‘The Sheik’ Isn’t King of This Hill : Zeke’s Heap of Dung Not on His Property

Call it another rung on the ladder of dung.

The ongoing effort by Los Angeles County health officials to level Zeke the Sheik’s seething mountain of fertilizer has unearthed a curious discovery: The 30-foot-high heap doesn’t belong to Zeke.

Although Zeke has spent 17 years cultivating next to his Altadena home what he considers a monument to the Earth’s regenerative powers, officials have learned that the colossal compost pile actually sits on property owned by Mountain View Cemetery.

It seems that Mountain View years ago gave Zeke--the alter ego of 47-year-old Timothy Dundon--permission to pile the steamy mass onto a vacant lot next to to his two-story farmhouse. Lawn clippings from the cemetery, just a block down the road, along with household garbage and animal droppings have long been the main components of the nutrient-rich tower.

But now the county Department of Health Services, which considers this an illegal dump, has cited Mountain View for the alleged violations. The cemetery, far more eager than Dundon to avoid offending officialdom, has agreed to remove the mound by an April 16 deadline.

“I guess we should have been watching it more carefully,” said Mountain View’s president, Paul A. Brown, who on Monday wrote Dundon that he would be billed for the cost of removal if he doesn’t cooperate. “We were very surprised to find that it had gotten to be, well, this size.”

Dundon, whose 200-foot-wide mountain feeds a teeming one-acre jungle below of fruits, vegetables and rare cacti, already has his defense mapped out.

This week, he erected two giant crosses, each about 12 feet tall, atop the hill “because that’s what the county’s doing to me: the double-cross,” he says. If the bulldozers come, he vows to have himself nailed to one of the wooden crosses.

“That would be nothing compared to the hole they’d be ripping in my heart,” Dundon said Tuesday, clad in turban and caftan, as he adjusted one of the crossbeams. “They’re going to take a living creature and bury it in a landfill. Now, to me, that’s sacrilegious.”

Things began to go downhill for Dundon, a former plasterer and ironworker, in February, when heat generated by decomposing bacteria twice caused his mound to catch fire spontaneously.

Firefighters, who had to come douse the smoldering pile, cited him for improperly storing hazardous waste and warned that another ignition would result in its removal.

That caught the attention of county health officials, who cited Dundon for creating fly-breeding conditions and for allowing about 50 chickens, turkeys and geese to roam wild on his property.

Ultimately, health officials decided the mound was really an unlicensed landfill. But when they began to prepare the legal documents necessary to take action against Dundon, they discovered that the land underneath was owned by Mountain View.

“I’m hopeful that they will be more responsive,” said health inspector Rudy Bagnera. “It’s not one of those things where you can just turn your back and say, ‘Gee, there’s nothing there.’ . . . It is a big pile of organic debris.”

Dundon, who does odd jobs for a living while caring for an invalid brother, claims that he is being persecuted for recycling waste--an activity, he notes, that the government is urging everyone to undertake.

Perhaps he has pursued it on a scale much larger than most normally do. But the result of his efforts--a fecund hill of supercharged soil--is something that he says restores, not destroys, life on the planet.

“All that stuff from the cemetery is feeding a living mountain over here,” he says, grinning from behind his grizzled beard. “It’s the ultimate exchange.”