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Melissa Checker Queens College, CUNY Department of Urban Studies

DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT REPRODUCE, CIRCULATE OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION!

Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap: Environmental Gentrification, Organized Crime & the Political Ecology of Fiscal Crisis in Staten Island, New York

University of California Berkeley, Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics October 15, 2010

[Author’s Note: I am extremely grateful and honored by the invitation to participate in the Workshop on Environmental Politics. I have taken advantage of the Workshop’s goal of providing feedback on works in progress and am providing a work that is, indeed, very much in progress. That said, I had intended to bring this paper to a more polished state but recent unforeseen circumstances interfered with my schedule substantially. Out of respect for the seminar’s schedule, I am apologetically submitting this paper while it is still in need of both copyediting and citations (which I can provide upon request). I do very much look forward to discussing is potential and possibilities with the Workshop later this month.]

Beryl Thurman, the president of Staten Island’s North Shore Waterfront Conservancy

(NSWC), likens her neighborhood to an industrial “Girls Gone Wild Video.” Thurman lives on a

5.2-acre stretch of Staten Island known as “the North Shore,” which houses approximately 21

toxic facilities, including (among other things) two private waste transfer stations, a Department

of Sanitation garage, a Con Edison plant, a New York City Department of Environmental

Protection sewer treatment plant, an industrial salt factory, several bus depots, a former lead

paint factory (now a Superfund site), and a radioactive site that was part of the Manhattan

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Project. All of them reside 70 feet or less from residential streets. Staten Island, nicknamed New

York City’s “forgotten borough,” has historically received far more attention for housing another

noxious neighbor – the legendary Fresh Kills, once the world’s largest landfill. Far fewer New

Yorkers are aware that just a few miles from Fresh Kills, the North Shore teems with toxic waste

and its residents must struggle mightily to have their voices heard by elected officials and

environmental regulators. Not coincidentally, the North Shore also houses the borough’s lowest

income families and its highest numbers of African American and immigrant families.

In January, 2010, North Shore residents believed they won a significant victory when,

thanks in large part to Thurman’s tireless efforts, the EPA named the North Shore one of its ten

“Environmental Justice Showcase Communities.” Despite its peppy nomenclature, the EPA gave

this designation to ten neighborhoods across the country singled out for containing “multiple,

disproportionate environmental health burdens, population vulnerability, and limits to effective

participation in decisions with environmental and health consequences”.1 The Environmental

Justice Showcase Community program is a new initiative, launched by EPA Administrator Lisa

Jackson, the agency’s first African American administrator. The EPA website announces that the

Showcase Community program focuses on bringing together governmental and non-

governmental organizations to achieve “real” results. In the ten months since granting the

designation, EPA officials have visited each of the North Shore’s 21 toxic sites at least once,

noting and following up on some regulatory violations. They have also convened a number of

meetings that bring together local, state and federal regulators with local businesses and some

NSWC members. Along with the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (a local advocacy

organization with a strong environmental justice track record), some North Shore residents have

also begun to organize a new coalition of community organizations and individual residents.

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With the express purpose of leveraging the resources animated by the EPA designation, the

coalition plans to make diesel exhaust, air pollution and lead contamination its priority issues.

However, some NSWC activists are frustrated and continue to view their environmental

justice battle as an uphill one, for a few reasons. First, many sites have not been, and are not

currently scheduled for, remediation. Second, a number of new projects (some of which I

describe below) which threaten to worsen their environmental situation are seeking permits and

are likely to receive them. Third, members are extremely concerned about sea level rise and find

that regulators are doing little to guard against the effects of future flooding. Finally, Thurman

has said on many occasions that the main outcome of the designation was to generate a lot of

meetings that “suck up [her] time.”

