BY Robert Dominguez
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Manny Sosa has already spent a good hour on his hands and knees, steaming and scrubbing and finally getting the best of a stubborn stain on a kitchen floor, when he calls out to his supervisor.
“I got the blood up,” says Sosa, his voice muffled through a hazmat helmet and respirator. “But the skin’s not coming off the tiles.”
“Waddya expect?” answers Ron Gospodarski. “The body was decomposing for a week.”
This is clearly no ordinary cleaning job, and the men spending a sunny day in a Manhattan apartment casually getting rid of a horrific mess are not your average custodial workers.
Like the characters in the movie “Sunshine Cleaning,” opening Friday, Gospodarski’s Queens-based company, Bio-Recovery Corp., specializes in cleaning up the grim and gory aftermath of crime and trauma scenes — everything from murder to suicide to a bloody home accident.
Or, as they’ve been hired to do on this day, tidying, straightening and ultimately sanitizing a one-bedroom rental in Chelsea where the tenant keeled over, died in the kitchen — and was found seven days later after neighbors complained of the smell.
The body of the tenant, a single man in his 40s, was removed days earlier. But the stench of death lingers, thanks to a huge and unsightly stain — a crusty, dark-brown puddle of blood mixed with other bodily fluids on the floor where the man was found.
“You can see the outline of the body,” said Sosa before the cleanup. “He was there so long, some of his hair and skin is stuck in it.”
“This is nothing,” says Gospodarski. “I’ve had jobs where the body fluids seeped through the floorboards and walls of a building for six stories, and then they had an insect infestation. And the suicides are the worst, especially when they use a shotgun.The blood splatters all over, and you’ll find pieces of brain and skull on the other side of the room.”
It may be a dirty job, but Gospodarski and Sosa are glad to do it. Bio-Recovery Corp. is one of only a handful of such companies in the New York area, and the pay is good — not surprising, given the morbid nature of the business.
Gospodarski, 47, is a former New York City paramedic who founded the company in 1998 after realizing there was money to be made in cleaning up the crime and trauma scenes he covered.
“A business owner who had a shooting or stabbing in front of his place would ask who was going to clean up the mess,” says Gospodarski. “The city is supposed to do it when it’s on public property, but they don’t.”
He says he can earn anywhere from $650 to $2,000 for a day’s work, depending on the complexity of the job and how much waste has to be disposed of.
A bag of medical waste, for example, costs $75 to throw away at a dump, while an old mattress soaked with body fluids can cost several hundred dollars to get rid of properly.
“We never turn away business,” says Gospodarski, noting that things have slowed down during these rough economic times.
“In a city like New York, you’d think there’d be no shortage of jobs for companies like us. But the problem is that families or landlords can’t afford to pay for a service like ours.”
Even during boom times, there are the potential health hazards. Bent over the stain and brandishing a high-pressure steam machine, Sosa has to wear a hazmat suit, helmet and respirator to protect himself from inhaling dangerous microbes released into the air by the steam.
“You have to assume that every body had a disease like HIV, TB or hepatitis,” says Gospodarski. “But the biggest danger, of course, is getting a puncture wound from a needle whenever we clean up a drug den.”
Bio-Recovery was involved in cleaning up buildings and offices in New York and Florida exposed to anthrax soon after the 9/11 attacks. But a typical job consists of being hired by a building to clean and sanitize an apartment where someone has died, or by a family that wants to clean out the room of a recently deceased relative.
Other times, they’re paid to remove the immense clutter of junk and garbage left behind by a pack rat who’s been evicted from an apartment.
But that’s tame stuff compared to the job a couple of years ago that left even these seasoned pros gagging in disgust.
“A guy died sitting on a toilet,” recalls Gospodarski, who clearly enjoys telling war stories “He had been there for days, and the toilet was clogged. When Manny reached in to clean out the mess, he came up holding the guy’s intestines. Even I couldn’t take the smell.”
“Yeah, once you bring something up out of the water that’s been there a while, it can smell pretty bad,” adds Sosa.
There are occasions, says Gospodarski, when the job can be emotionally draining. He and Sosa, 29, who joined the company four years ago, have cleaned up after several high-profile crimes, including the multiple murders in a marijuana den above the Carnegie Deli and the shootings in the basement freezer of a Wendy’s restaurant in Queens.
“You definitely need a strong stomach for this line of work,” says Gospodarski. “But you also need to be compassionate and a good listener. We’ve been in homes where a teenager killed himself and the family is devastated, and they reach out to us just to talk.”
It’s also important to be respectful of the dead and nonjudgmental, especially in a city like New York, inhabited by all kinds of people — with all types of lifestyles.
“Sometimes you uncover secrets of how people lived — really crazy stuff no one would believe — but you need to overlook that and just do your job,” says Gospodarski.
“It’s bad enough for a family when someone dies. But they shouldn’t have to find out something they don’t need to know about.”
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