Toms River (16 page)

Fernicola had arranged with Sam Reich to rent a building at the farm to store his fifty-five-gallon drums but soon outgrew that space. The drums started piling up outside—first by the dozen and then by the hundred. At first, Fernicola tried to find other places to empty the drums before taking them to the farm. The Dover landfill was no longer a friendly destination, so he briefly dumped waste at the nearby Whiting and Manchester town dumps. That arrangement ended in early November when a laborer in the Manchester landfill struck one of Fernicola’s drums with the blade of his bulldozer, setting off yet another explosion and injuring the driver. By then, Fernicola had hit
on a novel, if illegal, idea: He would make his own mini-landfill in the back of Sam Reich’s farm. He used a front-end loader to scrape out a series of shallow trenches into which he and his haulers could dump drums that were too damaged to be recovered.
²⁴
Instead of using a ramp, Fernicola often would just roll the drums off the backs of the trucks and let them drop into the trench, where they often broke apart on impact. Thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals splashed directly onto the farm’s sandy soil, with no barrier to prevent them from seeping down through the sand and into the groundwater that flowed beneath.

By the end of November, Fernicola had dumped five thousand drums at Reich Farm—in addition to the fifteen hundred drums he had dumped that summer at the town landfill. Business was booming, and Fernicola’s spurned partners at the landfill resented it. Things came to a head one November night at the Rustic Acres, when Sharkey and Columbo confronted him. What happened next, according to Fernicola, was a scene that combined elements of
The Godfather
and
The Three Stooges
. In a court deposition years later, Fernicola claimed it happened this way: “They said I am taking bread out of their mouths.… They threatened me: ‘A match would cure all your problems. We know where you’re dumping.’ So I knocked both of them out cold.… I grabbed them in the back of the head and whacked the heads together and they went out, and I left.”
²⁵

There is no way to know how much Fernicola embellished his description of the head-knocking incident, but what is incontestable is that a few days after the fight, the authorities started taking at least a vague interest in Fernicola’s operation at Reich Farm. Someone from the town government called the New Jersey Bureau of Solid Waste Management, an arm of the attorney general’s office, but that office—whose small staff was responsible for investigating dumping throughout the entire state—declared that it lacked jurisdiction, based on assurances from Fernicola that he was only storing drums on private land, not dumping them.
²⁶
There is no indication that anyone from the state bothered to take a look at the site to see if Fernicola was telling the truth.

Finally, in early December, Sam Reich awoke to the magnitude of
what was happening on the rear two acres of his property. He got into an argument with Fernicola about the dumping, which by now was generating a powerful odor. A few minutes later, summoned by Reich, the town police showed up and arrested Fernicola, charging him with dumping without a permit and violating zoning laws. Union Carbide officials, also summoned by Reich, paid their first visit to the farm on December 15. The following day, the company finally barred Fernicola from taking any more of its drums.

The question now was, what to do about the toxic waste? More than five thousand drums were strewn across the back of the old farm, and Fernicola was in no position to remove them. When Reich called the newly created state Department of Environmental Protection to ask for help, he was told that the state had no jurisdiction on private land and that his lawyers would have to take it up with Fernicola and Union Carbide. For their part, town officials were in no rush to see exactly what kind of a mess they had on their hands; they waited until the end of the following month—January 1972—to send a team over to Reich Farm for a detailed look. When the officials finally arrived, they found a foul-smelling, snow-covered wasteland, with thousands of drums lying in open, muddy trenches near some abandoned trucks. Jack Farrell, the town’s code enforcement officer, said in a legal filing that his clothes stank for days after his brief inspection and that his rubber galoshes disintegrated after he walked in the muck. The inspectors found drums marked with labels like “Polymer Solution,” “Toluene,” and “Styrene” as well as large-print warnings stating the contents were flammable and explosive. Many carried this label: “Caution: Leaking Package Must Be Removed to a Safe Place. Do Not Drop. Chemical Waste.”

Don Bennett, the newspaper reporter, remembers getting a call from Jack Farrell, who said, “You’re not going to believe what I found on this old chicken farm.” Bennett hustled over and was shocked by the scene. “The drums were just all over the place, everywhere you looked,” he recalled. Farrell and the other town health officials knew so little about toxic waste that the only way they could think of to assess the hazard was to haul four of the Union Carbide drums to the town landfill and attempt an extremely primitive form of chemical
analysis—using live ammunition. Under Farrell’s direction, a town police officer named Michael Carlino pulled an army rifle from the trunk of his Ford Thunderbird and took aim at the drums, which were set up on an earthen berm one hundred yards away. After emptying two clips from his M-14, Carlino finally scored a direct hit. Bennett, who witnessed the spectacle, said that Farrell turned to him and said, “Well, I guess the stuff can’t be that bad. It didn’t explode.”

While Carlino was target shooting at the landfill, Nick Fernicola was busy haggling with the town and with Union Carbide over what to do with the drums he had dumped at the farm. The company at first claimed that it bore no responsibility for removing them, citing Fernicola’s promise a year earlier to assume all liability for disposal. Fernicola, for his part, was engaged in some fancy footwork, telling the town and Union Carbide that he was deep into final negotiations for yet another dumpsite, this one in Berkeley Township, on the appropriately named Double Trouble Road. By February, however, Fernicola’s shenanigans were public knowledge in Toms River. The local papers were carrying stories about the illegal dump at the back of a Pleasant Plains egg farm. Meanwhile, Fernicola’s “negotiations” with Berkeley were going nowhere. The Reichs had filed a lawsuit against Union Carbide and Fernicola and so had the town, which argued that the site was a public nuisance and a health threat. The state Department of Environmental Protection was preparing to bring charges, too.

