Life in Violin's New Jersey

“BY JONATHAN SCHUPPE
Star-Ledger

The state's juvenile justice system is illegally holding hundreds of mentally ill children in overcrowded conditions with so little care that suicidal behavior has become commonplace, according to a report by the state's child advocate.

A yearlong investigation of New Jersey's 17 juvenile detention centers found many children who have serious mental disorders, are heavily medicated and are at risk of killing themselves. During the first eight months of this year, investigators documented more than 90 suicide threats or attempts.
[...]
To illustrate the problems, investigators detailed the cases of three mentally ill children. One, a 16-year-old boy, attempted suicide in the Union County detention center in May by drinking the contents of a chemical ice pack.

He was treated and underwent an evaluation for a possible placement in a psychiatric unit. A month later, he was still in detention, taking psychotropic drugs. By then, he had attempted suicide four more times and had been charged with assaulting three workers. He was eventually sent out of state for mental health care because no place was available in New Jersey.

"I wish I could tell you this story is exceptional or rare, but it is not," Ryan said.
[...]”

“That's a blue state, yes?”

“You suck as a troll 'fiddle'.

I thought this one was much better:

Morris 1st-grader brings in grenade

PARSIPPANY -- A first-grader who wanted to share his family vacation souvenir with classmates brought a hand grenade for show-and-tell at the Eastlake School on Thursday, prompting a 30-minute evacuation, authorities said.

During snack time, the pupil asked his classroom teacher if he could make a show-and-tell presentation with something he brought from home. When asked what he had to show, the boy told his teacher he had a grenade.

The teacher took the grenade from the first-grader and brought it to the main office, notifying Principal Tena Wright, who ordered an evacuation shortly before 10:30 a.m.

Local police, the Morris County Sheriff's bomb squad, a fire truck and an ambulance all arrived at the school in response.
<snip>


Sure you wanna #&%!$ with us?”

“Man, these mobsters really suck as parents...”

“"The teacher took the grenade from the first-grader and brought it to the main office, notifying Principal Tena Wright, who ordered an evacuation shortly before 10:30 a.m.

Local police, the Morris County Sheriff's bomb squad, a fire truck and an ambulance all arrived at the school in response"
------------
What a bunch of dipsh1ts.

#1 the teacher moving a potentially explosive device through the school to the Principals office.
Correct action - leave it where it is, do not touch it, evacuate the classroom and the adjacent classrooms to the far end of the school.

#2 the principal evacuating the school. The device was obviously stable after DS#1 walked the thing through the school and it did not go bang. Leave it along and call police only, with a bomb squad request.

#1 & $2, deactivated grenades have the fuse removed so there is a hole in the bottom so you can see the thing is obviously empty. If these idiots MUST handle a potentially explosive device that they know absolutely nothing about in a school full of children, a simple visual would have told them there was no danger, no need to grandstand and evacuate all the children into yesterdays rain just above freezing temp for a complete non threat. What a pair of politically correct azzholes.”

““You suck as a troll 'fiddle'."

I think this is hilariouse seeings how fiddle made a thread exactly like V does and cut and paste something. Too bad V doesn't see how much he sucks as troll too. LOL!”

“By Steve Strunsky
Associated Press

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - The little black bag seized in a raid on a cockfighting "ranch" contained the tools of the cruel trade: syringes for injecting steroids into already ornery roosters, tiny boxing gloves worn by the birds during training matches, and sharp plastic claws that replace the birds' less-lethal talons when blood and money are on the line.

Animal-welfare officials say a September raid in Monmouth County was among a growing number of arrests and animal seizures linked to blood sports, mainly cockfighting and, to a lesser extent, dogfighting.
[...]

"We're seeing an increased popularity of these sports," said Chief Carl Galioto of the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a largely volunteer organization that has law enforcement authority in animal-cruelty cases.
[...]

"Dogfighting was very popular among our forefathers," Galioto said.
[...]

"What we do know is it's making the news more," he said. "Law enforcement and legislative entities are better aware now than in the past of the grim implications of all forms of cruelty to animals. With blood sports, certainly you find guns, narcotics operations, gambling and, most horrifically, children. Many spectators deem it appropriate to bring their young children along, and the link between cruelty to animals and interpersonal violence is well-recognized."
[...]

...disabled fighting roosters are tossed into a barrel with other losing birds, bleeding but alive, to die slowly in a writhing, feathered heap...”

“I don't know. I just can't see Violin cockfighting. I always heard he was very willing.”

