“The Mob was in charge of garbage and, it seemed, no one could stop them.”

Since the mid-1950s, when local officials handed over commercial waste collection to private haulers, New York City’s garbage industry had been dominated by a Mafia-led cartel. (The city government’s Department of Sanitation has continued to collect residential garbage) …. The Mob was in charge of garbage and, it seemed, no one could stop them. Some of the Big Apple’s trash carting businesses were more directly Mafia-connected … but many were not; yet if they wanted to run their collection trucks down New York City streets, they had to join the cartel. The payoff for being a member was guaranteed customers and a healthy income — in other words protection against the market forces that might drive prices down and companies out of business. Estimates put the amount that the cartel overcharged its customers in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

All this ended rather abruptly in the mid-1990s when the Mafia’s New York City garbage monopoly was destroyed. The confluence of forces behind the cartel’s demise included a police crackdown on Mob activity and, perhaps more significantly, a major restructuring in the garbage industry. No longer was refuse treatment simply a service municipalities conducted themselves or contracted out to quaint mom-and-pop hauling companies. Multinational trash corporations, started in the 1970s and 1980s by a handful of innovative refuse firms, were seizing control of the garbage trade.

[Heather Rogers, “The Power of Garbage “: Link]

Personal anecdote: in college (circa the mid-eighties), I took a course in Land Use Ecology. The professors (two of them) asserted that it was common knowledge, in some circles, that New York City’s garbage disposal was run by organized crime, and that anyone who made too much fuss was liable to end up as part of the garbage stream. They said it laughingly, but it was clear to me that they were serious.