In this paper, I discuss the many competing and powerful interests that hamstring

environmental justice activities on the North Shore. In particular, city initiatives to bring New

York City out of fiscal crisis ignore, and sometimes worsen the North Shore’s toxic problems,

despite the fact that they often come dressed in bright, “green” wrapping. Drawing on

ethnographic research on Staten Island, I aim to pinpoint some of the specific contradictions

inherent in discourses of sustainable development in New York City. This research is part of a

larger ethnographic project that explores the dynamic relationship between environmental justice

activism, sustainable development and gentrification in New York City’s current climate of fiscal

and environmental crisis. I have found a disturbing pattern I refer to as “environmental

gentrification”, a process which works on both material and discursive levels. Materially, I find

that the successes of environmental justice activists have unintentionally paved the way for the

displacement of their constituents. Discursively, the simultaneous ubiquity and ambiguity of

“sustainability” becomes a greenwash that disguises the inequalities and inconsistencies

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embedded in profit-driven urban development strategies. By reconfiguring historic inequalities

through an appropriative process, environmental gentrification also works to disable meaningful

resistance. This continual tension between action and co-option, I argue, leaves activists and

residents in a particularly paradoxical and sometimes perverse situation.

The case of Staten Island diverges somewhat from this pattern, as sustainable

development here is taking two tracks, which do not always run on parallel courses. On one

hand, city planners promise to install bike lanes, waterfront parks, farmers markets and other

amenities designed to attract today’s class of gentrifiers – middle-to-upper-class, eco-conscious

consumers. But on the other hand, they are well aware of the North Shore’s strategic geographic

position on the New York Harbor, between New Jersey, Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Indeed, this position makes the North Shore’s ports some of the busiest in the New York area,

and it could play a pivotal role in bringing New York City out of economic decline. Although it

is pursuing both strategies simultaneously, thus far the city has devoted more funding to the

development of “green” maritime business. I find that, as it capitalizes on the urgency of the dual

economic and environmental crisis, the city also circumvents meaningful public participation.

Moreover, green development on the North Shore actually threatens to create more

environmental harm than it does good, belying the integrity of the city’s commitment to

sustainability as well as to eco-friendly residential development. At the same time, both

strategies – gentrification and maritime industrial development -- elide any substantive efforts to

address the environmental and social problems of long-term North Shore residents. In a far more

unusual twist, I explore another obstacle to environmental justice -- the presence of organized

crime on the North Shore. Here, I argue that organized crime plays an often overlooked but

important role in both the political economy and ecology of Staten Island.

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Background

One of Staten Island’s oldest and densest neighborhoods, the North Shore began as a

resort town that relieved early New York’s hoi polloi from the crowds and stress of the growing

city. But as the industrial revolution overtook the area, Staten Island's waterways became

integral to the city's growing economy, and industries proliferated along the North Shore. By the

turn of the 20th century, the area had become Staten Island's most densely populated in terms of

industry and people. It was not until the passing of zoning laws in 1961 that the city undertook a

serious effort to limit the degree to which industries and residences could cohabitate. At that

time, the city zoned almost half of Staten Island's waterfront, including all of the North Shore,

for mixed industrial use. While new residences now had to be built behind a buffer that protected

them from industries, the city permitted all existing industrial properties and residences to remain

as they were. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, factories and industries came and

went – often new polluting facilities replaced old ones. Thus, successive noxious industries

create layers of ground and water contamination. For instance, the Atlantic Salt company, which

provides road salt for the New York/New Jersey area, recently expanded after it bought and

demolished an old gypsum plant (NSWC 2008). Importantly, the trucks serving these industries

tend to use the neighborhood’s old narrow, residential streets such that a coalition of residents

recently identified diesel fumes and asthma as their number one concern.

The water, itself (a ½-mile wide tidal straight known as the Kill Van Kull that connects

the Upper New York Bay with Newark Bay, and which runs between Bayonne, N.J., and Staten

Island) is zoned for industrial use. It continues to provide the principal access for hundreds

ocean-going container ships to Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, the busiest port facility

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in the eastern United States. A recent study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration found that commercial vessels - freighters, tankers and cruise ships - generate

enough air pollution to pose "a significant health concern for coastal communities" and a follow-

up study in Britain showed that just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much

pollution as all the world's 760m cars (see Vidal 2009). Fuel lines also run under the Kull, and

some experts estimate that over 300 oil spills occur in the Kull every year from the fuel lines,

and from ship transfers (Checker 2009). Portions of the Kull are also part of a Superfund Site,

which includes the lower Passaic River and parts of the Newark Bay. According to the EPA,

these bodies of water contain dioxin, PCBs, mercury, DDT, pesticides and heavy metals from

various companies that once manufactured pesticides along the Newark Shore (EPA.gov).

