Boyle's first visit to Plum Island was like something out of an episode of The Twilight Zone — to him, it was an eerie isle that time forgot. The once impeccably groomed and abundantly flowering "plantation" was now a wildly overgrown jungle. Paint had chipped off Lab 101's walls and huge chunks barely clinging on were flapping in the ocean winds. "Scientists were just sitting around doing nothing." Or at least Boyle thought they were scientists. "You couldn't tell the difference between a scientist, a tech, or the guy who swept the floor." The place had gone to pot — it was filthy and carried a rank, musty smell. The floors, caked with stains, hadn't been mopped in ages. On laboratory bench tops, which required an ultrasterile surface for virus research, Boyle spied dried soda pop, crumbs, and papers strewn about in piles. He took his index finger and swiped it along a pipe that ran along the wall, removing a quarter-inch layer of dust. "It was just ugly," says Boyle. "And everyone had the same attitude—'fuck it.' "
Plum Island was also a mess in other ways, especially when seen through the assiduously burning eyes of an accountant. "There was a lot of what we call indirect research cost [IRC]," remembers Boyle. "Scientific money that is eaten up by administration, support, building maintenance, grounds crew. And this side of Plum Island was essentially a Golden Cow." John Boyle explained how it worked during the reign of Dr. Callis: "Engineering would say, 'Well, we have this hurricane season, and we need [power] redundancy up here because we may lose a 50,000-kilovolt transformer that might go out on a Saturday night, when there's no one around.' They would use scare tactics like these, and add, 'Now if we lose that 50-KV transformer, then we lose power to Lab 101, we lose our negative airflow, and there's danger of what we have escaping out into the atmosphere.' And it would scare the bejesus out of management, so they'd say, 'Here, take this $75,000 and purchase a generator.' They dazzled them with footwork."
No longer would the tail wag the dog. To Breeze and his man Boyle, the primary need was not support, but rather Plum Island's piece de resistance, its holy graiclass="underline" the science. Without science, there could be no glory. "The IRC was outrageous — it was 78 percent [of Plum Island's yearly budget] when we got there." At a normal lab, Boyle says, it would be in the low twenties. To improve science and keep the island from being shut down? "Shave the IRC down to a bare minimum," says Boyle. No longer would engineering and plant management be the Golden Cow that got whatever it wanted. Boyle sharpened his pencil and got to number crunching, putting in late nights and seven-day workweeks, huddled over stacks of spreadsheets and financial data. With a stroke of his pencil, he slashed the animal supply contract and whittled down oil and new vehicle purchases. Next, he started counting up all the widgets — electric saws, toilet paper, circuit breakers, circuit boards, soap, hammers, nails, lightbulbs — and figured out where costs were coming from. "We bought thirty items, used twelve, and they reported six in inventory," he recalls. "People were carrying stuff off the island on Sundays, typical stuff people try to steal from the government — except here, they were doing it wholesale."[31] He installed a phone switchboard that provided reports of outgoing calls. "The day after I announced that one, there were cries I was violating people's privacy." But it worked — the monthly Plum Island phone bill plummeted in just one month from $7,000 to $3,000.
"John, I am hiring a doctor and I need an X-ray crystallography machine," Breeze told Boyle early on. "It costs half a million dollars — now go find me the money for it." Coming up with that kind of dough stumped even the uncanny number cruncher, who had just completed chiseling together a budget. He tore the whole thing apart again and found Breeze another $500,000, securing a renowned doctor's transfer to Plum Island. "He was very demanding to work for," Boyle says, smiling fondly, relishing working on the Breeze dream team. "I had to pull a string here and there and unravel it all and put it back together — and of course I found the money." But from where had it come?
"If you watch the pennies," Boyle's parents had taught him growing up in hardscrabble Dorchester, an Irish Catholic inner-city Boston neighborhood, "the dollars will take care of themselves." Now he was watching nickels and dimes, too, and to Breeze's delight. "We cut a substantial amount of money," says Boyle. "We cut well over a million dollars." He believes even more could have been slashed. After six years on the job, says Boyle, "I still didn't know where all the waste was. There was still some shit going on that I couldn't put my finger on — which tormented me to no end."
