by Dan Fagin
One morning in the spring of 1985, an envelope from Ciba-Geigy arrived in McVeigh’s mailbox at school and the mailboxes of the other teachers. The company was sponsoring an endangered-species coloring contest and wanted teachers to encourage students to enter. “So I told the kids, ‘OK, you know what, we’re going to draw ourselves. We are the endangered species because of all this pollution,’ ” McVeigh remembered. “After that, the superintendent invited me down to have a chat. He told me that what Ciba was doing was no big deal, and that it was like spilling a can of soda in a swimming pool. I told him I really don’t believe this company should be sponsoring anything, and that I was going to organize a boycott of the contest.” She got about twenty other teachers to join in and even met with Ciba executives, visiting the factory behind the trees for the first time. “I was scared to death, but I went there, and wouldn’t you know it, the plant manager said the same thing to me, that it was like spilling a can of soda in a swimming pool. They all had the same line.”
Similar acts of rebellion were breaking out all over town. In a sense, the entire county was engaged in a coloring contest, with each side attempting to paint the other in the most unflattering shades possible. By now, Ciba-Geigy had smartened up and hired a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent as head of factory security and a public-relations man who was much better than Jorge Winkler at communicating with reporters and the public. The company still faced a hostile press, determined prosecutors, and a skeptical public, but at least its executives as far away as Basel finally understood the stakes. They were fighting for the factory’s survival and could no longer count on the public’s unquestioning support. Whatever the summer of 1985 brought, they would be ready—and after the craziness of the previous summer, they were sure it would bring something.
They were right, of course. Greenpeace had made its reputation by saving whales, not fighting chemical companies, but the Toms River operation had been so successful that there was never any doubt that the activists would return the following summer. In fact, Dave Rapaport had promised they would. In 1985, he was scheduled to sail up the California coast for Greenpeace, so the new leader would be Jon Hinck, a seven-year Greenpeace veteran and New Jersey native who as a boy had gone to Boy Scout camp in Toms River.
In mid-April, the double-masted wooden schooner Fri (Danish for “free”), chartered by Greenpeace from a supporter, sailed into Ortley Beach and anchored at a now-familiar spot: about three thousand feet offshore, directly above the Ciba-Geigy pipeline, which lay half-buried in the sediment forty feet below. Greenpeace was going to make a second attempt to plug the pipe’s discharge vents, and this time the activists were ready to make a more credible effort. The Fri was almost three times the size of the Aleyka, with enough room for a team of filmmakers to record the action, a full crew, and four experienced divers plus two advisers who plugged pipes professionally for industry. The wood-and-foam plugs Greenpeace used in 1984 had flopped, so this year the group had devised a superior alternative consisting of semi-spherical metal caps that could be attached to the discharge vents with bolts and waterproof cement.
In the early morning hours of April 20, 1985, Jon Hinck placed a call to the Ciba-Geigy security office. Worried about creating a dangerous situation, he wanted to make sure that the company knew what Greenpeace was up to. Hinck told the incredulous shift supervisor that unless Ciba-Geigy shut down its pipe voluntarily, Greenpeace would again take “direct action” to block it. “It was pretty funny,” Hinck remembered. “The guy said to me, ‘Let me get this straight. You would like us to shut down our discharge to facilitate your plugging our pipe?’ ” To no one’s surprise, the supervisor declined the request, so Hinck sent his divers into the chilly, choppy Atlantic. Attaching each plug was a slow and hazardous process because the water was so cloudy. There was another reason for the divers’ struggles, but Greenpeace did not know it until months later. After getting the telephone call from Hinck, Ciba-Geigy’s pipeline operators began pumping huge volumes of river water into the line, doubling the water pressure. At that pressure, attaching a metal cap to a spurting vent was like trying to fly a kite in a hurricane.
