Word: gatto
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Since then Gatto has been personally responsible for more than 150 arrests and citations for environmental crimes, making him one of the world's greatest eco-cops. In 1992 Gatto helped set up the Environmental Enforcement Division within DEP to focus on investigating and enforcing watershed-pollution laws. Gatto's EED has handled more than 1,100 major pollution investigations resulting in more than 400 arrests and citations...
...never been easy. DEP has underpaid its police officers--the top salary prior to March was $24,435 for patrolmen--and has not given them enough training in the detection of environmental crimes. It has starved them of basic equipment from chemical testing kits to cars. Gatto trained himself with books and videos and bought his own cell phone, cameras, video and tape recorders for preserving evidence. He learned all the tricks for detecting concealed improper discharges of waste. For example, he could put a green dye tablet into a toilet and rush outside to examine the water flowing into...
...Gatto has a special talent for discovering pollution. He can smell a leaking septic tank from a moving vehicle. He once brought his patrol car to a screeching halt--to the shock of his passengers--and began sniffing the air like a bloodhound. Before long he found and ticketed an illegal septic bypass. No one is safe from Gatto's by-the-book zeal. In 1990, after a late-night dinner in a restaurant owned by a friend of his father's, he followed the odor of sewage into a back alley where he spotted a septic tank overflowing into...
Rather than rewarding Gatto for this extraordinary police work, city officials have subjected him to a 10-year campaign of harassment. They refused him basic equipment, begrudged him routine promotions and pay raises, and denied him permission to appear on television programs honoring his environmental record. He has been the target of five separate New York City Department of Investigation probes into allegations of wrongdoing, mostly petty and always baseless. In all the cases, he has been cleared...
...watched the city's harassment campaign increase dramatically in February 1999 after 11 environmental groups praised Gatto's record in a highly publicized report critiquing the administration of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for its failure to support its environmental police. Gatto was effectively demoted when another officer was placed above him in charge of environmental enforcement. DEP officials reassigned Gatto's car, replacing it with a worn-out wreck with 156,000 miles on it and no working two-way radio. (He's since been given a newer model.) Meanwhile, the city started an investigation against Gatto...