Authors: Roberto Saviano
The clans manage to drain all sorts of things from north to south. The bishop of Nola called the south of Italy the illegal dumping ground for the rich, industrialized north. Dross from the thermal metallurgy of aluminum; smoke-abatement dust from the steel and iron industry; derivatives from thermoelectric plants and incinerators; paint dregs; liquids contaminated with heavy metals; asbestos; polluted soil from reclamation projects that then pollutes other, previously uncontaminated soil; toxic waste from old petrochemical companies such as the old Enichem of Priolo; sludge from tanning factories near Santa Croce sull’ Arno; and sediment from the purifiers of primarily publicly owned companies in Venice and Forlí.
Large companies as well as small businesses eager to rid themselves cheaply of material from which they can no longer extract anything except costs are the first step in illegal disposal. Next come the warehouse owners who shuffle the documents and collect the waste;
often they dilute the toxic concentration by mixing it with regular trash, thereby registering the whole as below the toxic level set by the CER, the waste catalog of the European Community. Chemicals are essential for rebaptizing toxic waste as innocuous trash. Many operators supply false identification forms and deceptive analytic codes. Then there are the carriers who haul the waste to the selected dump site. Finally there are the people who allow for disposal: managers of authorized landfills or compost facilities where waste is turned into fertilizer, as well as owners of abandoned quarries or farmlands given over to illegal dumping. Any space with an owner can become a dump site. Fundamental to the success of the whole operation are public officials and employees who do not check or verify procedures or who allow people clearly involved in organized crime to manage quarries or landfills. The clans do not need to make blood pacts with politicians or ally themselves with political parties. All it takes is one official, one technician, one employee—one individual who wants to add to his salary. And so the business is conducted, with extreme flexibility and quiet discretion, and turns a profit for every party involved. But its architects are the stakeholders; they are the real criminal geniuses of illegal toxic-waste management. The best Italian stakeholders are shaped here, in Naples, Salerno, and Caserta. Stakeholders in business jargon are entrepreneurs who are involved in an economic project in such a way as to directly or indirectly influence its outcome. Toxic-waste stakeholders have come to constitute a regular managerial class. During the stagnant stretches of my life when I was out of work, I’d often have someone say to me, “You have a college degree and the skills, why don’t you become a stake?”
In southern Italy, at least for college graduates whose fathers are not lawyers or accountants, becoming a stakeholder is a sure path to enrichment and professional satisfaction. Educated and presentable, they study environmental policy in the United States or England for a few years and then become middlemen. I knew one. One of the first. One of the best. His name was Franco. Before listening to him and
watching him work, I understood nothing of the treasure trove of trash. I met him on the train on the way back from Milan. He had graduated from the Bocconi—Italy’s most prestigious business school—and in Germany had become an expert in environmental renewal policy. One of the stakeholder’s prime skills is knowing the European Community’s waste catalog by heart and understanding how to maneuver within it, so as to work around the regulations and to find hidden shortcuts into the business community. Franco was originally from Villa Literno, and he wanted to involve me in his trade. The first thing he told me about his work was the importance of physical appearance, the dos and don’ts of the successful stakeholder. If you have a receding hairline or a bald spot, it is strictly forbidden to wear a toupee or grow your hair long to comb it across your scalp. For a winning image, you should shave your head, or at least keep your hair short. According to Franco, if a stakeholder is invited to a party, he must avoid skirt-chasing and always be accompanied by a woman. If he doesn’t have a girlfriend or a suitable date, he should hire an escort, a companion of the elegant, deluxe sort.
Stakeholders approach owners of chemical plants, tanneries, and plastics factories and show them their price list. Waste removal is an expense that no Italian businessman feels is necessary. The stakes all say exactly the same thing: “The crap they shit is worth more to them than trash, which they have to drop heaps of money to get rid of.” Stakeholders must never give the impression that they are offering a criminal service, however. They put the industrialists in touch with the clans’ trash disposers, then coordinate every step of the process from a distance.
