Toxic Crock

Sometimes when a man goes to jail at Leavenworth Prison, his father drives him. His father buys him one last Frosty at Wendy's and frets about being late for the 2 p.m. reporting time.

His father wonders which of the driveways leading to the gray fortress is the right one, then repeats himself into the intercom at the gate, spelling his son's name -- his own name -- for the guard in the tower.

A voice from the white speaker tells James Dillon to drop his son at the flagpole at the end of the circle drive.

"I'll tell him where to go," the voice says.

Before his son gets out, James Dillon fumbles with two credit cards and a driver's license he pulls from the center console.

"I don't need those," John Dillon tells his father.

"You'll be all right," his father says.

"I'll call you tonight."

James Dillon watches his son walk along the sidewalk in the September sunshine. John waves once before going through a tall, chain-link gate that slides open to admit him.

James watches his son raise his arms to be frisked.

John Dillon is the newest resident of the minimum-security federal prison at Leavenworth -- camp, it's called. He enters as a felon of standing. He can look the drug dealers, tax evaders and embezzlers in the eye. His five-year prison sentence for possession of hazardous waste without a permit makes John Dillon the worst environmental criminal the four-state region has ever seen.

People rarely get prison time for pollution. They pay fines for releasing toxic fumes in the air, tickets for letting contaminated water trickle into the sewer, Notices of Violation from the Environmental Protection Agency for dumping wet paint in landfills.

Even Ed Sechrest didn't get prison time after his hazardous-waste disposal plant in Kingsville, Missouri, burned down and EPA inspectors accused him of shredding aerosol cans, dumping contaminated military gas masks in a Warrensburg landfill and instructing his employees to hide evidence. Instead, he pleaded guilty and earned a 21-month prison sentence for lying to an insurance company.

Sechrest shares part of the blame for Dillon's trip to Leavenworth: Some of the hazardous waste Dillon was illegally storing at a West Bottoms warehouse had come from Essex Waste Management, Sechrest's Kingsville facility. But the hazardous materials in Dillon's warehouse came from lots of other places, too.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Even the EPA shares some of it. That's where Dillon learned everything he knows about the hazardous-waste business.

EPA scientist James Aycock had never seen anything like the crowded cinder-block warehouse he walked into on November 23, 1998. The building was a former beef-packing plant in the shadow of the James Street viaduct in the West Bottoms. Some of the slaughterhouse equipment remained, including the insulated cooling room and the metal box where, one at a time, the animals were killed and then dumped to the side to be hung. Other parts of the building had collapsed from neglect.

Aycock was most stunned by thousands of 55-gallon barrels -- some metal, some plastic, some full, some empty, some leaking -- stacked to the ceiling and crowding each room.

"It was like a maze," Aycock says.

No one had answered when Aycock and five contractors had knocked on the front door. He led his parade through an open gate and into a building reeking of paint thinner.

He found Dillon alone at the back of the warehouse, unloading more barrels from a semi trailer.

"We had to explain why we were there," Aycock recalls.

Then Aycock picked up the phone and made the kind of call more usual for city police than for EPA scientists. "I called in for backup."

Aycock's crew found massive piles of barrels stacked three high and as many as four deep. The tops of some bulged like Coke cans left in a hot car too long. Gigantic trash bags called Supersacks, some of them full of fish parts, had been flung on top of the stacks. Many grimy old barrels had shiny new green stickers with the words Non Hazardous Wasteprinted in bold letters.

Aycock didn't find much safety equipment, only a couple of fire extinguishers, one spill kit, a 55-gallon drum of saline to wash out eyes and giant sponges and pads to soak up liquids. The kit was nearly unreachable because of the barrels stacked in front of it. The only working phone was upstairs, a long run from the most likely place a fire might break out.

John Dillon was desperately trying to keep his business going. He'd set up the warehouse operation to decontaminate and reprocess tons of everyday filth -- used motor oil, oil filters, old paint, degreaser, waste ink, the grime washed off of dirty cars, cooking oil, water contaminated by spilled fuel. He collected it from all over town: from a Liberty chocolate factory, from Firestone oil-changing stations. Semi trucks loaded with barrels arrived from Philip Services, a massive hazardous-materials processing plant just down the street from Dillon's warehouse.

Dillon had set up a mini assembly line for cleaning the barrels. He turned them upside down to drain on an angle-iron rack. Then he ran them through an enormous dishwasher-like contraption, crushed them in another machine and loaded them onto a flatbed truck backed up to one of fifteen loading docks.