I have read a lot about the NYC and NJ mafia families, and these guys seem to have a prediliction for trash collection-why is this?
I assume that trash/garbage collection is a vital city service, and that cities and towns prefer to contract out this service (very few cities run their own trash collection these days).
What is it that attracts the Mob? Big kickbacks? Sloppy bookeeping (allowing “skimming”)?
Not to mention that owning a dump/landfill is a good way to dispose of bodies!
An answer from Slate magazine’s “Explainer”. One comment they make: it’s easy to get into (you just need a bunch of trucks, there’s no huge amount of technical knowledge needed), it’s lucrative, and it’s based on contracts.
Not to mention that it gives you a convenient way to dispose of the bodies that Mob activity tends to produce.
I was pretty shocked back in the '90’s when I’d heard that Giuliani was working hard to break the Mafia’s grip on the Fulton fish market. I said, “Fish? As in, offloaded from fishing boats and sold in NY restaurants and sushi bars? That’s how the Mafia makes it’s money? Not prostitution, gambling, drugs and extortion?” But it’s true, those are all important, but apparantly, garbage collection and fish market rackets earn money too. The bottom line for the mob is the bottom line – not the Hollywood glamour.
If you do some Googling about Waste Management, you’ll see that Mafia connections to trash companies extend to the west coast as well. In fact, Waste Management went through an accounting scandal that was one of the biggest in the pre-Enron years.
Good money laundering vehicles. If you remember from the Soprano’s, Barone Sanitation was only a place that Tony was a VP of and received a W2 every year to legitimize a portion of his earnings from other sources. His crew were all on the Barone payroll books. When the New York group wanted to take it over, Tony was mostly concerned about the W2, not the sanitation business per se’.
Not only money laundering, probably the biggest reason, but plenty of opportunities for profit skimming, no-show jobs as favors, and buying off local officials for the big contracts (sometimes with no-show jobs for their nephew or cousin). Our trash is the Mafia’s treasure.
Hell, I remember reading some years ago that if you owned a restaurant certain gentlemen it was difficult to say no to would show up and gently suggest how many cases of parsley you wanted to order every week. Trash collection sounds like big potatoes compared to that.
There’s also Teamsters and other unions. Couldn’t you say a “prediliction” to that as well? RIP Jimmy.
I think the prediliction should only be “connected” depending on the area of the USA you’re considering. I’ve lived in several large cities in the southern US and almost without exception trash collection is handled by the city. In rural areas it’s usually handled by some other contract service which is usually Waste Management Inc. They seem to be the big boys in the South. But in the rural south there are lots of independents and lots of people that either burn or take their stuff to the landfill themselves.
But then again, I guess by “mob” you just mean the italians??
Or once upon a time, the jukebox rental industry was heavily mob controlled. What makes some industries more racketeering-susceptible anyway?
And in the book The Godfather, the trash business was controlled by a Sicilian family, the Bochicchios, who were also hostage brokers used by the big mobs whenever there was some large meeting where the safety of attendees needed to be guaranteed.
There’s money in scrap metal, too. I’ve been in a swimming pool that scrap metal built.
Refer to the Slate article linked above.
Simple to operate businesses with lucrative contracts where they can use illegal muscle to discourage competition, and maintain an effective monopoly. The mob has traditionally infiltrated dock, transportation and construction businesses as well.
During WWII, the government even made a deal with Lucky Luciano to curtail Axis sabotage on the waterfront. Tacit admission that the mob was running the docks, and Luciano had influence over them, even from prison.
Even when trash collection is handled by a city, it’s often contracted out to a company that is not city owned. It’s just that the city controls pricing and collection of revenue. If you’re a mob boss with some city officials in your pocket, that’s not such a bad thing.
And, no, we don’t just mean Italians. We mean that trash collection is historically run/owned by organized crime as a legal front. As I said, even Waste Management is a perfect example of this.
I also wonder how this interacts with the growing occurrence of recycling theft. In some places, there are no longer just a few individual scavengers picking though the recycle bins for the aluminum cans, but groups clandestinely running trucks around and picking up recyclable paper en masse. You might wish to think twice about stealing from the mob …
Criminal involvement in the jukebox industry wasn’t all bad - if nothing else, it formed part of the basis for the plot of The Girl Can’t Help It, one of the best rock ‘n’ roll movies ever made. 
“We”? As my grandma would ask, do you have a mouse in your pocket? 
Well, I’m not the only poster here agreeing that the trash collection industry has been dominated by the Mafia. And I’m assuming that I’m not the only one here who differentiates between “organized crime structures that originated in Italy” and “Italians.” Lord knows, no one in my extended family is either a criminal or a garbage man.
The Slate article specifically mentions Taiwan and Tbilisi – those Italians must really get around!
Jumping in a little late, but I believe another factor is that sanitation is a service where it’s easy to underperform. Many businesses are required by law to dispose of certain types of waste (toxic chemicals, used oil, medical waste, used electronics, etc) in a proscribed manner that’s difficult and expensive to do the right way. Organized crime run sanitation companies will underbid legitimate disposal companies. So they’ll win the contracts to dispose of these hazardous items. Then to keep their profits up, they’ll just dump the hazardous waste in regular landfills rather than dispose of it in the right way.