Hell On Wheels
June 4, 2018 11:27 AM   Subscribe

Fatal accidents, off-the-books workers, a union once run by a mobster. The rogue world of one of New York’s major trash haulers.

The Squitieri brothers, owners for decades, can be found on the top floor of the house-like structure on Manida Street. The three brothers are men of considerable wealth and fixtures in Bronx politics, and one of them, Steven, has been seen riding to special events in a white chauffeured Rolls Royce. They are also, according to employees, unforgiving bosses, profane taskmasters who push a small army of drivers and off-the-books workers through grueling shifts of 18 hours or longer.

previously
posted by poffin boffin (7 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
another ProPublica story about this
posted by thelonius at 12:53 PM on June 4, 2018


I miss Bohannon and his wrangling with Durant. Not much changes in corrupt America.
posted by unliteral at 5:18 PM on June 4, 2018


I feel like a lot of stories involving the corrupt waste companies in NYC have been coming out lately. Is there any particular reason for that? This has gotta be the 4th or 5th I've seen posted on here in the past few months.
posted by gucci mane at 7:58 PM on June 4, 2018


Every now and again, Rhode Island elects a Republican as Mayor of Providence or as Governor in protest to the corruption endemic in the Democratic Party. I mean, it's almost a summer ritual, the Speaker of the House is escorted away by the State Police...

They wake up real slow, but wake up they do once the coffers run dry because The Gov was stuffing million dollar checks into a famous baseball player's jock strap as fast as he could rather than attracting viable businesses to the state, and the scope and detail of his corruption became very clear during his successor's term. His Republican successor wasn't corrupt... Linc Chafee's problem was that he was as sharp as a bag of hammers. He then went on to debate Hillary Clinton as a Democratic challenger.

Bag. Of. Hammers.

Gina Raimundo is about to be voted out, despite dragging us back from the brink of Akron-style failure. GE just bought a huge chunk of vacant office space to house developers and other high-tech workers in Providence, and this isn't to bolster their toaster line. She signed off on two really tough gun laws, and credited her daughter to drive her to find a solution with the State Assembly. Brutally, painfully honest, self-made woman of means and determination, her dad was a small-piece assembler at a watch company, she was the first woman to graduate Valedictorian from LaSalle academy. Warm, funny, sharp as a tack.

I wonder in what fun, new ways Allen Fung will out-corrupt the statehouse Dems? He's had a history of using the PD as his personal enforcers. Maybe he'll start by pardoning himself?
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:06 PM on June 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


I feel like a lot of stories involving the corrupt waste companies in NYC have been coming out lately. Is there any particular reason for that? This has gotta be the 4th or 5th I've seen posted on here in the past few months.

I found this post from January and this post from May - both ProPublica articles, as is this one. So that would explain why - they've clearly been looking into this for a pretty long time.

The first article was about the general shittiness and danger of the way our commercial garbage collection is run. The second was published in the wake of Sanitation Salvage's second killing in six months - after which it was discovered that the first killing had actually been of an undocumented Sanitation Salvage worker rather than, as they had initially claimed, just some guy who blundered in front of the truck. And this article goes into more depth about the awfulness of Sanitation Salvage.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:44 AM on June 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


And it sure sounds like the next big revelation here will be that the head of the Business Integrity Commission is incompetent at best and at worst, corrupt. Maybe both!
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:53 AM on June 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


Jesus, what a nightmare. This reads like a story from the 1950s.
posted by suelac at 1:51 PM on June 5, 2018


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