Dumpster

Immaculately dressed and precisely coiffed, Georges Perrier stood in the alley behind his Center City restaurant and gestured hotly at the trash lining his neighbors' sidewalks. Next door, heaps of tiny, white styrofoam packaging fillers spilled into the street. Down the block, soggy cardboard boxes piled up next to a dumpster. But the space behind Perrier's Le Bec-Fin was clean and getting cleaner as an employee hosed down the walk. Perrier pointed this out to litter cop Anthony Gordy with French-accented despair.

To pick or not to pick. Although there are no official rules in the trash-picking trade, urban miners do have their basic tenets. "As far as I'm concerned, if it's in a dumpster, people have put it away," David Vann said. "If somebody put something on top of a trash can, and the trash man is going to pick it up, I don't see the problem if I get it first. " Vann speaks the truth. But technically, if he wants to salvage, he is required to get a $200 business privilege license and a $20 discarded waste collector's license from the city, explained Eileen O'Brien, administration analyst for the sanitation division of the city's streets department.

At Monday night's work session, the Warminster Board of Supervisors agreed to see to it that an overflowing dumpster was removed from the Buttonwood Farms development, on Delmont Road off of Street Road. The dumpster is the most visible of a long list of eyesores and safety hazards that residents of the development said they have had to tolerate for more than a year now. The developer, the Mallard Group of Huntingdon Valley, has left the site, and the Bank & Trust Co. of Old York Road took over the development's public improvements in August after winning a $1.26 million judgment against the developer for nonpayment of a construction loan.

They're being called the "Fortunate Five. " Five tiny kittens were found last week in a duct-taped beer box that had been tossed into a Dumpster at the Bell Lake Park Apartments in Woodbury. They were spared almost certain death when an 11-year-old boy, told by his mother to empty the trash, heard faint mewing from inside the bin. Yesterday, the feline siblings - two females, Kahlua and Malibu, and three males, Jack, Bud and Miller - were put up for adoption by Furrever Friends, a South Jersey animal-rescue group.

Police have recovered a cache of car stereos, other automotive accessories, and tools they say were stolen from 50 cars in recent weeks and have charged two local men in connection with those thefts. Robert Buck, 41, of the 800 block of State Road, Croydon, and Jonathan Evans, 32, of Marion Avenue, Levittown, were arrested at 6 p.m. Wednesday after police simultaneously raided Buck's apartment and a rental storage locker and recovered most of the goods. Both men were charged with theft, receiving stolen property, and conspiracy in the vehicular break-in spree, which police said occurred over the last five weeks in the Levittown and Croydon areas.

When residents speak out at Jenkintown Borough Council meetings, their comments are usually short. But Monday night, residents and merchants complained for more than an hour about code enforcement and police problems in the borough. Also, Councilman Walter G. Bertha has resigned from the 12-member panel, effective Monday. Council President Judith J. O'Neill announced the resignation at the council meeting. Bertha, who has served for three years, said Tuesday that he was quitting for "personal reasons" but declined to elaborate.

APROMINENT Philadelphia crime sleuth is speculating that the region's high-profile murder mystery - the shocking discovery of ex-Pentagon official John "Jack" Wheeler III in a Wilmington landfill - might not be a murder at all. William Fleisher, an ex-cop who co-founded Philadelphia's murder-solving Vidocq Society, said that the discovery of eyewitnesses and surveillance video of a disoriented Wheeler before he died suggests that the 66-year-old man...

Friends and family of 19-year-old College of New Jersey freshman John Fiocco Jr. have been granted some measure of closure with the recovery of his body. But investigators probing the Gloucester County student's disappearance will have trouble resting until they find out exactly what happened to him. New Jersey state police confirmed yesterday that the body they found Tuesday afternoon in a Bucks County landfill is that of Fiocco, who disappeared from his campus dormitory a month ago. "There continues to be no evidence of foul play," said Col. Joseph "Rick" Fuentes, the state police superintendent, at a news conference yesterday on the college's suburban Trenton campus.

Prosecutors said yesterday that suspended Woodbury Police Sgt. Andrew J. Woodrow strangled his wife and mother-in-law in the Williamstown trailer home where the three lived in August 1989, then drove south and stuffed their bodies in a dumpster behind a food market in a Baltimore suburb. The remains of the two women, which had gone unidentified until Thursday, were identified yesterday as those of Woodrow's wife, Diane Palumbo Woodrow, 32, and his mother-in-law, Yolanda Nazzario Palumbo, 67, investigators said.

An East Norriton man convicted of killing a woman after his vehicle slammed her car off Allentown Road in Franconia Township will spend at least 3 1/2 years in state prison, beginning tomorrow. Last week, Montgomery County Court Judge Samuel W. Salus 2d sentenced Peter P. Highlands, 44, to two concurrent sentences of between 3 1/2 and seven years in prison for vehicular homicide while driving under the influence of alcohol, aggravated assault and related charges. Highlands was convicted in May during a four-day, non-jury trial.