A few months ago, in a clanging, hissing plant on the outskirts of Newark, a tanker truck backed up to a deep reservoir and delivered thousands of dollars’ worth of raw material—what people in the rendering industry sometimes refer to as “liquid gold.” The plant’s owner is a company called Dar Pro, and the C.E.O., Randall Stuewe, looked on while a hose from the truck gushed a brown fluid, filled with fine sediment and the occasional mysterious solid. Slowly, the pit became a pool, whose surface frothed and eddied and gave off a potent odor of old French fries, onion rings, and batter-fried shrimp. “Used cooking oil,” Stuewe told me. “We process two billion pounds a year.”
Stuewe, a former farm kid from Kansas with a wide girth and a booming voice, explained that for decades his company’s business model was simple: collect discarded animal parts from the food industry, render out the fat and proteins, and sell them to companies that make cosmetics, soap, fertilizer, and pet food. Fifty-nine billion pounds of animal parts are processed each year in the United States; Dar Pro, with a hundred and twenty plants in forty-two states, is the country’s largest processor. In 2010, the company, then known as Darling Rendering, bought its main competitor, Griffin Industries, and began operating under the name Darling International. Stuewe instituted the snappier “Dar Pro” as part of his efforts to improve rendering’s public image. “As an industry, I’d have to give us a C-minus, maybe a D,” he says. “We never told anybody what we were doing. And we did that because we were making money. Money is perceived as evil sometimes in this country—which is a whole other discussion.”
Dar Pro is now valued at two billion dollars, and its improved fortunes have come largely from used cooking oil, collected in steel bins behind restaurants all over the country. Not long ago, the oil was used mostly by livestock farmers, who spray it onto animal feed to fatten up hogs, chickens, and cows. Lately, it has found a new life, by being cleaned, filtered, and chemically modified into biofuel. The process isn’t tidy. The wastewater has to be cooked off, and the scraps of hash browns and wontons and buffalo wings filtered out—to say nothing of the old shoes, dirty diapers, and used hypodermic needles that can end up in a bin in a back alley. But used cooking oil, correctly processed, burns eighty per cent cleaner than fossil fuels, has a smaller carbon footprint than corn ethanol, and doesn’t compete with the food supply. Nathanael Greene, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me that it provides “probably the best of the biofuels out there.”
There isn’t enough grease to solve the energy crisis, but it does put a dent in the problem—and grease that’s converted isn’t dumped in landfills. To encourage biofuel production, governments have enacted incentives. According to a federal law passed in 2007, thirty-six billion gallons of biofuel must be blended into transportation fuel by 2022. There is also a dollar-a-gallon subsidy for refineries that mix renewable fuel into their products. This year, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, in partnership with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, started a daily transatlantic flight powered by fuel that is twenty-five per cent converted fryer oil, collected at Cajun restaurants in Louisiana.
The increased demand has made the price of used cooking oil skyrocket. A decade ago, used grease traded on the Chicago commodities exchange for less than eight cents a pound. Now it can go for more than four times that price, providing criminals with a potent incentive to get at spent oil before renderers do. Thieves use bolt cutters to remove locks on container lids, or cut through steel with blowtorches; they use vacuum hoses to suck grease into tanker trucks. A thief driving down a strip-mall alleyway can collect four thousand dollars’ worth in half an hour. “It’s right up there next to Rolexes,” Stuewe told me. Dar Pro, he says, loses millions of dollars to theft each year.
Like other big renderers, Dar Pro has turned to security firms to protect its grease. In 2011, Stuewe hired Total Compliance Associates, a Manhattan-based firm headed by Stuart GraBois, a former U.S. assistant district attorney, and Mike Ferrandino, a former F.B.I. supervisor. When I visited the firm’s offices, in a Times Square high-rise, GraBois, an elegantly dressed, white-haired man, admitted that he was nonplussed when he got the call from Dar Pro. “I thought, Grease?” he said, laughing. “I didn’t want to say, ‘Who cares?’—but grease? Then you find out what a huge business it is, and how much they’re losing.”
In the past two years, GraBois and Ferrandino have pursued more than a hundred grease cases, using classic crime-busting techniques: surveillance and stakeouts, undercover operations, stings, hidden cameras. They still struggle to persuade law-enforcement officials to take grease theft seriously, but GraBois insisted that they’re making headway. “You speak to a prosecutor a year ago,” he said, “and it’s ‘What are you calling me about?’ Now I think it’s reached a point where they’re believing that it’s real.”