“Family doctor admits possessing child pornography

The Associated Press

A family doctor from Passaic has pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography and admitted there were up to 600 pictures and videos of youngsters engaged in sex acts stored on his computer.
[...]

Authorities said Mendez was among New Jersey residents caught in a sweep that started in September 2003 and also nabbed two former ministers, a former school principal and elementary and high school teachers.
[...]

Mendez is free on bail and is still allowed to practice medicine pending a hearing of the state Board of Medical Examiners.
last edited: 12/07/04 1:01:14 PM”

“We didn't need a separate thread to tell us that New Jersey sucks. It has been New York's toilet for years.”

“nah, thats just newark, the rest of new jersey is quite nice

ok, somewhat nice

ok, sorta nice

ah fuggit its just another state”

“Silvio is making a count. Furio may be coming back from Italy to square accounts.”

“Hmmmm... VioliN® vs. fiddle®. I'll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul... but first I'm gonna grab a beer and chello out a bit.”

“Girls 'stomp kitten, then brag about it'
13-year-olds facing cruelty charges for act called 'beyond sick – it's evil'
Posted: January 1, 2005


Two girls from New Jersey are facing animal-cruelty charges after allegedly stomping on a kitten before burying it alive up to its neck.

"This is beyond sick – it's evil," Cumberland County SPCA Agent Beverly Greco told the Bridgeton News. "We have reached a new low."

The 13-year-olds from Laurel Lake, N.J., reportedly acquired two kittens Dec. 5, but were told by their father they couldn't keep the animals.

"We received information from the local animal-control officer and the school [they attended] that the girls were bragging about what they had done," Greco said. "The girls, who are stepsisters who live separately, reportedly had taken two 8-month-old kittens who had been offered for adoption by their owner."

"They took the kittens to a nearby wooded area, where one of the kittens escaped. The other one was stomped, had a red tank top tied around its neck, and was buried in the dirt with its head sticking out."

Greco said most of the feline's bones had been broken during the onslaught.

"Another person found the dead kitten and removed it from the dirt and reburied it," she told the paper. "We exhumed the kitten and did a necropsy on the body, and determined that it had suffocated from the dirt packed around it after the girls buried it."

The names of the girls were being withheld by authorities because of their age, but each have been charged with three counts of animal cruelty and a disorderly persons offense.
last edited: 1/02/05 2:53:44 PM”

“They probably started out playing Mapleleaf's kitty shooting gallery.”

“no doubt”

“Laurel Lake is below the Mason-Dixon line and isn't really in New Jersey.”

“Northern New Jersey:

Did youse go to da landfill?

Southern New Jersey:

Did y'all go to th' landfill?”

“Pretty close! (bastard)”

“how can you go TO the landfill, when you're already there?”

“That's why Violin said I was pretty close and didn't say I was right on.”

“Our landfills are full of people who dissed this fine state.”

“haha! burn.”

“What he's really saying is, "Yo, youse wanna swim wit da sharks or wut?"”

“Did Violin just make you an offer you couldn't refuse?”

“MIDDLETOWN — A 76-year-old nun has been charged with driving while intoxicated after an accident on the Garden State Parkway as she was returning from Belmar's St. Patrick's Day parade, state police said.

Sister Mary George Barlow — a Bayside, N.Y., resident and nun with Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in Albany, N.Y. — was traveling northbound in the parkway's local lanes about 4 p.m. March 6, said New Jersey State Trooper Thomas Powell, when she hit the rear passenger side of a car being driven by Sharon M. Anuario, 49, of Bridgewater.

Powell said she was traveling at an excessive speed. After hitting Anuario's car near mile marker 113, Barlow drove off the road and hit two trees in a nearby wooded area, Powell said. She did not appear to be wearing a seat belt, he said.

Anuario's car spun clockwise and stopped in the roadway.

Barlow suffered a head wound and was treated at Bayshore Community Hospital in Holmdel, Powell said. While the trooper said he smelled alcohol on Barlow, her DWI charge is pending lab tests of her blood-alcohol level.

more...”

“You are the cubit zirconium to bit pusher’s diamond.”

“When the trooper asked her how many drinks she had, she said, "Nun! I don't have a habit."
last edited: 3/17/05 4:55:50 PM”

“Boooooo! Hissssssss!

LOL!”

“lmao @ Geo! That was pretty funny!”

