CLEVELAND, OH – It would be logical to conclude that when they decided to purchase Boyas Landfill neither Pete Ristagno senior nor junior read Title 15 and Section 2 of the United States Code known as the Sherman Antitrust Act president Benjamin Harrison signed in 1890. The law coined in the name of the late Cleveland attorney and U.S. Senator John Sherman name makes it a felony for a person, trust or corporation to create a monopoly. It’s found in Title 15 in the United States Code under Sections 1 through 7.
Section 2 is what the Ristagno’s should have read. Sherman was an abolitionist Republican like President Abraham Lincoln who served in the U.S. House and Senate from Mansfield, Ohio. He also served as the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for President Rutherford B. Hayes.
“Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.”
The word “person” shouldn’t be confusing to the Ristagno’s because it includes corporations and trusts. Corporations or “trusts” after the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865 were growing in wealth and gaining influence over individual members of Congress and local politicians everywhere by the late 1880’s. Local mayors, judges, prosecutors and police were taking bribes to pervert laws for the rich; while state and federal lawmakers made laws the corporations wanted more important than the ones “the people” electing them wanted.
Congress enacted Title 5 and Section 4 of the U.S.C. Code 15 made it the “duty” of local United States attorneys like President Donald Trump’s appointee, Justin Herdman, to “prevent and restrain violations of sections 1 to 7; and to “institute proceedings in equity to prevent and restrain such violations.” But a review of former Jones Day partner attorney Herdman’s Northeast Ohio criminal prosecutions reveals a federal prosecutor who’s wasting prosecutorial resources investigating petty criminals and fake terrorists he creates with FBI agents.
Herdman’s former employer represents the Russian Federation from its Moscow office, WKYC as well as Brown, Gibbon & Lang that handled the Boyas purchase for the Ristagno’s Pete & Pete. Despite his pointing to “Muslims” and not Saudi’s and Israelis as the nation’s biggest terror and spy threat, Trump didn t tweet Herdman’s big announcement of fake terrorist Demetrius Pitts’ arrest two years ago. Pitts was entrapped into committing an act of terrorism while he was under the control of undercover FBI agents and never a terror threat. FBI agent Andrew Wilson testified that Pitts was identified as a possible terrorist target because he was black, Muslim and made the following comment. Read this crap in his affidavit.
On December 31, 2015, a Facebook profile for ABDUR RAHEEM RAFEEQ (which was ultimately determined to be PITTS) came to the FBI’s attention after RAFEEQ sent a private Facebook message to “The Craig Sewing Show,” a California-based political commentary program, stating: “Fuck America and there arm[sic] forces. The USA will be destroy. Allahu Akbar.”
The Russian American U.S. Attorney’s biggest threat has been against Americans who are Descendants of U.S. Slaves or White Anglo Saxon Protestants he calls “white nationalists” whose ancestors once deported his ancestors as “anarchists” after Cleveland Russian Leo Cszogolz assassinated President William McKinley in 1901; and after Russian immigrants initiated a race war in East Saint Louis, Illinois against over 300 black men, women and children they killed as “strike breakers” in 1917. Herdman’s conduct today in ignoring Riley, Beynon, Norton, Wheeler, King and the Ristagno’s crimes against majority black East Cleveland residents shows he has the same vicious disregard for their lives that his Soviet ancestors did in East Saint Louis and 25 other U.S. cities between 1917 and 1925.
The Ristagno’s July 2019 announcement of their Boyas Landfill purchase, and their prior conduct before the announcement, appears to fall neatly within the descriptions the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) uses to determine the characertistics of a monopoly deploying illegal means to destroy competition. Herdman would, himself, be in violation of the nation’s “misprision of felony law” under 18 U.S.C. 4 if he doesn’t investigate facts behind what he now should know through previously-published reports may be a monopolistic enterprise. n of the nuances of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 that give it the appearance of being applicable to the Ristagno’s conduct after the purchase.
The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize.
The first “hint” of a monopoly is in the “exclusionary” relationship the Ristagno’s created in conspiracy with George Michael Riley when he approached Pete & Pete to dump construction and demolition debris in an illegal dump behind residential homes in East Cleveland. A source close to Riley said their agreement was that he wouldn’t let anyone but the Ristagno’s dump at the illegal site he ran for and with Beynon. That gave the Ristagno’s exclusive below-market dump construction and demolition debris dump costs which put the extra money saved from dumping in legal landfills in their bank account.
Records FBI agents can easily obtain from East Cleveland city council’s clerk, Khadijah Guy, detail the scheme Norton, Wheeler and King violated the city’s charter, ordinances, state and federal laws to deliver the land to Beynon and Riley under the guise they would prepare it for redevelopment. That’s the specific language of the ordinance in Norton and Riley’s conspiracy to deliver the land to him for the illegal landfill knowing it would create a potential bribery cash cow that concerned Congress in the 1890’s when they enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act. Norton’s former girlfriend told this writer her gave her $700 a week in cash on his $40,000 a year statutory salary in exchange for refusing to perform the official law enforcement duties Ohio law imposes on this state’s mayors. [NOTE: This writer served as East Cleveland’s mayor prior to Norton].
Noble Road resident Harry Drummond, Willie Morrow and others confirmed it was Pete & Pete’s trucks dumping drywall, broken glass, shattered wood, concrete, brick and tar-laden roofing materials 5-stories tall behind and in front of their homes while Norton and the city’s other law enforcement officers turned their backs on them. Barbara Garner died of lung cancer and her son believes his non-smoker mother’s death was caused by the Beynon, Riley and Ristagno’s construction debris pile of death.
Money the Ristagno’s saved in their scheme with Riley and Beynon, by dumping debris that created acid rain, burning tar and spewed particles of glass and gas in a residential neighborhood, between two schools and churches, turned into the profits that may have been used to invest in the Boyas landfill purchase.
