PASCAGOULA, Miss. — They came when called. They honored their guarantees. The roach men promised no bug on Earth could skitter away alive from their stuff. They were sloppy, but always thorough. Even when their spray ran wild, leaving fetid yellow trails on coats, walls and carpets, the poison killed.
It was the secret of their success. And it explained how the handiwork of a few unlicensed exterminators, unknown to each other and invisible to government regulators, grew into an environmental disaster that spread as relentlessly as vermin crawling inside masonry crevices, popping up in Mississippi Gulf Coast trailer parks, then in New Orleans shanties, then in crumbling two-flats in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods.
Down here, retired shipyard worker Paul Walls Sr. sprayed hundreds of homes and businesses, leaving cards with drawings of belly-up roaches: "Call on Paul. He'll kill them all." On Chicago's West Side, where roach armies invade bedrooms and roost in cookware, Reuben Brown was welcomed for his "Mississippi stuff." Only Southern emigres recognized his spray's familiar stench as the malodorous fog that rolls in from cotton fields deloused of boll weevils. Some were so excited to find "cotton poison" up north they hoarded it in milk jugs and spray bottles.
For years, perhaps decades, hauling their noxious syrup along the Delta highways that poor black sharecroppers and bluesmen once took to make new lives, roach men sprayed thousands of Southern and Midwestern homes and businesses. But not until environmental authorities discovered last fall that 500 mobile homes, churches and day-care centers in this coastal town had been laced with methyl parathion--a lethal farm pesticide and chemical cousin of the deadly nerve gas sarin--did they suspect they faced a sprawling toxic menace on the scale of Times Beach and Love Canal.
Over the last year, the Environmental Protection Agency has spent $69 million to decontaminate more than 700 homes and businesses, stripping their innards or replacing them entirely. More than $100 million likely will be spent--the highest single-year expenditure of federal dollars on a toxic cleanup. Six roach men, Walls and Brown among them, have been prosecuted for hazardous and unlicensed spraying. Despite his age, Walls, 62, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years, the highest prison term ever meted by a federal judge for environmental crimes. Brown has pleaded guilty to two similar counts and faces a November sentencing.