Finally, the North Shore’s sewer treatment plant currently uses 56-year old boilers to

decontaminate its waste before discharge, and its capacity is woefully inadequate – millions of

gallons of storm overrun are discharged into the Kull each year, where some people also fish.

In 2007, NSWC received a grant from the state Department of Environmental

Conservation to research the history of all of the North Shore sites they believed were

contaminated. The result is a 44-page booklet, mainly created by Thurman, which, after

concerted effort drew the attention of the EPA. Once the agency began conducting some

investigations on the North Shore, they began to exercise some of their regulatory power. in

spring 2008 the EPA announced that it found lead levels up to 10 times higher than acceptable

on the site of a former Sedutto's ice cream factory, just steps away from several homes. In 1980,

this history made the site a candidate for the federal Superfund program, which was enacted to

clean up toxic sites. However, the government team sent to inspect the area had an incorrect

address. Unable to find the property, the agency closed the case until 2007, when Thurman

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started bugging the EPA and local officials to reopen the investigation (NSWC 2008). The EPA

completed site cleanup in 2010.

In another and even stranger case, the EPA recently stepped in to generate cleanup of a

site that played a role in the Manhattan Project. Briefly, from 1939 to 1942, Archer Daniels

Midlands Co. agreed to use a portion of their linseed oil manufacturing property on Staten Island

to store 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore mined in what was then the Belgian Congo. The

uranium was to be used in building the atomic bomb. However, at some point (either during

initial delivery or eventual shipment), the uranium spilled on the waterfront property. The DOE

knew about the spill and conducted a limited study of the area in 1980, and the DEC conducted

another study in 1992 and then another one in 2003. All found radiation many levels higher than

acceptable standards, but nothing was ever done. In fact the DOE determined that the site was

ineligible for their remediation program because they never owned the uranium. Currently, the

site is owned by Dolan Transportation Services, and is a deteriorating paved parking lot and

storage area for trucks and other large vehicles. It is surrounded by an eight-foot high chain link

fence on three sides and the fourth borders the Kill Van Kull. According to the Environmental

Protection Agency, “ardent” trespassers, boaters on the shipping channel and site workers could

potentially access the site. Yet, today, the signage around the site consists only of some “No

trespassing” signs posted on the fence. “I call [the site] ‘You too can glow in the dark,’” said one

member of NSWC.

Indeed, all this time, residents have suspected that the site was radioactive. For

generations, parents have told their children not to go near it. They also say that at some point,

some people from Hiroshima made some kind of pilgrimage to it. And there are other stories of

businesses that started up on the site but suddenly discontinued. For instance, residents say that

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once a company tried to build a warehouse nearby, but stopped; that ConEd was doing work

around there and stopped. One woman told me that a former head of the bus driver’s union said

the MTA used to store buses near the site, but the drivers were getting sick so they stopped. One

woman who lives behind the site said that when the overgrowth is low she can see the wetlands

and that the water has “a peculiar greenish color and something that looks like a oil slick on top

of it.” When Thurman was compiling her booklet, she found some documentation of the site’s

history. She and her group then started pressuring the state Department of Environmental

Conservation to pressure the EPA to re-evaluate the site.

In 2008, the EPA conducted its own study, which revealed levels of radium and uranium

contamination nearly 10 times higher than allowable standards in some places. Because the site

is also located within a 100-year flood plain, the EPA stated that, in the event of a flood, there

would be “a high tendency” for the material to migrate into the adjacent Kill Van Kull and

Newark Bay. Moreover, the agency’s report states that although the area is currently fenced,

trespassers coming either by land or water, and site workers could “receive an unacceptable

cancer risk under a conservative hypothetical risk assessment scenario.” After their study, the

EPA wrote to the DOE asking them to reconsider cleaning up the site. The two agencies tossed

responsibility back and forth a few times until last spring when the EPA announced that the

Army Corps of Engineers would develop a plan to remediate the site, starting in 2011. However,

in August, one of the local activists I work with drove by one day and found that the site had

been leased to a construction company. The owner, who knew nothing of the contamination

claimed that two weeks earlier, a Japanese film crew had been there shooting a documentary.

