Illegal dumpers, be warned: Miami-Dade’s trash detectives have ways to track you down
Criminals, most of them anyway, try to be smart. But all-too-often they leave clues behind. That’s especially true when it comes to illegal dumping.
Boxes have labels and bar codes. Tires, most of the time, can be traced to a point of sale. Cars have VINs. As for personal watercraft and boats, shaving off the visible serial numbers doesn’t accomplish much with identical numbers in hidden compartments.
“We’ve found medical files. Tax returns. Baby pictures. You can’t believe what we find,” said Doug Peacock, a Miami-Dade police sergeant in the Agricultural Patrol’s Illegal Dumping Unit.
“If it’s in the water, it’s probably stolen,” said Sgt. Christopher Garcia, another unit member. “One time we pulled a car out and a body was in it.”
Tuesday, under a crystal-blue sky and with a slight chill in the air, Miami-Dade Marine Patrol divers Michael Mallon and Pete Delgado submerged in the relatively clear waters of a 12-foot lake just north of the Robert is Here Fruit Stand in South Dade’s Redland agricultural community. The plan was to hook a thick steel cable from a huge wrecker to a car they believed was resting on the lake bed about 300 feet off-shore, pull it onto firm ground and search for clues as to who dumped the vehicle.
Twenty minutes later, out came a completely stripped, slimy green, mold-covered fishing boat that investigators estimated was close to 50 years old, and a battered Seadoo watercraft with a punctured hole to make it sink easier — minus its engine and all other electrical parts. Divers had mistaken the hull of the boat for a car.
“There are lots of insurance scams,” said Marine Patrol Lt. Michael Barrios. “This one is completely stripped and the motor is gone.”
Whoever dumped the boat, though, made a mistake. Under some green sludge was a decal showing the vessel was last registered in 1994. It’s at least a start for detectives who spend much of their time scrounging through debris for the slightest of clues. Hidden off a pothole-filled road behind a berm of pine trees, the lake has become a popular dump site. About 18 months ago, police found a stolen patrol car in the water there.
Illegal Dumping is an important unit that was scrapped from the police department just after the 2009 recession and only re-established with a lean team this past February. For the past few years it has been run out of the county’s Solid Waste Department, which had less investigative tools and no arrest powers.
It’s an especially important tool in the Redland community, rich in agricultural and named after its pockets of red clay and limestone. Residents get their drinking water from the area west of U.S. 1 and south of 184th Street, which is also filled with u-pick’em fields and farms that ship foods like tomatoes, avocados and coffee beans all over the country.
Not far from Robert Is Here, the iconic South Dade fruit stand that also sells wildly popular milkshakes, is a plant that also supplies the Florida Keys water. The market is walking distance from where the dive team pulled the wreckage on Tuesday. Close enough, said Illegal Dumping Detective Ryan Cowart, that oils and other pollutants could contaminate the important water supply.
“It’s the same water table,” he said. “People like me who live in the Redland, we’re drinking the same water.”
Now composed of just 10 officers, including two sergeants, the team would like to grow, become its own task force and join up with the police department’s Economic Crimes unit. Leaders have been trying to get the county to free up more than $1 million that has been frozen since the unit was disbanded.
The money, accumulated from a combination of auction sales, government funds and private donations from community stakeholders, would be used for more officers and new technology like cameras, GPS devices and drones. In the past year the unit said it has discovered more than 402,000 cubic feet of illegally dumped material, enough to fill almost 100 football fields.
As it’s constituted now, Illegal Dumping dishes out civil citations ranging from $500 to $2,500, depending on the amount of waste disposed. It also makes arrests, usually of people operating illegal dump sites who lure people looking to get rid of trash with cut rates, then dispose of the garbage illegally.
But looking to bolster its crime-fighting ability, the unit has an agreement in the pipeline to work with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the county’s Regulatory and Economic Resources department, formerly known as the Department of Environmental Resources, or DERM. The agreement would give the unit more tools to investigate state, even federal crimes, mainly in South Dade’s sensitive wetlands and waterways. Unit leaders said they’d also like to eventually join forces with a Biscayne Bay task force if Miami-Dade commissioners move forward with the proposal.
Miami-Dade County Commissioner and former county cop Joe Martinez is familiar and supportive of the Illegal Dumping unit. He said he’d like to see more recycling and dumping stations and add more bodies to the unit. Much of the dumping crime, he said, is done at night.
“Our tourism depends on clean water,” he said. “One of the things that is killing us is illegal dumping in the waterways, the canals and the ocean.”
Miami-Dade Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins, who represents the county’s southern district, said she welcomes strengthening prevention and enforcement measures when it comes to cleaning up the region.
“We must be mindful of budget, especially during this pandemic in all of our decisions,” she said. “But I feel this issue is important to the residents of South Dade and we must explore all options to prioritize it.”
Of course, the illegal depositing of waste materials isn’t limited to South Florida’s waterways. Shortly after recovering the dilapidated vessel and personal watercraft earlier this week, members of the Illegal Dumping unit headed a bit north to a neighborhood called Sea Pines, east of U.S. 1 and just below Naranja. There, in a group of open fields with slight tree cover, were old leather couches, king-sized mattresses and discarded tile.
One pile detectives were taking a close look at they estimated at more than 3,000 cubic feet of waste. Among the items were window shades, bathroom tiles, parts of toilets, even an old wooden rocking chair. Miami-Dade Detective Mario Fernandez, with more than 24 years on the force, picked through the pile and finally found a mailing label to a home in Cutler Bay, he said.
Fernandez’s plan: Visit the home, try to sweet-talk his way in without a warrant and see if a piece of unusual looking tile matched anything, perhaps in one of the home’s bathrooms. At that point, Fernandez said, it’s up to the homeowner to pass along information on the contractor — if there was one — or face the consequences.
“If you don’t have any information on who you hired,” said Fernandez, “then you own it, it’s on you.”
This story was originally published December 23, 2020 at 4:43 PM.
