By Steve Hopkins

If there’s one truism I’ve learned during my late-blooming career in journalism, it’s that everybody seems to love a good animal story. Indeed, the knee-jerk popular press paid more attention to following the Obama clan’s process in choosing the requisite First Pooch (a politically and allergenically correct, shelter-rescued Portuguese water dog, as it turns out) than it did reporting on the president’s comfortingly mainstream cabinet choices. It doesn’t really matter if a critter saga’s got a happy ending; the papers fly off the newsstands just as fast when some woodsy survivalist chops his sick dog’s head off with an axe as when 20 starving calves are rescued from a veal farmer’s feces-infested death camp. I’m betting the interest level holds true for Chronic readers as well, although they’ll surely require a little more effort than my just interviewing the neighbors and paraphrasing the sheriff’s report.

With all that in mind, this will be our first attempt at a blockbuster animal yarn. It concerns a big, friendly 8-year-old yellow Lab named Eli, who, having been one of the growing legions of canine victims of the Great Recession, was recently rescued from puppy purgatory by a committed group of animal activists called PANT (Partnership for Animals Needing Transition), and landed in the loving Hyde Park home of the fully employed, ethically responsible Cotton family.

If ever there was an animal needing transition, it was Eli. According to PANT’s vice president and fundraising coordinator, Connie Price, the poor guy was emaciated and covered with chlorine burns from lying in pools of the chemical left in his cage at the tragically misnamed Beekman Animal Shelter. “He had a staph infection on the stomach, because

he was lying in pee and poop, and then had burns on his legs, because he had bad allergies to the chemicals in the bleach and the Pine Sol that they were using,” said Price. “Because basically they’re putting the animals back in on bleached surfaces that aren’t even dry. That’s like me cleaning your shower and putting you back in and closing the shower curtain door, and the bleach gets you right in the face. It’s not dry. And garage floors take forever to dry, unless you have fans on it.”

We’ll get to more of Eli’s thrilling escape story by and by. But first, there’s some housekeeping to do. Habitual Chronic readers will notice a trend developing: we like more than anything else to set up a meandering, unnecessarily complicated back story. So bear with us as we fully explore the little corner of Hell from which Eli was sprung, in order to make his ascendance to Dog Heaven with the Cotton household that much sweeter …

O little town of Beekman

Hardy, quasi-rural Beekman, tucked away in the southeastern quadrant of Dutchess County pretty much off of anyone’s radar screen, is historically a wild and conflicted place. The still mostly green, undulating landscape, its hilltops once crowned with vast farms, succumbed to the developers’ bulldozer through the go-go ’90s to the degree that it was temporarily dubbed the fastest growing municipality in the county, if not the state. The town’s largest development before the Great Recession hit last year is a 560-odd-unit agglomeration of townhouses and detached homes blanketing much of what used to be stately Dalton Farms, a homestead that once belonged to a scion of the far-flung Roosevelt family. FDR Jr.’s former house sits in the center of this neocolonial suburban fantasyland, having been retooled as a community center.

Dalton Farms was built with its own privately-run water district, which has enough capacity to also service 24 nearby homes and businesses that were left with poisoned wells during the mid-’90s in a still only partially resolved scandal involving a mob-influenced toxic chemical-dumping operation and the town’s former highway superintendent. As a result of illegally bought solvents having been poured down the drains in the highway garage, two large plumes of chemicals – one containing mostly 1,1,1-trichloroethane (TCA), the other made up of perchloroethylene (PCE) – wended their way “downgradient,” as they say in hydrogeologist’s parlance, into the drinking wells of these 24 property owners. Both substances are still widely used in the dry cleaning and silicone chipmaking industries, and both have been accused of causing leukemia and bladder cancer in laboratory rats.

To make a long story a little shorter, the residents – including Poughquag resident Bob Phillips and his late wife Shirley, had gotten together and filed a class action lawsuit against the town regarding their fouled water.

Interestingly, this was happening around the same time Congressman Maurice Hinchey was sticking his nose across the river into Beekman’s toxic business. He’d sicced his longtime investigator, Arthur Woolston Smith, on the town, and the sleuth quickly hit paydirt. Smith, on loan to the Beekman saga from central casting, was and still is an avuncular, Hitchcockian gentleman who came out of British Intelligence. Hinchey trusted Smith’s dogged persistence and ruggedly unbribable, unthreatenable demeanor – Smith had investigated everything from Watergate to Love Canal to a series of successful mob-busting cases for Hinchey’s former toxic waste committee in the state Assembly. He was and still is known affectionately in the gangbuster trade as “Smitty.”