Not everyone is convinced that theft is the problem. Jon Jaworski is an attorney in Houston with a practice in family law and a sideline defending grease thieves. His first case, he said, was in 1986: “I had a couple of guys get busted in Galveston County at a Popeye’s Fried Chicken.” Back then, grease went for only a few pennies on the Chicago exchange, but, if you collected enough of it and knew where to sell it, you could make some money. Jaworski won the case, and then sued the renderer for malicious prosecution, winning a forty-two-thousand-dollar settlement. Accused thieves flooded his office. “I became the hero of all the little grease guys,” he says. His clients stank of rancid oil, and left greasy stains on his furniture, but Jaworski—a goateed man with slicked-back hair who collects Three Stooges memorabilia and exotic firearms—fell in love with the work. “They’re fun cases,” he says. “Lots of interesting characters.”
Since the advent of biodiesel, his typical defendant is as likely to be a guy with a science degree who runs a biofuel startup—“environmentalists,” Jaworski says. But the central issue in grease litigation remains the same, he told me: the national renderers like Dar Pro are not actually concerned with trying to stop grease theft, which he insists has a far smaller effect on their bottom line than they claim. “Half the time, they aren’t even paying restaurants for the grease,” he told me. Instead, Jaworski says, they are simply trying to crush independents and gain a monopoly.
His favorite case to illustrate that charge involves a fifty-four-year-old Houston native named Everett Henley. In the eighties and nineties, Henley ran a small rendering plant, buying spent cooking oil from the city’s haulers, cleaning it up, and selling it to feed companies. According to Griffin Industries, he was also the kingpin in a used-grease crime ring—and has still not entirely reformed. “Everett knows grease,” Jaworski says. “And they will do anything to get him out of business.”
Henley is a ruggedly built man, with a salt-and-pepper brush cut, a toothy smile, and a guileless good-ol’-boy manner. Many who work in grease grew up in the business; Henley came to it late. After high school, he did a couple of semesters of college, and worked for a time at his father’s engineering firm, but he hated being confined to a desk. He ran a car-repossession business, worked in a jewelry store. Then one day he put his name in for the fire department, and the city passed along his application to the police force. “I said, ‘What the heck. Why not?’ ” Henley told me. That’s how he became a cop. “I worked some pretty bad parts of town,” he says. “Then I went to Special Operations, where I did Presidential details, parades.” He liked the job, but it didn’t pay much, so he took on some hours as a security guard at the Galleria mall. There, he met a clothing-store manager named JoAnn Villegas, a brunette divorcée with two small kids. They started dating. JoAnn wanted to marry him right away, but when she saw his police paycheck—three hundred and sixty dollars a week—she was aghast. She told him that she had an idea for how to supplement his income.
JoAnn was second-generation grease. Her father, José, born and raised in Corpus Christi, was twenty in 1958, washing dishes in a hospital cafeteria in Pittsburgh, when a man came in and offered twenty dollars for the grease drum in the corner. “My dad said, ‘What are you doing with that?’ ” JoAnn told me. “The man said he sells the grease to companies who process animal feed, and my dad said, ‘I’m going to move back to Texas, and I’m going to make myself a millionaire doing this!’ ” José’s wife, pregnant with JoAnn at the time, was game.
In those days, restaurants simply dumped their spent oil into unmarked barrels out back and were happy to have grease rustlers take it. The only obligation was that you had to replace each barrel you took with a clean one for the restaurant. “Take a barrel, leave a barrel,” JoAnn says. “That was the rule.” José sold the grease he collected to Ernie Allison, a successful independent operator, and eventually they became partners. “My whole family—aunts and uncles, everybody—got in the grease business,” JoAnn told me.
José raised six kids and sent them to college, all on grease. As a young girl, JoAnn rode with him on collecting runs and dreamed of having her own business, but instead she went to school, got married, had kids. At the age of thirty-one, she found herself divorced and managing the clothing store. When she first saw Henley, she thought, “This is the guy I’m going to marry, and we’re going to be in the grease business!”
Henley took a little convincing. “I’d never heard of selling used cooking oil,” he says. But he was willing to try. On an evening off from the police force, he and JoAnn went out in his pickup with some empty drums, and traded them for the grease-filled barrels that she pointed out. He collected thirty of them and brought them to an independent rendering plant called the Grease Man. The owner wrote him a check for seven hundred and eighty dollars—more than Henley made in two weeks as a cop.
