Toms River (29 page)

These were the types of experiences that would leave any man
short-tempered and willful, and Hueper was both. Immigrating to America in 1924 after getting his medical degree, he worked as a pathologist at a Chicago hospital before quitting in 1930 in a dispute over money. He then accepted an offer to join the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Research Laboratory in Philadelphia. Like cancer researchers all over the world at that time, he tried to emulate Katsusaburo Yamagiwa’s success in inducing tumors in test animals, but Hueper’s attempts to match the feat by injecting mice with arsenic compounds succeeded only in killing the mice. He did make progress on another front, however. Irénée du Pont, one of the richest men in America and a former president and longtime board member of the industrial behemoth founded by his great grandfather, bankrolled the research lab where Hueper worked. As a result, Hueper made several trips to the du Pont mansion in Wilmington, Delaware. Hueper was even invited to see the company’s massive Chambers Works complex across the river in Deepwater, New Jersey. Hueper’s lab experiments on chemical carcinogenesis were not going particularly well, but he had a natural affinity for workplace investigations. Perhaps a tour of one of the world’s largest chemical manufacturing plants might provide fresh inspiration.
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DuPont, the company, and du Pont, the man, would come to regret the 1932 invitation, but their association with Hueper began innocently enough. During the tour of the factory complex, several chemists told Hueper that as part of its aniline dye production process DuPont was making large quantities of two chemicals Hueper knew well: benzidine and beta-naphthylamine. (The same two compounds were also being produced by the Cincinnati Chemical Works, a rival facility run by DuPont’s Swiss competitors.) Hueper knew about them because they had been identified as the likely causes of the bladder cancer clusters that had been detected in dye factories in Germany, Switzerland, and England as far back as 1895, the year Ludwig Rehn first took note of “aniline tumors” among dye workers in Frankfurt. Those European studies suggested that bladder cancer appeared in factory workers ten to fifteen years after they began handling the two chemicals; the Chambers Works had been producing aniline dyes
since 1917, and it was now 1932. To Hueper, it was obvious what was about to happen: DuPont was going to face an epidemic of bladder cancers. In fact, it might have started already. Returning to Philadelphia, he dashed off a strongly worded note and sent it directly to Irénée du Pont. Hueper waited for months but got no answer, and when he raised the issue with his supervisor at the laboratory, du Pont’s close friend and personal physician Ellice McDonald, he was told there were no bladder cancer cases at the Chambers Works.

A few months later, however, the medical director of DuPont turned up at the doorstep of Hueper and McDonald’s laboratory with alarming news: There
were
bladder cancer cases at Chambers. In fact, the company had identified twenty-three cases among its aniline workers. Hueper immediately wrote another letter to Irénée du Pont, this time proposing that the company create its own toxicological institute to study chemical risks to employees and consumers. Again, there was no response, until a few months later when Hueper accompanied McDonald on another house call to the Wilmington mansion. Pulling Hueper aside for a confidential chat, Irénée du Pont told him the timing was not right to fund an institute because the country was in the depths of the Great Depression and DuPont could not spare any more funds for health research.

The following year, in 1933, Hueper felt the effects of the economic collapse more directly: McDonald fired him. The two men had clashed—Hueper regarded McDonald as an unethical self-promoter, and we can only guess what McDonald thought of Hueper—and now Hueper was told that the laboratory could no longer afford his salary. Desperate for work, Hueper returned to Germany with his wife and son to search for a medical position. Spaces had opened because so many Jews had fled after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, but Hueper got no offers. The family returned to the United States, and Hueper finally landed a humble post at a small hospital in a Pennsylvania mining town. Then, in 1935, something surprising happened: Hueper received an offer from the director of the newly created Haskell Laboratory of Industrial Toxicology. The Haskell lab, under construction in Wilmington, was about to become the in-house health research
arm of the DuPont Corporation. Irénée du Pont had taken Hueper’s advice after all, and now Hueper was being invited to be part of the team. He quickly accepted.