According to Smitty, the Beekman mess came about as part of an elaborate scheme involving a mob-tied operator named Daniel Luongo and an associate named “Fat Pat.” In 1990 Luongo, owner of a number of bogus chemical companies based in Danbury, Conn., pled guilty to federal mail fraud and conspiracy charges as a result of a similar scheme conducted in the towns of Amenia and East Fishkill in which he was paying kickbacks to highway superintendents for buying undelivered chemicals. He ended up with a light sentence. Smitty maintains that Luongo’s chemicals were in fact delivered, but were actually toxic waste solvents collected from regional manufacturers that ended up being stored until they could be dumped over time around the towns.

Operation Double Steal, a push by the feds to investigate mob-influenced kickback schemes in town halls and highway departments across the region, was introduced with great fanfare in 1987. However, although Luongo’s kickback scheme was in as full force in Beekman as everywhere else, the town somehow magically escaped the feds’ noose.

Luongo wasn’t just a small-time corrupter of public officials, and he was no chemical salesman either. His actual occupation, according to Smitty, was getting rid of toxic waste for the mob. His favorite modus operandi was to double-dip – to get paid twice for the 35- and 55-gallon drums he was unloading – once by the customer trying to get rid of them and again by a public official to whom he would offer a kickback in exchange for his or her municipality “buying” them.

He had a lot of “customers.” Beekman’s former highway superintendent, Bob Clark, told Smitty of his being invited along with dozens of highway supers from towns up and down the Hudson Valley on an all-expenses-paid bus junket to Giants Stadium, arranged by Luongo.
According to reams of eyewitness testimony amassed by Smitty and others in depositions, most of the contents of those drums were poured down the drains of the highway garage, causing the aforementioned toxic plumes that were making local residents sick. Yet the town, with the help of a phalanx of lawyers and the Pataki administration, was somehow able to protect its reputation, minimize its culpability and completely defuse the scandal by, at different times, either denying that the toxic plumes existed, paying off the residents to be quiet with a settlement (after paying the lawyer a quarter of a million dollars, they each got a paltry $20,000 to split between them, plus a promise to be hooked up to the new Dalton Farms water system), and presiding over a growing list of disappearing evidence, including scores of barrels of toxic chemicals the highway super hadn’t gotten around to pouring into the aquifer.

Hinchey had been alerted to the existence of this remaining cache of evidence and swung into gear. “This week my staff was notified that potentially important and relevant evidence is slated for removal from a Town of Beekman warehouse, for incineration in Pennsylvania,” he wrote. “…The importance of the drums … is clear. … Several questions demand answers. Are the newly identified drums the same as those purchased with public funds which created the state hazardous waste site? Who is responsible for the receipt of the two dozen drums on behalf of the town, and where did they originate? Are the materials in the drums the same as the contaminants in the underground aquifer? After so many years, why is the town suddenly so interested in disposing of the chemicals?”

Good questions all, Maurice.

But, of course, he never got his answers, because the drums were spirited away without being tested further. Before being hauled off, according to former Beekman councilman Peter Barton, the labels were spray-painted over in a last-minute attempt to obliterate any possible chance that someone would find out where they came from.

The specific storage room from which those barrels disappeared happens to have been in the very same “kennel” from which the scrawny, heavily chlorinated Eli Cotton was liberated this past winter. The building is situated, as many municipal animal shelters seem to be, disturbingly, in an old landfill.

Bob and Shirley Phillips, the citizens whose property was closest to the town garage, lived their entire adult lives in that location, bathing in and drinking their well water. Shirley worked for the town, right next door, for many years. Theirs was the well that was first to show “negligible” amounts of PCE in tests, and was the first to reach the magical 200 ppb TCA result that set the whole Beekman crisis in motion.

By that time, though, Shirley was already dead. She had retired early, in her late 50s, and went with Bob on a trip of a lifetime to Hawaii. They had to cut their trip short, though, because Shirley was bleeding internally. Six tragic weeks later she died, of liver and bladder cancer – the very same diseases that PCE causes in rats.

Shirley Phillips, however, was not a rat. She was a human being, a warm, loving country sweetheart who trusted in her government and her fellow man and felt safe in her cozy little small-town world. “Beekman killed my wife,” said Bob Phillips, who netted just over $1,000 from the Poughquag citizens’ settlement – not even enough to replace his corroded appliances, in 2000. “Beekman killed my wife.”