There are two types of waste producers: those whose only objective is to save on price and who have no concern for the trustworthiness of the removal companies, considering their responsibility complete as soon as the poison leaves their premises; and those directly implicated in the operations, who illegally dispose of the waste themselves. Yet in both cases stakeholder mediation is necessary to
guarantee transportation and identify a dump site, and for help in contacting the right person to declassify the waste. The stakeholder’s office is his car, and he moves hundreds of thousands of tons of waste with a phone and a portable computer. He earns a percentage on the contracts relative to the number of kilos slated for removal. His prices vary. For example, thinners, when handled by a stakeholder with ties to the clans, go for from 10 to 30 eurocents a kilo. Phosphorus sulfide is 1 euro a kilo. Street sweepings 55 cents; packaging with traces of hazardous substances, 1.40 euros; contaminated soil up to 2.30 euros; cemetery remains 15 cents; fluff, or nonmetallic car parts, 1.85 euros, transportation included. The clients’ needs and the difficulty of transport are factored into the prices. The quantities handled by stakeholders are enormous, their profit margins exponential.
Operation Houdini, carried out in 2004, revealed that just one establishment in the Veneto illegally managed about two hundred thousand tons of waste a year. The market price for legal disposal ranges from 21 to 62 cents a kilo, while the clans provide the same service at 9 or 10 cents a kilo. In 2004 the stakeholders in Campania saw to it that eight hundred tons of soil contaminated with hydrocarbon from a chemical company were handled at 25 cents a kilo, transportation included—a savings of 80 percent on regular prices.
The real strength of the stakeholders who work with the Camorra is their full-service guarantee, whereas those employed by legitimate enterprises offer higher prices that do not include transportation. Yet stakeholders hardly ever become clan members. There’s no reason to. Their nonaffiliation is an advantage to both parties: they work freelance for several families, have no hit-squad obligations or specific duties, and do not become battle pawns. A few are nabbed in every roundup, but the sentences are light: it’s difficult to prove their direct responsibility because they do not formally participate in any step of the illegal dumping.
Over time I learned to see with the eyes of a stakeholder. A different point of view from that of a builder. A builder sees empty space as something to be filled and tries to occupy the void; a stakeholder looks for the empty space in what is already full. When walking about, Franco did not look at the landscape but thought instead about how to insert something in it. He’d search the land as if it were a giant carpet, look at the mountains and fields for the corner he could lift up and sweep things under. Once when we were walking together, Franco noted an abandoned gas station and realized immediately that the underground tanks could hold dozens of drums of chemical waste. A perfect tomb. Such was his life—an endless search for emptiness. Franco later gave up stakeholding; he stopped chewing up the miles in his car, meeting with businessmen from the northeast, being called all over Italy. He set up a professional training course. Franco’s most important students were Chinese, from Hong Kong. Asian stakeholders learned from their Italian counterparts how to do business with European companies, offering good prices and speedy solutions. When the cost of waste removal in England increased, Chinese stakeholders educated in Campania moved in to offer their services. In March 2005 the Dutch port police in Rotterdam discovered a thousand tons of English urban trash that had officially been passed off as pulp paper for recycling. Every year a million tons of high-tech waste from Europe are unloaded in China. The stakeholders relocate the waste in Guiyu, northeast of Hong Kong. Entombed, shoved underground, drowned in artificial lakes. Just as in Caserta, Guiyu has been contaminated so quickly that the groundwater is now completely polluted, and drinking water must be imported from neighboring provinces. The Hong Kong stakeholders’ dream is to make the port of Naples the hub for European refuse, a floating collection center where the gold of trash can be crammed into containers for burial in China.
The stakeholders from Campania are the best; with the clans’ help, they beat out the Calabrian, Pugliese, and Roman competition
by turning the region’s landfills into one enormous, unlimited discount store. In thirty years of trafficking they’ve managed to confiscate and dispose of all sorts of things, with one sole objective: to bring down the costs so as to contract for greater quantities. King Midas, a 2003 investigation that took its name from an intercepted phone call—”As soon as we touch the trash, it turns into gold”—revealed that every step of the waste cycle makes a profit.
