Mafia Cartel Controlled City Trash

Until the mid-1990s, organized crime controlled New York City's private trash collection industry, enforcing a cartel that inflated prices and punished companies that challenged it with threats and violence. In 1995, NYPD detective Rick Cowen began a three-year undercover operation and secretly recorded hundreds of hours of cartel meetings, extortion demands, and payoffs. Authorities charged 72 defendants in 1997, convicted nearly all of them, closed their companies, and barred them from the garbage industry. Collection prices initially fell by 40 percent, producing an estimated $600 million reduction in costs across the city.

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