Battling the Steel Baron

Politicians gave speeches. Unions grudgingly offered benefits cuts. "Save Our Steel" was the sacred motto. If the shooting blue flames next to I-77 were to die, you'd expect men, women, and children to climb atop one another with lighters, trying to get them going again.

Yet while the company kept more families afloat than a cruise liner -- 3,200 Clevelanders depended on an LTV paycheck -- this ship's captains had taken the only life rafts. While management blamed their troubles on unfair foreign competition and begged for federal welfare, CEO William Bricker cashed out $660,000 in bonus pay just before resigning. Two weeks before Christmas, the furnaces went cold. There were so many pink slips that they had to be dispensed from a pushcart.

For the first time since 1912, the land next to the Cuyahoga River was as quiet as western prairie. Acres of corrugated rust sat like rotting farm equipment.

"It was like a bomb went off," says Cleveland Councilman Joe Cimperman. "That's like if you got rid of every auto plant in Detroit. Or if you went to New York City and said, 'No more theater.'"

The vultures soon arrived. Wilbur Ross, a New York financier, decided to put a few coins into the rusty old slot machine of the steel industry. He bought the plant's skeletal remains along with some other Rust Belt carcasses, resurrecting them as International Steel Group in 2002. The company was just like LTV, only with bariatric surgery. By acquiring the plant at a bankruptcy sale, Ross avoided taking on any of LTV's crushing pension obligations. Then, with half the workforce of LTV and a cheaper union contract, he returned the plant to profitability. Then he flipped it.

The buyer was a man named Lakshmi Mittal, the Bill Gates of steel. Akin to something you'd see on a Christian Children's Fund commercial, Mittal's childhood was spent in an isolated Indian village with no running water.

Yet his adult life has been all about bling. Mittal is now the world's fifth-richest man, according to Forbes. His company, Mittal Steel, owns plants from Buffalo to Kazakhstan and produces 10 percent of the world's steel. He paid $127 million for a London mansion. For his daughter's wedding, he threw a party at the Palace of Versailles, the former home of France's Louis XIV. Final bill: $55 million.

In 2005, Mittal bought International Steel Group to officially become the largest steel company in the world -- 165,000 employees strong. You wouldn't expect the guys at the United Steelworkers hall to respect a boss who gets chauffeured around in a $300,000 Maybach. Yet Cleveland workers slept easier, knowing that a true steel man was in charge.

In June, the Cleveland mill made its first international shipment in five years, exporting 12,000 tons of hot-rolled coils on a freighter bound for Belgium. The news was the equivalent of a moon landing for the city.

But not at Ohio Citizen Action. In case you haven't noticed the thousands of yard signs sticking up around town, the environmental group says Mittal is poisoning residents. And it wants Mittal to "Clean Up for Real."

The Slavic Village homes overlooking the plant have a beautiful view of hell. Flames shooting 20 feet in the air. Glowing vats of iron ore. Sparks like the Fourth of July. A choking smell like rotting garlic. Nowhere does the Cleveland motto "You've gotta be tough" apply more than here.

"I've seen orange clouds. I've seen green clouds, red, big black clouds," says Sue Cochran, a tattooed mom with a baby monitor clipped to her belt and a rottweiler pawing at the screen door. She's lived here for five years, during which she's developed sinus problems so severe she's had two surgeries.

"When I told [my doctor] where I live, he told me I should move," says Cochran. But with her family's finances stretched thin, that's not happening anytime soon.

The air here can literally choke you. On particularly dusty days, you'll find 11-year-old Craig Denham with a breathing mask strapped to his face to deliver his asthma medicine. Sometimes it gets so bad, he has to take steroids.

Craig's the third generation of his family to grow up in the shadow of Big Steel. He lives with his grandma, his mom, his aunt, and his cousins in a cute little home with a cute little yard, on a street where cute checked out a long time ago. Behind a flimsy backyard fence, you can see marshmallowy smoke billows mixing with the cumulus clouds.