Earlier in the summer, a French documentary filmmaker also contacted Thurman because she,

too, had heard about the site and wanted to make a film about it.

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Heightening residents’ fears around all of these issues, the North Shore is a low lying

area and it floods, creating a double jeopardy -- the heavily contaminated Kull washes onto the

shoreline and contaminants from the land along the shoreline wash into the Kull. According to

Thurman, as floods worsen each year, residents “put their stuff on higher and higher shelves in

the basement.” Thus, NSWC is increasingly concerned about climate change. Thurman sits on

the New York State commission on sea level rise and frequently speaks about climate change

and climate justice. However, she and other NSWC members often complain that their neighbors

do not connect increased flooding to sea level rise. Thus, a significant part of their mission is

climate change education, an area into which many environmental justice groups are now

moving.

The North Shore is also like other environmental justice communities in terms of its

constituency. According to recent U.S. Census data, Staten Island is the borough with the city’s

fastest growing number of immigrants. Most of them gravitate towards the North Shore. In 2008,

48 percent of North Shore households were African American or Latino, although recent years

have also seen a large influx of African residents (US Census Bureau 2008). Not coincidentally,

the area also has the borough’s lowest incomes and highest rates of unemployment. NSWC,

members, themselves, are middle to low income white and African American men and women,

with one or two Hispanic members. Their membership numbers change from year to year,

depending on which issues are prominent on the Island. Typically, a core group of five or six

men and women do most of the organizing.

Environmental Gentrification & Selective Sustainability

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Several years ago, city planners began to take new notice of the North Shore’s unique

political ecology. Maritime industry held the potential to be a heavy lifter in pulling the city out

of the recession. In addition, residential decline and disinvestment along the waterfront, parts of

which include panoramic vistas of the harbor, made the area ripe for residential redevelopment.

New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) conducted a study to investigate

long-term economic development options in the area. Last winter, I attended a “Visioning

Workshop”, where the EDC presented the results of that study and to solicited community input

into the next phase of the plan. About 40 men and women sat around 8 folding tables munching

on assorted Italian pastries (ubiquitous as large public Staten Island meetings) and sipping

coffee. An EDC staffer stood up and greeted us. According to her, a major purpose of the study

was to identify ways to boost economic activity on the North Shore, while protecting its

environment. She also told us that as part of the study, they had conducted a series of “listening

sessions” and had gotten the message that people were “planned out and they wanted action.”

After about 45 minutes of presentations on the various options the EDC envisioned for

revitalizing the North Shore and its waterfront, we were going to play a game called “the budget

game.” Each table was now a team. My team, the Blue team, more or less represented other

meeting goers which means it included a couple of 20-something artists, a burgeoning population

in the St. George area, right around the ferry landing, some long-term residents, both blue and

white collar, and one lone community activist, representing the North Shore. Each team got to

divide a pot of money between various categories the EDC had identified, such as revitalizing

commercial centers, improving mobility around the island and to other boroughs, restoring and

providing open space and green space, creating and retaining jobs, and supporting maritime

expansion. These choices not only prefigured the range of possibilities for development on the

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North Shore, but they also presented a hopeful vision of concurrent industrial and residential

development. At the same time, they ignored the area’s urgent toxic problems. As Beryl

Thurman commented, “Oh didn't you hear EDC is from another solar system and planet? They

are completely out of touch with the mundane things like toxins that surround and impact the

lives of mortals.”

The 20-somethings on my team, who were members of various art and bike collectives,

excitedly voiced their support for initiatives like bike lanes, food coops and farmer’s markets.