On his days off, he started collecting grease. Friends told him the stuff smelled “dirty and nasty,” but Henley just laughed. “To me,” he says, “it smelled like money.” Business became more lucrative as he learned the fine points of the trade. Renderers who buy raw used grease put a sample in a centrifuge, spin off the sediments, and pay according to the proportion of pure grease. The accepted limit for sediment is perhaps twenty per cent. The best grease, two per cent or less, usually comes from high-volume places that change out their grease frequently, preferably big chicken chains—Popeye’s, Church’s—because poultry doesn’t break up much and contaminate the oil. Barbecue places are the worst: the grease is filled with water, because cooks throw frozen meat into the fryers.
Henley quickly decided that simply hauling grease was no way to make real money; he wanted to get into rendering, too. JoAnn told him to call her dad’s old partner, Ernie Allison, who had retired and moved to Kansas. Allison flew to Houston the next day. Henley recalls, “He says, ‘You got a dollar? Give it to me.’ I did. He said, ‘O.K., you hired me as a consultant.’ He called his wife and said, ‘Pack everything up, we’re moving back to Texas.’ He said he was born in the grease, and he wanted to die in the grease.”
Allison showed Henley how to build a rendering plant for a fraction of the going rate, using discarded gas-station tanks with steam-heated pipes inside, and demonstrated how to get every penny from every load. Raw grease contains “heavies” (big chunks of food and garbage) and “fines” (silt-like sediment made up of food particles). Allison shovelled the heavies and the fines into a perforated steel box, and applied heat and pressure to sweat out the oil. One day, he laid burlap sacks over the drain in the floor to catch drips. Henley thought he was crazy. After a week, Allison poured off two hundred dollars’ worth of grease.
Soon, Henley was buying close to a million pounds of grease a month, cleaning it up, and selling it to an exporter. He worked three days a week for the police force; the other four days and nights, he bought used grease and ran his own collection routes. “Everything seemed to be going real well,” he told me. Then Griffin Industries came to Houston.
Like many other grease companies, Griffin began as a family outfit, but by the nineteen-eighties it was a big business, operating in twenty states. Griffin imposed the system that still prevails: making contracts with restaurants, and placing locked, labelled steel containers out back. At establishments where Griffin had not yet placed a container, it claimed ownership of the barrels that were already there. The days of “Take a barrel, leave a barrel” were over.
For the city’s independent grease haulers, Griffin’s arrival came as a shock; people who had serviced accounts for decades had their livelihoods threatened overnight. Many of them kept on taking barrels from locations that had not converted to locked containers. When they did encounter locks, some didn’t scruple about using bolt cutters to remove them, or employing a “stinger,” a PVC siphon threaded through the screens on top of the bins. For many of them, each act of theft felt like taking back something that had been stolen from them.
Griffin Industries had a different view. Robert Griffin, one of the family’s five sons, controlled the company’s western territories; he hired Larry Findley, a former San Antonio police officer, and put him in charge of two moonlighting detectives from the Houston Police Department. The officers, sergeants Steve Felchak and Danny Spurlock, staked out the hardest hit of Griffin’s containers, and began to make some busts.
One night in February, 1990, a Griffin driver in the Houston suburbs was out collecting grease and noticed an abandoned Ford pickup. There were grease barrels in a trailer attached to the truck. Felchak ran the plate number, and found that the truck was registered to a police officer: Everett Henley. Internal Affairs put a tail on him, and a few nights later agents videotaped a man getting out of the pickup behind a restaurant and taking a barrel of Griffin’s oil. Police arrested Henley for grease theft. “I said to JoAnn, ‘What do we do now?’ ” Henley recalls. “She said, ‘Call Jon Jaworski.’ ”
For accused grease thieves throughout Texas, Jaworski had become the first resort when they got into trouble. Jaworski, who once dreamed of being a labor lawyer, saw the cases as a way to fight for the little guy. He also recognized in grease litigation the kind of inside-the-business complexities that allow an agile defender to introduce doubt into jurors’ minds.
