As promised, here's the rundown on the extortion game. The "local authorities" got word of some doings with the feds. I'm being obscure because I don't know all of the facts. Remember I was talking about the paperwork I found in the dumpster?
So the local "organized crime" interest has a cut in city contracts. Their only organized in a loose sense. It's not the Italians or the Asians, it's the Russians. These guys basically muscled their way into the waste business. And they do have muscle.
Now their ties with the boys in blue are built on the fact that the boys in blue can only work in their neighborhoods safely with their permission. And the Russians skipped out on the union stuff in favor of preferred "no bid" contracts on the sly. Why mess around with pseudo democratic organizations when you can skim the till in the accounting room, right?
Turns out that a Russian had one of his boys - who also owed several thousand to a Russian boss - working in the city's accounting office. The deals were coming through and were being disguised as "contributions to health care." That's an interesting way to describe potential hazmat contracts. The trouble for the city was that some idiot had scribbled all over one document. It was sort of the same thing I got, only in more detail.
The city's mistake was that they were passing the money along to a New York firm. That had something to do with an attorney, though I don't have all of those details yet. Well, the Russians own two reporters and at least one elected official. They were planning a grand leak of everything. It was sort of like "If I don’t get my cut, everyone loses."
They got their cut. Now they've got several contracts to do basically nothing. The question on my mind is this: If the Russians are getting paid to do nothing and the city might actually need a hazmat response, what happens when the emergency strikes? We'll all be in the same mess that happened to New Orleans after Katrina.
But why do we need a hazmat response? That's the million dollar question.
