The contaminated parcel, the 40 acre site your brother-in-law's evidence documented. It has been through three separate reasonzoning attempts in the past 8 years. Each one failed at the planning commission level. Each failure kept the property from triggering a mandatory environmental assessment. I sat back in my chair.
He was running interference, I said, from the inside. That is the current investigative theory. Yes. And Daniel figured that out. Daniel had the external evidence from his brother-in-law and the internal financial records from the shaft in the garage.
Combined, they document not just the illegal disposal, but the mechanism by which it was protected, the false rejections at the planning commission, the payments that corresponded with each rejection. She paused. What Daniel assembled is frankly one of the most complete self-contained environmental crime packages I've seen in 22 years in this office. I thought about that for a moment about a firefighter sitting in a locked workshop cross-referencing public records and property deeds and financial documents. Building something that would take a professional 22 years to say was one of the most complete packages they'd seen.
He was trained in incident documentation. I said firefighters document everything. Chain of events, cause and origin, evidence preservation. He used the same methodology. Torres looked at me.
That's exactly what our document examiner said when she went through the notebook. The formal statement took until 10:15. When it was finished and the recorder was off, Frell poured herself coffee from a machine in the corner and looked at me over the rim of the cup. The phone call you received last night, the people capable of making that call of knowing your name, your number, your involvement within hours of the federal investigation. Beginning.
That tells us something about the reach of this operation. She sipped the coffee. I want to be transparent with you, Mr. Sir, because you've been cooperative and because you're in this now, whether you chose to be or not. We made two arrests this morning, early before 6:00 a.
M., I stared at her. Already, the evidence from the storage unit photographs, combined with the materials recovered from the shaft in Mrs. Bennett's garage, was sufficient for the warrants we needed. We've been building toward this for longer than you know. She sat down her cup.
The man in the photograph, the planning commission member, he was one of the two. Who was the second? The person who had been storing the insurance records in the shaft. The individual inside the operation who'd been keeping financial documentation as leverage. She paused.
He came to us voluntarily at 4:30 this morning. His attorney made contact late last night. He'd been watching the activity at Alderton Road yesterday and he understood what it meant. He flipped. He made a decision about which side of this he wanted to be on before we made the decision for him.
She looked at me. His records, the ones in the waterproof case in the shaft, they document 6 years of financial transactions, wire transfers, cash payments, invoices for waste disposal contracted through a shell company. 47 Documented illegal disposal events at the Alderton site and two other sites in the county. She said the number flatly, like it had long since moved past the point of being shocking and settled into being simply factual. 47.