Will the D.A. Find Dirt in Refuse Probe? : Garbage: Inquiry into much-investigated Waste Management, the giant of the garbage industry, continues. The firm denies it has ties to the underworld.

Steve Anear, a San Diego County deputy district attorney, is looking for dirt on the world’s largest garbage company.

He’s not looking for the kind of stuff that fills landfills. He wants to get his hands on private corporate records, memos, letters and files--the kinds of papers that explain internal operations and strategies of a company that wants to expand its business operations in San Diego County.

He wants to find out how the Illinois-based company--and its 400 subsidiaries from coast to coast--sets its price schedule and overwhelms the competition.

He would like to find out which politicians are financially supported by the company.

He wants to know as much as he can about the company’s environmental sins.

He wants to know--and here’s where it gets especially interesting--if the company has mob connections.

He’s hardly re-creating the investigative wheel. The company, which takes in $6 billion a year, already has been investigated, from Florida to Washington state.

The company paid a $1-million fine in 1989 after pleading no-contest to price-fixing charges in Los Angeles. Another subsidiary was convicted of price-fixing in Florida in 1987, as was another subsidiary in Ohio, in 1988.

Greenpeace, the environmental group, once estimated that Waste Management paid $18 million for environmental violations nationwide between 1980 and 1989--a total that equalled, in 1989, less than two days’ revenue for the company.

Now that Waste Management wants to own and operate its own private landfill in northern San Diego County, county supervisors want to find out for themselves the story on Waste Management.

In November, the Board of Supervisors told Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller to look closely at Waste Management. Miller gave the job to Anear, who works in the special operations unit.

Anear’s been working on the Waste Management inquiry for six months. He won’t say how close he is to being done. He won’t say how many hours he and others have put into it. And he won’t say what he’s found out so far.

All of this is raising the hackles of Waste Management officials.

“Let’s be frank about who and what this company is,” said Gaye Soroka, manager of environmental affairs for Waste Management of California and the primary spokesman for its San Diego County subsidiaries.

“This isn’t some mom-and-pop organization that grew up in New Jersey. This is a privately held company traded on the New York Stock Exchange. We are the largest waste-management company in the world, twice as large as the next biggest one. The largest stockholder is a public retirement association,” she said.

“We are looked at and regulated more than anybody else.

“This issue of organized crime--recognizing that the waste management industry doesn’t have a wonderful history--is an insult to our company. And I don’t like to talk about it because each time you talk about it, it reinforces a stereotype that is very inappropriate.”

(In San Diego County, the company operates three trash-hauling businesses. The largest is Waste Management of San Diego, which handles both commercial and multi-residental trash as well as a separate contract with the city to handle curbside recycling for 40,000. The company also owns Universal Refuse Removal in El Cajon and Oceanside Disposal, also known as Waste Management of North County. The latter firm also picks up trash in parts of unincorporated North County.)

Bad blood between the district attorney’s office and Waste Management surfaced early in the investigation.

The probe was requested by Supervisor Susan Golding last November.

Soroka and other company officials immediately pledged the company’s cooperation--and said it would even help pay for the investigation, estimated at the time to be $75,000.

But when Waste Management learned more exactly the kind of cooperation the county was seeking, it balked.

Here’s how Dist. Atty. Miller characterized the investigation when he updated Golding by letter in January:

“Your board was concerned with allegations that the company was connected to organized crime, had engaged in business practices that were in violation of antitrust statutes, and had been involved in illegal dumping and mishandling of hazardous waste.

“At the time (of the board’s request), Waste Management Inc. promised full and open cooperation with this investigation and, further, pledged to pay all investigative costs.”

His office, Miller said, asked for “open access to corporate records, including a waiver of any claims of confidentiality,” as well as “a waiver of any claim of defamation the company might perceive it had as a consequence of the conclusions reached in our investigation, should those conclusions be adverse to the corporation.”

But Waste Management reneged on its promise, Miller said. His letter said the firm “has been unwilling to grant the waivers or full access to its company records . . . (and) demanded unreasonable limitations to the waiver, in effect limiting our investigation of corporate records to an examination of those records the company itself chooses to share with us, at least raising the perception that damaging information might be secreted away, covered over by a cloak of ‘attorney-client’ privilege.”

Miller said his office would proceed with the investigation without Waste Management’s full cooperation because to concur with the company’s conditions could compromise the results.

Anear said last week that he is still moving forward on the probe, has collected public documents on the company, and has consulted with other investigative agencies around the country to ask what they know about the firm.

He declined to elaborate, except to say, “We’re looking at almost everything we can.”

Soroka defended the company’s decision not to offer a waiver to the district attorney’s office to look for whatever it wanted and to release its findings, whatever they might be.

“The D.A. feels, I think, that he seems to need a waiver in order to get what he wants. He wants to go fishing,” she said. “But we feel that truth is the best possible, absolute defense” for the county, should the company feel it was libeled by the district attorney’s findings.

“Our chief counsel looks at these kinds of requests all the time and asks, ‘Why do you need to indemnify yourself from libelous statements? You shouldn’t be writing things like that to begin with.’ ”

Soroka said she doesn’t believe the district attorney’s office has yet asked Waste Management officials for anything from internal sources.

“We haven’t been asked to give up any files, or the keys to anybody’s offices,” she said. “He hasn’t asked to see my datebook, for instance, which I was assuming was something he might want to do.”

The company, meanwhile, is still pursuing its own environmental studies on the benefits of a private landfill, which the company wants to establish on 1,600 acres alongside the San Luis Rey River, a few miles east of Interstate 15.

The county has yet to discuss the pros and cons of whether it even wants a company--any company--to privately operate a landfill in North County.

County officials are hard-pressed to find a site for new North County landfill because the existing dump in San Marcos is virtually filled. While considering both the Waste Management site in so-called Gregory Canyon and another site in Fallbrook as prime candidates, officials have agreed to continue their search for still more, albeit smaller, landfill sites, and the decision on where to put a new landfill is still years off.