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- Over the next six years, culminating in 1997, students passing through Isseks’ high school class would film, edit, and release a feature-length documentary that exposed a generation’s worth of illegal, mob-connected dumping of toxic materials in their part of New York state. Industrial solvents, liquid refrigerants, crushed battery casings, petroleum additives, printing inks and untreated medical waste, including radioactive isotopes: it all flooded the landfills of Middletown, constructed without ground liners, atop freshwater aquifers that fed the region’s drinking wells. As a retired compactor operator explains to Isseks’ students in the film, sometimes there was so much bloody hospital waste on the ground, it looked as if he had run someone over. Another interviewee, a former driver for a mafia-owned waste-hauling firm, described tipping fuming truckloads of paint sludge from a nearby automobile factory straight into the dump. Middletown residents were told it was all just certified municipal waste.