“http://ws.gmnews.com/news/2005/0412/Front_Page/020.html

WOODBRIDGE — A Brooklyn man unhappy with the sentence he received for masturbating in public, repeated the crime before the assistant municipal court clerk on closed circuit TV last week, police said.

Reggie Frank, 34, had just been sentenced over closed circuit television on April 4 to six months in the Middlesex County Detention Center for masturbating in the women’s lingerie section of the Lord & Taylor at Woodbridge Center Mall, when he decided to begin doing what landed him in jail in the first place, police said.

“The way the system works with closed circuit TV is they can see and talk to him up here at Woodbridge,” Capt. Charles Rowinski said. “If they plead guilty, the judge can sentence him over T;, if they plead not guilty, they have to come before the judge [in person].”

Frank, who was being held at the Middlesex County Detention Center, had pleaded guilty to the lewdness charge and was being sentenced by Municipal Court Judge Emery Z. Toth over closed circuit TV, he said.

The court clerk alleged Frank had been acting agitated and was using profanity during the process, according to the police report.

“The judge sentenced him to six months and apparently the defendant thought it should be less,” Rowinski said.

After sentencing, Toth left the conference room and Frank moved off camera, police said.

Moments later, Frank reappeared on camera while exposing his genitals and masturbating, police said.

A criminal complaint was signed by the clerk against Frank, whose bail was set at $75,000 with no 10-percent option.”

“Tell it was not Ice-Tea”

“http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=817&ncid=757&e=10&u=/ap/20050419/ap_on_fe_st/school_animal_parts

another link
http://www.nj.com/news/expresstimes/nj/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1113987954110560.xml#continue

GLEN GARDNER, N.J. - Discovery of a bag full of rotting animal parts hidden in the ceiling above the school lunchroom forced the closing of Voorhees High School on Monday.



Officials said the school would remain closed Tuesday to allow workers to sanitize the area and health inspectors to clear the cafeteria to serve food.


"An unusual odor led to the discovery of decomposing animal parts that had been surreptitiously placed in the drop ceiling," Lebanon Township police Patrolman Larry Campbell said.


The bag was found about 7:30 a.m. Monday; students were dismissed at 11:55.


Police believe the bag was hidden over the weekend, Campbell said. He would not say what kind of animal the parts were from or how much was hidden.”

“Glen Gardner is where the late wife of Robert Blake is from.”

“Deer parts. A co-worker is a member of the school board there. They were likely hidden when they were setting up for a "battle of the bands".”

“Oh deer.”

“Now we know why New Yorker's say New Jersey stinks. It does stink.”

“ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. - Four more surveillance camera operators at Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino have been accused of using the equipment to ogle women, according to a complaint filed Tuesday.

In December, the same casino was fined $80,000 for incidents involving two camera operators who trained their in-ceiling cameras on low-cut blouses and revealing clothing.

The hidden cameras are required by law in New Jersey casinos to deter and prosecute theft, embezzlement, cheating and other crimes.

According to the new complaint filed by the state Division of Gaming Enforcement, the four Caesars employees aimed their cameras on "selected parts of the anatomy" of female gamblers and employees over a three-day period in October.

"Obviously, we take this kind of issue very seriously," said Robert Stewart, spokesman for Caesars Entertainment, which owns the casino. "We will be conducting a through investigation ... and will be dealing with the matter appropriately."

In a 2001 case, two women told the state Division of Civil Rights that they were fired by Caesars after complaining about voyeuristic camera work by surveillance department co-workers. Caesars paid $95,000 to settle that complaint.”

“Darn, no ogling? I thought that's what hidden cameras were for.”

“LOL:

The mob cleaned up; Big profits from illegal dumping; now we're paying
Wednesday, October 5, 2005

By ALEX NUSSBAUM and TOM TRONCONE
STAFF WRITERS

Special report: Toxic Legacy


Robert Constant got the message through a neighbor: If he didn't stop complaining about the toxic waste being buried at a nearby landfill, he would "end up walking on the bottom of the Hudson."

Constant wasn't the only one in the small community above Greenwood Lake who felt threatened. One family found their vehicles sabotaged.

The residents had spoken up about a parade of trucks carrying industrial chemicals, medical waste, and castoffs from Ford's Mahwah plant to a private landfill tucked into the woods. In doing so, they dared to take on dumpers with mob connections.

Mafia haulers and other corner-cutting garbagemen had a chokehold on industrial waste in New Jersey and New York a generation ago. Haulers carried off toxic trash from Ford and other factories and dumped it anywhere they could.