Meanwhile, the old timers grumbled skeptically, pointing out the numerous half-finished projects

throughout the island. They were very annoyed that fast ferries were not listed as an option, even

though at previous listening sessions, they had enthusiastically agreed that they needed a fast

ferry system to connect to other parts of Staten Island, New Jersey and Manhattan. The divergent

perspectives at the meeting, and the degree to which one was privileged over another, reflects a

pattern that I am finding in several New York City neighborhoods that have historically fought

for environmental justice, such as Manhattan’s Harlem and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, and

Sunset Park. Although their toxic problems have traditionally discouraged residential

redevelopment in these areas, in the last decade, reinvestment has taken root (Angotti 2008).

Today, they have each seen varying rates of redevelopment and the depletion of low income

housing stock.

Elsewhere, I argue that these neighborhoods’ gentrification is tied to the successful

efforts of environmental justice activists to “green” their neighborhoods. For instance, in Harlem,

a long-standing environmental justice group successfully blocked the expansion of a waste

transfer station and over the course of a decade, transformed the site into a waterfront park.

During that same decade, property values in Harlem skyrocketed and the city instituted several

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rezoning initiatives to pave the way for high-end development (Checker, ND). This unfolding of

events follows an historic and well-established pattern of the relationship between the greening

of urban neighborhoods and upscale urban redevelopment (see Angotti 2008; Rosenzweig and

Blackmar 1992, Low et al. 2005; Zukin 1995; see also Page 2001). In Harlem, environmental

justice successes thus facilitated redevelopment plans already in the works, with the unintended

consequence of displacing low income residents in the process (see Checker ND). Similarly, the

creation of green amenities on Staten Island was key to the city’s strategy for making the area

attractive to more affluent residents.

Today, green gentrification takes on a new twist, as it coincides with the now ubiquitous

trend of rebranding major urban centers as “sustainable” and “green,” Such branding plays an

increasingly important role as metropolitan centers compete to attract investment, commerce and

tourism (see Goldsmith and Blakely 2010; McDonogh N.D.; Tretter N.D.). In New York City,

in the early years of his administration, Mayor Michael Bloomberg drew fire for lagging behind

cities like London and Paris that were viewed as being on the cutting-edge of sustainability

planning. In 2007, Bloomberg released PlaNYC 2030 (also known as “PlaNYC: A Greener,

Greater New York”) Bloomberg repositioned himself as a top contender in the sustainable city

race. With 127 separate initiatives, the plan lays out sweeping and lofty goals for New York

City, including increasing affordable housing as well as access to parks, playgrounds and open

spaces, reclaiming brownfields, enhancing the city’s water and energy infrastructure, and

reducing its citywide carbon emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by the year 2030.2 But critics

point out important contradictions between the plan’s stated goals and city-supported

redevelopment initiatives. For instance, while the plan promotes biking and transit-oriented

development, the mayor’s office has also encouraged certain car-based development projects

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(such as Ikea in Brooklyn and East Harlem’s new East River Plaza). Moreover, new waterfront

developments proliferate along New York City’s coasts, regardless of the plan’s warnings about

sea level rise (Checker 2008). Indeed, an unprecedented number of rezoning measures, like those

in Harlem, characterized Bloomberg’s mayoral tenure, resulting in a massive increase in

residential units, most of them targeted towards high-end renters and buyers (Furman Center

2009).

In keeping with the city’s stated priorities, the EDC’s plans for redevelopment thus

emphasized sustainability. In so doing they also appealed to a trend among affluent urbanites,

who exercise their environmental concerns through consumerism. Scholars link this kind of

consumerism to a crisis over the risks associated with modernity, which individuals salve in part

through their consumptive choices (see Beck 1992; Giddens 1990, 1999). Such choices include

buying green products, organic food, using less energy, recycling, etc. (Ishenhour 2010).

Ironically, of course, in their attempts to appeal to the eco-consumers, city planners glossed over

the very risks that were most pressing on the North Shore. In other words, it ignored the area’s

pernicious and urgent toxic problems.