One of his preferred tactics is to question who actually owns the grease. The containers that renderers put behind restaurants are locked and labelled, and have a clear warning that anyone removing grease is breaking the law. But since renderers pay at the end of the month, Jaworski argues, for the thirty days that the grease sits in the container it still belongs to the restaurant. If the restaurant isn’t bothering to prosecute (and restaurants usually have other things to occupy them), what’s the problem?
Then there’s the value of the stolen grease. Is it what restaurants charge the renderer? Some ask for more, some less; some take nothing. The commodity price? The number on the Chicago exchange fluctuates, and in any case it’s for rendered grease, not for the raw stuff. And how do you even determine how much grease was taken? If you arrest a hauler as he pulls away from a container, he might have hit five other companies’ containers that night, or picked up at his own legitimate restaurant accounts. Renderers train security people to read the “grease line,” the oily horizontal left inside a drained tank. But what about the density of the oil, which affects the weight? For juries, it becomes very difficult to establish value—and thus what kind of crime was committed, or even if one was committed at all.
In Henley’s trial, Jaworski tried his favorite arguments. But, with videotape evidence and the compelling narrative of a “dirty cop,” it was no use. Henley was convicted of a Class B misdemeanor, for theft of property valued at between twenty and two hundred dollars, and was given a year’s probation and three hundred hours of community service. He was suspended from the police force, and quit soon afterward. “So that’s how Griffin Industries can say I’m a grease thief,” Henley says.
There was only one problem. The man in the video was not Henley. It was JoAnn’s brother, Omar, who had been staying at the Henleys’ house while his place was being fixed up. One night, he borrowed Henley’s pickup to go on a grease run and had hewed to the take-a-barrel, leave-a-barrel ethos. (When I called Omar and asked if it was him in the video, he chuckled and said, “Well . . . yeah.”) I asked Henley why he didn’t tell the police who the real perpetrator was. “I wasn’t going to accuse him,” he said, “and I wasn’t going to tell on him.”
“That’s the way Everett is,” JoAnn said, with considerable exasperation.
“I just said, ‘Whatever,’ ” Henley told me. “ ‘We’ll take a chance with going to court.’ ”
The impediment to convicting renderers for buying stolen cooking oil—then as now—is that they can always claim that they did not know the product was stolen. In a six-page memo to Bob Griffin, Findley suggested a solution. To secure testimony that local renderers knew they were buying stolen grease, he proposed stepping up arrests of small-time thieves. In Texas, misdemeanor-theft charges, after a third infraction, become felonies, and, he explained, “It is reasonable to expect that a percentage of the thieves caught will give statements in exchange for leniency.”
Henley knew he was a target, given the unfamiliar cars parked, day and night, across the street from his rendering plant, the frequent visits from Griffin’s security people, and the fact that Felchak stopped him and confiscated a set of keys from his pocket, claiming that they fit Griffin’s locks. Throughout, Henley maintained his innocence. “I was raised that right is right and wrong is wrong,” he says. “And I wasn’t doing anything wrong.” He knew that some haulers might skim from a Griffin container when no one was looking. But, he insists, short of riding on every truck with every hauler on every route, there was no way he could be certain.
On Jaworski’s advice, he got haulers to sign a legal disclaimer with each load, saying that their grease was not stolen, as a hedge against a potential prosecution. Then, in the spring of 1991, Findley found a way around this obstacle. In Austin, a mysterious man had presented himself to a Griffin driver and said that he knew everything there was to know about grease theft in Houston. Findley took note of the driver’s description of the man—“big, bearded, and toothless,” with a limp, and “possibly panhandling”—and drove to Austin, where he quickly located the man among the city’s street people. The man introduced himself as David Rice and said, “I’ve been expecting you.” As it turned out, he had been questioned months before by Felchak and Spurlock, and had admitted to stealing Griffin’s grease. Now, he said, he wanted to “go straight.” Findley offered a deal: if Rice could gather evidence that Henley knowingly bought stolen grease, Findley would help him out. Rice agreed, and said that he knew enough about Henley “to send him to the penitentiary.”
Findley later recorded a statement from Rice. In the transcript, Findley establishes that Rice had stolen grease from more than a hundred Griffin containers, and then asks Rice where he sold the contraband. “Henley’s Grease Service,” Rice says. According to Rice, Henley knew the grease was stolen. “How did he know?” Findley asked.
“ ’Cause he told us to go out there and steal it.”