It was obvious that Fernicola and Union Carbide were out of options and ready to cut deals. They found willing partners in government officials who were just as eager to close out an embarrassing incident in which they appeared to be either negligent or corrupt, or both. Union Carbide switched tactics and agreed to take back the drums, pay the Reichs $10,000 in damages, and reimburse them for the cost of digging a new water well for the property, since the old well had been poisoned. Crews from Union Carbide and a new waste contractor hauled the leaky drums back up Route 9 to their starting point in Bound Brook and eventually to landfills and incinerators around the region. At first, the company took just thirty-five hundred drums off the property. Only after the Reichs threatened to reinstate
their lawsuit did Union Carbide return to haul away another fifteen hundred drums. State and town officials, meanwhile, were similarly focused on making the problem go away as quickly and quietly as possible. No one was prosecuted for corruption at the landfill, which would close nine years later, but Sharkey, Columbo, and the landfill manager were transferred to jobs elsewhere in town government.

By July 1972, just seven months after Fernicola ended his dumping spree, the whole incident had been buried—literally. Having removed all of the drums that were in plain sight, Union Carbide bulldozed Fernicola’s trenches, covering up the solvent-soaked soil and some stray drums too. The thousands of gallons of hazardous chemicals that had spilled, or had been poured, into the unlined trenches and onto the sandy soil of Reich Farm were now out of sight and out of mind, and so was all the Union Carbide waste that earlier had been dumped and buried in the town landfill. No one seemed the least bit worried about where all that buried toxic waste might go—in particular, whether it would trickle down through the sand and reach the water-saturated layer of soil, the aquifer, that the entire town depended upon for its drinking water. No one tested the backyard wells of the Reichs’ neighbors to see if they were tainted, even though officials already knew that the Reichs’ own well had been poisoned. Could the plume of contaminated groundwater spread even farther? By the summer of 1972, the Toms River Water Company was using six newly drilled wells at the Parkway well field, about a mile south of Reich Farm. Might those wells be affected by Fernicola’s folly? No one tried to find out, even though the water company was pumping more groundwater every year to try to keep up with ever-increasing demand and even though the natural direction of groundwater flow—southward—ensured that the chemical plume from Reich Farm would head toward the six new wells.

The Reichs stuck it out for another four years before moving away, but their efforts to sell the old farm were hopeless. No one wanted to own a leaking toxic dump. Instead, the Reichs watched in frustration as their neighbors made big profits selling to developers. Forty years after Nick Fernicola’s 1971 misadventure, their property was still in limbo and Bertha and Sam Reich—at ages eighty-four and ninety,
respectively—were still bitter. They blamed Union Carbide, government regulators, and especially Fernicola, and they defended their original decision to rent out the back two acres for $40 a month—money Fernicola never bothered to pay them—in exchange for four calamitous months of dumping. “All we did was rent out to a guy who was supposedly gathering the empty drums and selling them,” said Bertha Reich. “We didn’t know he was a crook.”

As for Fernicola, he exited the waste hauling business; he had little choice, since the town had seized his trucks. (Four years later, his permanent departure from hauling would be formalized in an agreement with the state in which Fernicola was also required to pay a $100 “settlement.”) He moved on to a new venture that fit his talent for prevarication: fixing and selling used cars. Fernicola stayed in Ocean County until his death in 2006 but rarely spoke about his year as a waste-hauling entrepreneur, doing so only when compelled by legal subpoena. When he did talk about it, he did so with rueful self-pity instead of remorse and with characteristic dissembling. It was unfair to single him out, he would complain, because other haulers paid similar bribes to dump drums at the town landfill for much longer time periods, while he did it for less than a year.
²⁷
“My whole thing in the drum business lasted about five months,” he told lawyers in a 1993 deposition. “From what I heard, everybody made money but me. I am the only one that lost money and I started it. I lost the trucks. I lost everything.”
²⁸

Others would lose more.

The labor was painful, and he took a few frightening extra seconds to draw his first breath, but nothing else about the birth of Michael Thomas Gillick at Point Pleasant Hospital on February 1, 1979, suggested that anything was amiss. A few days later, his parents, Linda and Raymond “Rusty” Gillick, took Michael home to nearby Toms River, where his eight-year-old brother, Kevin, was waiting. Michael immediately became the center of adoration. He was an unusually attractive baby, with blue eyes, long lashes, and a sunny disposition to match his golden hair. He looked like a cherub in a Renaissance fresco, pink and lively. Linda Gillick, who had taught first-graders for years, considered herself a good judge of children. This child, she decided, was perfect. She never changed her mind about that, despite all the horrors that followed. In his mother’s eyes, Michael would always be beautiful.
¹

In May, shortly after he turned three months old, Michael vomited after his morning feeding, which was out of character for him. Later that same day, when his father went to Michael’s crib to pick him up after his afternoon nap, the infant’s eyes were darting back and forth, as if he was staring at a swinging pendulum. By the time his terrified parents got him to the pediatrician’s office, Michael’s eyes had stopped
their bizarre movements, but the pediatrician recommended a visit to a neurologist, who gave Michael an electroencephalogram, a simple test of electrical activity in the brain. It came back normal, but Michael did not stop vomiting. The formerly placid infant also began to twist and turn in his sleep, as if he could not get comfortable. Five days after Michael’s symptoms started, his father was changing Michael’s diaper when he saw a lump beneath his son’s belly button. In a few more days, there were similar lumps on the small of his back and his right leg. Whatever they were, they were spreading with ferocious speed.