Arriving in Wilmington, Hueper found that the bladder cancer epidemic he had predicted was in full swing, with more than fifty confirmed cases among dye workers. He quickly launched a long-term study of dogs exposed to beta-naphthylamine, the aniline dye ingredient known as BNA. DuPont had previously tested its other key dye ingredient, benzidine, on lab animals and had never found tumors, but the company always halted its experiments after less than a year. It was the first example of what Hueper would later adopt as a truism: Manufacturers could not be trusted to run carcinogenicity tests.
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He knew it took more than a decade of exposure to dye chemicals for humans to develop bladder cancer, so he thought that animal tests should last for several years at least—especially since both Yamagiwa and Kennaway had exposed animals to carcinogens for more than a year before seeing tumors. In his new lab, Hueper set up a much more thorough experiment in which sixteen female dogs, large enough to have their bladders checked with a cystoscope, would be given BNA with their daily chow.
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The dogs would be monitored at least two years, twice as long as previous experiments.

While he was waiting to see what would happen to the dogs, Hueper decided to take another trip across the Delaware River to tour the BNA operations at the Chambers Works—this time as a DuPont employee. When he got there, Hueper was surprised to see that the BNA manufacturing area was extremely clean, with no telltale powder strewn on any surfaces. Spotting a foreman, Hueper told him, “Your place is surprisingly clean.” The reply came back: “Doctor, you should have seen it last night; we worked all night to clean it up for you.”
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He decided to make an impromptu visit to a separate building where benzidine was made. This one had not been cleaned up, and the loose powder was everywhere. “With one look at the place, it became immediately obvious how the workers became exposed,” he later wrote. Fifteen years earlier, in 1921, the Geneva-based International Labour Office had examined the accumulating evidence about dye manufacture and bladder cancer and had identified benzidine and
BNA as the most likely suspects, urging manufacturers to adopt “the most rigorous application of hygienic precautions.”
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Judging from Hueper’s visit to the dye production buildings at the Chambers Works, that message had apparently never reached the DuPont Corporation. Angry about what he regarded as an attempt to mislead him about conditions in the factory, Hueper reacted in typical fashion: He dashed off yet another note to Irénée du Pont, this one complaining about the “deception.” As usual, there was no reply, but Hueper was never again allowed to tour the dye operations at the Chambers Works.

Hueper’s effective banishment from the factory floor was a sign that something fundamental was changing at DuPont—and in the chemical industry as a whole. Manufacturers had always downplayed the health consequences of their business practices, but their tactics tended to be subtle because nothing more aggressive was required. Governments lacked the popular mandate and medical evidence needed to challenge them. But by the mid-1930s, the balance was shifting. Kennaway’s 1932 confirmation that benzo(a)pyrene was carcinogenic energized the worldwide search for additional industrial chemicals capable of inducing malignancies. By 1936, more than a dozen had been shown to be carcinogenic, and DuPont’s initial enthusiasm for Hueper’s aniline research program was flagging by the day. The company published its last study on bladder cancer at the Chambers Works in 1937, identifying eighty-three cases—fifty-six of them diagnosed in the previous three years.
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Henceforth, DuPont would keep the growing body count to itself, although in a private letter in 1947 the factory’s medical director observed that
every one
of the workers who had handled BNA in the early years of the chemical’s production at Chambers had developed bladder cancer. Public disclosure of that fact might have helped workers at the Cincinnati Chemical Works, where a similar bladder cancer cluster was emerging in the late 1940s, but DuPont did not publish what it knew.
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The era of scientific openness was ending. A new era of regulatory warfare was beginning.

Combat, of course, was nothing new to Wilhelm Hueper. He was not about to abandon his work, especially when, twenty months into
his dog experiment, cystoscope examinations showed that many of them were developing tumors in their bladders. By the time the experiment ended after thirty-six months, thirteen of the sixteen dogs had bladder lesions—the same fast-spreading growths Hueper saw in his examinations of dye workers at DuPont.
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More than forty years after Ludwig Rehn first took note of “aniline tumors” in German dye workers, a specific dye chemical—beta-naphthylamine, BNA—had finally been shown to be a carcinogen. Hueper had added another important industrial chemical to the growing list Kennaway had started five years earlier. A few months later, in November of 1937, the inevitable ax fell: Hueper was fired again. This time, he was told that he could not discuss any of the work he had done at DuPont without the company’s consent, which he would not receive.