In a gleeful note to Griffin, Findley wrote that Rice “is, in fact, the ‘inside man’ we have needed to do irreparable damage to these people.” He drove Rice to Houston, put him up in a Western Inn motel near Henley’s plant, and showed him how to use a tape recorder hooked up to the room phone. Rice began calling up his former colleagues in the grease trade. In one call, Kenny McGlothlin, a twenty-four-year-old hauler who’d been collecting with his dad since he was nine, admitted that he’d just taken a full load from Popeye’s—top quality, four per cent.
“I bet old Griffin’s going to be mad about that,” Rice said.
“Oh, they know I’m the Cat Daddy,” McGlothlin said. “They let Cat Daddy get away. I’m the man, the main man.”
Rice called a half-dozen haulers, including his cousin Ronny Lemond. “You ain’t hitting Griffin no more, are you?” Rice asked. “Hell,” Lemond said, “I’m making a living off of Griffin.”
With each call, Rice took care to establish that his interlocutors sold to Henley’s Grease Service. He also strapped a tape recorder to his leg and made secret recordings inside Henley’s plant, following Findley’s instructions on how to act. “He told me, ‘Be like any other day,’ ” Rice later said in a deposition. “ ‘Don’t agitate nothing. Let them do the speaking.’ ” Rice visited repeatedly, hanging around for hours, but failed to capture any evidence of theft. Henley and JoAnn recall Rice showing up with a tanker of grease that he ostentatiously announced was stolen—a tactic known as a “reverse sting.” (Findley denied taking part in this.) JoAnn ran him off the property.
With other haulers, Rice established where and when they planned to strike, and tipped off Felchak and Spurlock. In a month, fifteen people were arrested. “Like shooting fish in a barrel,” Findley noted. One November morning, around 4 A.M., they swooped in on Kenny McGlothlin while he was inspecting a Griffin bin behind a Popeye’s. “We kind of got you by your nuts this morning, don’t we?” Felchak observed. He said that they might take McGlothlin downtown and book him, or they might not. “Depends on what you tell us.”
McGlothlin wavered at first, but, under duress, he agreed to testify that Henley knew he was buying stolen loads. Several other independent haulers, facing possible jail time, also coöperated, and the charges against them were dropped.
In an attempt to secure a grand-jury indictment, Findley met with an assistant D.A., Larry Standley—a meeting that he later called a “complete disaster.” The D.A., whom Findley described as “rude, uninterested, and belligerent,” blamed Griffin’s problem on the company’s own lax security, and dismissed the testimony of the thieves. “Who’s going to believe them?” he said. An attorney suggested to Findley and Bob Griffin that a civil suit, under RICO statutes, might be easier. “Hearsay is usually accepted,” Findley wrote, “and you must only show ‘a preponderance of the evidence,’ not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ ” In December, 1991, Griffin Industries filed suit against Henley and a dozen independent haulers, accusing them of taking part in an organized grease-theft ring.
But during the early legal proceedings Griffin’s strongest witness, David Rice, was nowhere to be found. Findley finally tracked him down in West Virginia, where he was serving a nine-month jail sentence for negligent homicide; he had killed a man in a car accident and then fled. Findley also learned that Rice had been living under an assumed identity; his real name was David Himes. Jaworski saw an advantage. In the depositions, he questioned Griffin’s tactics: coöperating with a felon, wringing testimony from haulers, and dispensing money to key witnesses. For weeks, Griffin had paid for Himes’s motel room and living expenses, and promised him a hundred dollars for every arrest that resulted from his phone work. Himes testified that he was given twelve hundred dollars to help pay for a leg operation, and that, during his time in jail, Findley visited him and put money in his account at the canteen. Upon his release, Himes was given regular work at Griffin.
“Do you know why they did any of those things for you?” Jaworski asked Himes in a deposition. “Was it because they wanted you to testify against Everett Henley?”
“Objection!” Griffin’s lawyer said. “Calls for speculation.”
Jaworski insists that he could have won the case, given the chance. But defending a RICO charge against a wealthy corporation would have cost Henley and his co-defendants ninety thousand dollars, Jaworski estimates. “I told him, ‘You can fight it and spend your life savings on me—which I would appreciate.’ ” Instead, Henley chose not to contest the lawsuit. Griffin was awarded a default judgment of almost $1.9 million for lost grease, damaged equipment, and legal fees. Jaworski describes the suit as an act of corporate aggression. Findley argues that Griffin was merely protecting itself. “Anyone who intimates that Griffin Industries set out to put independents out of business is a bald-faced liar,” he said.