With the budget in Boyle's capable hands, Breeze next brightened up the physical appearance of the laboratories, taking special interest in the toilets. "Nobody had cleaned these rest rooms — there would be no toilet paper, and the sinks were filthy. I wasn't prepared to live with people not doing their job. Everything at Plum depends upon a handful of scientists who are pulling the train." At a minimum, those scientists had to have sparkling bathrooms, perhaps the most basic of all provisions. "I had to completely remove all of the furniture in the toilets because it was so bad — so dirty — it couldn't be cleaned." Breeze ordered brand-new porcelain, metalwork fixtures, shiny faucets, and gleaming tile, and refinished the rest rooms. Then he explicitly set forth the frequency and manner in which they were to be cleaned. He also conducted unannounced spot checks throughout the week to ensure full compliance.[32] "It was a personal tour de force," Breeze gloats.
After that episode, employees knew better than to mess around with the new budget director. "Roger says tact and diplomacy are not my strong suits," says Boyle.
But that was only child's play compared to what he did next. Within a year, the new administration had become a lean and mean machine, deaf to the rants and raves of the support staff and their supposed needs.[33] So when Walter Sinowski, the building foreman of Lab 257, told them in early 1991 that an emergency backup power cable needed repair, management had a different answer this time around: no.
Roger Breeze had become a slave to science.
Soon after taking over the reins, Breeze set out to acquaint himself with wthe island's three hundred daytime inhabitants. "When he first came in, we really thought he might be one of us," says one worker. Whereas Jerry Callis wore a suit and tie to work each morning, Dr. Breeze scarcely looked like a doctor, let alone the director. Sporting a plaid shirt and jeans and smiling broadly, Breeze was slapping workers on the back as if they were old friends. Veteran employee Martin Weinmiller recalls Breeze coming ashore on his first day. Heading home after the graveyard shift, Weinmiller watched the ferry bearing the new director tie up at the harbor dock. "He walks off the boat, and looks out at the island for a time. Then he says, 'Either I'm going to make this place or I'm going to break it.' "
Easing himself quite comfortably into the chair occupied by Dr. Callis for decades, Breeze quickly set the tone with employees with his newsletter, the Plum Island Diary:
I am sure that the last many months have been very frustrating and disheartening….This Center is not going to close, we are not moving to another location….Together, we are going to plan and build the next proud 35 years of our history.
31
On one occasion — after seeing numerous instances of employees walking off the ferry on quiet Sunday afternoons with large boxes under their arms, dashing for their cars — Boyle spotted three men hauling a large machine off the ferry into a van. Rubbing his eyes in disbelief, he looked out the window again and swore; his hard work was again being undermined right before his eyes. Exclaiming, "That's it! I am not putting up with this anymore," he charged out of the warehouse toward the trio when one of the boat crew grabbed his arm and stopped him, saying, "Whoa, wait, John, you don't have to — they're just borrowing that. It'll be back in a few days — you'll see." The big machine was a floor-washer and the employees were taking it off to wash down the Greenport VFW hall, something they were doing every six months or so.
32
Director Breeze also took a similar interest with the hallway floors. In a moment of candor, he said to me, "It's kind of silly when you hear a scientist talk about the hallways — is it waxed, is it shiny — why would you give a damn? But you are
33
All the deep cost-cutting apparently didn't extend to the creature comforts enjoyed by Dr. Breeze's cabal. Boyle first worked in the Orient Point office, but Breeze soon moved him onto Plum Island. "He put me in possibly the best quarters on Plum Island," remembers Boyle. "Talk about an Irish promotion!" From his desk in the old Army jail, he gazed through an all-glass solarium and viewed the parade ground and aqua-blue waters beyond. He complained to Breeze that the greenhouse effect made the office unbearably hot. "I told him it might be seen as elitist if I install an air conditioner, and he said, 'Yes, John, it will — but do it anyway.' So I put a big-ass 12,000-BTU unit in there — and E&PM [engineering and plant management] didn't like that at all."