The New YorkerSign inShopNewsCultureBooksBusiness & TechHumorCartoonsMagazineVideoPodcastsArchiveGoings OnSubscribeThe New YorkerSubscribeThe Talk of the TownJuly 10, 2000 IssueLocal Heroes Riding Shotgun on Tap-Water PatrolBy Elizabeth KolbertThe New Yorker, July 10, 2000 P. 23Talk story about Ron Gatto, 42, who serves in New York City's watershed police... Gatto first joined the force eighteen years ago, after stints as a mechanic and as Richard Gere’s estate manager. At the time, little more was expected of him than to break up illegal swimming parties and finish off the occasional wounded deer. Toward pollution, the department had adopted a see-no-evil, smell-no-evil attitude, and when, in 1991, Gatto wanted to ticket a hospital and a prison for releasing raw sewage, he was urged to let it go. Instead, he complained publicly about the city’s inaction and helped to start a unit that specializes in the detection of crimes like illegal dumping. Since then, Gatto has gone as far as anyone in making enforcement of the state’s sanitary code seem like daring work. He is constantly getting awards from environmental groups at the same time that he is constantly running afoul of his superiors. They have, he claims, passed him over for raises and assigned him a decrepit car with more than a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it. “They’re very blatant in what they do to me,” he observed. Gatto has a lot of powerful political allies locally, which may explain why he still has a job at all. He is particularly tight with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and just a few months ago was cited by Kennedy in Time as a “hero for the planet.”...Part of Gatto’s appeal as a “hero for the planet” is that, with his biceps and his Cadillac, he is an odd poster boy for environmental idealism. His fervor seems less an expression of any particular ideology than of a natural-born stubbornness, and he insists that what he is doing is simply applying a little common sense.View ArticleElizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “.”Read more »More:Croton ReservoirEnvironmentNever miss a big New Yorker story again. 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