The jailed garbageman case is NOT racism

[ND-Dem]

156. a little of both; the founder is said to have underworld ties.

Born 1937, Wayne Huizenga and company built the behemoth waste disposal company, Waste Management. He then used his Midas touch to build Blockbuster Video into the nation's largest video rental company. In 1997 he sold Blockbuster to Viacom for a whopping 8.5 billion dollars. Wayne currently owns the Miami Dolphins and Florida Panthers sport organizations. He was the original owner of the Florida Marlins baseball team which won a world series with him as owner in 1997. Two years later he sold the team.

Huizenga is chairman of AutoNation Inc., the nation’s largest automobile retailer, chairman of Extended Stay America, which operates in the lodging industry, and chairman of Republic Services Inc., one of the largest providers of non-hazardous solid waste collection and disposal services in the United States. He is also chairman of Huizenga Holdings Inc. and is the sole or majority owner of several service businesses.

As you might guess, Huizenga was not without hard times. As a child of divorced parents, he had great difficultly often denying himself a paycheck in the early years. He was accused of having connections to the mafia and even accusations of illegal disposition of harmful toxins (later disproved) while at Waste Management.

http://www.ltbn.com/hall_of_fame/Huizenga.html


poor liddle wayne, folks were always accusing him of bad things.


Dozens of state and federal investigations, lawsuits, and press accounts indicate that WMI ran a profit-obsessed conglomerate that was not averse to employing Huizenga's standby tactic: When met with resistance, grab your competition by the balls, and twist.

The authors of a 1991 Greenpeace report about the history of WMI concluded, "To create an empire, the company has mixed business acumen and foresight with strong doses of deception, corruption, and monopolism." The San Diego District Attorney's Office seconded this impression in a scalding 1992 report that reviewed WMI's history of environmental problems and alleged public corruption. (San Diego County was considering doing business with the company at the time.) The transgressions catalogued in these reports include everything from bribery to death threats.

The garbage business has long been associated with the underworld. The reason is simple. With little to differentiate one hauler the next, mob specialties such as price-fixing, predatory pricing, and thuggery often have been employed to protect established territory and ensure a healthy profit.

Huizenga has repeatedly denied any association with organized crime. "That reputation comes from your part of the country, up north," he told a New York Times reporter some years ago.

He was apparently unaware of the resume of co-founder Dean Buntrock. In 1960 the Wisconsin attorney general accused Buntrock and eleven other officials of unfair business practices as a result of the haulers' efforts to infiltrate the Milwaukee trash market. Their companies' alleged tactics, detailed in a 1962 civil suit filed by the attorney general, included "threatening physical harm to the owners of competing firms…and their families and destruction or damage to their property and equipment." The Milwaukee Circuit Court issued an injunction against the companies, which remained in effect for eight years. Buntrock's Ace Scavenger Service was also a member of a Chicago trade association that was sued in 1972 for price-fixing and harassing competitors. The trade group settled the suit by paying a $50,000 fine and agreeing not to engage in these practices for five years.


http://www.corporations.org/wmi/huizenga.html