![]() While journalists, NGOs, and American diplomats considered the Colbert brothers’ export schemes as morally defrauding and environmentally problematic, Charles and Jack Colbert proclaimed they were doing society a favor, a service even. They served industrial customers all over the global South. From an inner-city suburb of New York City, they ran a small-scale, yet extremely lucrative chemical retail business with almost a dozen warehouses in New Jersey, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Instead of disposing of these chemicals as hazardous waste in the United States, the Colberts exported them legally to countries where the material was still a permitted commodity. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had banned for sale in the United States. Their primary focus lay on those chemicals that the U.S. ![]() Footnote 3īy 1986, the Colbert brothers had been active for more than a decade in what they called the “surplus chemicals business.” Footnote 4 They bought all sorts of chemicals and chemical products-ranging from oxidizers, poisons, acids, alkalis, and pesticides to slightly contaminated toothpastes-recycled some of it into usable chemicals, and disposed of the rest. He sentenced the brothers to thirteen years’ prison time and fined their two companies, Signo Trading International and SCI Equipment and Technology, each $250,000. District Court, ordered the Colbert brothers to make restitution of $66,000 to the victims. Footnote 2 Essentially, the Colbert brothers had been defrauding not Chemplex, but the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) financed purchases for overseas firms as a way of bolstering economic ties. ![]() Unfortunately for the Colbert brothers, the contract between them and Chemplex had been arranged under a program in which the U.S. Instead of the pure chemicals, the Colbert brothers had shipped recycled and watered-down material. Footnote 1 In 1983, the Zimbabwean company, Chemplex Marketing Corp., had ordered $55,000 worth of perchlorethylene and trichloroethylene, two chemicals used in dry cleaning and machinery cleaning. At the end of an unremarkable six-day trial, the court found Charles and Jack Colbert guilty of fraudulently shipping hazardous and impure chemicals to a chemical company in Zimbabwe. District Court for the Southern District of New York convicted two brothers in a criminal court case that would stand out in business history. ![]()
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