Benjamin Franklin Pass was the owner of P&W Waste Oil Services in North Carolina, a company in the business of collecting and blending used oil for industrial use. The large operation included a tank farm for collecting material in amounts ranging from 20,000 gallons to 500,000 gallons. In July 2009, an employee of P&W collected and transported oil that was contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and, with the knowledge of Pass, who had obtained testing results that the oil was contaminated, continued to sell the polluted oil to companies and mishandled the material, causing significant contamination to both the company’s tank farm and companies that accepted the product. A customer, Colonial Oil, had to transport and incinerate some three million gallons of contaminated oil at a cost of $17 million, and EPA declared P&W a Superfund site and incurred over $3.4 million in remediation costs. An investigative unit including EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division (EPA-CID), typically in charge of investigating federal environmental crimes, along with investigators from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Office of Criminal Investigations (CI) and the U.S. Coast Guard’s Investigative Services (CGIS) found Pass had knowledge of the contaminated oil, employees had illegally discharged the oil near the tank farm, the company falsely certified its employees had taken required hazardous waste training, and between 2002–2011, Pass also failed to pay federal income taxes. In United States v. Pass, Benjamin Franklin Pass and P&W were charged with giving false material statements, unlawful handling of PCBs under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), and failing to pay income taxes. The defendants were charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Environmental Crimes Section (DOJ-ECS), which are the typical entities that work with EPA-CID to bring criminal charges and prosecute offenders in federal environmental crime prosecutions. On July 16, 2014, Pass was sentenced to serve forty-two months in prison, pay restitution in the amount of $21,373,143.38, and pay $538,857 in back taxes to the IRS, while P&W was sentenced to serve five years of probation, and ordered to remediate environmental contamination at its facility.

Investigating and prosecuting environmental crimes involving significant harm and culpable conduct, such as those committed by Benjamin Franklin Pass and P&W Oil Company, demonstrate the value and necessity of criminal enforcement to punish serious violations of environmental law and deter future offenders. Investigating and prosecuting these crimes also demonstrates the importance of coordination between federal law enforcement agencies to pursue cases against chronic and serious violations of environmental law. While the application of criminal enforcement tools is decidedly valuable for enforcing TSCA, very little is known about how EPA-CID criminal investigators and DOJ prosecutors have pursued such cases historically. We work to fill this gap through analysis of all TSCA criminal prosecutions stemming from EPA-CID criminal investigations, 1983–2019. Through content analysis of EPA-CID criminal prosecution summaries, we are able to select for analysis all prosecutions where defendants were charged under TSCA and explore charging and sentencing patterns in these prosecutions over thirty-seven years. We are also able to draw out the broader themes in TSCA prosecutions. We provide an overview of TSCA below, followed by a discussion of the history of federal environmental criminal enforcement, criminal provisions of TSCA, and then our method and analysis.