Since I’m on their mailing list, I’m accustomed to seeing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announce crackdowns on big corporate polluters, multimillion dollar fines and monumental toxic cleanups. That’s why it piqued Whistleblower’s interest to read Thursday’s news release. EPA’s Region 5, the Chicago office that covers six Midwestern states, announced that after discovering a violation of the Clean Air Act, it had reached an “administrative consent order” with the violator - Pfeffer’s Cleaners of White Bear Lake.

Pfeffer’s Cleaners?

Now Whistleblower knows that the principal chemical used in dry-cleaning, perchloroethylene or “perc,” takes the dirt out of clothes, but it’s tough on the earth and creatures that live on it. It’s dangerous to breathe, it’s a suspected carcinogen and it can contaminate water, says Nathan Frank, an environmental scientist with the EPA in Chicago. So the EPA has been tightening the rules on the handling of perc for 20 years.

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Sherene O’Hern, shown above in haz mat attire, didn’t want to take any chances when she went back to her apartment in south Minneapolis in May. Read more about how her family fled a botched asbestos removal project in my Sunday story. Also, Whistleblower reporter Lora Pabst reported how the workers at a now-closed private school in St. Paul’s mansion district are on their own in seeking back wages - the Department of Labor and Industry’s labor and standards division doesn’t have the personnel to go after every employer who stiffs employees. Four investigators look into 20,000 to 25,000 unpaid wage complaints every year. So even as our volume of story tips goes up every week, Whistleblower has no excuse for failing to return your emails or phone calls!

The Van Dusen mansion, a palatial pink stone pile built in 1892 at 1900 LaSalle Avenue, was put up for sale in 2006 on eBay. Now the company that owns it, Oxford Global Advisors LLC, is one of the entities in legal trouble with two Ohio families and their pastor, who filed a federal lawsuit alleging fraud by Twin Cities-based investment advisers and associated businesses, my colleague Dan Browning reported Thursday. Browning reports that one of the principals in the investment businesses is Trevor Cook:

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It was a sultry summer evening in south Minneapolis. I was helping my son and his friend from across the street look for bugs underneath rocks in my front yard. A young man with a stubbly beard walked up my steps and crossed my lawn.

“Is this your home?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered, antennae twitching. I noticed his gray tennis shirt had a corporate logo on it, and that he held a binder in his hands.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Who are you?” I said. I’m sure he could almost taste the hostility in the air, but he kept smiling. He said he was selling alarm systems for Pinnacle Security and that in this neighborhood –

I cut him off. “Do you have a city solicitor license?”

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