Greenpeace’s attempt to monkeywrench the pipeline was so difficult that when a state police patrol boat showed up before lunch, Hinck half-hoped that they would all be arrested so that he could call off the operation. Instead, the police merely told them to stop. When Hinck refused, the cops took down the names of everyone on board and left. By the end of the afternoon, the divers had managed to plug fifteen of the fifty discharge vents. They were back at it the following day after getting their scuba tanks refilled. But in the afternoon, after Ciba-Geigy’s own divers confirmed the blockages and the company got a judge to issue arrest warrants, the same patrol boat again pulled alongside the Fri. This time the police arrested twelve people, charging them with disorderly conduct and criminal mischief. Ciba-Geigy then sent a crew out to remove the plugs.
Sprung from jail the following day on bail of $250 each, the young activists immediately headed back out to the outfall site, where they collected more water samples and then headed down to Trenton. On the front steps of state Department of Environmental Protection commissioner Robert Hughey’s office, the activists set up a wading pool, filled it with brownish water collected from the outfall, tossed in a couple of dead fish and a beach ball, and invited the commissioner to take a dip as reporters watched. He declined.
There would never be any direct evidence to support Greenpeace’s central contention that Ciba-Geigy’s offshore discharge was a threat to ocean swimmers. By any standard, the company’s wastewater was not safe to drink, but no one was drinking it or swimming anywhere nearby—except for the divers from Greenpeace or Ciba-Geigy who kept checking the vents and collecting more water samples. In fact, the dilution effect of the ocean was so extreme that water samples taken ten yards away from the discharge vents were unable to detect any hazardous chemicals at all.
To Greenpeace, however, the literal truth of its arguments was less important than their moral resonance: Ciba-Geigy was dumping in the ocean, and the ocean belonged to the public. Besides, Greenpeace was providing compelling street theater and great fun for everyone except the company. On a cloudy day in May, two hundred people waving flags and singing “God Bless America” attended a rally on the Lavallette boardwalk that served as a valedictory for Greenpeace. In October, charges against the twelve activists were dismissed after a local judge ruled that he lacked jurisdiction for offenses committed offshore. Greenpeace would not return to Ocean County; it did not need to.23 “In Toms River, we were a catalyst. The community got excited and motivated and worked together,” Hinck recalled. “We knew it wasn’t going to fall apart after we left.”
As bad as things looked for Ciba-Geigy, its leaders could at least take comfort in the fact that they had not been criminally charged. Six months after the raid, prosecutors issued grand jury subpoenas to more than a dozen managers, but there were no indictments. Soon the conspiracy theories again were flying in Toms River, just as they had the previous summer in the weeks before the raid. Had the company found a way out?
Ciba-Geigy certainly seemed to be assuming that if it played ball with state regulators, the criminal case might go away. On April 25, 1985, after more than two years of on-and-off negotiations and less than a week after Greenpeace embarrassed the company by partially plugging its outfall pipe a second time, company executives and Commissioner Hughey reached a sweeping deal. The company agreed to pay the largest penalty for an environmental violation in New Jersey history—$1,450,000—in return for being allowed to operate its ocean pipeline five more years. Ciba-Geigy’s actual costs would be much higher because the company also agreed to remove all fourteen thousand drums it had buried since 1982 in the active section of the landfill, Cell Two. (The removal ultimately cost more than $4 million.) Those drums would have to be trucked to hazardous waste landfills in other states; Ciba-Geigy’s own landfill from now on could be us
ed only for sludge from the wastewater treatment plant. The company’s wastewater also would have to meet stricter standards, including the use of sensitive mysid shrimp as a test species. Since Ciba-Geigy already knew that its effluent killed shrimp and mutated DNA, the company would have to improve its treatment process or risk the state shutting down the pipeline and closing the plant.
With the settlement agreement in place, the company tried to turn the page. In a full-page advertisement in the Observer, Ciba-Geigy promised to “focus on the future” while conceding that it “should have done more to respond to the legitimate concerns voiced by our neighbors.”24 It was the closest the company would ever come to apologizing to the people of Toms River, though there would be many more opportunities to do so later. In July, a contractor began the massive job of removing all the drums that Ciba-Geigy had dumped in Cell Two. Pressured by Ciba-Geigy’s executives and union, the county legislature returned to its traditional stance of servile obsequiousness, rejecting a proposal to hold a countywide referendum on whether the pipeline should be shut down and approving a weakly worded substitute instead. For the first time in more than a year, things were looking up for the company. Greenpeace was gone, the war with state regulators seemed over, and the local politicians were back in line.