Henley declared bankruptcy, which temporarily allowed him to avoid payment. Though he continued running his grease service, the judgment gave Griffin the rights to any profits—and Henley, who was determined not to give up a penny, was forced to put whatever he made back into the business. After two years, JoAnn says, “we couldn’t do it anymore.” In 1996, they closed the plant and moved to the countryside north of the city. There they ran a small farm, launched a wrecker business, and raised the kids.
When Stuewe took over Dar Pro as C.E.O., in 2003, the company was doing everything it could to extract added profit from its rendered fat and bonemeal. “We tried making particleboard, landscaping timbers—we tried everything, and nothing really works,” he told me. Although biofuel from used cooking oil was clearly the frontier, it was a seemingly limited one. “It doesn’t work real well as road fuel,” Stuewe said. The glycerine in biodiesel leaves glasslike deposits in engines, and it freezes. Dar Pro enlisted the technology arm of Honeywell to fix the problem, using a method called hydrocracking—essentially knocking a carbon atom off of each molecule of the oil—to produce a fuel that is identical to petroleum yet burns far cleaner. But the process is expensive and complex, requiring high temperatures and intense pressure. So Stuewe approached Valero Energy Corporation, an oil refiner based in San Antonio, to manufacture the fuel. In June, the two companies opened the Diamond Green Diesel plant, in Norco, Louisiana, which will produce a hundred and thirty-seven million gallons of renewable diesel a year. To operate at capacity, Stuewe said, it will need to capture “up to fifty per cent of all the used cooking oil in the country.”
The biofuel boom has injected into the trade a degree of money and professionalism that was unthinkable in what Jaworski calls “the Wild West days.” Jaworski has lately been getting calls from as far away as Australia from people with chemistry degrees trying to figure out how to get into the biofuel business. One of the new entrepreneurs was Jason Burroughs, a thirty-nine-year-old former skate punk who had helped build a multimillion-dollar data-storage company. He told me that he had had an epiphany on the day after the September 11th attacks—the same day he picked up his Dodge Viper. “It was awkward,” he says, “because pretty quickly we learned why these terrorist attacks were happening—the connection with oil and all that. Here I am driving around this nine-mile-per-gallon car.” Burroughs sold his Viper and bought a Prius, and in 2005 launched a cooking-oil-collection venture, DieselGreen Fuels. If the business fell through, Burroughs said, he could just get a pickup truck and go out collecting. “It’s such easy money,” he told me.
The changes in the business have only sharpened Dar Pro’s desire to stop theft. During my visit to Total Compliance Associates, the security company, in May, GraBois outlined the firm’s plan. “What we’re trying to do is cut off the head of the ultimate recipient,” he said, referring to the smaller renderers and biofuel companies who buy stolen grease. “Once we put these people out of business and there’s no place to sell it, the gypsies”—his term for street-level thieves—“will go on to a different crime.” It was the same strategy that Griffin employed twenty years ago against Henley. Indeed, GraBois described to me a classic reverse sting—or started to. “We’ve set up undercover operations, where we try to get people to deliver the stuff— Mike,” he said, interrupting himself and turning to Ferrandino, “stop me if I’m going too far.” Mike stopped him.
Henley also took note of the rise of biofuel. When his stepsons, Nick and Michael, announced a desire to get into the business, in 2002, he and JoAnn were all for it. Henley built a holding facility on the farm, and began soliciting local restaurants and hauling raw grease down to Houston to be rendered. After a few years, Henley recalls, “We had a meeting with the kids, and we said, ‘O.K., what do y’all really want to do? Want to go big or go home?’ Nick said, ‘Let’s go big.’ ” In 2011, they bought a warehouse and offices on the northern fringe of Houston, acquired five enormous rendering tanks, applied for a license, and launched Service First Grease Recycling.
When I visited Service First in April, the office had tasteful gray tile underfoot and an elegant reception desk beyond a set of French doors. It might have been a boutique ad agency—although, with annual revenues of more than two million dollars, Service First does better than a lot of ad agencies these days. In the main office, Nick, now twenty-six, sat at a large-screen iMac, typing figures into a spreadsheet. Dressed in a backward baseball cap, designer jeans, and a Supreme T-shirt with a silk screen of Kate Moss, he looked like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. JoAnn, his mother, was working at a computer at an adjacent desk. Michael telecommutes from home.
