{"id":576397,"date":"2018-05-08T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2018-05-08T13:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=576397"},"modified":"2018-05-07T09:20:34","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T15:20:34","slug":"treated-like-trash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/05\/treated-like-trash\/","title":{"rendered":"Treated like trash"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_576400\"  class=\"wp-caption module image alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 771px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-576400\" src=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-like-trash-3x2-771x514.jpg\" alt=\"The Bronx\" width=\"771\" height=\"514\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-like-trash-3x2-771x514.jpg 771w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-like-trash-3x2-336x224.jpg 336w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-like-trash-3x2-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-like-trash-3x2-1170x780.jpg 1170w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-like-trash-3x2.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Ryan Christopher Jones \/ for ProPublica<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">The intersection of Gun Hill Road and Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, where 21-year-old Mouctar Diallo died while working on a Sanitation Salvage garbage truck on Nov. 7, 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The body\u00a0of the young man lay\u00a0in the middle of Jerome Avenue beneath the elevated train tracks, the scene lit by the\u00a0neon blue sign above the shuttered El Caribe restaurant.\u00a0A\u00a0garbage truck\u00a0sat mid-turn\u00a0at the otherwise deserted intersection in the Bronx.<\/p>\n<p>Emergency medical personnel arrived, records show, and pronounced the young man dead at\u00a05:08 a.m.\u00a0on Nov. 7, 2017.<\/p>\n<p>The police came, too. Officers\u00a0taped off the scene, and interviewed the truck driver and his assistant, according to records and interviews. The driver and helper, according to the police report, said the dead\u00a0man was a stranger who had inexplicably jumped on the truck\u2019s passenger side running board, lost his grip and was run over. The initial police report left blank the spot for the young man\u2019s name.<\/p>\n<p>Within\u00a0hours, a Bronx News12 reporter said neighbors thought the victim was \u201ca homeless man that they\u2019ve seen in the area.\u201d By afternoon, he was \u201ca daredevil homeless man\u201d in the Daily News.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"module align-left half type-aside\">\n<h3>About this article<\/h3>\n<p>This article comes from\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/treated-like-trash\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ProPublica<\/a>, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom.\u00a0Sign up for their\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.propublica.org\/forms\/newsletter_daily_email\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>The garbage truck belonged to Sanitation Salvage, among the largest commercial trash haulers in the city.\u00a0A company supervisor\u00a0eventually\u00a0came to retrieve the truck\u00a0and take it back to the company yard.<\/p>\n<p>Then,\u00a0according to workers told about the night\u2019s events, it was promptly sent back out without so much as a cleaning.<\/p>\n<p>Two miles south of the accident, in a Bronx apartment off the Grand Concourse, a mother waited for her son. Hadiatou Barry, a Guinean immigrant, had come to the Bronx for a better life for her family. Her eldest son, Mouctar Diallo, 21, had a bed in the living room of their apartment. The young man\u00a0often worked nights, and with the sun coming up\u00a0should have been home asleep. But his bed remained empty.<\/p>\n<p>Soon enough, Hadiatou Barry got the worst sort of news, a double-barreled blow of devastation and insult.<\/p>\n<p>Mouctar Diallo\u2019s nighttime job had been as an informal helper on garbage trucks owned by Sanitation Salvage, and the truck he\u2019d been working on that night had killed him. Then, she learned, the truck\u2019s driver and main helper \u2014 men who\u2019d known him for more than a year and paid him off-the-books for his help hauling trash to the curb \u2014 had claimed not to know him. The rest of the city now knew her son only as a homeless person.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe\u00a0is my son, and I want the truth for him,\u201d Hadiatou Barry said in a recent interview. \u201cIn order for it to not happen to somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The truth of Mouctar Diallo\u2019s death is that the authorities investigating the accident did not learn that he was a worker on the truck for at least two months, and that when they did, they took no action against the driver and helper who had lied to police. The Business Integrity Commission, the New York City agency charged with oversight of the commercial garbage industry, allowed both the driver and main helper to keep working. The police and Bronx prosecutors closed their investigation with no criminal charges.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month, Sean Spence, the Sanitation Salvage driver who authorities say ran over Diallo and lied about it, struck and killed another man, 72\u2013year-old Leo Clarke. Clarke, walking with a cane, was crossing in the middle of a Bronx block in the evening when he was crushed by the 40-ton truck. A police investigation is underway, and Spence now has been suspended from driving for Sanitation Salvage.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOh my God,\u201d Hadiatou Barry said when told of Spence\u2019s involvement in the second fatality.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_576401\"  class=\"wp-caption module image alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 771px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-576401\" src=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-police-line-inline-771x515.jpg\" alt=\"152nd Street and Jackson Avenue\" width=\"771\" height=\"515\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-police-line-inline-771x515.jpg 771w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-police-line-inline-336x224.jpg 336w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-police-line-inline-768x513.jpg 768w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-police-line-inline-1170x781.jpg 1170w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/20180504-police-line-inline.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Ryan Christopher Jones \/ for ProPublica<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">On April 27, 2018, Sanitation Salvage driver Sean Spence killed a second person, a 72-year-old man crossing the street, at 152nd Street and Jackson Avenue in the Bronx.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The New York Police Department said lying to the police was not a crime. The department maintains it did a thorough investigation, collecting witness statements, 911 calls and videotape from the scene. The police, a spokesman said, had no authority to investigate the operations of a private sanitation company.