The story behind the story has two parts.
One is an almost rags-to-riches saga about an immigrant businessman. The other turns on interstate intrigue over a vast national market of radioactive waste disposal worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.The central character in both is 49-year-old Khosrow B. Semnani, known by most associates as "Khos," a nattily dressed man who has a Mercedes-Benz in his garage but drives a Dodge pickup to work.
Semnani until recently was not a public figure, although he has been well-known for some time in certain circles.
His name became widely publicized two weeks ago when a scandal emerged over his payment of $600,000 in cash, gold coins and real estate to Larry F. Anderson, the very state official who was supposed to be regulating him.
Now, Semnani and his radioactive-waste dump company, Envirocare of Utah, are under siege.
The Utah Attorney General's Office is investigating the relationship Semnani had with Anderson from 1987 to 1993. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an influential Washington-based environmental group, has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to strip Envirocare of its licenses and to bar Semnani from operating anywhere in the country ever again. Numerous voices have called for him to resign his seat on the state's Radiation Control Board, which oversees the Division of Radiation Control, the state agency that regulates Envirocare.
Semnani has thus far responded in a fashion consistent with his usual quiet style of operation, offering little comment on the matter and remaining for the most part out of the public eye.
His court filings speak volumes, however, charging that he was extorted by Anderson, who has since retired from his post as the state's chief radioactive-waste enforcement officer and relocated to Mesquite, Nev.
Semnani's court assertions came in response to a lawsuit by Anderson, who acknowledged he was on the Envirocare payroll in an action he brought charging that Semnani had not paid him his full due.
The dispute brought Semnani under immediate public scrutiny.
For years he has worked behind the scenes to create a priceless niche in the waste market, founding Envirocare of Utah a decade ago and gradually developing it into a major repository for radioactive garbage from elsewhere in the United States. Most of the material consists of soil from cleanup sites.
The company employees about 220 people, most of them at its dump site in the desert a few miles south of I-80, about halfway between Salt Lake City and Wendover, Nev.
Semnani and his executive staff occupy offices at American Towers in downtown Salt Lake City, a 10-minute drive from state regulators who police Envirocare and only a few blocks from Utah's Capitol offices.
Envirocare officials won't disclose how much the privately held company makes, but Tooele County tax records show the county's 5 percent take of gross revenues from Envirocare totaled $3.9 million in 1996. Based on that figure, Envirocare's revenues amounted to $78 million last year.
Such prosperity is a far cry from what Semnani knew in his previous life.
Born and raised as the middle-class son of a businessman-farmer in Mashhad, Iran - a remote city of about 100,000 near Iran's mountainous borders with Afghanistan and Turkmenistan - Semnani left home for the West when he was almost 20.
That was in 1966, when he went to England to work on degrees in chemistry and physics. In 1968, he came to Utah, hoping to borrow a few dollars from a friend who was teaching at Brigham Young University.
"I ran out of money," he said. "That's why I stopped here."
The friend never offered the loan Semnani was expecting, but the now-naturalized citizen enrolled at the University of Utah and eventually earned a degree in engineering administration.
His first job in the Salt Lake area, Semnani said, was working as a janitor. Later he moved to lawnmowing and for a time worked as a teaching assistant at Westminster College before getting a better job as a technician at Kennecott Utah Copper.
"Then I was laid off in 1976, with everbody else," he said.
Semnani said he found employment supervising work on circuit boards for another company, and sometime in the late 1980s he formed a company called S.K. Hart Construction.
Under the auspices of S.K. Hart, Semnani planted the seeds for his future as a dangerous-waste mogul, developing the Grassy Mountain hazardous waste site just a few miles from where Envirocare operates today. Semnani sold the Grassy Mountain facility to waste-management giant USPCI in 1981, directing the proceeds from that sale into a housing development in Wendover.
That project apparently funded the creation of Envirocare, and perhaps gave Semnani enough cash flow to pay Anderson, to fund the expensive above-the-table process of permits and to market the facility.
Licensed in 1988, Envirocare attracted almost no interest at the time. Salt Lake's major newspapers did not report on the development, and potential competitors in other states made little public noise about it.
