Handcuffed Cop

Around the world, water supplies face relentless threats from industrial waste, agricultural pollution and poor sewage treatment. The battle to protect water purity must be fought not just by national governments but also in every town and village on the planet.

Even in the U.S., which has some of the toughest environmental laws, safeguarding rivers and reservoirs is a constant struggle. While many companies obey the rules, others still try to use waterways as dump sites. American environmental-enforcement officials have been bombed, shot, run over and sued while trying to perform their duties. But the most demoralizing blows invariably come from their employers: the Governor or commissioner who wants to shield a political contributor or recruit polluters to the state by shutting down environmental enforcement. Some environmental cops must dodge both bullets and their bosses to protect the public from pollution.

My personal hero is Captain Ron Gatto of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection Watershed Police. Since 1905 New York City has employed an environmental police force to protect the 1,969 sq. mi. (5,100 sq km) of watersheds that feed the city’s upstate drinking-water reservoirs. DEP, which came into being in 1978, has the authority to enforce laws against polluting the watersheds. But records show that prior to 1989, DEP’s police never arrested a single polluter. A succession of New York City governments apparently didn’t want to antagonize upstate landowners, who wielded great power in the state senate, which approves state aid to the city. Meanwhile, illegal pollution from farms, construction sites and sewage plants steadily contaminated the city’s once pristine water.

One DEP patrolman bridled at the practice of leaving polluters unmolested. Ron Gatto is a burly fireplug of a man with 21-in. (53-cm) biceps. He once bench-pressed a trophy-winning 575 lbs. (261 kg). Gatto grew up in Westchester County, just north of New York City. He joined the police in 1982 to fight the polluters who were despoiling the green landscapes and the reservoirs he had fished as a boy. Instead, he recalls, his bosses had him drive around and chase swimmers.

In 1989 Gatto wanted to give tickets to a hospital and a prison for discharging raw sewage into the reservoirs. But a superior pocketed the citations, Gatto says, and they were never delivered. Undaunted, Gatto reported the incident in a hearing before the New York City Council president. His courageous testimony in October 1991 finally forced DEP to get serious about arresting polluters.

Since then Gatto has been personally responsible for more than 150 arrests and citations for environmental crimes, making him one of the world’s greatest eco-cops. In 1992 Gatto helped set up the Environmental Enforcement Division within DEP to focus on investigating and enforcing watershed-pollution laws. Gatto’s EED has handled more than 1,100 major pollution investigations resulting in more than 400 arrests and citations.

It’s never been easy. DEP has underpaid its police officers–the top salary prior to March was $24,435 for patrolmen–and has not given them enough training in the detection of environmental crimes. It has starved them of basic equipment from chemical testing kits to cars. Gatto trained himself with books and videos and bought his own cell phone, cameras, video and tape recorders for preserving evidence. He learned all the tricks for detecting concealed improper discharges of waste. For example, he could put a green dye tablet into a toilet and rush outside to examine the water flowing into a storm drain. If it turned green, it meant that sewage was illegally running into the drain. He sat next to pipes throughout the night waiting for intermittent eruptions of toxic effluent. He busted apartment buildings, stores, car dealers, restaurants, bars and a flying school at the Westchester County Airport. Fearless, he once blocked an angry developer’s bulldozers with his body as he radioed for support.

Gatto has a special talent for discovering pollution. He can smell a leaking septic tank from a moving vehicle. He once brought his patrol car to a screeching halt–to the shock of his passengers–and began sniffing the air like a bloodhound. Before long he found and ticketed an illegal septic bypass. No one is safe from Gatto’s by-the-book zeal. In 1990, after a late-night dinner in a restaurant owned by a friend of his father’s, he followed the odor of sewage into a back alley where he spotted a septic tank overflowing into a storm drain leading to a reservoir. Gatto arrested the family friend, who paid a $10,000 fine.

Rather than rewarding Gatto for this extraordinary police work, city officials have subjected him to a 10-year campaign of harassment. They refused him basic equipment, begrudged him routine promotions and pay raises, and denied him permission to appear on television programs honoring his environmental record. He has been the target of five separate New York City Department of Investigation probes into allegations of wrongdoing, mostly petty and always baseless. In all the cases, he has been cleared.

I watched the city’s harassment campaign increase dramatically in February 1999 after 11 environmental groups praised Gatto’s record in a highly publicized report critiquing the administration of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for its failure to support its environmental police. Gatto was effectively demoted when another officer was placed above him in charge of environmental enforcement. DEP officials reassigned Gatto’s car, replacing it with a worn-out wreck with 156,000 miles on it and no working two-way radio. (He’s since been given a newer model.) Meanwhile, the city started an investigation against Gatto’s senior detective, Chris Clinch, for allegedly mishandling a police parking placard and placing household garbage in a DEP Dumpster. A judge later exonerated Officer Clinch in a decision suggesting that a city official may have fabricated testimony to discredit Gatto and his men.

Many of the officers in Gatto’s environmental unit have left the department in disgust, and they told me that the city’s persecution campaign was the reason. Gatto fights on with an anemic detail of three green recruits, ever hoping for the day when the city government cares as much about clean water as he does. He is suing the city for harassment and intimidation.

Unfortunately Captain Gatto is not alone. From Florida to Alaska, federal and state environmental-enforcement officials spend as much time fighting their employers as they do pursuing polluters. But they are gaining strength by banding together. In 1992 a group of environmental enforcers organized the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility to protect environmental heroes like Ron Gatto from intimidation by polluters or by their bosses. Today PEER, based in Washington, has 10,000 members, mostly from various state, federal and local environmental-enforcement agencies. They’re fighting for the idea that courage under fire should not get you fired.

Kennedy, president of the Water Keeper Alliance, has long been Ron Gatto’s ally in the fight to protect New York City’s water supply