Digression over

But this is supposed to be a dog story, and so it is. All of the above is water – er, perchloroethylene – under the bridge, so to speak. It’s just remarkable the way the human and canine stories dovetail together so neatly, and show the continuum of indifference to the public weal evidenced by generations of local officials. As PANT vice president Connie Price brings us up to date, nothing much has changed at the old “kennel.”

“Basically the East Fishkill animal control officer contacted us because they needed to place that dog someplace because he was up for euthanization,” said Price. “The towns of Union Vale, Beekman and East Fishkill have a 10-day hold policy, wherein if the dog is not placed in 10 days, it’s euthanized. They only have four stalls in Beekman. And what happens is that if another dog comes into the program, there’s really no cage for him but a large crate. This is an old town highway garage they’re using. It still smells; it smells like septic in there. It’s just an old landfill. You get the back-feeds from the ventilation into the building.” One can only imagine what’s in that “septic” smell.

The Beekman shelter is the go-to facility to warehouse and conduct the final solution for unwanted dogs from at least three other nearby towns: East Fishkill, Union Vale and Washington (Millbrook). “This is the only shelter in four towns,” she went on. “And with all the money that East Fishkill gets from taxes, they keep postponing that they’re supposed to get a new shelter. Now they keep getting bounced around, and the more the funds get tightened and squeezed …”

Animal control has been taking a budgetary back seat throughout the Mid-Hudson region since long before the current economic troubles. Multiple municipalities commonly use the facilities provided by one town stuck with the role in a long-running game of “You’re It.”

The Beekman shelter, Price said, is a cheap alternative for surrounding towns. “I think they’re renting it for like $8 a day for an animal.” But naturally, you get what you pay for. “I talked to the SPCA, and I said, you know, you’ve got an animal control officer that’s denying medical care to dogs that should be turned over to you guys,” said Price. “There’s conflict between the East Fishkill animal control officer and the SPCA, they’ve had run-ins, and I said to the humane officer, I said, you know, Stephanie, I don’t want to get involved, I know you guys have got tit for tat going on here, but you’ve got mammals in crisis that were left behind here.”

Inside help

The wild swings between cruelty and benevolence exhibited in overburdened municipal animal shelters mirrors the extremes of human nature exhibited by the morally stressed administrators of human systems of incarceration. Indeed, there is usually a dog warden’s version of Schindler’s List. Animal control people are not without a heart, maintained Price, despite the appallingly low standard of care in facilities like Beekman’s. Eli, for example, benefitted greatly from the actions of someone who twisted the rules into pretzels for him. “He should have been re-placed, but his name gets changed, because what the animal control officers do is that they take them out of the shelter for a day or two, then they try to either take them home themselves or they change the dates to keep Ag & Markets and the town off their backs. That’s why this dog was still there and it was more than 10 days. What they do is they change the dates; they usually put the dog in, like if the dog came in at night they’re able to change the date and later on give him another 10 days, saying ‘Oh, he came in on the 19th.’ It prolongs it; it’s a nice thing to do, but if they get caught, Ag & Markets can really fine them in violation. And if a town official finds out about it, then the town can fire an animal control officer for altering documents.

“It’s good and bad,” she said. “You know, they try on one hand, and then deny on the other. And basically what happens with animal control officers, right now they’re all being switched and placed into sheriff’s stations and things like that. The Town of Poughkeepsie animal control officer, they moved her out of the town facility and now, as of last month, she’s under the police department. And she has to report to a sergeant and not to Pat Myers, the town supervisor, any more.

“They’re re-designating these people and moving them out,” continued Price. “And when you put an animal control officer in with the police department, they feel like they want more power. The animals suffer. They want prosecutions; they start forgetting about the animals. It becomes more of a power play. Why they took the job starts to change. And that’s what’s happening.”

“I’m just disappointed in the towns,” she said. “They’ve got all this money, and they’re using a stinky old garage, with no windows. The lights are turned off when they leave, and they’ve got two people from Millbrook who are feeding the animals at 7 in the morning and 7 at night. Basically the dogs never see the light of the sun. Not unless the animal control officer comes and decides to take the dog out for a walk, because she’s there putting one in or showing one to a potential adopter.”

Price tried to get official action taken regarding what she had witnessed in Beekman, but so far nothing has been done. “Well, it kind of got passed off. I contacted Joel Miller’s office to try and get some help and he passed it off,” she said. “I actually got a little annoyed because he took my e-mail that I asked him to help me with, and he forwarded it to the SPCA. It was kind of like a pass-the-buck thing.”