Today, their legacy seeps through Superfund sites in New Jersey and New York, costing taxpayers and corporations hundreds of millions of dollars in hazardous-waste cleanups. And those are just the sites authorities have discovered.

"The Meadowlands is a burial ground, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey is a burial ground, all of the waterways," said John Fine, a former assistant attorney general in New York who prosecuted dumping cases. "People will be poisoned forever because these kinds of materials - some of the most deadly materials known to man - they will be there forever."

The Ford plant represented the biggest hauling contract in the state - with thousands of tons of paint sludge alone. And with 15,000 other New Jersey businesses generating industrial waste in the 1970s, plenty of opportunity existed for haulers. Especially those who didn't care where they dumped.

It was easy for haulers to make toxic waste disappear: They flushed it down sewers, buried it with regular garbage, poured it in creeks, abandoned it in vacant lots or just opened the valve on a tanker truck rolling down the highway.

An investigation by The Record found haulers dumped Ford's waste far and wide. They left it along the banks of the Hudson in Edgewater. They dumped it behind what is now a college in Wanaque. They buried it in landfills that were supposed to take only household garbage. Truck drivers told of being ordered to dump paint, solvents and other industrial junk alongside streams.

Those who tracked polluters in the freewheeling 1970s still worry about the mercury, lead, PCBs, dioxins and other substances dumped illegally across the region.

"These chemical contaminants are leaching out of these landfills, leaching out of illegal dumps, and it eventually gets into the environment," said Maurice Hinchey, a New York congressman who led a probe of toxic dumping in the 1980s. "We know where most of the worst materials are, but there are places off the back roads that have not really been dealt with."

New Jersey is home to 134 federal Superfund cleanup sites and has nearly 16,000 contaminated sites on its own list. But officials acknowledge that there are sites they have not yet discovered.

"Waste haulers took things to a lot of dumpsites and didn't keep records," said Bradley Campbell, New Jersey's commissioner of environmental protection. "Our operating assumption is that there are still additional sites that have not been identified."

Nobody is hunting for these sites. State and federal officials say they lack the staff to seek out the waste that still lies secretly buried, perhaps leaching into waterways or wells or lingering near homes or woods.

"I'm pleased to be able just to cover what we have now," said Bill McCabe, acting Superfund director in the Environmental Protection Agency's New York office.

New Jersey's industries produced a staggering amount of pollution a generation ago, before better production methods and a decline in manufacturing reduced waste. In 1977 alone, according to congressional testimony, New Jersey generated 1.5 billion gallons of liquid toxic waste and chemical sludges - enough to fill Giants Stadium nearly three times.

The toxic waste vanished quickly. In one notorious scheme during the oil shortage in the early 1970s, haulers mixed waste oil with industrial chemicals and sold it as fuel to schools, hospitals and apartment buildings in the New York region, Hinchey's investigation found.

Dirk Ottens, a retired New Jersey State Police detective, staked out some of the worst offenders in the 1970s and witnessed the toxic sleight-of-hand many times. Some raised it almost to an art form: They lined the containers of their trucks with sawdust to absorb the chemicals, poured in hazardous waste and clamped sheets of plywood over the loads to keep them from spilling. Often, they added a final layer of municipal trash on top so they could haul it unnoticed into a municipal landfill.

In 1976, Congress passed tougher laws regulating where the hazardous waste went and requiring paperwork to track it. But the changes largely served to make the business even more profitable for shifty garbage companies. Almost overnight, haulers quadrupled the price to take away what was now considered "toxic waste." Some charged $100 to cart off a drum they would end up tossing in the woods.

Not everyone who hauled toxic waste was a mobster, but it was hard not to play by the mob's rules.

"It is exactly this type of lucrative business that attracts organized crime elements," a congressional panel investigating the waste business was told in a 1980 hearing.

In New York, Fine, the assistant attorney general, overheard two gangsters discussing the business on a wiretap. "These racket guys were bragging: 'We're making more money on this toxic waste than we're making on heroin.'Ÿ"

For mobsters, toxic waste was a growth industry in the 1970s, when the new laws were being imposed. They had exerted control over the garbage business for decades. The Mafia controlled many haulers and demanded tribute from others. They used intimidation to enforce an illegal property-rights system to divvy up customers - whoever hauled at a particular address owned that location forever, free from competition. Move in on another man's territory and you risked getting your trucks blown up, your legs broken or a bullet in your head.

They had the trucks and the muscle and were already entrenched with many of the customers. Moving into the toxic waste business was a natural progression.

