The Mongo King

The King of Mongo is on his first coffee break. He leans against the brick wall of a Queens apartment building, sipping a cup of coffee laced with a shot of Gordon's Gin. The alcohol helps with the early morning aches and pains that come from 25 years as a New York City garbage man.

The King is 52 now and doing a job better suited to the young and strong. The years show on him. He claims he only has one or two shots of gin, but never when he is driving. The alcohol gets him through his day as a New York City garbage man. "Every year the cans seem to get heavier," he says. "They call Department of Sanitation guys New York's Strongest. Not me. Not anymore. It is a hard, brutal job. Making that 6 a.m. roll call at the garage ain't getting any easier but I got to stay on because I got two kids and I am paying for them to go through college sos they don't ever have to do this." He says this with a thick New York accent.

The King won't let me use his name because he fears retribution from his supervisors. He's been in trouble his whole career-mostly for mouthing off to supervisors. He is a short, thick man with hands like slabs of ham. His dark green DSNY sweatshirt strains from his pot belly and he wears a baseball hat to hide his bald head.

He drains his coffee cup and throws it into his truck's hopper.

"Twenty-five years! That's longer than my first cousin lived. He got shot dead in a drug deal gone bad when he was only 20. All the young guys on the job laugh at me. Call me 'Pops' but they know I am the King. They ask me why don't I retire and take my pension. They all say that is their big plan. We'll see. Life takes some funny turns these kids don't see coming. But it is a hard job and I would retire if I could. I can't afford it. I'd get over half of my salary but half of not a lot ain't much."

Back in 1980, with only a high school degree and not much ambition the King took a job with the Sanitation Department. One reason for becoming a New York City sanitation worker is that after 20 years you can retire and get half pay for the rest of your life. The 2005 hiring salary is $30,696 and after five years it jumps to $48,996. Each time the Department holds a test for jobs over 30,000 people apply. They know that along with the base salary there is bonus pay for tonnage collected, differential pay for various jobs and shifts, and quite a bit of overtime-especially when it snows.

"When you need money you pray for snow. I have gone to church and asked God for a blizzard. A big snow hits and until it is cleared all we do is snow removal. No garbage collection. At first it is like a vacation. Then the hours become endless, and mandatory. You have to do 12-hour shifts seven days a week until the snow is removed. This is a big city. The overtime is so much that at the end you almost regret asking for the snow. It is back-breaking, but then the big ass check comes-and it is all forgotten and your prayers are answered."

With overtime a veteran like the King can earn more than $80,000 in a year-not bad for a job that requires only a strong back, a somewhat clean record, a high school diploma and a commercial drivering license.

With that sort of pay, it is not cheap to collect garbage here. A survey by the Independent Budget Office found that it cost New York $108 for every ton of garbage it collects-the third highest rate in the nation. The city has 6,998 uniformed Sanitation workers and supervisors and 1,877 civilian workers who haul away almost 12 tons of garbage each day. It is the nation's largest force of sanitation workers.

To handle this enormous volume of rubbish the Department has 2,200 garbage collection trucks, 450 street sweepers, 275 specialized bulk collection trucks, 353 salt/sand spreaders and 2,360 support vehicles: mostly sedans that fly around the city spotting problem areas and issuing fines for illegal dumping and other violations.

For all that, the Department doesn't collect commercial trash, and an even bigger group of garbage men work in private sanitation. These moilers pick up almost 13 tons of refuse daily.

Because garbage is a perfect bottleneck, private sanitation has had a long history with organized crime. Firms come and go like the seasons, incorporate under different names and when they get sued or fall behind on payments they take their trucks and open up shop elsewhere, under a different name. It is a giant shell game that even Guiliani couldn't fully bust.

"Eight million slobs is what this city got. I've worked everywhere and the whole place is a mess. No one thinks about their garbage. They put it out into cans and like magic it gets taken away. That's what we are. We're fuckin' magicians," the King says.

He got his nickname because Mongo is what Sanitation workers call the refuse they collect for their own use. Throw away a scratched-up wooden table and Mongo men may take it home. Some spruce it up and sell it-others use it for the family dinner table.

"If it's free it's for me," The King of Mongo tells me.

I tell the King that the dictionary defines mongo as a Mongolian unit of currency, and that a monger is defined as a dealer.

His big belly shakes as he laughs and says, "Then I guess us garbage pickers are just a pack of Mongolian dealers taking off your hands what you think is junk and turning that into money."

The King's biggest score was a baseball card collection he sold for $3,000. He has taken every piece of furniture you can name and either restored and sold it or used it in his Staten Island house. His bounty includes computers, electronics, GI Joes and Barbies that he gave his kids as Christmas presents, art work, old magazines, gym equipment, DVDs, posters, pet cages, brand new clothes, car parts, Waterford crystal, silver cutlery, coin, stamp and record collections and private shots of women in the nude.

"I found some other pretty disgusting sex photos. Things that I never thought of doing, never mind taking a picture of. Those I trash. The pretty pictures of nude woman-I mean these are someone's private photos. Those I keep. I guess the boyfriend or whoever got pissed off and threw them away. I keep that stash hidden in my cellar. Can't let the wife find that. But it is the other Mongo that I made a second job out of. I can't believe all the decent things just thrown out in this city. It is unbelievable what people waste."

Mostly, though, he seems to miss the old days: "This job has changed. Can't get away with what you used to. What surprised me when I first started was how quick I got over the stink of garbage. The first couple of days I almost threw up from the smells and then it just went away and I loved the job. Back then I was single and working the Bronx in the Hunts Point section. We would pull up to the hookers and get the Sanitation Man's Special. You know what that is?" I tell him I don't.

