GARBAGE IN, GOLD OUT

Seventh Entry In The Low Road Dialogues Series By Paul Coffee

Call him Izzy.

That’s not his name, or anything like his name. He’s the most cautious, the most secretive kind of man, and well he ought to be. He is a very valuable man, and it’s the kind of value that’s easily taken once it’s located.

Izzy has been 30 years in the business of turning garbage into gold. He does this with chemistry that is explosive, hot, corrosive and toxic. He doesn’t know a thing about chemistry and has never been curious enough to learn about the materials and reactions that have made him rich. He knows recipes, which he learned as an apprentice from a man who’d learned them as an apprentice from a man, and so on into antiquity,

When Izzy reckoned he’d apprenticed enough, he flew from his native land to one of the major American coastal cities to set up shop. There wasn’t enough room for one more of his kind back home. He rented low-end space in a light industrial district, and built the shelves, cabinets, racks, and apparatus he’d require to chemically transform, as noted earlier, garbage into gold.

It’s called “garbage” in the trade. What it is, is the floor sweepings from jewelry manufacture. The craftsmen's castings, cuts, and grinds spew a fine dust of gold that combines with shed epidermal cells, sweat, snot, tobacco ash, rat turds, and all the other debris of an urban workshop, and settles to the floor.

There’s gold in it.

The manufacturers pay sweepers to carefully collect it from the floor, and from the workers’ shoe soles on their way out at quitting time. Attentive sweepers, who can be relied upon not to steal more garbage than is reasonable and customary. The garbage is bagged, and Izzy is called to pick it up.

Back in his windowless little lab, Izzy puts the garbage through a process which, once started, cannot be stopped until it’s completed. It involves a furnace, concentrated acids, reagents, and catalysts, and produces a toxic waste sludge that Izzy illegally – very illegally – drains into the municipal sewer system. He’s left with curls of pure gold, each about the size and shape of a Fritos corn chip.

Izzy sets aside some of this gold for himself and returns the rest to the manufacturer, his client. He rides city buses with $100,000 in gold in his pockets. The manufacturers like Izzy because he consistently returns more gold per kilo of garbage than do his competitors. He, like the sweepers, can be depended upon to take no more than is reasonable and customary.

No contracts are written, no receipts passed, no records kept. Izzy sells the gold he harvests in shadow market, for greenbacks, according to his cash requirements and his forecast of gold price trends. He puts a modest amount of the cash into a business checking account, from which he pays the rent, utilities, office supplies bills, and a comically low salary to himself. His accountant, a pal from the old country, knows how to shape all this into tax returns that have never drawn an audit.

Izzy’s done well turning garbage into gold. He’s acquired two upper-middle-class single family homes in one of America’s most expensive metro housing markets, a spacious apartment in the city’s prestigious global commercial center, and put two children through expensive private colleges.

His hands are streaked with black stains that nothing can remove. His back was ruined 10 years in by the daily manhandling of heavy vats of toxic slurry in the confined space of his lab. He fought off one determined intruder, somebody who plainly knew there was a lot of wealth behind the heavy door in that dingy industrial building.

Some of his manufacturer clients went down in an FBI campaign against the pervasive money laundering and tax evasion the trade thrives on. Izzy was untouched, which ( he knows well) leads some to suppose he’s an informer.

Maybe he is.