IT was 5 in the afternoon, and the scratched-up green Dodge pickup was stopped at a light at Foster and Remsen Avenues in Canarsie, Brooklyn. A teetering bureau and a load of wooden slats were in back.
Lieutenant DeRossi, left, and Officer Joseph Fontana follow a pickup during their patrol in Brooklyn.
“Look at that,” said Lt. Robert DeRossi, a barrel-chested, baby-faced officer who was at the wheel of an unmarked white Jeep.
His partner, Officer Joseph Fontana, thinner and bespectacled, followed his glance through the windshield. “Let’s follow,” he said.
The men tailed the truck three miles northeast into a deserted, marshy patch of East New York, watching it make repeated U-turns.
“He’s spooked,” Officer Fontana said.
At one point during the 30-minute tail, the pickup doubled back on them and passed the Jeep as the two officers studiously pretended to ignore it.
“Is he eyeballing us?” Lieutenant DeRossi asked.
“He doesn’t even know we’re here,” Officer Fontana replied.
Finally, the pickup turned onto the southernmost block of Forbell Street, a lonely stretch near the Belt Parkway that is bordered by blocks of scrub, and pulled in next to a graffiti-scrawled shipping container surrounded by a spray of junk.
For a few minutes, nothing seemed to be happening. From 600 yards away, the officers settled in to watch. “Give him a chance,” Officer Fontana said, half to himself.
Then a tiny form appeared in the bed of the pickup, and an object flew off the truck into the weeds beside the road.
“Bobby, they’re dumping!” Officer Fontana shouted. “Go down there!”
A man in a plaid work shirt was tossing planks and slats onto the road. As the Jeep rolled up, he began to tip over the bureau. When it hit the ground, Lieutenant DeRossi said: “O.K. Let’s get him.”
Lieutenant DeRossi and Officer Fontana are members of the Sanitation Department’s Illegal Dumping Task Force, a unit of 35 armed plainclothes officers, former sanitation workers all. And this is their busy season. Construction work and spring cleaning pick up in April and May, generating large amounts of debris; some 21 dumpers’ vehicles were impounded in May of last year, a number exceeded only in August.
“The season’s heating up,” Inspector Robert D’Angelo, the unit’s commander, told a group of his officers during a briefing at their Bensonhurst headquarters in early May. “Keep your eyes open. Let’s get back to hunter mode, and be careful.”
To nab their prey, task force officers fan out across the city and work around the clock, sometimes following potential dumpers for miles or lying in wait for them in vacant lots. Sleuthlike, they poke through magazines that have been discarded amid spring-cleaning debris, looking for mailing labels that will help them track down offenders.
Sometimes officers sit in a welding truck, wearing hard hats and posing as welders. They have been known to lie belly down in high grass at stakeouts. When Lieutenant DeRossi was a rookie, he was fond of hiding in trees, eyeing potential offenders through the leaves.
As with many other hard-to-control crimes, the punishment for illegal dumping is stiff: a fine of at least $1,500 for each person caught in the act, and a cleanup charge of $150 per cubic yard of material. In addition, officers impound the vehicle used, a practice that tends to strand dumpers in the city’s most godforsaken corners.
A look at the task force’s yearly impoundment rates suggest that on a historical scale, the problem is waning. The city’s construction boom, though it has created much stuff to dump, has also consumed many of the vacant lots that were once desirable dumping sites, and many of those remaining are being watched more closely.
Last year, 201 dumpers’ vehicles were impounded, the second-lowest number on record; the lowest was in 2005. By comparison, the task force impounded 464 vehicles in 1995, and close to 1,000 a year throughout the late 1980s. If current trends continue, New York may lose the unwatched no man’s lands where dumping thrives. But for now, many of those parts of the city are still around.
When illegal dumpers are caught, they seldom look panic-stricken, like the perps on cop shows. More often, they wear a puzzled but friendly expression, a look that says, “What seems to be the problem, Officer?”