Quietly, however, concerns about Envirocare were being expressed by state officials working under Anderson, who thought the relationship between Semnani and Anderson seemed too cozy.
Ken Alkema, then-director of the Department of Environmental Quality, ordered an investigation that found no illegal activity in a report that was reviewed by the Attorney General's Office.
It noted that Semnani paid frequent visits to state regulators, proffering gifts of perfume, neckties and food. But such activities were not in violation of the state's law against government workers accepting gifts worth more than $50.
"It only confirmed Larry had lost his credibility with the staff (at the then-Bureau of Radiation Control) and a lot of other people," Alkema said.
He said he promptly removed Anderson from any substantial role in regulating the agency.
Though Alkema now works for Envirocare as its liaison to government agencies, he adamantly says his current post has no connection with his time as an Envirocare regulator. (He left Utah for three years between his government time and his hiring by Envirocare last year.)
Alkema and the Division of Radiation Control's current director - Bill Sinclair - say they believe Envirocare was properly licensed, and Sinclair has noted that the company is in full compliance with state regulations.
Dan Sinerfrock, a section manager at the division who has been closely involved with Envirocare's regulation since its inception, said Semnani gave him a necktie and a box of nuts some years ago but said such gifts did not influence the state's enforcement of rules governing the company.
"I'll passionately defend the technical reviews were done properly," he said.
Anderson apparently managed to be helpful to Semnani nonetheless, largely in his role as Utah's representative to the Northwest Interstate Compact.
That group is one of several established by Congress in 1989 to decide where to put America's radioactive waste, and Anderson - according to numerous sources close to the industry - was instrumental in talking the compact into an important exemption that paved the way for Envirocare's success.
The northwest compact was formed with the intention of allowing only one such dump like Envirocare's into a eight-state region. Its intent was to preserve the market for an already established radioactive-waste site near Richland, Wash.
But the group - at Anderson's urging - allowed Envirocare to proceed as long as it promised not to take materials from the eight states in the Northwest Interstate Compact - Utah, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska and Hawaii.
"As long as they were not competing with our regional disposal site (at Richland) and making them less economically viable, we were okay," said Dave Stewart-Smith, Oregon's delegate to the compact's board.
Stewart-Smith said Oregon, however, watches Envirocare closely so that it does not expand its markets to accept large volumes of the kinds of waste in which the Richland site specializes.
Others are not so comfortable with the arrangement, arguing that Envirocare's mere existence - as an exception to the geographically dispersed system Congress envisioned in 1989 - threatens the already slow and politically unpopular process of building regional waste sites elsewere.
Envirocare is one of only three radioactive-waste dumps in the nation.
"The Envirocare facility is being used by opposition all across the country as an alternative to states and regions moving forward (and building their own waste site)," said Rich Paton, a Boise-based vice president for U.S. Ecology, which operates the Richland site and is considered an Envirocare competitor.
"They say, `Why should we build our facility when we have access to another one? . . . A lot of states and regions are bending to the pressure and halting the process."
U.S. Ecology, which is trying to open regional radioactive-waste dumps in California and Nebraska, has found a budding Envirocare lobbying presence in each of those states.
Charles Judd, an Envirocare vice president, said that's because Envirocare is looking to expand.
"We're a growing company," Judd said. "We're a company looking ahead."
But Preston J. Truman, who thus far has been the Radiation Control Board's most outspoken member on the Envirocare scandal, cautioned that there is much more to the struggle over waste sites than meets the eye.
"People need to view what's going on in Utah against this whole national scene," he said. "Anything that happens in Utah (to affect Envirocare) affects what happens in other states. And more regulation in one state can bring more waste into Utah."
Ultimately, such policy is either influenced or dictated by lawmakers, and Semnani has made a point of having his name known by the powers-that-be in Utah.
Considered something of a master at political etiquette, for years he has been a contributor to scores of political campaigns, giving thousands of dollars to legislators, governors and congressmen.
In the end, he insists, getting the upper hand in a competitive industry has to do with much more than money, however.
"The key here in this country," he said, "is that if you have a good idea and are willing to work hard and have some vision, you can be successful."