<\/p>\n<p>A spokeswoman for the Bronx district attorney said the Business Integrity Commission had made no criminal referral to prosecutors about the conduct of Sanitation Salvage\u2019s employees and thus prosecutors had no cause to investigate further.<\/p>\n<p>The Business Integrity Commission\u2019s spokesperson said the commission was alerted to the possibility that the November death involved a worker in early January, during a meeting with labor advocates about conditions at Sanitation Salvage. The fact that it was Diallo who had been killed had been an open secret among the workers for months. Commission officials said they then confronted Spence and his chief helper, Chris Bourke, and that the two men confessed to having invented the tale of an unknown pedestrian jumping on the truck.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The commission spokesperson said the agency lacked the power to suspend the driver on its own. It said Spence was suspended after the second death because the commission asked the company to do so, and Sanitation Salvage complied.<\/p>\n<p>Asked why the commission did not make that kind of request immediately after finding that a driver in a fatal accident had lied to police, a spokesperson declined to comment.<\/p>\n<p>Several attempts to contact Spence were not successful.<\/p>\n<p>Sanitation Salvage did not respond to multiple requests for comment over several weeks.<\/p>\n<p>In an interview, Bourke, the main helper on the truck that killed Diallo, claimed not to know where the tale of the daredevil homeless man had come from. He said he only talked briefly to police, and couldn\u2019t remember what he told them. Diallo, he said, \u201cpopped out of nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To this day, Hadiatou Barry and former colleagues of Mouctar at Sanitation Salvage say they are not confident they know the truth about how Mouctar died. Helpers are not supposed to ride on the front running boards, workers say. They walk the street, haul trash to the curb and ride the back of the truck.<\/p>\n<p>Every night in New York, an army of private garbage trucks from more than 250 sanitation companies sets out across the five boroughs picking up the trash from all manner of businesses. Racing to complete long and often circuitous routes, the trucks crisscross the city at breakneck speeds. The human toll is substantial: Since 2010, there have been 33 deaths attributed to private garbage trucks across the city.<\/p>\n<p>Sanitation Salvage trucks, now involved in two deaths in six months, have failed federal safety inspections at a rate that\u2019s four times the national average. A Department of Labor investigation found that the company had failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages and that workers pulled 18-hour days. Drivers are so overtaxed that they hire additional helpers \u2014 often young men off the street \u2014 to try and complete their routes on time.<\/p>\n<p>Mouctar Diallo was one of those, known at Sanitation Salvage as \u201cthird men.\u201d It is unclear when Diallo arrived in the Bronx \u2014 the borough has one of greatest concentrations of Guinean immigrants in America \u2014 but he\u2019d begun working for Sanitation Salvage in the late spring of 2016, according to interviews with co-workers. He first worked with a driver named Timothy Belgrave, and later with Vernando Smith. Diallo, nicknamed \u201cGotto,\u201d was beloved for his intrepidness \u2014 he wasn\u2019t afraid of rats \u2014 and the way he made everyone laugh. He\u2019d been working with Spence and Bourke for over a year.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAlmost everybody there would know Gotto,\u201d Smith, the former driver, said of workers and management at Sanitation Salvage. \u201cThey would see him on the truck. Maybe they didn\u2019t know his name but they knew his face. He was the only African who worked for the company.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Such third men, according to interviews with 15 current and former workers, often got paid off the books, either directly by the company or out of the pockets of drivers and main helpers. The drivers and main helpers were then sometimes reimbursed by the company, according to current and former workers. Such informal payments were a testament to how impossibly long the routes were. A typical route at another company in the Bronx would be around 200 stops. At Sanitation Salvage, many routes had close to 1,000 stops, if not more.<\/p>\n<p>Third men could make anywhere from $30 to $80 a night, for shifts as long as 18 or 20 hours, according to workers.<\/p>\n<p>In 2015, after an investigation, the Department of Labor concluded that Sanitation Salvage\u00a0owed workers $385,000 in unpaid overtime over the past three years. Sanitation Salvage refused to pay, claiming the workers were seeking to be paid for time actually spent hanging out with friends. When the department chose not to take the company to court, the issue ended.<\/p>\n<p>Bourke, the helper who first recruited Diallo off the street, said of the long hours and demanding routes, \u201cIf you do the math, accidents will happen.\u201d\u00a0Waste and recycling work is the fifth-most fatal job in America.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s not just about Gotto\u2019s death,\u201d Bourke said. \u201cTo work like this is unhuman. They\u2019ll make you work like a slave. You can do 18 hours one day and, say, go home and get four hours of sleep and come back and do 12 hours.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Voice of America and ProPublica sent Sanitation Salvage and its lawyers a detailed set of questions weeks ago \u2014 about Diallo\u2019s death, the false account given by the driver and helper, the working conditions at the company, and its trouble with the Department of Labor. The company did not respond.<\/p>\n<p>This week, the Business Integrity Commission said the second death and the accounts of dangerous working conditions had prompted an investigation that could result in halting the company\u2019s operations or installing a monitor.<\/p>\n<p>However, a coalition of labor, safe streets and Bronx community organizations are calling for an immediate suspension of Sanitation Salvage\u2019s license.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe take these workers\u2019 allegations very seriously,\u201d the commission said. \u201cIf the results of the investigation merit these actions or any others, they will be taken immediately.\u201d<script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"http:\/\/pixel.propublica.org\/pixel.js\" async><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A death. A cover-up. An immigrant meets a terrible end in the Bronx.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":576400,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[140,142],"class_list":["post-576397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-border-and-immigration","tag-crime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}