Book details NYC cartel. (Scrap Industry News).

For several decades, solid waste and scrap paper generators in New York City were at the mercy of a cartel that colluded to rig bids and fix prices for trash pickup and paper recycling services.

The undercover operation detailed in a new book entitled Takedown: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire (G.P. Putnams Son's, New York, Copyright 2002.) finally brought the scheme to an end in the mid-1990s.

The book is co-authored by New York police detective Rick Cowan, who spent several years pretending to be Dan Benedetto, an executive with Brooklyn's Chambers Paper Fibres Corp., an honest paper recycling firm that worked its way into the corrupt cartel in order to expose it.

The cartel, which was ultimately controlled by a handful of organized crime rings, divided New York's five boroughs into spheres of influence and held together an anti-competitive price-fixing scheme from at least the early 1950s until 1995. The rings operated under the guise of trade associations with such names as the Greater New York Waste Paper Association and the Association of Trade Waste Removers of Greater New York.

The undercover operation produced large volumes of audio recordings that led to the cartel's downfall in 1995. Subsequently, with the introduction of honest competition, New York businesses have seen their solid waste bills drop by as much as 90 percent and receive competitive bids for their scrap paper.

The multiple indictments resulting from Operation Wasteland identified 17 individuals, 23 companies and the four trade associations as co-conspirators in the scheme, which relied on intimidation and violence to perpetuate itself.

Cowan credits Sal Benedetto and others with Chambers Paper Fibres and related Benedetto companies for exposing themselves to risk. "Sal Benedetto knows he's got a target on his head for the rest of his life," writes Cowan.