In its superficial and ultimately staged treatment of environmental concerns, the “budget

game” mirrors a second urban trend, which has also gained popularity in recent decades. Since

the civil rights-era and in the midst of neoliberal policies, responsibility for poverty relief has

shifted from local and state governments to private entities like churches and non-profits. At the

same time, the selective appropriation of civil rights era political discourses about

enfranchisement, equality and participation serve to mask this shift (Maskovsky N.D., 2006; see

also Davis 1986; di Leonardo 1998; Kelly 1998; Reed 1999; Steinberg 1996; Taylor and Gutman

1994). In this case, under the guise of participation, city developers offered participants a

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preselected set of options that adhered to their goals of economic redevelopment. Moreover, in

catering to the viewpoints and activities of affluent white residents, these priorities trumped the

needs of less affluent people of color and they overrode any of their concerns about toxic

remediation. Thus, in the end, just as discourses that promote public participation actually

subvert it, the language of sustainable development erases a history of environmental injustice

and structural inequality.

Best of Both Worlds

After the meeting, the EDC tallied the results of the game and reported that participants

voted to spend 31% of their budgets on restoring and providing open space, but only 11% on

creating and retaining jobs, including maritime expansion. Yet, the EDC and the mayor’s office

continually call for the building and support of maritime industry on Staten Island. According to

city press materials, “A top priority for the Bloomberg administration is to identify opportunities

for sustained and increased maritime activity. With the Port Authority, NYCEDC is working

hard to develop strategies that will optimize these sites as engines for economic growth.” For,

real estate alone may not cement New York City’s relevance in the global economy. Rather, to

stay competitive, it must support the development of maritime industry. Perhaps most critically,

by 2014, if all goes according to plan, the Panama Canal will be enlarged in order to

accommodate container ships up to 2.5 times larger than it does today, known as “post-panamax

vessels” (Dominowski 2009). However, the ships will not clear the Bayonne Bridge, even at low

tide. Accordingly, this summer the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a Request

for Proposals from engineering and consulting companies to develop a plan for either raising the

bridge or dredging deeply into the channel underneath it (Leach 2010).

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Residents near the bridge well remember a seven-year Army Corps of Engineers

dredging project that finished in 2007. Residents and local businesses complained of cracked

foundations, broken windows and falling household items during blasting sessions that occurred

three times a day, six days a week. Insurance companies denied responsibility for covering

claims associated with the dredging. Although they filed complaints with the Army Corps and

their elected officials, most residents never received compensation as they were unable to

document adequately the damage to their homes (NSWC 2008). Indeed, several of NSWC’s

current members frequently brought up the dredging and said that it radicalized them and led

them to the organization. To be sure, they oppose further bridge construction and consider it an

environmental justice issue.

North Shore businesses, on the other hand, stand to profit significantly from the dredging

project. For example, for several years, New York Container Terminal, the largest cargo facility

in the New York Harbor, has been trying to get permits to expand to accommodate larger

container ships. The Terminal promises to create 300 construction jobs and 3,218 indirect jobs.

But, the expansion builds into 17 acres of Arlington Marsh, the last of the tidal wetland areas on

the North Shore that has not been filled in by industry. Activists, and the state’s Department of

Environmental Conservation, worry that the expansion will compromise the wetlands, which

provide a natural buffer to prevent flooding as well as release even more toxins into the waters

around the North Shore. Moreover, opponents argue that the jobs created by the project will most

likely go to union members. Despite their opposition, local politicians are reluctant to resist the

project; in particular, the EDC has been strongly in favor of it. In a private conversation with an

EDC staffer, when I inquired about the controversy over the Terminal project, she shook her

head and said, “This local business has been trying for years to get permits to move forward.

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What business would be that patient? I can’t believe the state is standing in the way of this.” This

quote highlights the contradictions between the city’s attitude towards environmental regulations

that impede economic development and its rhetoric about sustainability. As the fiscal crisis

descended in the late 2000s, these contradictions became even more apparent.

