Toms River (30 page)

Convinced that their case was slipping away, Chinery and Wells decided to try something outlandish. At the end of August, Chinery picked up the phone and called the state Environmental Crimes Bureau. He informed the unhappy prosecutor at the other end of the line that the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office had decided to raid Ciba-Geigy alone and pursue its own prosecution. The county cops would be going in, Chinery said, just as soon as a judge issued a search warrant. That was a lie. There was no warrant request, no plan to raid the factory. The county investigators—whose first try at environmental enforcement had been a farcical attempt to arrest a belligerent cesspool dumper in 1980—were utterly unequipped to tackle a site as huge as Ciba-Geigy. In fact, Wells and Chinery were unequipped to tackle a site of any size. “We had no idea what to do. We didn’t even own a white chemical suit,” Wells recalled. “We were just so disgusted by the foot-dragging that we wanted to make something happen.” It was a gamble, but Chinery thought the state would not dare to call his bluff. If the local cops went in alone, the state would miss out on all the news coverage that would come from busting Ciba-Geigy and would miss out on any fines, too. Even worse would be the perception that the state had caved in to political pressure to go easy on the company, in contrast to the plucky county prosecutor. It was, Chinery decided, a foolproof plan. The state would have to act.

He was right. A few hours after Chinery’s phone call, a carful of
prosecutors from Trenton showed up at his office in the old county courthouse, ready to do almost anything to head off a unilateral county raid. Before the meeting was over, the state officials had agreed to share any fines with the county and to swear in Chinery and Wells as special deputies in the attorney general’s office so that they could monitor the investigation from the inside. The state prosecutors promised to raid the plant quickly so that Ciba-Geigy would not have time to clean up the site or destroy any evidence. In return, County Prosecutor Turnbach conceded the obvious: The state would take the lead on the prosecution.

The following Saturday, September 1, was the start of a long holiday weekend. Jorge Winkler was relaxing at his lake house in the Adirondacks, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen at the factory he had helped to run for seventeen years. In Trenton, Wayne Smith was hard at work. He spent the weekend combing through all the evidence the state had collected at the landfill and writing a request for a search warrant, which a judge issued September 4. Two days later, at eight-thirty in the morning, more than a dozen investigators from the state Division of Criminal Justice showed up at the factory complex with an escort from the town police. Two county investigators were there, too: Dick Chinery and Dane Wells were finally getting a chance to storm the castle. By then, they were expected. Matthew Boylan, the Ciba-Geigy lawyer and former director of the state Division of Criminal Justice, was waiting at the front gate. But there was nothing he could do to stop his former colleagues from entering. Many times over the past few years, DEP inspectors had been kept waiting for an hour or more at the gate. This time, thanks to the warrant, the prosecutors and police drove right in.

And that is how Dane Wells ended up watching moonlit barrels of toxic waste. The drums were critical evidence in the nascent criminal investigation. Even after spending two full days confiscating records and taking chemical samples at the factory, state investigators were not finished collecting evidence. Someone had to stay all night to make sure the drums were not tampered with.

Wells was alone at the landfill that night because every other cop on the graveyard shift in Ocean County was working on an extraordinary
murder case. Robert Marshall was telling the police a terrifying story: He and his wife, Maria, were heading home from a night of dinner and gambling in Atlantic City when they pulled off the Parkway south of Toms River and parked their Cadillac Eldorado at a darkened picnic area to fix a rattling tire. While crouching by the tire, he told police, he was struck from behind and knocked out. When he regained consciousness, his wife was sprawled in the passenger seat of the Cadillac, dead, the apparent victim of an assailant who stole her money and shot her twice in the back. The murder was a stunner in Toms River. A handsome couple, Rob and Maria Marshall had three teenage sons, were prominent members of the Toms River Country Club, and lived in Brookside Heights, the same neighborhood where most of the Ciba-Geigy executives lived. What made the case even more of a sensation was that within days of the murder, there was talk in town that the Marshalls had had a troubled marriage and that the police doubted Rob Marshall’s account of what had happened.

With the raid on Ciba-Geigy and the growing suspicion that Rob Marshall had arranged his wife’s death, the people of Toms River felt the ground shifting beneath their feet. Just a few months earlier, Marshall had chaired the annual gala of the Ocean County United Way; Ciba-Geigy had, as usual, been the biggest donor. Now both were suspected of conspiracies that directly challenged the community’s smug self-image as an island of safety and morality in a dangerous, immoral world. In a town where no one ever asked many questions, suddenly everything was up for vigorous discussion. The pages of the
Ocean County Observer
became a chronicle of civic strife: “Doctor Seeks Ciba Boycott,” “Ciba Fails to Search for Reported Cyanide,” “Ciba-Geigy Workers’ Bags Searched,” “Chemicals Found in Private Wells near Ciba Plant,” “Greenpeace Cites Clam Kill,” “Ciba Hints Dead Clams Were ‘Planted,’ ” “Health Chief Is Told: ‘Don’t Drink the Water.’ ”
¹⁹

No one had a rougher September than Jorge Winkler, the factory’s director of production and environmental services, when he returned from the Adirondacks. On September 10, he was called into the plant manager’s office and told he was losing his title because of the violations
at the landfill. A few days later, the local papers reported for the first time that a water-testing laboratory that back in 1981 had failed to detect toxic chemicals in a backyard well on Cardinal Drive was co-owned by Winkler and another Ciba-Geigy executive, David Ellis. Winkler’s supervisors had known about this potential conflict of interest, but the public had not. Soon afterward, Winkler, Ellis, and four others were suspended with pay. They continued to insist that any problems at the landfill were innocent errors, but to the Republican power brokers in Ocean County, the message was unmistakable. The suspended managers had been the public face of Ciba-Geigy on environmental matters; local politicians had dealt with them for years. Now they were gone, and the politicians were not sure whom or what to believe.