The hazardous waste industry "reeks of organized crime," John J. Degnan, then the attorney general of New Jersey, told Congress in 1980.

It is unclear what Ford knew about those who were hauling its hazardous waste. The company declined to answer questions about its contractors, mentioning "limited historical records."

By the mid-1960s, the Mafia was fighting for a share of the garbage moving out of the Mahwah factory. A Genovese family gangster named Joseph "Joey Surprise" Feola vanished in 1965, reportedly after swiping the Mahwah job from the Gambino crime syndicate. In the final years before the plant closed in 1980, the factory's waste was most often in the control of people who were playing by the mob's rules, The Record found.

"A great deal of the material illegally dumped in northern New Jersey, in Orange, Rockland and to some extent Sullivan counties, was from [Ford's plant in] Mahwah," said Hinchey, the congressman, who lives in Hurley, N.Y. "And what you have to some extent now is that material sitting in the ground, infiltrating our watercourses."

As haulers dumped hazardous waste indiscriminately across the region in the 1970s, some lawmakers made it clear privately that their priority was keeping big industries and jobs in their communities - even if that meant overlooking some toxic hot spots, said Jeremiah McKenna, the lead investigator for the New York State Senate Select Committee on Crime when it probed the mob's hazardous-waste ventures in the 1980s.

"I don't think people fully understood the dangers of this, or the amount of bribes that were going down," McKenna said recently. "They just didn't want to shut down those industries. They sacrificed children to economics."

To be sure, the blame for New Jersey's pollution problems doesn't rest solely on organized crime and the government's inability to stop it. Industries also dumped on their own - in some cases before the dangers of their discards became clear, in others, afterward. Berry's Creek in Carlstadt, for example, was for decades an open sewer for chemical companies in the Meadowlands. Today, it's one of the most polluted streams in New Jersey, loaded with PCBs and the highest freshwater concentrations of mercury on the planet.

Ford's old property and dumping ground in Ringwood is another example. Millions of gallons of Ford's paint sludge was dumped there in the late 1960s, even though the land is in one of the state's most precious watersheds. State officials acknowledged this summer that residents who live near the site suffer elevated rates of some cancers.

Companies that wanted to properly dispose of toxic waste discovered licensed disposal sites were in short supply - and not always trustworthy.

In Edison, the Department of Environmental Protection allowed the Kin-Buc landfill to accept industrial chemicals starting in 1971. The dumpsite ended up leaching an inky toxic soup into the Raritan River. And in 1980, a roaring inferno at Chemical Control Corp. in Elizabeth consumed tens of thousands of drums of chemicals, explosives and medical wastes piled there illegally.

Kingpins of trash

Front and center among Ford's unscrupulous contractors was a Monroe, N.Y., family led by Joseph Mongelli, a trash hauler who entered the business in the 1960s with two used garbage trucks and no credit, according to federal prosecutors. In 1971, the Mongellis partnered with Louisville, Ky.-based Industrial Services of America and landed the Mahwah contract.

ISA founder Harry Kletter said that his firm worked with the Mongellis on the contract only until 1973 and that during that time Ford's waste was disposed of properly. The Mongellis and others hauled Ford waste until the plant closed in 1980.

The Mongellis put Mario "The Shadow" Gigante on the payroll of their company, ISA in New Jersey Inc. Gigante controlled garbage collection in lower New York State for decades, according to federal prosecutors. His brother, Vincent "Chin" Gigante, later became boss of the Genovese crime family.

The Mongellis ordered Ford waste buried illegally in more than a dozen places in the area, according to retired ISA driver Charles Oetzel and another driver who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. Oetzel said one of the sites to which he trucked sludge was the old Wanaque municipal dump, now a satellite campus of Passaic County Community College.

The Mongellis' favorite burial ground was the landfill just above Greenwood Lake, a private dump tucked into mountains in Warwick, N.Y. Grace Disposal, another Mongelli company, leased the property starting in 1977.

Trucks made their way there in a steady flow. They carried blood, organs and other hospital waste; battery acids; industrial chemicals and paint sludge, according to a 1986 report by New York State's Assembly Environment Committee. Eyewitnesses told of material that "popped and glowed" in the night.

One nearby family, the Penalunas, spied on the dump for months and later turned their notes over to investigators. In an account from the spring of 1979, the Penalunas described the witches' brew that arrived by night:

"Household rubbish, mixed with thick black liquid," read the report, provided to the Assembly committee. "Black liquid burns skin on contact, has strong smell. ... Also a bag containing rubber gloves, masks ... and a piece of paper stating materials in bag are radioactive-contaminated. About a half-hour later, a load from Ford plant."