By the time the SPCA became involved, thinks Price, someone had tipped the Beekman people that trouble was brewing. “When I talked to Stephanie Fitzpatrick of the SPCA Humane Law, she says, ‘Well, the shelter is fine, I was there two weeks ago.’ And I said, ‘Well then somebody must have given them a heads-up that you were coming.’ She said, ‘Yeah, we were there on something else,’ and I said, ‘So, there you go, so obviously they knew you were coming.’

“Basically that’s it, and I said to Stephanie, ‘You need to go there when nobody else is there.’

“I was there on two occasions. The animal control officer didn’t want to let me in. She wanted help with the dog (Eli) that Kristin (Cotton) got. And I went there, and I said, ‘Well, let me see the dog.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’ll go get the dog. You don’t want to go in there.’ And I said, ‘Well, maybe there’s another dog in there that I may be able to help put in foster …,’ and she said, ‘No, they’re not my dogs. I can’t show them to you.’ So I said, ‘Okay, fine.’

“So then when she brought the dog out, he was perfect, he had a perfect temperament, we did our testing out in the back in the field, and then I said to her, ‘You know, why hasn’t this dog gotten medical attention? It’s emaciated, it’s got these open wounds, he needs to see a veterinarian right away.’ And she says, ‘Well, the Town of East Fishkill won’t pay for it.’ ‘Did you contact the SPCA?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I’ve had my run-ins with them,’ she says. ‘We’re not on good terms.’

“And I said, ‘Listen, can I have this dog for an hour and a half, so I can take him to my vet, to see what my vet has to say?’ So I rush this dog all the way over to Millbrook, and the vet tells me: ‘He’s a great dog. He’s got burns from chemicals, he’s got a staph infection; it’s gonna be a losing battle if you don’t get him out of there.’ So unfortunately I have to bring the dog back and give it to her, because my foster home couldn’t take the dog until Sunday.”

Nonstop love express

Somehow Eli made it through the weekend and was united with the Cottons, who have welcomed him with open arms. “He’s nonstop, moving, from morning until he goes to sleep at night,” said Joe Cotton of the gregarious, relentlessly playful pet. Joe is attending criminal justice classes at Dutchess County Community College as part of a training regimen that will qualify him to become a humane law enforcement officer. He volunteers to participate in animal trapping operations with Connie Price and PANT, after having been introduced to the organization through his younger sister Tara. His stepmother, Kristin, joined PANT’s board of directors as secretary in February, deepening the family’s animal activism.

Eli is one of many successful animal rescues performed by the people at PANT. In its short three-year history in Dutchess, the group has rescued, spay/neutered and placed nearly 800 adoptable dogs and cats in permanent homes. In many cases the animals were saved from euthanasia or from a life on the street. The innovative foster program, which boasts a 95 percent success rate, allows PANT to give its animals time to adjust in a home environment with people, other animals and children. Adoption counselors work with the foster homes to ensure proper placement of all animals into a “forever” home best suited for the needs and preferences of each animal.

If you want to find out more about PANT, perhaps even slip them a donation or look into following in the Cottons’ footsteps and volunteering your time and energy, check out the organization’s website at www.pant.org. The increase in man- and womanpower would not be unappreciated. Said Price of the fate of animals in these hard economic times: “So many people are leaving their pets behind. We’ve got animals left in their carriers at churches; I mean there’s just no room in any shelter. I’m averaging between three and four calls a day from people who need help with their animals because they’re leaving their homes. Some of these people can’t even afford to pay for food and litter. I’m sure it’s happening everywhere, because it can’t just be an epidemic in this county. I took Joe Cotton to one just the other day. They had the keys in the car, the car loaded, and left the animals in the house to die.”

By the way, for anyone who’s interested, the Beekman toxic waste story is only the fingertip of a very large iceberg, something for which I’ve been hoarding three filing cabinets full of documents and evidence, in case anyone ever questions my work. The project, a 23,000-word report for The Nation Institute titled “Adventures in Patakistan: Toxic Waste Dumping, Politics and the Mob in Upstate New York,” took the better part of a year out of my life, and has never been published. It names names and casts aspersions in a manner that might have made editors of The Nation squirm had they chosen to run parts of it, which they decided against because, since George W. Bush didn’t pick George Pataki as his running mate in 2000, the story lacked national appeal.

If you want to read it, send 20 bucks and I’ll fire off a copy. Otherwise, it’s probably best to let sleeping dogs lie – or at least fester in their own pee and excrement while lying in a pool of toxic chemicals.