And then, on October 24, 1985, the other shoe dropped with a resounding thud. A grand jury in Trenton handed up indictments charging Ciba-Geigy and three executives with engaging in a decade-long criminal conspiracy to circumvent state and federal environmental laws. A fourth Ciba manager faced a lesser charge, illegal dumping. The indictments painted a devastating picture of life inside the factory gates, charging that executives had flouted the law by ordering the dumping of thousands of hazardous waste drums in the landfill. To cover their tracks, the grand jury charged, the executives doctored records, deceived state inspectors, and pursued their scheme for years—even after they knew that the landfill was leaking and that an older underground pollution plume had seeped off the factory grounds, tainting backyard water wells in Oak Ridge.
What made the charges especially shocking in Toms River is that the grand jury’s indictments attributed the criminality not just to the company in general but to individual executives. Like the Marshall murder case, this was a personal betrayal. It was the first time in state history that the executives of a chemical company had been personally indicted for environmental violations, and the four managers who were targeted all had strong ties to the town’s social and political establishment.25 They were not naïve small businessmen or mob-connected midnight dumpers; they were highly trained professionals who wore a coat and tie to work, played golf at the country club, and sailed at the yacht club.
Two months after the Ciba-Geigy indictments, Robert Marshall’s murder-for-hire trial began in a small town near Atlantic City. (It had been moved there out of concern that an unbiased judge and jury could not be found in Toms River.) After an eight-week trial, Marshall was convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection—a sentence eventually reduced to life in prison.26 To the humiliation of image-obsessed Toms River, the case would be chronicled in a best-selling book, Blind Faith. The book, and the television miniseries that followed, painted a scathing picture of a debauched society of vapid social climbers in a town where “you were what you drove, you were what you wore, you were where you lived—no matter how heavily mortgaged it was.”27
Together, the very different crimes of Ciba-Geigy and Rob Marshall smashed to smithereens the guiding mythology of Toms River. Its residents could no longer pretend that their town was an apple pie refuge from the chaos of the outside world. Outsiders had not poisoned the water supply, polluted the ocean, and then hid their actions for years. It was not thugs from Newark or Camden who arranged to put two bullets in Maria Marshall’s back. Those betrayals came from within. Their own neighbors had done it, the people they knew from the Little League and the United Way’s annual fundraising gala.
As in any culture that loses its guiding myth, struggle and dislocation ensued. Instead of denial, there was open conflict, a coloring contest writ large. Jorge Winkler watched from the sidelines. Although he was never indicted, he was not allowed to return to work by the factory’s new management team. He stayed in town another ten years, insisting throughout that he was guilty of nothing but inept public relations. If he had returned to Switzerland, he later explained, “it would have been a signal to the people of Toms River that I had done something wrong and had to disappear.” In 1995, he finally left, after twenty-eight years. He and his wife moved to Montana, where the craggy peaks of the Bitterroot Range reminded him of the Alps. He skied, hiked, and tried not to think about his bitter experiences in Toms River or the calamities that occurred there after he left.
“It’s a nice place to hide,” Winkler said of Montana. “When I came out here, the first thing I did was to make sure I was not near a Superfund site.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cases
More than twenty years had passed since George Woolley took a final plunge into the Toms River, brushing purplish foam off his arms as he surfaced in its reeking waters. In the years since that foolhardy 1962 swim, the river had gotten cleaner and Woolley had developed an abiding interest in environmental health. He had worked at the factory since 1964, when he was twenty-two and an offer from the Toms River Chemical Corporation rescued him from a humdrum job behind a hardware store counter. As a teenager, Woolley had dreamed of being a science teacher, but there was no money for college. He had no complaints, though. By the 1980s, experienced laboratory technicians like him were getting more than $500 a week at Ciba-Geigy plus overtime. The job also allowed Woolley to indulge his interest in science by learning as much as he could about the chemicals he was handling. This self-taught knowledge had come in handy many times: After reading up on the hazards of epichlorohydrin in the late 1960s, for example, he told his supervisor that he would not work with it anymore unless the company provided properly ventilated workspaces, which it promptly did.