Mongelli workers piled up drums stamped "Ford" behind the landfill office at night and later crushed them with a bulldozer, the Penalunas reported.

Robert Constant, who was a Midland Park High School teacher at the time, told The Record that he often followed trucks from the Mahwah plant all the way to the landfill near his home.

Residents discovered there was a price to pay for complaining: The Penalunas said someone slashed the brake lines on their truck and loosened the lug nuts on their car. Constant said he was warned several times to keep his mouth shut.

But instead of staying quiet, residents interviewed truck drivers and landfill workers and campaigned to close the dump. They were worried that the landfill was leaching contaminants into the water supply.

"We determined we would risk our lives because the alternative was to allow the lives of millions of people to be in danger," Constant said. "We knew who we were dealing with."

State health officials eventually declared the location a public health hazard. The dump was closed in 1980.

In a brief interview inside his expansive house in Monroe, Joseph Mongelli Jr. said his family had no connection to organized crime. He also defended his family's handling of Ford's waste. He said the Mongellis brought all paint sludge to the Bergen County landfill in Lyndhurst, where today the EnCap development is under construction. His statement contradicts the recollections of former drivers, as well as some of Ford's legal settlements.

"When you are talking to the drivers, you're talking to old men," Mongelli said. "They have to be confused."

His brothers, Louis and Robert, pleaded guilty in 1992 to racketeering and bribery in connection with the operations of their garbage empire. They were never charged with illegal dumping. Attempts to contact them were unsuccessful.

It was easy money

Other contractors who worked for Ford in the late 1970s were a Who's Who of problem haulers.

At the top of the list was the Duane Marine Salvage Corp., a Perth Amboy hazardous waste processor. The Mongellis hired the company to haul paint sludge out of Ford's Mahwah plant. Duane Marine also removed sludge from Ford's plant in Edison for Statewide Environmental Contractors Inc., a company owned by New York garbage magnate Charles Macaluso and his partner Frank Lotano.

Duane Marine's contract required that the sludge be incinerated, according to Ottens, who investigated the company.

There was just one problem: Duane Marine did not have an incinerator, Ottens said. Instead, the company stockpiled thousands of leaking drums on its waterfront property along the Arthur Kill. Ford's sludge was mixed with shale, a dusty byproduct from a Chevron refinery in Perth Amboy, and dumped in East Brunswick's Edgeboro landfill, according to testimony by Harold Kaufman, a mob associate-turned-government informer who was a Duane Marine executive at the time.

It was easy money: Duane Marine charged Ford up to $85 per cubic yard to remove the sludge, and paid just $3.75 a cubic yard to dump in Edgeboro, Kaufman said.

Three weeks after the Mahwah plant closed in 1980, a spectacular fire ripped through the waste company's Perth Amboy property, incinerating chemicals and evidence alike.

Duane Marine's owner, Eddie Lecarreaux, was later fined nearly $2 million for not cooperating with the Superfund cleanup of the site and pleaded guilty to violating the Water Pollution Control Act. Lecarreaux said he did so just to end the dispute with the state.

Ottens said he staked out the offices of another Mongelli subcontractor, S&W Waste Inc. of South Kearny, and saw chemical wastes secretly mixed into loads of household garbage - a common, illegal dumping practice known as "cocktailing."

"We took the paint sludge and mixed it with cement dust for solidification," said Robert Fixter, general manager of S&W Waste - now Clean Earth New Jersey - and the company's compliance officer in the late 1970s. "Then we took it to licensed disposal facilities in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Niagara Falls."

In 1984, an S&W shipment of sawdust mixed with paint residues from a chemical company exploded in an Akron, Ohio, trash incinerator, killing three at the plant. The hauler and five employees were charged with involuntary manslaughter. A judge dismissed the case, saying he saw no evidence of criminal recklessness in the explosion.

Another Ford contractor, All-County Environmental Service Corp. of Edgewater, was shut down after the state discovered 6,000 gallons of PCB-contaminated oil on its Hudson River property. The company was also fined for illegally hauling toxic waste in New York. All-County was a partnership between the Mongellis and brothers John and Frank Coppola.

John Coppola says the state allowed the facility to reopen within weeks because authorities found nothing improper at the site. He lays any blame for illegal dumping on the Mongellis, who he said took advantage of his youth.

