenpeace’s monkeywrencher-in-chief on the Jersey shore, Dave Rapaport, became a community activist in Vermont and then a manager at a company that sold environmentally sustainable consumer products and also worked with Walmart and other companies to “green” their supply chains. Both men would look back on their respective summers in Ocean County as high-spirited idylls in what was, for a while, an activist’s Arcadia.

24.
“An Open Letter from Ciba-Geigy,” advertisement,
Ocean County Observer
, July 28, 1985.

25.
One of the indicted executives, James McPherson, the plant’s supervisor of solid waste processing, was a particular embarrassment to Ocean County legislators because they had appointed him chairman of the county’s solid waste advisory council. Another, William Bobsein, the plant’s manager of environmental technology, was on the state’s hazardous waste advisory council. The third and youngest of the alleged conspirators, forty-four-year-old David Ellis, had a doctorate in chemistry and was the plant’s assistant manager of environmental technology. He was also Jorge Winkler’s partner in their side business, J. R. Henderson Labs, the water-testing firm that had caused controversy in 1984 for initially failing to recognize groundwater contamination in Oak Ridge. A fourth Ciba-Geigy executive, production manager Robert Fesen, was charged with illegal dumping, a lesser charge. Jorge Winkler, the suspended senior executive who had supervised all four men, was not charged.

26.
On March 5, 1986, just hours after his conviction, Robert Marshall was sentenced to death. His appeals dragged on for eighteen years until 2004, when U.S. District Judge Joseph E. Irenas set aside the death sentence on the grounds that Marshall had had inadequate counsel during the sentencing phase of the trial. Two years later, Marshall was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole as early as 2014.

27.
Joe McGinniss,
Blind Faith
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), 47.

1.
“Court Upholds Widow’s Award,” a United Press International story published May 4, 1984, described a case in which the widow of a worker at the Toms River plant was awarded $63,200 in death benefits and legal fees to compensate for her husband’s death from lung cancer, even though he was a smoker. Ciba-Geigy appealed the award but lost. “We are convinced that the evidence proffered establishes within a reasonable probability that [the worker’s] squamous carcinoma was aggravated, accelerated and exacerbated … by the chemicals to which [he] was exposed for a 23-year period in combination with cigarette smoking,” the three-judge panel of the Appellate Division of Superior Court ruled.

2.
For an insightful exploration of Wilhelm Hueper’s conflicts with the environmental research establishment as it evolved in the mid-twentieth century, see Christopher Sellers, “Discovering Environmental Cancer: Wilhelm Hueper, Post–World War II Epidemiology and the Vanishing Clinician’s Eye,”
American Journal of Public Health
97:11 (November 1997): 1824–35.

3.
Sigismund Peller, “Mortality, Past and Future,”
Population Studies
1:4 (March 1948): 405–56, 445, table 16. The increase was at least partially due to better record keeping.

4.
German prewar research into tobacco’s carcinogenicity had an all-powerful sponsor in Adolf Hitler, whose mother had died of breast cancer. Hitler had smoked as a young man but later came to despise the habit, which he regarded as a plague foisted on the Aryan race. Citing its American origin, he called tobacco “the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor.” Hitler made sure that the regime’s antismoking propaganda included racist images associating cancer and cigarettes with Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables.

5.
The definitive book on cancer policy and research during the Third Reich is Robert Proctor’s
The Nazi War on Cancer
(Princeton University Press, 1999). It begins with a chapter on Wilhelm Hueper’s efforts to find a job in Nazi Germany after being fired (the first time) by DuPont Corporation. See also Devra Davis,
The Secret History of the War on Cancer
(Basic Books, 2007), ch. 3.

6.
For Richard Doll’s brief description of his 1936 visit to Nazi Germany, see Christopher Cook, “Oral History—Sir Richard Doll,”
Journal of Public Health
26:4 (2004): 327–36. Doll, who was Christian but not a churchgoer, described hearing a lecture by a famous German radiologist who used X-rays to treat cancer. The radiologist illustrated his talk with a drawing of X-ray “stormtroopers” annihilating cancer cells marked with Jewish stars. Later, sitting at a Frankfurt café with local medical students, Doll complained about the anti-Semitism and was immediately accused of being Jewish himself, which he “disproved” by showing his companions that he lacked the thick ankles they had insisted were characteristic of Jews. Doll added, “We didn’t require many experiences of that sort to realize that there was something evil that had to be eliminated from the world.”

7.
Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill, “Smoking and Carcinoma of the Lung,”
British Medical Journal
2:4682 (September 30, 1950): 739–48.

8.
Ernest L. Wynder and Evarts A. Graham, “Tobacco Smoking as a Possible
Etiologic Factor in Bronchiogenic Carcinoma,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
143:4 (May 27, 1950): 329–36.

9.
Hueper,
Adventures of a Physician
, 183.

10.
Richard Doll and Richard Peto, “The Causes of Cancer: Quantitative Estimates of Avoidable Risks of Cancer in the United States Today,”
Journal of the National Cancer Institute
66:6 (June 1981): 1191–1308.