For instance, in perhaps the most glaring example of inconsistency, in November, 2009,

the city awarded its biggest chunk of stimulus money in the form of $28M worth of tax-free

bonds to Staten Island Terminal, LLC. For two years, this company had been amassing the

financing to develop the state's largest cement importation and distribution terminal on the North

Shore. After contributing $8 m of his own funding, the company’s owner claimed that he was

unable to secure the necessary construction loans to finish the project, due to the financial

meltdown. The plant will receive cement shipped in from South America and distribute it, by

truck, to construction sites around the New York area. Somewhat strikingly, the project is being

promoted as “eco-friendly.” Its website claims that it will also use only environmentally friendly

equipment and, by receiving materials by ship, it will greatly reduce truck traffic in the area. As I

mentioned earlier, a recent study finds that container ships emit can emit almost the same amount

of cancer and asthma-causing material chemicals as up to 50 million cars (Vidal 2009). Thus,

this project again calls attention to the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in “sustainable”

development, and it demonstrates the ways in which the city favors economic over ecological

sustainability. Ultimately, it illustrates the lack of substance behind large-scale projects labeled

“green.”

Connecting Organized Crime and the Environment

Perhaps the most curious part of my evening with the EDC arose during the discussion of

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one subcategory of the open space category -- an initiative to replace fencing around maritime

businesses. “Right now,” said an EDC staff person, “businesses use opaque fencing which blocks

the view. We’re not sure why, but we want to replace those fences.” I argue that, probably

unbeknownst to the staff person, the reason for the fencing had much to do with another of the

EDC’s strategies. In its list of budget game priorities, under “maritime expansion,” the EDC

listed “limiting or excepting certain state environmental regulations.” In fact, during the

presentation, EDC consultants had spent several minutes explaining how getting permits from

the state was hamstringing business investment and they wanted to correct that issue. These

comments echo those of the person I quote earlier, who was dismayed that state environmental

regulators were impeding the Container Terminal expansion. Many of the businesses behind the

fencing had accomplished just the kind of skirting of environmental regulations that the EDC

called for.

A few weeks earlier, at an NSWC meeting, one woman offered an explanation for the

opaque fencing. She reminded me that regulators require environmental reviews only for projects

that receive governmental or bank financing, or which are seeking a new permit, or to change an

existing one. Financed projects are also far more likely to undergo a due diligence process than

projects not financed with cash. Her point as that many of the North Shore’s waterfront

properties are bought and sold with cash. She also implied that cash transfers are enabled through

organized crime. In fact, some NWSC activists related stories about finding guns or drugs during

their periodic waterfront cleanups. These people believe that city officials are aware of certain

illegal waterfront activities, but are reluctant to intervene in them.3 Such perspectives stem from

Staten Island’s long and continued history as a hub for organized crime. For instance, less than a

year ago, the state attorney general’s office and the NYC police department arrested twenty-two

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people, including reputed members of organized crime families and a New York State court

officer, on loan sharking and gambling charges in early-morning raids on Staten Island (AP

2009). Among those arrested was a deputy chief at the city’s Department of Sanitation. A year

earlier, police raided several Staten Island properties, including a recycling company and a

cement company, allegedly connected to organized crime (Balsami 2008). Moreover, scholars

have documented the historic involvement of organized crime in maritime businesses, including

waste transfer, cement manufacturing and container shipping (Schneider and Schneider 2003.

1999; Sze 2007).

Even so, in depth analyses of the role of organized crime in urban political economies is a

relatively under-studied academic subject. One exception is the work of Jane and Peter

Schneider, who explore the intricate and symbiotic connections between the construction and

real estate industries, municipal authorities and organized crime. Operating in a liminal space

between consent and coercion, the Schneiders argue that organized crime plays a critical part in

sustaining the city’s political economy (2003, 1999). I extend these findings by suggesting that

the mob also plays a vital role in NYC’s political ecology in two ways. First, they occupy an

interstitial space that allows business to flourish in an unregulated atmosphere. That ability to

skirt regulation benefits the city by generating jobs and, more importantly, allowing it to compete

in the global maritime economy. At the same time, it adds to local pollution. Thus, while mafia-

related businesses are not entirely responsible for, but have helped to enable the uneven

environmental circumstances that plague North Shore residents.