"We only took paint sludge like maybe seven times, 10 times," he said. "It was our attempt at pumping and blending and disposing of it properly. Mongelli, he just dumped it.

"We had no idea who [Louis Mongelli] was, to tell you the truth," Coppola said. "We had no idea."

During his conversations with investigators, Kaufman vividly described how the Mongellis did business.

He told of a 1978 meeting that pitted Chin Gigante against Joseph Macaluso, whose son owned Statewide Environmental, the company that held a garbage contract at Ford's plant in Edison.

Kaufman said Gigante was seething over Macaluso's "theft" of a Ford garbage contract. Gigante brought the meeting to an abrupt climax, according to notes of the interview, which were obtained by The Record.

"Chin Gigante puts a gun to Joe Macaluso's head," Kaufman recounted. "He says, 'Are you going to give up Ford, no more fooling around?'

"Joe Macaluso says, 'Let me tell you something. If you shoot me or you hurt any of my sons, the war would never end.'Ÿ"

The way Kaufman told the story, Macaluso soon gave back the contract. But Lotano, as well as Charles Macaluso's brother-in-law, John McDonald, dispute much of what the career criminal told investigators. McDonald said the meeting contained no threats of violence. Lotano said Statewide was never told to give up the contract.

Charles Macaluso, who served as an honorary co-chairman of the 1976 Democratic National Convention, had close ties to the Genovese crime family, according to a congressional report on organized crime in the hazardous waste industry. But those who knew Macaluso instead describe the second-generation garbage hauler as a maverick in the tightly controlled industry - someone whom organized crime kept at arm's length.

Macaluso pleaded guilty in 1984 to bribing a Wanaque official to fix a garbage contract. He died in 2000. His father, Joseph, died in 1998.

'Everyone was in on it'

Crooked haulers sometimes got help from the very people who were supposed to police them.

In New York, state landfill inspector Sandra White pleaded guilty in 1988 to taking $10,000 in bribes to protect an illegal landfill in Tuxedo. The town's police chief and municipal judge also served time for taking bribes from Frank Sacco, the landfill's operator and an Upper Saddle River resident. Sacco, meanwhile, got 25 years to life in prison for killing the dump's manager.

Meanwhile, some police officers maintained that their attempts to enforce anti-dumping laws were not supported. Former Orange County Sheriff's Officer Armondo Bilancione said he issued more than 80 tickets in 1986 to haulers for violations. Almost all of those tickets vanished after he filed them, he said.

In Rockland County, a sheriff's lieutenant remembers seeing the "connected" trucks bypass the scales at landfills. Cigar-chewing men driving Lincoln Town Cars rolled in and acted with impunity.

"Everyone was in on it," said Stanley Greenberg, now retired. "People were getting paid all over the place."

In New Jersey, a former deputy attorney general who had once prosecuted toxic polluters was sentenced to nine months in prison after a company he co-founded was accused of pouring 13 million gallons of untreated chemicals into the sewers of Elizabeth. Authorities claimed George Gregory falsified reports about the company's dumping and paid an Elizabeth building inspector - a reputed soldier in the DeCavalcante crime family - to look the other way.

To this day, Ottens is uneasy about papers he said went missing at Ford's Mahwah plant. He claims he visited the factory in 1979 and found memos that detailed falsified manifests and fraud by some of Ford's haulers. When he returned with a subpoena for the records, however, key documents were missing. In their place, Ottens claimed, was a note that somebody in the state Attorney General's Office had warned Ford he was coming.

"The question always came to mind: Is this merely gross incompetence or is it by design?" Ottens told The Record.

Lasting damage

Illegal toxic dumping continues today.

Officials in Trenton say they increasingly find trailers filled with contaminated soil abandoned along streets and vacant lots in Paterson, Newark and other cities. The soil comes from the cleanup of polluted sites - some of them, no doubt, polluted by an earlier generation of illegal dumpers.

Still, today's problems aren't nearly as bad as those in the free-for-all years of the 1970s, authorities said. The public is more aware of the dangers of chemical waste and more likely to report trucks skulking in the night. Companies like Ford, stuck with enormous cleanup bills at illegal dumps, are more careful about whom they hire. The mob has largely been pushed out of the hauling business by national garbage giants such as Waste Management Inc., state officials say.

As for toxic waste abandoned 30 years ago, some of it will probably stay hidden forever.

