Toms River

by Dan Fagin

  5. Despite not being able to participate directly in the final identification of benzo(a)pyrene in 1932 due to his worsening Parkinson’s symptoms, Ernest Kennaway lived until 1958 and was ultimately awarded a knighthood, among other high honors, for his work identifying carcinogens. He died in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, the place where, almost two hundred years earlier, Percivall Pott had first drawn attention to the carcinogenic potential of coal pollution through his observations of chimney sweep boys. Kennaway was seventy-six when he died, having stayed an active researcher for almost his entire adult life thanks to the assistance of his wife, Nina, who helped him dissect animals, keep records, and perform other tasks requiring a steady hand.

  6. Greenpeace’s coming-out party actually began a few days before the press conference, thanks to an attempted ruse Dave Rapaport cooked up with William Skowronski, a founding member of Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water. Rapaport asked to appear on a local radio talk show to discuss the organization’s pollution-fighting activities around the world. When it was time for outside callers, Skowronski dialed in and issued an invitation that he pretended was unrehearsed. “You don’t have to go to the South Pacific to battle pollution,” he told Rapaport live on the air, “you can battle it right here in Toms River.” Rapaport responded enthusiastically, as if he were hearing about the Ciba-Geigy factory for the first time instead of having spent the previous two months investigating the plant and even sneaking onto the property twice.

  7. The banner that Samuel Sprunt and Beverly Baker hung from the Ciba-Geigy water tower—“Reduce It, Don’t Produce It”—referred to a key element of Greenpeace’s toxics campaign that year. In addition to trying to shut down industrial discharges into oceans and lakes, the group was pressing companies to reassess their manufacturing processes to reduce the amount of waste they generated. In fact, as Dave Rapaport would later explain, the attempted shutdowns were just a dramatic way of attracting attention to Greenpeace’s real goal: reducing the use of toxic chemicals in manufacturing.

  8. Sam Sprunt and Beverly Baker did not have to return to Toms River to answer the trespassing charges because Greenpeace negotiated a plea bargain on their behalf. On October 24, 1984, the two activists pleaded guilty in absentia to four counts of trespassing. They were fined three hundred dollars each by a Dover Township municipal court judge, who agreed not to impose any jail time. Greenpeace paid the fines.

  9. The attempted theft of Greenpeace’s jar of effluent was mentioned in an August 5, 1984, editorial in The Reporter, a weekly newspaper in Ocean County. Its headline read, “The Greenpeace Show Ending Is Up to Us.” An accompanying cartoon, captioned “The Sludge That Ate Lavallette (A Ciba-Geigy Production),” showed a monster emerging from a pipe. The jar incident was also described by Dave Rapaport, Nancy Menke Scott, Michele Donato, and Samuel Sprunt in interviews. The identity of the pilferer is unknown, although all sources agree he was affiliated with the Ocean County Chamber of Commerce.

  10. Eugene Kiely, “Greenpeace Challenges Ciba to Water Tests,” Ocean County Observer, August 20, 1984.

  Chapter Ten

  1. In a January 1980 letter to the state Department of Environmental Protection, a Ciba-Geigy manager estimated that the factory was burying 9,800 drums and 8,900 cubic yards of sludge in the landfill yearly.

  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 Anthrop
ology 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.

  Chapter Eleven

  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 E
tiologic 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.

  11. The trend toward case-control studies was approvingly documented in 1979 by epidemiologist Philip Cole, who would later play an important role in Toms River as a consultant to Ciba-Geigy. Cole looked at epidemiological studies published in 1957 and 1958 in the British journal The Lancet and found almost twice as many case series studies as case-control studies. But by 1976 and 1977, he found, the proportion had flipped. The trend in the New England Journal of Medicine was the same: many more case-controls, far fewer case series. See Philip Cole, “The Evolving Case-Control Study,” Journal of Chronic Disease 32 (1979): 15–27.

  12. Joseph Heller’s description of Wilhelm Hueper’s personality appears in Lester Breslow, A History of Cancer Control in the United States (National Institutes of Health, 1979), 139.

  13. Wilhelm Hueper blamed DuPont for anonymous charges, lodged with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1948, that he was a secret Nazi. (Among the allegations: In 1934, while looking for work in Germany, Hueper had included the salutation “Heil Hitler” in some of his job application letters to Nazi Party representatives at German hospitals.) The FBI cleared him of being a Nazi, but his troubles were not over. In 1949, according to Hueper’s unpublished memoirs, the National Cancer Institute received a letter from DuPont’s chief of medicine asserting that Hueper had shown “communistic tendencies.” The DuPont letter also objected to Hueper’s plan to organize a joint government-industry investigation of cancer risk in dye manufacturing. With DuPont leading the opposition (the Swiss firms and others later joined in), the chemical industry’s objections scuttled the planned joint investigation. Hueper reacted with characteristic belligerence, writing a letter to the New Jersey Department of Health urging it (unsuccessfully) to investigate the unusually high rate of bladder cancer in Salem County, home of the Chambers Works. Hueper clashed with other powerful entities, too, including the Atomic Energy Commission, which squelched his efforts to publicize the link between lung tumors and uranium mining in Colorado—a link that was first established in Schneeberg in 1878.