Nick explained that Service First has collection contracts with many of the city’s top restaurant chains: Chili’s, Texas Roadhouse, Church’s Chicken, Popeye’s. Having learned from Henley’s experience, Nick renders only grease that his own haulers collect—“I wouldn’t buy grease from anybody in this town,” he says. Although Dar Pro pays more for grease than he can afford, he stays competitive by offering personal services, like power-washing a restaurant’s back area every time a driver picks up grease. “It can take hours,” Nick says, “but the big companies don’t do it.” He also equips all his drivers with iPads to snap time-stamped photographs after each pickup, to show that they left things clean. Competitors are not above spreading rancid grease around to make a rival look bad.
In March, a constable and a phalanx of Dar Pro lawyers visited Service First, hoping to collect on Henley’s outstanding judgment—which, with accrued interest, is now about ten million dollars. Nick informed his visitors that Service First legally belongs to him and to his brother; Henley works as a “consultant.” So Dar Pro seized the only property that was in Henley’s name: two grease-collection trucks. Two weeks later, an injunction notice arrived, claiming that Service First had illegally placed a container at a Denny’s where Dar Pro had an account. If the container wasn’t removed, Henley could be found in contempt of court and sent to jail.
When I returned to Houston, in May, Henley had been dodging a process server for weeks, and had developed a habit of driving cautiously around lone trucks idling in parking lots. The server had camped in front of his house for three days. To sneak out for our meeting, Henley had sent JoAnn first, as a decoy. Henley drove with me and Nick to the disputed Denny’s franchise, on a heavily trafficked stretch of Highway 6. They were planning to remove the offending Service First container—not on Dar Pro’s orders, they said, but because the restaurant was closing. As Nick hosed out a final load of grease, I sat in the dining room with the franchise holder, a woman named Debi Haq, under a forlorn banner announcing, “Baconalia! Celebrating Our Bacon Obsession!”
Haq told me that she owned five Denny’s locations in the city, and had ended her association with Dar Pro at all of them. She balked at Dar Pro’s agreements, which were binding for five years and insisted that she pay damages if she didn’t renew. “I used to work for HUD,” Haq said, “so I can read a contract like nobody’s business.” But the real deal-breaker was Dar Pro’s whimsical approach to payment: promising top dollar, then finding excuses not to pay. “Obviously, it’s not a big income stream,” she says. “I make my pennies selling pancakes. But, hey—every little bit helps.”
After Haq broke off her arrangement, Dar Pro never picked up its container; a slime-encrusted box was still sitting out back. (“They’ll leave their container here and whoever takes over the building will think, Oh, there’s our grease container,” Henley said. “Automatic account.”) Haq brought in Service First, and in April Nick placed a container in the only available spot—a few feet in front of Dar Pro’s abandoned container. Within a week, Henley received the injunction notice. Haq calls Dar Pro’s actions “vindictive,” but isn’t surprised. “Just like Walmart or anyone else, they’re trying to squeeze out the little guys and have a monopoly.”
Stuewe scoffs at the notion that Dar Pro is seeking a monopoly. “If we look at our market share in the United States,” he says, “we may have anywhere from fifteen per cent to twenty per cent—which is far from a monopoly in any way, shape, or form. Besides, monopolies are formed when barriers to entry are so high that no one else can play in the game. Well, the barrier to entry in this business is a pickup with a fifty-five-gallon drum and a five-gallon Home Depot bucket.”
“My dad always had a vision that this was going to be a huge business,” JoAnn told me one day over a lunch of take-out tamales at Service First. But José Villegas died in 1993, long before the biofuel boom. Six months before his death, José was arrested collecting a barrel at a Popeye’s, and began a long court battle that put him under great stress. While collecting grease one night, he collapsed behind a restaurant, dead of a heart attack. “He died on a grease run,” Nick said.
“Died in the grease,” JoAnn said.
I asked Nick if he and his brother planned to stay in. “I hope so,” he said. “But with Darling around . . .”
JoAnn spoke ominously of the Dar Pro-Valero plant in Louisiana. “It’s going to need all the grease that it can get, anywhere and everywhere. It needs it.”