There would be no more publicity about cancer clusters in the dye industry for a very long time. The new rules of contested science would not permit it.

On the night of the most notorious murder in the history of Toms River, September 7, 1984, Dane Wells was left alone at the Ciba-Geigy landfill to stand watch over hundreds of unburied drums. They stood in long rows, like an army of shabby toy soldiers, glistening faintly in the light of a nearly full moon. “It reminded me of some sort of science fiction lunarscape,” Wells remembered many years later. “As someone who had concerns about toxic waste, it was frightening to me. I wanted to get out of there.”

A very unlikely set of circumstances had brought Wells to the landfill on that eerie night. At the time, he was a young investigator in the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office. Wells and his boss, Dick Chinery, who ran the office’s special investigations unit, had spent the previous summer trying to build a criminal case against Ciba-Geigy. It was exciting stuff for a couple of local cops who had grown up in Ocean County—“pineys,” they called themselves—and were accustomed to investigating burglaries. In reality, Chinery was less of a boss to Wells than a co-conspirator, in an entirely noncriminal sense. The two saw themselves as Jersey versions of frontier lawmen: incorruptible, adventurous, and not overly concerned with the niceties of
legal procedure and office hierarchy. Like reporter Don Bennett at the
Observer
, Chinery and Wells were close observers of the local power structure but not a part of it, and they shared Bennett’s fascination with the contradictions of Ciba-Geigy. How could a place so familiar, where thousands of people had enjoyed the best wages in the county for two generations, also be so mysterious? “Ciba-Geigy was kind of like a closed book,” remembered Chinery. “No one really knew what was going on there. We wanted to find out.”

They pursued the case with gusto, running down every lead that they could find. Operating under the loose supervision of County Prosecutor Edward Turnbach, Chinery and Wells arranged secret roadside meetings with informants who worked at the factory and made a surreptitious alliance with Greenpeace to exchange damaging information about Ciba-Geigy. (As a memento, Wells even saved one of the bowl-shaped wooden plugs that Greenpeace had used to try to block the ocean discharge pipe.) In July came the electrifying news that the state DEP had secretly referred the Ciba-Geigy case to the state Division of Criminal Justice for possible criminal prosecution. Wayne Smith, the chief investigator of the division’s Environmental Crimes Bureau, would be coming to Toms River, and Chinery and Wells would be working with him on a joint investigation.

Excited, the two county investigators told Smith everything they had learned about Ciba-Geigy. But they soon found out that the state-county investigation would not be much of a partnership. Smith and the lawyers from the Environmental Crimes Bureau were the experts, and they were not interested in collaborating with a couple of amateurs who probably thought toluene was a brand of toothpaste and filter cake was for dessert. “They didn’t understand the complexities of environmental crimes,” Smith remembered. “We did.” Smith told the pineys to be patient while he built a criminal case that Ciba-Geigy executives had intentionally, repeatedly violated the terms of the company’s state-issued landfill permit. To Wells and Chinery, it sounded like an airtight case. They were sure that a raid on the factory, followed by mass arrests, was imminent.

But weeks passed, and there was no raid. In Toms River, meanwhile, the rumors were flying. There was talk that Ciba-Geigy had
asked local politicians to lobby state officeholders on the company’s behalf and that the company’s well-connected attorneys had even appealed to the state’s Republican governor, Tom Kean, who would be up for election the following year. Wayne Smith would later maintain that there was never any serious doubt that the state would eventually charge Ciba-Geigy, though the timing was uncertain because it was a complicated case. But Chinery and Wells did not believe that. They were sure that the big shots from Trenton were looking for any excuse either to drop the criminal case or to cut the county investigators out of it. It was a question of money, not just pride, because if the state brought the prosecution by itself, any penalties Ciba-Geigy paid would go exclusively to Trenton and would not be shared with Ocean County.