Second, the mafia is especially imbricated in New York City’s waste management

businesses. As urban scholar, Julie Sze documents, before 1993, New York City’s private waste

market was dominated by small businesses with heavy mafia influence. In 1995, Manhattan

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district attorney Robert Morgenthau indicted thirty-three garbage firms and four trade

associations for conspiring to fix costs. He also charged that organized crime controlled the

commercial waste sector (Sze 2007; 120; see also Lentz 1995). A year later, Giuliani announced

the closing of Fresh Kills. Today, multinational companies handle much of the city’s commercial

waste. But, as far back as 1990, organized crime families had begun moving into the business of

recycling, especially as disposal costs in the New York area for nonhazardous waste rose to $60

to $80 a ton. Recyclable materials could be cheaply removed at waste transfer stations and then

sold, an added way to make a profit. For instance, in New Jersey, the owners of a garbage-

brokering business who had been charged with bribery, racketeering and illegal dumping,

founded a new company in Newark known as Hub Recycling Inc. (Egan 1990). The closing of

Fresh Kills and the crackdown on mafia-related waste management companies only reinforced

the appeal of shifting to recycling businesses. These examples not only clarify the role of the

mafia in waste-related industries, but they also clearly reflect its oft-discussed opportunistic

nature and ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Recently, this opportunism has included further expansions into the international green

economy. For instance, in September 2010, Slate Magazine reported:

Italian officials confiscated more than $1.9 billion worth of mafia assets tied up in alternative energy—"the largest seizure ever made," Interior Minister Roberto Maroni asserted. The money was placed in more than forty companies and luxury holdings, but the majority of the investigation focused on Vito Nicastri, a Sicilian businessman dubbed "Lord of the Wind" for his investments in wind farms and solar energy panels. "This is the proof of the fact that the Mafia is dynamic and able to interpret the new needs of our society," parliamentarian Francesco Forgione said, adding that the mob is trying to move away from traditional rackets like drugs and weapons, and into the lucrative "new economy" of green energy. "It's no surprise that the Sicilian mafia was infiltrating profitable areas like wind and solar energy," Palermo magistrate Francesco Messineo agreed. Over the past

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fourteen months, authorities have seized more than 19 billion dollars from the mafia (Pullella 2010).

While the mafia’s intrusion into New York City’s new green economy is undocumented, it is

certainly possible that it will expand on its foothold in both recycling and maritime industries in

the coming years. Thus, its impact on the city’s past and future environmental conditions warrant

further exploration.

Conclusions:

The potential for the opportunistic appropriation of green capitalism by organized crime

provides an extreme example of the contradictions of market-based sustainable initiatives. As the

case of the North Shore also shows, balancing economic growth and environmental sustainability

often prove to be mutually exclusive. In an era of dual economic and environmental crisis, the

privileging of economic priorities is masked by the ambiguity of sustainability discourses. Beryl

Thurman recently told me that she believes that with its grand plans for the North Shore, the city

is looking at the area “through rose colored glasses.” She added that this view allows the city to

avoid accountability. For her, the city’s rosy perspective enables it to ignore the role of organized

crime in sustaining maritime business, in part by avoiding environmental regulations. As well,

this perspective creates a certain kind of myopia which includes promoting development on the

North Shore while ignoring its toxic problems. All the while, by privileging economic priorities,

superficially sustainable projects exacerbate the long-standing problems of environmental justice

communities. As NSWC activists challenge some of this new development, among other things,

they like to argue that it puts new, affluent residents at risk, as well as long-standing low income

residents. Indeed, as pseudo-sustainable projects perpetuate environmental injustice and

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endanger the social and environmental well-being of low income communities, so do they

endanger the health and well being of all urban residents.

 1 See http://www.epa.gov/compliance/ej/grants/ej-showcase.html 

2 See (http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030). 

3 I reiterate that these are unverified allegations and beliefs. I include them here as it an indication of some North Shore residents’ perspectives on the role of organized crime in environmental activities and activism.

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