By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
A Broward whistleblower’s lawsuit kept secret for nearly five years alleges a trio of companies illegally dumped oily waste and sludge containing heavy metals and other pollutants at Port Everglades, then falsely billed the federal government for proper disposal services that were never provided.
The defendant companies – longtime Port Everglades tenant Cliff Berry Inc. (CBI), the Berry family’s Everglades Waste Removal Services LLC and Davie’s World Petroleum Corp., operated by the husband-and-wife team of Eric and Vickie Miranda – are also accused in the complaint of “misrepresenting” to Broward County that the sludge and oil they discharged into the port’s sewer system at “dramatically reduced cost” was “ordinary wastewater.” The lawsuit says the Mirandas previously worked for Cliff Berry Inc.
The defendants in the federal False Claims Act lawsuit are all identified as regulated “used oil transporters.”
“These illegal activities had the effect of defrauding the United States while simultaneously dramatically increasing the Defendants’ profits,” says the 35-page complaint bought by Christopher Rosinski, a former skilled-trades supervisor at the port.
“Defendants’ discharging oily wastewater into the publicly owned wastewater treatment system at Port Everglades violates, Federal, State and County laws, and violates the Broward County Industrial Pretreatment Program which is designed to prevent the introduction of pollutants that will interfere with its operation,” the complaint filed Rosinski’s Boca Raton attorney Chandra Doucette says.
The port’s George T. Lohmeyer treatment plant is not designed to remove “residual oils, heavy metals and other pollutants” which the complaint says the companies dumped into the sewer. Thus, as the plant disposes of effluent by injection approximately 3,500 feet below ground, the “pollutants pass through to pollute groundwater,” the complaint says.
“Due to the fact that Defendants are misrepresenting the nature of the materials being dumped into the system…the County, State and Country have no idea of the damage being done.”
$50 MILLION SOUGHT
The complaint was filed in August 2019 under a provision of the act known as qui tam. It allows individuals with evidence of fraud against the government to sue the culprit on behalf of the government in hopes of claiming a percentage of any collected damages and penalties.
Rosinski’s complaint, brought as a co-plaintiff with the government, seeks to recover $50 million “in appropriate damages, fees, fines, penalties and other charges related to Defendants’ unlawful, unpermitted, illegal and unsafe actions.”
As provided for by law, the U.S., represented by Miami Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Feeley, investigated Rosinski’s complaint but declined to intervene and assume primary responsibility for the litigation. No details of the government’s investigation or explanation for its decision were made public, but the government has reserved the right to intervene for good cause at a later date.
None of the companies responded to Florida Bulldog’s requests for comment.
Cliff Berry Inc. was founded at the port in 1971 by Cliff Berry Sr. Berry, who died at age 93 on Oct. 2, 2023, began oil and chemical clean-up and disposal in the early 1980s, according to Berry Sr.’s Legacy obituary. His son, Clifford Berry II, runs the company today. His daughter, Cynthia Berry, is the managing member of Everglades Waste Removal and is also listed on corporate records as the secretary of Cliff Berry Inc.
Cliff Berry Inc. was convicted in December 2008 of grand theft and fraud after a jury found the company guilty of using payoffs to steal millions of gallons of gas from Miami International Airport’s fuel farm, which it later sold illegally. Cliff Berry II was also charged but acquitted. In 2012, a panel of judges from Miami’s Third District Court of Appeal overturned CBI’s conviction and ordered a new trial because the trial judge had not given proper jury instructions. The company was acquitted at a second trial.
EYEWITNESS EVIDENCE
The pending lawsuit rests upon illegality that Rosinski is said to have personally witnessed and is documented with hundreds of pages of records, including ships’ logs of oily waste and sludge transfers, and photographs.
Rosinski “has personally witnessed more than two dozen instances where Defendants dumped substances which had been offloaded from vessels docked at Port Everglades, none of which were sampled, tested or measured in any way,” the complaint says.
