That's "refuse" as in: Noun 1. refuse - food that is discarded (as from a kitchen) food waste, garbage, scraps waste, waste material, waste matter, waste product - any materials unused and rejected as worthless or unwanted; "they collect the waste once a week"; "much of the waste material is carried off in the sewers"

Not to be an ethnic bigot, but this is really a question for an Italian to answer. In this case, the Explainer offers nothing about the waste haulage that's different from other industries coopted by the Mob. Might as well be talking about dry cleaners and Chicken Unlimited.*

Waste haulage, and their vertically integrated component, the dump, have more uses than merely being cash cows. Garbage trucks, like Israeli moving company vans, have an advantage in providing contraband transportation in a truck that is rarely, if ever, stopped by the police. When they are stopped, the likelihood that the trash will be thoroughly searched is minimal, and even a narc dog will be unlikely to get past the discarded food to find the cocaine.

Additionally, the dumps, with their incinerators and mountains of putrid trash are the perfect means for disposing of unwanted inventory-- i.e., dead hookers, mobsters and witnesses.

Next time, when a topic like this comes up, don't ask some fool lap monkey. Ask an Italian.

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* Folks from Chicago may recall Chicken Unlimited chain. If they ever actually sold a piece of chicken, I haven't heard it. It was the one food joint in the city with a parking lot full of Lincolns and Caddys without a single customer in the store. They were all in back, throwing bones (the six sided kind, not chicken).

There's also the perennial problem of sanitation workers selling drugs out of their garbage trucks as they roll along (much as is done from taxi cabs, delivery vans, etc.)

This is a problem even in cities where there's little or no real mafia or where waste services are done by municipal employees. (Is this why so many garbage men have designer doo-rags and diamond earings? Just wondering.)

And the mafia does like to enter legitimate businesses that are avoided or looked down upon by much of America - recycling and scrap metal (the opposite of waste disposal), sewage services, junkyards, funeral homes, etc - but thatcan be very lucrative, with a bit of muscle and "connections."

In NYC and many towns in New Jersey, individual businesses and apartment buildings contract for trash removal. From the viewpoint of the garbage collector, it's desirable to have a compact, contiguous route, so that your truck stops at all the buildings along the same street and fills up with the least time and gasoline. The building owner is indifferent to this; he wants the cheapest deal he can get. The carter wants someone to keep competitors off of what he regards as "his" route and away from "his" customers. The law doesn't recognize or protect his territory.

In New York and New Jersey, the carting business became dominated by Italian immigrants after the turn of the century. Enter the carter's cousins in the Mafia. For a premium, they'll enforce his territory and enable him to charge a monopoly price to his customers, who can't find anyone else willing to pick up their garbage. The mob will also referee territorial disputes. As long as the spread between what he can charge and what he has to pay in rake off is high enough, the carter is better off with a protected territory than he is competing. The system is acceptable to the "extorted" carting businesses, who receive a monopoly that the law won't allow them.

Once the mob is embedded in the business, the enforcement of territory extends to the award of municipal contracts for residential garbage collection, either by bribery or bid rigging. All of the potential bidders know what is going on, and the real bidding is in who will pay the most rake off in return for the contract.

The chicken thing? They was just havin one of those "standup meetins," is all.

Bada bing

(another source of info; should an Italian not be readily available)

This whole issue of garbage collection cracks me up. I lived outside a town in the Intermountain West of around 20,000 people that had no garbage collection. The county had "dumpster farms" that everyone took their own garbage to. The city was approached by a large, well known carting company who wanted to start collecting garbage in the city.

The company convinced the city to buy the trucks and the individual plastic bins for each residence. The arrangement was that the city would run the operation for one year and then the company would take over and run it cheaper than the city could.

The city carried out its part of the agreement. After the year was up, the company presented their plan to take over the service - it was within $100 of what it had cost the city to run it for the previous year and there were 30% in rate increases built in to the contract's first year. Needless to say, this didn't sit well with the city and they told the company to take a hike. This set off a round of lawsuits, which the company, ultimately, lost.

Meanwhile, those of us who lived in the unincorporated areas surrounding the town were approached by the same carting company with offers to haul away our garbage. They wanted $50 for one pickup a month - very few houses directly fronted on the street, so most people would have had to drag their dumpsters out to road, et cetera. Once one person on a "route" signed up, the company wanted the county to pass an ordinance to obligate everyone else on the "route" to buy their service. The county wouldn't cooperate, so they signed up a few people, stayed around a few months hauling a few people's garbage before they faded away...

And all this from a company that wasn't mobbed up... It's a business that is made or breaks on government monopolies. Without a government monopoly, they can't make any money, so corruption is built in...