"A $5 blow job. I guess they took pity on us when traffic was slow for them. We had three men on the truck back then. They changed that after I was on the job a few years. Now it's all two-men trucks.

"When we had three men we'd get our route done as fast as we could and we were free. I mean we couldn't go home but we'd roam the neighborhood. The driver always got to choose the hooker and get off first. That was our rule. Back then I tried to do a lot of driving. Didn't really care for sloppy seconds, know what I mean."?The King lowers his voice as his young partner hops into the cab of the truck.

"That kid never saw the things I did. He's a newbie. I only work with the new guys now because I work slow and steady and the vets all want to rush though the route. I take my time and the other guys just want to do their job and go back to the garage and rest.

"Maybe for the kid it is for the better. We did some foul shit when I was a young San Man. So back to the hookers-when I was young the driver got his load off first and then the other two guys would choose who would go next. I loved when I worked with married guys who didn't want to do it-although believe me there were enough married guys getting it too."

The King goes on to the dangers of his job. Rats running up his arms. Dog attacks and people throwing things at him out of windows. He broke his right hand lifting a cement block. He got splashed with chemicals that left scars on his legs.

"This is a dangerous job. I had a friend shot dead on Himrod St. in Brooklyn while collecting trash. Who the hell shoots a garbage man? The ghetto can get dangerous. When I was assigned to East New York in the early '90s I hit the floor a couple of times a week dodging bullets. Then there are the chemicals people toss that, when the hopper blade closes down on them, they blow up on you. A few years back we had a guy get killed when a tin of acid exploded. This is a very dangerous job."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, refuse collection is "high hazard" work. The fatality rate for all workers is 4.7 per 100,000. Garbage men die at a rate of 46 per 100,000-three times the rate of police officers or firefighters.

"The shit that haunts me is the dead bodies or parts of bodies. That gets in your head. Found a cut off hand once. I had a partner that pulled a dead infant from a bag. How do you just throw a baby away?"

I lowered my eyes.

The King sighed, "I've found a couple of corpses in dumpsters. One was a girl no older than 17-my daughter's age now. Someone raped and strangled her and just dumped her. When I popped the lid her eyes were open, just looking at me. I felt like she was asking me why someone did this to her. I stared at her for what felt like hours. Had to take a week off after that. I still see her when I close my eyes. That is the stuff of nightmares."

I asked the King if he'd tried other jobs at the Sanitation Department besides refuse collection.

"I done it all. I liked riding around in the street sweepers. That is a sweet job. You feel like you're above it all and you look back and you see how you just made a dirty street nice and clean. And now all those street sweepers are air-conditioned. I coulda used that back when I was doing it. The summers were brutal in the cab but I still enjoyed that job. I blew that by telling my supervisor to go fuck himself. He was a little bean-counting prick. This job ain't rocket science but this fool ran the garage like he was the CEO of some corporation. Now they all want the guys and the few women who pick up tons of shit everyday to act like accountants or office workers."

The King also had a stint on Motorized Litter Patrol, driving a white Sanitation sedan and ticketing home owners and businesses for breaking DSNY's endless rules.

"I liked it at first but then I felt like some kind of garbage cop. I mean, who am I that I should fine people? But they make big money writing those tickets. They have a snitch program where if you turn in someone illegally dumping the fine could be as high as $20,000 and if the person pays the fine, the snitch can get 50% of what the city collects. Believe me there are a lot of snitches.

"But I'm no snitch or cop so I went back to garbage collecting. I went back out picking up what you don't want-and don't want to deal with."

I ask the King which was his least favorite assignment.

"The Housing Projects were rough because they were so huge and there was so much garbage it was back breaking and endless. Asian neighborhoods can be tough because they can stuff more shit in one bag of garbage than any other group in this city. I mean they make it an art form. The other day I saw this Asian guy standing on top of a can and stomping it down. The thing weighed a ton when I picked it up."

He hated working Manhattan because if he was picking up trash from a side street the people in the cars behind the truck got annoyed with the delay and demanded he work faster. If he ignored them or moved slower they let him know what they thought of him.

"One day this big shot-at least he thought he was-in a BMW keeps honking at me while I'm working 74th St. Then he starts cursing and telling me to move it and that I am such a loser because all I amounted to was a garbage man. It was a shame that I tripped and smashed his hood with a can. Put a big dent in his car. That shut him up, and got me transferred out of that district."

He likes working Queens now. The people are easier to deal with. They understand hard physical labor. But what gets to him are the vagaries of New York's weather. The rain and cold are his main enemies.

"Rain makes the garbage so heavy I can barely lift the bags. And as I get older, the cold goes right through me now. We have unlimited sick time so I take full advantage of that. I mean you can't call in sick all the time but if a cold snap comes or I know we are going to get a few days of rain I go to my doctor and call in sick. This job has taken so much out of my body any doctor would let me stay home sick for as long as I wanted. I got herniated disks, arthritic hands and knees that feel like they are 100 years old."

What the King finds most insulting is that Sanitation Department supervisors call him at his house everyday he is out sick.

"They treat us like children. I am 52, and if I tell you I am sick, I am sick. They give you time to go to the doctor, but you have to call in when you are going and when you get back. They want you in your house, and if you ain't there when they call you are in the shit. But, hey, I am a garbage man. I have been in the shit for 25 years."

The King gave me a wave and limped off to his truck to finish up his route.