It alleges the three companies had contracts with the U.S. Navy, the Coast Guard and/or the Defense Department and were paid millions of dollars to transfer oily waste and sludge from their ships docked at Port Everglades and other Florida ports. The waste and sludge dumped into the port’s sewer system was supposed to have been delivered to used EPA approved oil processing facilities. Discharging it into the sewer violates both state law and the Florida Administrative Code, the complaint says.
“For defendants CBI and Everglades, they are supposed to use the CBI waste oil processing facility in Miami. Defendant WORLD has a waste oil processing facility at its location in Davie,” the complaint says.
The complaint does not say how many gallons of oily waste and sludge were dumped into the port’s sewers. But according to the complaint, the three defendant companies charged the Navy and Coast Guard $1.25 to $1.50 per gallon to accept, transport and legally dispose of oily waste and sludge from their ships. By illegally dumping it into the port’s sewers “defendants avoid virtually all costs associated with the proper and legal handling of the oily waste.”
Instead, the complaint says, the companies pay the county just six and a half cents per gallon, plus another three.65 cents per gallon – the port’s wharfage tariff for removing sanitary wastewater from ships. They were also obligated to pay to have a county employee present at the dock to observe the wastewater transfers – a requirement that is alleged to not always have occurred.
The complaint cites several examples of the illegal dumping in 2017-2018 but does not indicate when the alleged practice began. Likewise, there is no discussion in the court record as to whether illegal dumping continues today.
The complaint lists 21 Navy and Coast Guard ships that the defendant companies serviced between 2013-2019. By way of example, it cites the engineering logs of the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship which was at Port Everglades for Fleet Week in May 2018, and World Petroleum’s invoices.
“In total, Defendant WORLD documents having received and transported a total of 617,894 gallons from the USS Kearsarge and 16,000 gallons from the USS Detroit which were ‘discharged into port sewer system’ in May 2018, for which WORLD was billed by Broward County for disposal of ‘WASTE WATER/LIQUID’ resulting in a payment of only $63,375.17 to the PORT for dumping 633,894 gallons” the complaint says.
AN HONOR SYSTEM
The county’s monitoring of what goes into the port’s sewers appears to rest on an honor system.
“Unfortunately, the PORT does not have any mechanism to sample, test, or measure the amount being discharged into the PORT sewer system,” the complaint says. It further contends that Everglades Waste Removal transports most of the port’s oily water and oily bilge water.
“Nevertheless, in its 2016 and 2017 Used Oil Annual Reports, Everglades reported handling just 89,000 gallons of oily water in 2016 and 5,720 gallons of oily water in 2017,” the complaint says.
This is not Chris Rosinski’s first time as a whistleblower. About the time his federal lawsuit was filed, Rosinski also sued Broward County, alleging corruption there including widespread purchasing card abuse by port employees and the county’s failure to protect him from retaliation after he reported it.
Florida Bulldog reported in December 2019 on the findings in a 337-page report by the county auditor’s office that backed Rosinski’s allegations, concluding that “gross mismanagement” had led to mass employee P-Card theft and millions of dollars in unverified purchases.
The five-year audit, for 2014-2018, also verified Rosinski’s complaint regarding the illegal dumping of oily ship wastewater at Port Everglades. The report stated that approximately 2.5 million gallons of untreated ship wastewater had been illegally dumped into the port’s sewer system, which hooks to an aging treatment plant that auditors said is not designed to handle toxic substances or oily bilge wastewater.
To visualize, one million gallons would fill a swimming pool that’s nearly as long as a football field, 50 feet wide and 10 feet deep.
None of that wastewater, including some trucked north from the Port of Miami by county-approved hauler franchisees, was tested. Port management had no idea whether it was hazardous or contained excessive levels of contamination that spilled into Florida’s underground environment, the report said.
“Because of the lack of processes and controls, kickbacks or other bribery schemes could have occurred in collusion with Port staff without detection,” the report said.
The county settled Rosinski’s civil case in 2023 for a nominal payment of about $90,000.
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