Ford says it long ago told federal authorities about every disposal site it knew of. The automaker says it has cooperated whenever the government sought information, participating in "a substantial number of cleanups under the Superfund program," according to a written statement.

"Ford takes its environmental responsibilities seriously," said a Ford spokesman, Jon Holt.

The Mongellis' dump above Greenwood Lake is one of 15 sites in New York and New Jersey where the federal government declared Ford partially responsible for pollution or the company agreed to settlements for its share of cleanup costs. The Record also found evidence of Ford waste at six spots on state contamination lists, including landfills in Kearny and Lyndhurst.

Undoing the damage has been costly. In Greenwood Lake, the EPA put cleanup costs at $14 million. At Kin-Buc, where federal officials say some of Ford's waste ended up, the government expects to spend $100 million over the next 20 years to treat leaking chemicals.

McCabe, the EPA official, said companies like Ford bear no legal responsibility to track down every gallon of waste that rolled out of their factories. Moral responsibility, however, is a different question.

"That obviously is a totally ethical question," he said. "I can't answer that for anyone. But I would certainly want to know what my potential liabilities are. Personally, I'd rather go out and find them myself."

Ex-lawmen like Fine and Ottens have no doubt the dumping caused lasting damage. Ringwood's health problems are a sign, Ottens said; so are the cancers and skin disorders he saw in truck drivers who spirited industrial waste across New Jersey.

"We're reaping now what we were sowing back then," Ottens said. "You can't make those people healthy."

E-mail: nussbaum@northjersey.com and troncone@northjersey.com

Copyright © 2006 North Jersey Media Group Inc.”

“Violin did it...”

“DIRTY TRICKS' IN JERSEY?

From NBC's Ron Allen
In New Jersey's senatorial campaign, Republican candidate Tom Kean Jr.'s aides are charging that opponents "already have resorted to Election Day dirty tricks."

Last night, vandals chained shut the Kean campaign's headquarters in Mountainside, N.J., and broke keys off in the door locks to prevent entry, according to aides. "It's Jersey ... this is not surprising," Kean spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker told us. "It's the Menendez campaign, or their supporters," she added, but without offering evidence.

"It's just a lot of noise," was the response from campaign aides for Democratic incumbent Bob Menendez. They say they have "thousands" of lawyers at polling places across the site, especially where they expect problems - such as Essex and Hudson County, two big urban Democratic areas.

Menendez's folks are checking out a report of electronic voting problems in Essex County, where voting machines are reportedly defaulting to certain candidates rather than voters' choices. Whatever is happening there, they say that the problems don't appear to be widespread and that right now the voting process is "basically smooth."


http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2006/11/07/11670.aspx

********************************************

Dem dirty tricks in Jersey?
Oh my!!!!
Who'da thunk it?
New Jersey Democrats are never corrupt or sleazy, just look at our beloved violin.
[VBG]”

“TRENTON -- Three men seen urinating in front of a house on Federal Street got the surprise of their lives early Sunday morning -- an enraged homeowner ran out wielding a machete, then chased and shot at them, police reported.
[...]
The men had been walking home from the M&M Bar located at 400 Centre St., when nature called, and they allegedly stopped in front of a residence in the 400 block of Federal Street.

"They were confronted by a man who ran from his house carrying a machete, enraged (that) the three had been urinating in front of his house," Page reported.

The three men took off, and were chased by men in a van who cornered them near the intersection of Lamberton and Bridge streets.

"One man, later identified as Joseph Rivera, 19, of the 400 block of Federal Street, exited the van and fired a gun at the three (bar patrons)," Page reported.

"Martinez was struck once in the abdomen. His wound is not life threatening."

The three fleeing men finally flagged down a passing police patrol car in the 400 block of South Broad Street.
[...]

http://trentonian.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17461537&BRD=1697&PAG=461&dept_id=44551&rfi=6”

“I am SHOCKED, SHOCKED I say, at this violation of the Urinating Rights of these three poor men by NJ.
The ACLU needs to get on this ASAP!!!!

LOL”

“Someone needs to take a chill pill! I mean, someone pooped in your backpack, Violin, and you didn't go all apesh-t with a machete. LOL!”

“can I have my poop back, by the way?”

“I should think a person running out of their house waving a machete and yelling "Remember John Bobbit" would suffice to make a believer out of any drunk.”

“Wolnder if they crapped their pants? Finding a safe place to pee between the bars and ones home cam be difficult in a city.”

“I was caught by the police in Quebec and they just told us to "get your faces out of here".

Probably made more sense in French.”