Quite fascinating. Like Rossi, Tom Darden has been intimately involved in repurposing industrial contaminated waste as something useful. Kindred souls? Something more? Fellow con artists? You decide.
"HISTORY In 1984, a group of investors including Tom Darden purchased four brick plants and merged them to form Cherokee Sanford Group (CSG), which grew to become the largest privately held brick manufacturer in North America. When we discovered petroleum-contaminated soil at one of the plant sites, the regulators suggested taking the impaired soil to a nearby landfill. As an alternative, CSG proposed mixing it with clean clay in the brick-making process. The combustion in the kilns burned up the fuel oil in the soil. >From this beginning, CSG started a business of receiving contaminated clay from underground storage tank clean-ups. By 1990, CSG was the largest soil remediator in the mid-Atlantic region, eventually cleaning up nearly 15 million tons of contaminated material. Tom Darden and John Mazzarino formed the predecessor company of Cherokee in 1993 to focus exclusively on environmentally impaired assets. In 1994 they organized a risk management advisory affiliate and then formed Cherokee's first institutional capital (Fund I) in 1996. Cherokee formed a $250 million private equity fund (Fund II) in 1998, a $620 million fund (Fund III) in 2002, and its current, $1.2 billion fund (Fund IV) in 2005. "
