Justice Served

Martin Harrell, a prosecutor at EPA, fights to ensure America stays green.

The warehouse was, quite literally, a disaster waiting to happen. Located near a hotel and community college in downtown Pottstown, Pa., it served as a storage facility for Pyramid Chemical Sales Co. Pyramid's owner, Joel Udell, had been keeping chemicals in the warehouse since the mid-1980s. By 1998, it was crammed with thousands of corroded metal drums, damaged boxes and poorly labeled containers filled with toxins, poisonous chemicals, flammable substances and other hazardous waste.

For years, Udell ignored orders to address numerous violations at the site. And when he finally took action, he still skirted the law. He sold unusable chemicals at a steep discount to unwitting companies across the United States and shipped 29 containers holding roughly 300 tons of waste to an alleged Nigerian buyer via the Port of Rotterdam, where they sat for three years before the Dutch government had to pay for incineration.

When the Justice Department brought felony charges against Udell, Martin Harrell, a senior counsel for EPA's Region 3, led the prosecution. It was an unusual role for an EPA lawyer-Justice Department prosecutors normally try cases on behalf of their client agencies-but no one was surprised by Harrell's success. Udell pleaded guilty and was sentenced to pay more than $2 million in restitution and fines, serve six months of house confinement and perform 500 hours of community service in Pottstown.

Harrell "has a national reputation as one of the leading experts in environmental criminal prosecution," says Cecil Rodrigues, EPA's acting deputy regional counsel for Region 3. In addition to training other EPA lawyers and investigators on criminal enforcement issues, teaching an environmental enforcement course at Villanova University, and serving on an international team that has trained police, prosecutors and regulators in Eastern Europe and South Africa, Harrell has expanded the role of EPA attorneys in the prosecution process. "It makes a tremendous difference to have the agency counsel at the table," Rodrigues says.

In a case against the city of Roanoke, Va., for example, Harrell introduced an innovative punishment. Rather than simply pay a fine, the city would develop a waste compliance program and then host three-day training seminars for city attorneys, public works directors and other senior officials from 100 Virginia municipalities. "The thing we wanted to get out of that case, more than punishment, was corrective behavior," Harrell says.

One key to Harrell's success has been his willingness to fail. "He doesn't look for the easy cases," Rodrigues says. Though he wins a lot, Harrell doesn't worry about achieving a perfect record. "If you don't lose cases, you're not being aggressive enough," he says.

Even his choice of profession has required him to overcome significant obstacles; prosecuting federal cases and speaking before large groups are sometimes still difficult for Harrell, who says he was once a painfully shy boy from rural eastern North Carolina. Soft-spoken and barely 5-foot-7, he doesn't match the TV image of a prosecutor, but he's been able to rely on his intelligence and willingness to see shades of gray. "You can't remake yourself," Harrell says. "You just have to be open to the risk and the possibility of falling on your face."