Ben Nadeff-Haffrey
speaker
1,009 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Ben Nadeff-Haffrey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Everyone wanted to see the dump.
It was the symbol of Staten Island secession.
Over 7 million people lived in New York City in the 1980s.
Every day, they threw stuff out.
Most of that stuff wound up at the Fresh Kills landfill.
The sight of it alone was enough to stop visitors in their tracks.
People said you could see the dump from outer space.
Ornithologists wanted to study it because supposedly it was the East Coast's largest collection of seagulls.
Staten Islanders, meanwhile, rolled up their windows when they passed it.
It was next to the mall, and when you went to the mall, you'd cover your mouth and nose and sprint from the car to the front door.
It was unclear then if garbage juice was leaking out of the trash mountains and into the groundwater, but people were looking into it.
Spoiler alert, it was.
And rather than coming up with alternatives, all the ingenuity in Manhattan seemed to go towards dumping more faster on Staten Island.
And Dan Singletary was paying very close attention to this.
A weird thing happens to me when I work on stories like this.
People who aren't famous at all become like celebrities in my mind.
Here was a man on a misfit island ranting about a mountain of trash 30 years ago.
And because I've turned my bizarre fixations into a career, over the course of a year, I had read so many articles about Dan Singletary and watched so many videos of him arguing about Staten Island secession that he became a kind of folk hero to me.
Wandering around the island doing art, looking like a cowboy with his huge mustache.
I wanted to track him down, to understand the mind of a secessionist, but I kept striking out.
Showing 781–800 of 1,009 · page 40 of 51
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