When New York City officials needed someone to disinfect the apartment of its first Ebola patient, they found someone who seemed to be made for the job. Sal Pane boasted decades of experience cleaning up extremely dangerous materials, including anthrax in 2001. Ebola was his time to shine. “This is our Michael Jordan moment. The fourth quarter,” he told USA Today. “When everyone else says no, we show up.”
But when Pane and his Bio-Recovery crew showed up at Dr. Craig Spencer’s home, they brought a truck bearing permit numbers that belonged to a dead man. Pane had duped the dead man’s grieving sister into selling that truck, she said, as well as the company name. Pane then claimed the dead man’s years cleaning up anthrax sites and other danger zones as his own — despite the fact that the dead man’s family, friends, and former co-workers said they had never known him to work with Pane.
Soon after Spencer’s apartment was first cleaned, BuzzFeed News reported that Pane — who has referred to himself as the “chief safety officer” of the firm New York City hired to clean up a lethal pathogen— is a convicted felon and former mortgage scammer.
But now, further investigation has revealed that Pane has a long and colorful history of telling falsehoods. An examination of his past legal troubles and his current operation has found that he has a playbook: He uses fake names and makes false claims to inflate his credentials, gains credibility from media interviews in which he speaks of lofty ideals and glittering successes, and along the way accumulates a trail of people who feel he exploited them when they were vulnerable.
His story illuminates how, with enough audacity, a scammer can even land a job that’s critical to public safety.
Pane and Bio-Recovery have claimed to have certifications from the EPA and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. But BuzzFeed News could not find any evidence of this. Bio-Recovery’s state permit to haul medical waste expired in 2012, before Pane was associated with the company.
Some of Pane’s claims border on the ludicrous, such as his supposed decades of experience. “Twenty-seven years,” he told one radio station. “Not my first rodeo.”
Twenty-seven years ago, Pane would have been four years old. Bio-Recovery did not exist.
The city says it is reviewing “this situation,” but officials have defended Bio-Recovery’s work cleaning Dr. Spencer’s apartment. The company was hired because “they had the requisite skills in blood and body fluid assessment and cleanup,” said Sam Miller, a city health department spokesman. The state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene checked on Bio-Recovery’s work after it was done, the spokesman said, “and found the cleanup was successfully performed and executed.”
But New York may have been saved by Ebola itself. Deadly though it is, Ebola does notlive for long on dry surfaces such as door handles and countertops. If an unqualified company had botched the cleanup of a hardier pathogen, then those viruses might have survived, infected other people, and sparked an outbreak.
“The risks are high if you don’t know what you’re doing,” said Ian Lipkin, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. “You could become infected and set up a whole new chain of transmission that extends into the community.”
Lipkin gave the SARS outbreak as an example. “You have thousands of people that become infected from a single individual,” he said.
In a brief phone interview, Pane said he did not run Bio-Recovery but hung up before BuzzFeed News could ask about most of the points in this article. He did not respond to a detailed letter emailed to two addresses associated with him. The letter was also emailed to Bio-Recovery and an intermediary.
Before he ended the phone call, Pane bristled at questions about his past. “There’s real news out there,” he said. “Grow up.” He insisted that this article would not deter him. “It’s not going to change the fact I’m going to keep going to work every day and helping families,” Pane said. “Enjoy your smear campaign.”
No comments:
Post a Comment