Special Initiatives
Environmental Crime Task Force
In early 1992, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio and the Cincinnati Division of the FBI invited representatives of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation and prosecution of environmental crimes in the greater Cincinnati area to form a task force to coordinate their efforts.
The task force includes prosecutors from the offices of the U.S. Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice Environment & Natural Resources Division, Ohio Attorney General, Hamilton and Brown County Prosecutors, and City of Cincinnati. Investigative agencies participating are the FBI, Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification, U.S. EPA, Ohio EPA, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, Air Force Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Department of Transportation, Cincinnati Fire Division, and Clermont and Brown County Sheriffs.
The task force meets at least every other month, emphasizing the investigation and prosecution of water and hazardous waste violations. Members share their resources in each other's environmental crimes investigations. Members have shared personnel and equipment for sampling, surveillance, execution of search warrants, interviewing witnesses, serving subpoenas, and other aspects of investigations. Members work investigations jointly in cases that will be prosecuted by both the federal and state authorities.
During the operation of the task force, an Assistant Ohio Attorney General, two Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutors, and an Assistant City of Cincinnati Prosecutor have been appointed by the United States Attorney as Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys in order to participate directly in federal prosecutions and federal grand jury investigations of conduct that is a violation of both state and federal law.
The first joint federal-state prosecution was of an electroplater who abandoned hazardous waste at a site across the street from an elementary school and adjoining a park. The company and its president plead guilty in both state and federal courts; the president was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and a concurrent sentence of 24 months in state prison (City Bumper, Inc. and Roland Hedge, 1994).
Other
task force cases have resulted in the conviction of:
•
A Cincinnati scrap dealer and its vice-president who dumped
scrap metal into the Ohio River at its barge-loading dock
(Mose Cohen & Sons, Inc. and James H. Schwab, 1994);
• The president of a flavor-maker who transported hazardous
waste from the company and stored it in his barn (Jonathan
P. Fries, 1995);
• A tug boat company and its port captain who discharged
oil, solvents, sewage, and other waste from vessels and land-based
storage tanks to the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers (Kanawha River
Towing, Inc. and Ronald G. Mayes, 1996);
• The president and four employees of a chrome finishing
company who were observed on court-authorized hidden cameras
when they clandestinely bypassed the company's treatment equipment
and unlawfully discharged polluted wastewater to the public
sewers (Future Finishes, Inc. and Daniel L. Brown, Robert
Whitt, James Evans, Robert Neff, and Jeffrey Lovely, 1997);
• A heat treating company which caused a ten-mile long
oil slick on the Little Miami and Ohio Rivers from faulty
maintenance of oil-water separation equipment (Cincinnati
Steel Treating Co., 1998).