Everything in Toms River seemed to be falling apart now. On September 26, a grand jury indicted a Louisiana man in what a judge described as the “killing for hire” of Maria Marshall. Four days later, the people of Ocean County got two more jolts with their Sunday morning paper. Rob Marshall, now openly suspected of arranging his wife’s murder, had checked himself into a psychiatric hospital after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. And on three full pages of the
Observer
, reporter Don Bennett laid out in excruciating detail exactly what Ciba-Geigy was sending into the ocean off Ortley Beach. The word
cancer
appeared eight times in the story, which described twenty-two toxic chemicals in the company’s waste stream.
²⁰
Two weeks later, county legislators voted unanimously to urge the state Department of Environmental Protection to investigate the environmental impact of Ciba-Geigy’s discharge pipe. It was still a long way from the shutdown that an increasing number of county residents were demanding, but it was an epochal step for a board that had never before challenged Ciba-Geigy.

The civil war in town was starkly apparent in October of 1984, when more than eight hundred people attended a DEP public hearing on the company’s request for a new permit for its ocean pipeline. The crowd was split down the middle. Sign-waving critics of Ciba-Geigy sat in front; the back rows were filled with hundreds of employees in blue windbreakers bearing the company logo. One of the quieter audience
members that night was Linda Gillick. She may not have said much, but she seethed when a union official, Thomas Dooley, took the microphone and declared: “There is no greater devastation than people losing their jobs.”

Linda Gillick was just beginning her transition from kinetic fundraiser for children’s cancer causes to tough-minded political activist, but in a letter the
Observer
published a week later, she gave an early flash of her talent for passionate persuasion in her response to Dooley. “Do you have so little regard for humanity that monetary values are foremost?” Gillick wrote. “Try the devastation of pain, disfigurement and blindness of a child from cancer. Try paying the medical bills that wipe out your income even if you have a job. Try taking a child out in public so tortured by the disease physically that ridicule and silent accusations kill a part of his spirit every day.”
²¹
Michael Gillick, almost six years old at the time, had been undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments for all but the first few months of his life.

Even events on the other side of the world were resonating in Toms River. On December 2, 1984, forty-two metric tons of methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a tank at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Within two weeks, an estimated eight thousand people were dead, and tens of thousands were seriously injured. It was the worst industrial accident in history, and the majority owner of the plant was a subsidiary of Union Carbide, source of the waste that Nick Fernicola had dumped at Reich Farm in 1971. But the connection drawn by most Toms River residents was to Ciba-Geigy, especially after Don Bennett reported that the company was storing up to six tons of phosgene gas on the factory grounds. The sweet-smelling poison gas had been used in dye production at the Toms River plant starting in 1959, and there had been at least three leaks since then, including the one that killed a factory worker in 1974.
²²
In Bhopal, Union Carbide used phosgene to make methyl isocyanate. Now, Bennett was reporting that there was no plan to evacuate the town in the event of a Bhopal-style leak in Toms River. It would take another seven months and a dozen more newspaper stories before Ciba-Geigy succumbed to public pressure and stopped using phosgene in Toms River.

A week before Christmas of 1984, Robert Marshall was finally arrested
and charged with solicitation to commit murder. Prosecutors told the press that Marshall’s motive in arranging the murder of his wife of twenty-one years was to collect a $1.5 million life insurance policy, pay off his debts, and move in with his girlfriend, a former vice principal at an area high school.

Ciba-Geigy had an apparent motive, too: By the early 1980s, it was saving about a million dollars a year by claiming that its hazardous waste was not really hazardous and thus could be buried on the factory grounds. Whether anyone in Toms River had been harmed as a result was a question that had not yet been asked, much less answered.

From the vantage point of her backyard on Cardinal Drive, the property her husband had insisted on buying for its sylvan tranquillity, Sheila McVeigh had an up-close view of the tumultuous events of 1984 and 1985 in Toms River. The more she learned about what was happening behind the trees at Ciba-Geigy, the more upset she got. When a friend who was active in Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water called to ask if she had developed any rashes from living so close to the plant (she hadn’t) McVeigh started going to meetings and soon became the group’s secretary. McVeigh taught sixth grade at a school on the other side of town, but her two daughters had attended West Dover Elementary. That was the same school where, in November of 1984, the Board of Education had responded to parent demands by hiring an air-testing firm to make sure that no fumes were drifting over from Ciba-Geigy, whose property bordered the playground. The plume of contaminated groundwater beneath the entire neighborhood was another matter; there was nothing to do about it except to make sure that the schoolchildren were drinking only the water supplied by the Toms River Water Company—water everyone in town assumed was clean.

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.