The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

dioxin: manipulation and corruption 53gested that I get in touch with William Sanjour, one of the most highly visibleEPA managers before he was shunted aside until his retirement in 2001.In September 2007, as I was writing this, he was on the cover of Fraud Magazineas the recipient of the Sentinel Award from the Association of CertifiedFraud Examiners for his work at the EPA. 16“Cate’s afraid,” he told me when I reached him by phone in the spring of2006. “When you know what she’s been through, you can understand that.”Like Jenkins, Sanjour is a whistle-blower—someone employed in governmentor private enterprise who realizes that his or her employer is endangeringthe public interest by violating a law or regulation, an offensesometimes coupled with fraud or corruption. Provoking the fury of theirsuperiors, whistle-blowers are harassed, marginalized, defamed, and oftenfired. For them, the fall is all the harsher because they were really convincedthat their efforts to reveal the truth had meaning. Pragmatists call them idealists;for companies such as Monsanto, they interfere with the smooth runningof the production process. From this perspective, the story of WilliamSanjour is exemplary.After studying physics at Columbia, he joined the EPA at its founding in1970. He was soon appointed to head the Hazardous Waste ManagementDivision, in charge of supervising the treatment and storage of toxic industrialwaste. His work led Congress to enact the Resource Conservation andRecovery Act (RCRA) in 1976, which he worked to enforce, even if it meantprovoking the fury of the polluters and his own superiors. “Unfortunately,”he says now, “the EPA is more concerned with protecting the interests of thecompanies it is supposed to regulate than with defending the public interest.”Sanjour’s superiors were unhappy with his testimony to Congress andhis public speeches, in which he openly denounced the collusion of theagency with major industrial companies.A lover of sailing, Sanjour arranged to meet me on July 14, 2006, at a smallmarina not far from the nation’s capital. “Let me tell you how the EPAdreamed up a law especially for me,” he said with mock pleasure. Indeed, tosilence its black sheep, with the cooperation of the Office of GovernmentEthics the agency issued a regulation barring its employees from having theirtravel expenses paid when they were invited to speak for no fee and outsidework time by activist or citizen organizations. “My expertise was frequentlycalled on all over the country,” he said. “From one day to the next, I had to declineall invitations, because it would have cost me too much.” He took the