Like many longtime workers at the plant, Woolley’s feelings toward his employer were nuanced. He had seen working conditions gradually improve during his long tenure and was proud to have helped hasten the changes through his activism in the union, Local 8-562 of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union. In his early years at the factory, he had handled noxious, unfamiliar chemicals with almost no protective gear and had made dozens of trips to the old open-pit dump to pour cans full of solvents into the “smudge pots” that led straight to the sandy ground. By the mid-1980s, however, both practices had been banned. Although relations between the workers and management were always tense whenever a new labor contract was being negotiated, the two sides worked reasonably well together otherwise. Woolley regarded Ciba-Geigy as a decent employer that was generally willing to do what the rules required—but nothing more than what the rules required. As he explained years later, “I was working for a chemical company that, in my opinion, was one step ahead of the law—and I mean that in a positive way.”
The uproar over the leaking pipeline, and the torrent of bad publicity that followed, had brought labor and management closer together, united by a shared sense of persecution. Now that the company was notorious, Ciba-Geigy needed the support of its workers in a way it never had before, and the workers—fearful of losing the best blue-collar jobs in the county—were eager to be drafted. The union represented 650 workers, and even though they were a much smaller percentage of the town’s total population than in earlier years, they were still a formidable political force when mobilized. Now they showed up by the hundreds at public hearings, wearing company jackets and union baseball caps; some even drove out to the beach communities and organized counterdemonstrations near Greenpeace rallies. When Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water started getting publicity, Ciba-Geigy workers tried to take it over, demanding to see its bylaws, calling for elections, and showing up uninvited at meetings. The union president at the time, Jim
McManus, was particularly bellicose. “Swim somewhere else!” he would shout, if someone complained about the ocean outfall.
Even before the public criticism began, the chemical plant was in decline. At just under one thousand people, its workforce had fallen by one-third since its 1968 peak. The Swiss had lost patent protection for their most important dyes, allowing competing factories in Asia and Eastern Europe (some of which they owned) to use the same relatively simple manufacturing processes to make dyes much more cheaply. The new plants in places like India and Poland saved money by dumping barely treated waste into open pits or rivers, just as Toms River Chemical had done a generation earlier. An even more important economic advantage for overseas manufacturers was the cost of labor. Hourly wages at the Toms River plant were more than eight times higher than those at most foreign factories. A similarly huge disparity in wages had already devastated the American textile industry, creating yet another incentive for dye manufacturers to move overseas. Fabric was usually dyed before it was cut and made into clothing, so it made sense for dye manufacturers to be located near the booming textile factories of East Asia.
By the mid-1980s, it was obvious that high-wage, low-tech chemical plants like the one in Toms River did not have a long-term future in the United States, and the workers at the plant knew it. But that realization only strengthened their determination to hold on to their jobs for as long as they could. Besides, Ciba-Geigy had given them reason for hope by announcing plans to make Toms River the new home of its American pharmaceutical manufacturing operations, which were not as labor-intensive and therefore less vulnerable to foreign competition than dyes. If Ciba-Geigy’s executives told them that the ocean pipeline was necessary to keep the factory running, then the unionized workers would fight for it.
And yet, for all their aggressiveness in challenging Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water and Greenpeace, the unionized workers of Ciba-Geigy had more in common with the plant’s critics than either side acknowledged publicly. The more the environmentalists talked about the dangerous chemicals the company was dumping, the more worried the workers became about their own safety, especially after Don Bennett began listing many of the chemicals in his stories in the Ocean County Observer. “There was all this talk about cancer on the outside, so we said, ‘What about the people who worked in the plant?’ We were much more exposed than they were,” remembered John Talty, an officer in the union starting in the mid-1980s.