It appears discussions for the Ristagno purchase of the Boyas landfill came a year after Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish was approved by the county council in 2017 to invest public funds to clean-up the pile of death they left with Riley and Beynon behind the Noble Road homes. Despite the misery the humans exposed to the Ristagno’s illegal dumping will experience for the rest of their lives, Herdman has refused to use the resources of the U.S. Department of Justice to protect the health rights they were guaranteed by the environmental laws Congress enacted.
General Electric (GE) left the site filled with mercury and other toxins from its years of manufacturing lights in East Cleveland from its lighting division on Noble Road. Herdman won’t investigate GE as a client of Jones Day; possibly as a favor to the firm’s lighting division to add value to its service of obstructing government investigation of its clients.
With Herdman “in” as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio his former colleagues in the firm’s antitrust department appear not to have to worry about their corporate clients being investigated in the district he oversees. That’s not the case in Russia where “in-house” counsel have no attorney-client privilege protections as “shields” for their corporate employers. Jones Day offices in Moscow are in the same building as the Russian Federation and within a 15 minute walk of the KGB. It’s Moscow attorneys are Russian citizens. They follow Russia’s constitution and its laws.
Last year Herdman’s former employees advised GE on its sale of “the small industrial motors business of its Power Conversion division to Wolong Electric Group Co., Ltd.” According to Herdman’s ex-employer’s website, “the target business has operations in the United States, Mexico, and India and includes the first electric motor designed by Thomas Edison.”
The next antitrust hint is in how the Ristagno’s tookover the landfill in April or May without notice to Boyas’ customers before the July sale was publicly announced.
Between January 2019 and July when they announced their Boyas Landfill purchase, neither Pete & Pete’s Facebook nor its Twitter page shared that a sale was planned; or that they’d in either April or May been given management control of the corporation they were buying. Boyas officials conflict on the date as one Pete & Pete employee told a contracted and paid up client when they removed her office building’s dumpster that the transaction occurred in April. Boyas officials say the Ristagno’s company was given management control in May.
When haulers this writer consults with as clients arrived at the site to dump in May they were met with unannounced higher pricing. The site was still in Boyas’ name. A Boyas official confirmed to the hauler’s drivers that Pete & Pete was not supposed to raise prices. Boyas attorney T.J. Weil confirmed that monies generated between May and the final sale on July 6, 2019 belonged to his client and not Pete & Pete.
Evidence shows the Ristagno’s executed a scheme to generate extra money for themselves while defrauding haulers with false weights on dump tickets in violation of federal EPA laws.
One tandem truck with a 14 yard limit was billed for 40 yards by the Ristagno’s. That same truck was billed for 20 yards even though only the 14 yard dump ticket was correct. That’s just for one driver.
This writer has confirmed the Ristagno’s engaged in the same practices with three other trucking companies. The extra weight created extra revenue for the Ristagno’s, but it’s how they tried to collect on their illegal debt that makes their business practices fall perfectly in line with a Sherman violation. A third antitrust hint is in the unlawful scheme the Ristagno’s used at least on one of Boyas’ clients with the Valley View police department to collect on that company’s debts.
After submitting the inflated invoices to truckers either electronically or by the U.S. mail in violation of the nation’s wire fraud laws, Pete Ristagno, Jr. personally made calls to this writer’s client to collect on the dumping she did that’s the subject of debate with Boyas attorney Wiel. Wiel told this writer Ristagno has no right to collect debts generated prior to the July 2019 sale.
With that evidence and the call from a Valley View police sergeant who left a voice mail message on this writer’s clients cell phone another potential Sherman Antitrust Violation by Pete & Pete is triggered.
Like a fake “Goodfella” Ristagno, Jr. left a threatening message on this writer’s client’s cell phone telling her, “Make sure you pick up when the police call.”
The text was thought to be a joke since police play no legal role in the collection of alleged civil debts. But that didn’t stop a Valley View police sergeant from making a call he concealed from the police department’s recorded line by making it from the recreation center. The company owner was threatened with police action if she didn’t contact “Pete Jr.”
Valley View police chief David Rini left a message after a request for an investigation that the sergeant’s call was a “mistake.” Police don’t get involved in civil disputes but this one did, specifically, after the threat was left on the hauler’s cell phone by Pete, Jr. A civil service-trained police sergeant already knows police don’t get involved in civil disputes.
Herdman should want to know if or what he received in value for the “duty exceeding” and unlawful call. Pursuant to Ohio Revised Code chapter 737.11, the duties of municipal police are as follows:
“The police force of a municipal corporation shall preserve the peace, protect persons and property, and obey and enforce all ordinances of the legislative authority of the municipal corporation, all criminal laws of the state and the United States, all court orders issued and consent agreements approved pursuant to sections 2919.26 and 3113.31 of the Revised Code, all protection orders issued pursuant to section 2903.213 or 2903.214 of the Revised Code, and protection orders issued by courts of another state, as defined in section 2919.27 of the Revised Code.”
A fourth antitrust hint is the impact on the construction and demolition debris market; and the Ristagno’s ability to control it by raising prices on competitors and undercutting them on government bids. A U.S. Attorney without Herdman’s perceived conflicts might see the Ristagno’s conduct as clearly “antitrust.”
What baffles everyone in the hauling industry, however, is how “the Feds” or Herdman knows or should know Pete & Pete dumped illegally while he’s allowed them to also buy Boyas and drive up prices on the competition without punishment. How, it’s asked, is Herdman allowing Pete & Pete to profit off the death and misery they left in East Cleveland for the government to clean up while he’s prosecuting fake terrorists the FBI’s identifying through Facebook posts and threatening WASP’s?
