USA TODAY International Edition
RESIDENTS MOVED A ‘MOUNTAIN’
How one neighborhood fought dumping – and then the mob
In the spring of 1990, Gladys Woodson and her neighbors in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood started to notice dump trucks rolling down their streets – some sporting mismatched license plates and arriving as late as 2 or 3 a.m. Woodson had lived in a historic greystone since 1970. She was president of her street’s block club, a tightknit community of neighbors who looked out for each other. So other residents would come to her with questions and concerns. When the trucks were first brought to her attention, Woodson says she didn’t give them much thought. “I just thought, ‘Well, somebody’s just parking their trucks in there,’ ” said
Woodson, “’til a guy said, ‘Ms. Woodson, come down, look at this. Do you know that somebody’s over there dumping in that lot?’ ” And they were. Load after load of broken concrete, rebar, bricks and stones. When the dump eventually reached its peak, it sprawled across a lot the size of 13 football fields – or about half the size of the Pentagon. It towered six stories above the neighborhood, creating a habitat for rats and crime and filling the air with noxious dust. But it wasn’t just trucks going in and out of this lot. There was also a limo and the guy inside it – a heavyset man who liked to wear colorful sweaters. “Any time you see anybody drive over in a vacant lot in a limo,” Woodson told USA TODAY, “you know it’s no good.”
A Chicago story
Before the dump trucks came, before the lawsuits and the secret FBI tapes, before the arrests and the president’s executive order, before “the mountain” appeared and then disappeared – along with the guy who put it there – there was then-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Sworn into office April 24, 1989, Daley vowed to bring his city roaring back. In the 40 years leading up to his inauguration, Chicago lost nearly a million people and hundreds of thousands of jobs. The new mayor wanted to stem that tide. He began a major push to revamp Chicago’s aging downtown, paying special attention to tourist-friendly destinations like Navy Pier and the nowiconic Millennium Park, with its big silver bean sculpture and Frank Gehrydesigned amphitheater. He also set about rebuilding crucial parts of the city’s infrastructure, including roads and highways. By the spring of 1990, the city was full of workers in hard hats and orange vests who were breaking down concrete, jackhammering asphalt, gathering up dirt and gravel, loading it into dump trucks and hauling it away. Law-abiding trucking companies carted this debris to distant landfills. Others headed west. They drove through Greektown and what was left of Little Italy, past the University of Illinois-Chicago and the stadium where the Bulls and Blackhawks play, past the county hospital to a pair of vacant lots in North Lawndale – near Gladys Woodson’s home.
The dump
The average dump truck can haul up to 24 tons of stuff, and each new truck that drove into the lot added to the pile of debris. Woodson and others were increasingly alarmed by the growing mountain. “I think, ‘Oh no, we can’t have this over here. This is bad for health, bad for our children, bad for our houses,’ ” Woodson recalled. “You know, it’s just going to take our neighborhood down.” So the residents of North Lawndale decided to fight back. What they didn’t know then was that their battle to eliminate the dumps would last years. Their opponents would include not just the the powerful Chicago mob but corrupt local politicians, the specter of racism in America and one man – an FBI informant who orchestrated the dumping from the back of a limousine. In a yearslong investigation that led to the release of secretly recorded FBI tapes, USA TODAY found out what really happened in North Lawndale. Now we’re telling the story in the best possible format for this tale: audio.