Eric Lach
Staff writer Last summer, when I told a friend I would bewriting a piece about trash, he shared a story his father had once told him about a movie shot in Toronto some years back, a gritty crime drama, set in New York. Crew members had spent a whole morning making a Toronto block look more like a New York City block by strewing litter around and lining the sidewalk with piles of black plastic garbage bags. Then they broke for lunch. When they returned, to their astonishment, the bags were gone. A passerby had apparently happened upon the mess, and called in a complaint to Toronto’s sanitation agency, which promptly dispatched a team to clean up. They don’t tolerate that kind of trash in Toronto. Amazed, I relayed this story by e-mail to an official at the New York City Department of Sanitation. “Hate to break it to you but this is an unverifiable legend that has been repeated as fact since at least 1985!” the official wrote back. He included a link to a Snopes article, written in 2000, that traced the story to “Night Heat,” a cop show that aired on CBS from 1985 to 1989. For years, Sonny Grosso, one of the show’s producers, liked to tell reporters that the only downside of shooting in Toronto was that the city was too clean. He said he had to hire a guard to stand watch over his outdoor sets, lest the city send someone to clean up the grime. “We did ‘The French Connection’ in New York in 1971,” he toldForbes. “And the same garbage is still in the streets.” In the late sixties, Grosso had been one of the N.Y.P.D. detectives who helped crack the multimillion-dollar drug case depicted in “The French Connection”; Buddy Russo, played by Roy Scheider in the film, is modelled on him. The success of the movie afforded Grosso a long, fruitful second career, in Hollywood. Beginning in 1971, he worked as an actor, technical adviser, or producer on more than forty films and television shows, most of them crime dramas. In “The Godfather,” it was Grosso’s .38-calibre Colt revolver, packed with blanks, that Al Pacino retrieved from the bathroom stall. Grosso carried that same gun on him until the day he died, in 2020, according to hisTimesobituary. Trash is one of those topics: you start digging into it, you don’t know what will turn up. SupportThe New Yorker’saward-winning journalism.Subscribe today » | 