Nick, the company’s C.E.O., has worked in grease since his early teens. He says that sucking used oil from a container used to be a little humiliating. “You’d get the dirtiest looks from people,” he says. “Like, ‘That’s why you go to college—because otherwise you’ll end up like him.’ It really bothered me for a while.” He points out that his brother recently bought a custom Bentley, which cost three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, to add to his collection of vintage sports cars. Nick says, “People ask, Why would anyone risk going to jail for stealing something so petty? Because nobody knows.”
In Houston, I went out collecting with a hauler named Jeff Davis, a former Henley employee who now has a company called A-Quality. Like most haulers, Davis works only at night—there’s little traffic on the roads, and, because restaurants have emptied out, his presence won’t discomfit patrons. We met at midnight, in a Pappasito’s parking lot. Davis, a wiry man of forty-one with tousled brown hair and a bushy beard, was driving a refurbished 1997 International truck with a fifteen-hundred-gallon tank on the back—a chipped, painted-over relic with a greasy hose coiled around it. His wife, Elaine, a blond woman with a round, dimpled face, rode in the back seat, marking in a notebook how much grease they collected.
As we drove, Davis told me that he was happy to let Service First and Dar Pro fight it out for the corporate accounts. He is determinedly small-scale—a legacy, in part, of the time, in the nineties, when a security agent from one of the big renderers held a gun to his head. In a semi-residential part of town, we saw a sedan with tinted windows idling at an intersection. “Could be Darling security,” Davis said. “They usually have dark windows.” He chuckled. “Of course, it could also be a drug dealer.”
In the city’s desolate southern stretches, Davis pulled up behind a restaurant in a brick building and removed the top of a barrel, releasing a nauseating reek. The top of the grease was foaming with bacteria. “They said it was a wine bar,” Davis said, rolling the stinking barrel to his truck. “But this smells like rotten fish.” He drained the barrel, hopped into the driver’s seat, and said to Elaine, “About a hundred pounds—very smelly.” She made a note.
Around 2 A.M., he backed his tanker into a narrow alleyway in a deserted stretch of buildings. He strapped on a battery-powered headlamp, then climbed out and went down the alley, which was heaped with garbage. At the touch of his light, roaches scuttled for cover. At the end, he found his container, battered from years of sitting out. Beside it was a bright new box with a fresh label that read “Clean & Green Grease Recycling.” Davis nudged his box with his foot. Empty. He nudged the Clean & Green box and heard the slosh of grease. “Poaching my stop,” Davis said. “I’ve lost a few lately to them.”
He opened the screen door at the back of the restaurant—an all-night Chinese place—and called, “Hey!” A cook in a white apron was stirring something in a wok. “Grease man,” Davis said. “I need to talk to the owner.”
A harassed-looking middle-aged woman came out into the alleyway.
“You change the oil company?” Davis said, pointing at the Clean & Green box.
“Money,” the woman said in a heavy accent, pointing at the new box. “Money. He give.”
Davis asked if he could talk to someone who spoke English. She dialled a number on her cell phone and passed it to Davis. “She broke the contract?” Davis said into the phone. He listened, then said, “So this new guy says he’s going to give you money? Forty? A check? Once a month? What about our contract—our agreement?” Until now, he hadn’t had to pay anything for their grease—they’d been happy to have it carted off. As Davis spoke into the phone, the woman turned to me.
“Three and a half years,” she said. “No money. No penny. No good.” She waved a hand dismissively at Davis’s container.
“Look,” Davis said into the phone, “tell your mother that I’ll pay her three hundred and fifty bucks for the year. If I pay that up front—cash, not a check—you’ll stay with my service? And what will you tell the other company?” He listened. “Fine,” he said. “Tell your mother.” He handed the phone back.
“Got poached,” he said to Elaine, as he climbed back into the truck. She noted that down. “Paying three-fifty to keep it.” He put the truck in gear. “They’ve got lousy grease,” he said, “about a third water. I won’t make anything on it, but I’ll keep their business.”
And in this new grease economy, Davis says, he can’t afford to lose any stops. Ten years ago, he had eight hundred accounts, which kept him out every night of the week. “Of course, that was back when there was four or five people doing it,” he said. “There was enough to split between everybody. In the last probably five years, everybody wants to get a truck, get a license, and haul oil.” Davis concedes that there are benefits to the current price of grease, but he misses the old days.
“To me, I’d rather see it lower,” he said. “Then you don’t have all this stuff going on. I mean, you wouldn’t have to worry about all this if it was a nickel a pound.” ♦