Hardest hit by the cancer of traffic in poisons are the outskirts of Naples—Giugliano, Qualiano, Villaricca, Nola, Acerra, and Marigliano—and the nearly 115 square miles comprising the towns of Grazzanise, Cancello Arnone, Santa Maria La Fossa, Castelvolturno, and Casal di Principe. On no other land in the Western world has a greater amount of toxic and nontoxic waste been illegally dumped. In the last five years the trash business has shown an overall increase of 29.8 percent, a growth comparable only to that of the cocaine market. The Camorra clans became the European leaders in waste disposal in the late 1990s; together with their middlemen, they have lined their pockets with 44 billion euros in proceeds in four years. In 2002 the parliamentary report from the minister of the interior noted a shift from rubbish collection to a pact among certain insiders in the business, aimed at exercising full control over the entire cycle. Waste management has become such big business that, despite continuous tensions, the two branches of the Casalesi clan, headed by Sandokan Schiavone and Francesco Cicciotto di Mezzanotte Bidognetti, have managed to share the vast market and avoid a head-on collision. But the Casalesi are not alone. The Mallardo clan of Giugliano distributes an immense quantity of refuse throughout its territory and swiftly apportions its revenues. An abandoned quarry in the area was discovered to be completely overflowing with trash—the equivalent of twenty-eight thousand tractor trailers. Imagine a line of trucks, bumper to bumper, that runs from Caserta all the way to Milan.
The bosses have had no qualms about saturating their towns with toxins and letting the lands that surround their estates go bad. The life of a boss is short; the power of a clan, between vendettas, arrests, killings, and life sentences, cannot last for long. To flood an area with toxic waste and circle one’s city with poisonous mountain ranges is a problem only for someone with a sense of social responsibility and a long-term concept of power. In the here and now of business, there are no negatives, only a high profit margin. Most trafficking in toxic waste runs in just one direction: north to south. Eighteen thousand tons of toxic waste from Brescia have been dumped around Naples and Caserta since the late 1990s, and a million tons ended up in Santa Maria Capua Vetere over four years. Refuse from northern treatment facilities in Milan, Pavia, and Pisa has been shipped to Campania. The public prosecutor’s offices in Naples and Santa Maria Capua Vetere, led by Donato Ceglie, discovered that in 2003 more than sixty-five hundred tons of refuse from Lombardy arrived in Trentola Ducenta near Caserta over the space of forty days.
The countrysides around Naples and Caserta are veritable maps of garbage, litmus tests of Italian industry. The destiny of countless Italian industrial products can be seen in the local landfills and quarries. I’ve always liked riding my Vespa along the dumps, on country roads that have been cemented over to facilitate truck traffic. I feel I’m moving among the remains of civilization or the strata of commercial transactions, flanking pyramids of production or the record of distances traveled; here the geography of things creates a varied and multiform mosaic. Every scrap of production, the leftovers from every activity, end up here. One day a farmer was plowing a newly purchased field on the line between Naples and Caserta when all of a sudden the tractor motor stalled, as if the earth were unusually compact in that spot. Bits of paper started sprouting up on either side of the plow. Money. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of bills. The farmer threw himself from his tractor and began frenetically collecting the loot hidden by some unknown thief, the fruit of some unknown heist. But it was merely shredded and faded scraps. Minced money from the Banca d’Italia, bales of consumed currency, now out of circulation. The temple of the lira had ended up underground, the bits of old paper currency leaching lead into a cauliflower field.
Near Villaricca the carabinieri identified a piece of land where paper towels from hundreds of dairy farms in the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, and Lombardy had been dumped: towels used for cleaning cow udders. Farmhands have to clean the udders constantly—two, three, four times a day—every time they attach the suction cups of the automatic milker. As a result the cows often develop mastitis and similar diseases and begin to secrete pus and blood. They’re not allowed to rest, however. Their udders are simply cleaned every half hour so that the pus and blood do not get into the milk and ruin an entire can. Maybe it was just my imagination, or perhaps the heaps of yellowish udder paper distorted my senses, but they smelled like sour milk. The fact is that the trash, accumulated over decades, has reconfigured the horizons, created previously nonexistent hills, invented new odors, and suddenly restored lost mass to mountains devoured by quarries. Walking in the Campania hinterlands, one absorbs the odors of everything that industry produces. Seeing the earth mixed with the arterial, poisonous blood from an entire region of factories, I am reminded of a Play-Doh ball, the kind children make, using every available color. For decades the city of Milan’s trash was dumped near Grazzanise; all the trash collected in the city’s garbage bins or swept up each morning by the street cleaners was shipped here. Eight hundred tons of waste from the province of Milan end up in Germany every day, yet the total trash production is thirteen hundred tons. Five hundred tons are missing from official records. Where they end up is unclear, but it’s highly probable that this phantom refuse is scattered about the south of Italy. Printer toner also fouls the land, as the 2006 operation coordinated by the Santa Maria Capua Vetere public prosecutor’s office and entitled Madre Terra—Mother Earth—discovered. At night, trucks officially transporting compost or fertilizer were dumping toner from Tuscan and Lombard offices in Villa Literno, Castelvolturno, and San Tammaro. Every time it rained, a strong, acid smell blossomed: the land had become saturated with hexavalent chromium. Once inhaled, it lodges in the red blood cells and hair and causes ulcers, respiratory and kidney problems, and lung cancer.
Every foot of land has its own type of trash. A dentist friend of mine once told me that a group of boys had brought him some skulls. Real human skulls. They wanted him to clean the teeth. Like so many little Hamlets, each boy held a skull in one hand and a wad of money to pay for the dental work in the other. The dentist threw them out of his office and then called me, agitated. “Where the hell do they get those skulls? Where do they find them?” He was imagining apocalyptic scenes, satanic rites, boys initiated in the language of Beelzebub. I just laughed. It wasn’t hard to figure out. I once got a flat tire passing Santa Maria Capua Vetere on my Vespa; I’d run over what looked like a sharp stick. First I thought it was a buffalo femur, but it was too small. It was a human femur. Cemeteries periodically perform exhumations, removing what younger gravediggers call the superdead, those buried for more than forty years. The cemetery directors are supposed to call specialized firms to dispose of the bodies, caskets, and everything else, down to the votive lamps. Removal is expensive, so the directors bribe the gravediggers to throw everything together on a truck: dirt, rotting caskets, and bones. Great-great-grandparents and great-grandparents, ancestors from who knows where, were piling up in the Caserta countryside. In February 2006 the Caserta NAS—the branch of the carabinieri in charge of monitoring food adulteration and protecting public health—discovered that so many dead had been dumped in Santa Maria Capua Vetere that people crossed themselves when they passed by, as if it were a cemetery. Young boys would steal the rubber gloves from their mothers’ kitchens and dig with hands and spoons for skulls and intact rib cages. Flea market vendors pay up to 100 euros for a skull with white teeth. A rib cage with all the ribs in place could bring up to 300 euros. There’s no market for shin, thigh, or arm bones; hands, yes, but they decompose easily in the soil. Skulls with blackened teeth are worth 50 euros. There’s not much of a market for them; potential buyers are not repulsed by the idea of death, apparently, but by tooth enamel that eventually starts to decay.
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; smo
ke-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.
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