Colorado Hazwaste Dumping Brings Record Sentence

DENVER, Colorado, July 12, 2002 (ENS) - A California business man has been handed the longest jail sentence in Colorado history for an environmental crime. Hormoz Pourat was sentenced to spend 17 years in jail and pay a $100,000 fine for violating Colorado's Organized Crime Control Act by illegally disposing of hazardous wastes from a dry cleaning business.

Pourat is one of the principal managers and owners of a hazardous waste management company known as AAD, which operated in Colorado and California. AAD accepted waste perchloroethylene dry cleaning solvent from dry cleaners in nine states throughout the western United States, promising to incinerate the wastes at licensed hazardous waste disposal sites.

Instead, the wastes ended up buried illegally in landfills or stored in rented facilities.

Pourat's sentence was based on a grand jury indictment in the state's first ever environmental case charging criminal racketeering.

Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar (Photo courtesy Office of the Attorney General)

Hormoz Pourat, his brother Hormayoun (Harry) Pourat, and two corporations operated by them called AAD Disposal and AAD Distributors and Dry Cleaning Service were indicted in March 2001. AAD operated a hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facility in Vernon, California, and a transfer facility in Lakewood, Colorado, which also received waste from California and repackaged it for shipment to hazardous waste landfills in Idaho and Nevada.

Between February 1996 and March 2001, the Pourats and their businesses contracted with the dry cleaners to collect hazardous waste generated by the cleaners for treatment, storage and/or disposal, promising to conform to all state and federal laws and regulations. The waste picked up from the cleaners by AAD included both liquid perchloroethlyne wastes (PERC) - a chlorinated solvent also known as tetrachoroethylene -and filters or other solid material contaminated with PERC.

PERC is a central nervous system depressant and is known to cause liver and kidney damage. PERC has also been shown to be carcinogenic in animal studies and may cause mutations in unborn children.

PERC is listed as a hazardous waste because of its toxic properties as well as its potential to migrate into groundwater in harmful quantities when improperly disposed.

The state of Colorado charged the Pourats and their fellow defendants with a systematic criminal endeavor, charging hundreds of dry cleaners with fees for the collection and disposal of their hazardous waste.

Perchloroethylene is so toxic that many former dry cleaning shops, like this one in Jackson County, Michigan, become hazardous waste sites requiring special cleanup. (Photo courtesy U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

On many occasions, however, the California facility would simply falsify manifests and ship the drums of untreated waste back to Colorado, where the hazardous waste would be repackaged into cubic yard boxes. The boxes were then mislabeled and shipped for illegal disposal at hazardous waste landfills in Idaho and Nevada.

AAD's waste handling activities resulted in the illegal storage of hundreds of drums of wastes, many containing hazardous PERC waste, in Lakewood, Colorado. This waste's disposal ultimately fell to the landowner of the rented AAD facility.

Pourat also pleaded guilty to having made false descriptions of shipments of untreated wastes in order to have the waste illegally buried in Idaho and Nevada.

Hormoz Pourat pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering, a class 2 felony. Besides the criminal fine and jail sentence, Pourat was also ordered to pay for any necessary cleanup and for the investigative costs of Colorado's Jefferson County District Court.

Four AAD employees were also charged with various offenses. Two AAD Colorado managers, Robert Hearsch and Aaron Rios, pled guilty to violations of the Colorado Hazardous Waste Act and were sentenced to probation, community service, and assessed fines and costs.

Some dry cleaners, like Cleaning Concepts, Inc.'s Cleaner by Nature stores, have eliminated the use of toxic perchloroethylene in their cleaning processes. (Photo courtesy Cleaning Concepts Inc.)

The other principal owner of the companies, Harry Pourat, is believed to have fled the country to avoid prosecution, perhaps to his native country of Iran.