When Franco and I were in the car together, I’d listen to his phone conversations. He’d supply instant advice on how and where to dump toxic waste. He’d discuss copper, arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead, chrome, nickel, cobalt, and molybdenum, move from tannery residues to hospital waste, from urban trash to tires, and explain what to do, carrying in his head entire lists of people and places to turn to. When I thought about poisons mixed in with compost, about tombs of highly toxic waste carved out of the body of the countryside, I went pale. Franco noticed.
“Does this job disgust you? Robbe’, do you know that the stakeholders are the ones who made it possible for this shit country to enter the European Union? Yes or no? Do you know how many workers’ asses have been saved because I fixed it so their companies didn’t spend a fucking cent?”
Franco’s birthplace had trained him well, ever since his boyhood. He knew that in business you earn or you lose—there’s no room for anything else—and he didn’t want to lose or make the people he worked for lose. He justified his actions—to himself and to me—with fierce statistics, which completely altered my previous understanding of toxic waste management. By combining all the data from the Naples and Santa Maria Capua Vetere public prosecutors’ investigations from the late 1990s to the present, it is possible to calculate the economic advantage for businesses that turn to the Camorra for waste removal as 500 million euros. I knew that these investigations reflected only a percentage of the actual infractions, and it made my head spin. With the dead weight of disposal costs lightened by
Neapolitan and Casertan clans, many northern businesses were able to expand, hire workers, and make the entire industrial fabric of the country competitive, which was what pushed Italy into the European Union. Schiavone, Mallardo, Moccia, Bidognetti, La Torre, and all the other families offered a criminal service that relaunched and energized the Italian economy. The 2003 Operation Cassiopea revealed that every week forty tractor trailers filled with waste left the north and headed south; according to the investigators’ reconstructions, they dumped, buried, or otherwise disposed of cadmium, zinc, paint residue, purification-plant sludge, various plastics, arsenic, steel mill by-products, and lead. North-south is the traffickers’ privileged route. Through stakeholders, many a business in the Veneto and Lombardy has adopted a territory in Naples or Caserta and transformed it into an enormous dump site. It’s estimated that in the last five years around 3 million tons of waste has illegally been dumped in Campania, 1 million alone in the province of Caserta, an area specifically designated for this purpose in the clans’ urban development “plans.”
Tuscany, the most environmentally conscious region of Italy, plays a significant role in the geography of the illicit traffic. According to at least three investigations, King Midas in 2003, and Fly and Organic Agriculture in 2004, numerous steps of the process, from production to brokering, are concentrated here.
Not only do enormous quantities of illegally managed waste come from Tuscany, the region is also a regular base of operations for a whole host of persons involved in these criminal activities, from stakeholders to cooperating chemists to owners of compost sites who allow waste to be mixed with the compost. But the domain of toxic waste recycling is expanding. Further investigations have revealed activity in Umbria and Molise, regions that had seemed immune. In Molise, the 2004 Operation Fly, coordinated by the federal public
prosecutor’s office of Larino, brought to light the illegal removal of 120 tons of special waste from the metallurgy, steel, and iron industries. The clans ground up 320 tons of old road surface with an elevated tar density and had identified a compost site ready to mix it with fill so as to hide it in the Umbrian countryside. Such recycling metamorphoses generate exponential earnings at every step. It’s not enough to disguise the toxic content; further gains can be had by transforming the poisons into fertilizer and selling it. Four hectares of land near the Molise coast were tilled with fertilizer derived from tannery wastes; nine tons of grain with elevated concentrations of chrome were recovered. The traffickers had chosen the Molise coast—the section between Termoli and Campomarino—to illegally dump dangerous and special wastes from northern Italian businesses. But according to recent investigations by the Santa Maria Capua Vetere public prosecutor’s office, the true center for stockpiling is the Veneto, which has fed illegal traffic nationwide for years. The foundries in the north carelessly dispose of their dross, mixing it with the compost used to fertilize hundreds of agricultural fields.