Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  If Pasolini were alive and able to journey through Terra di Lavoro today, he would see a landscape radically transformed by the arrival of factories in the 1960s, and by industrial decline and the post-earthquake building boom in the 1980s. But perhaps more than these visible changes, Pasolini would be struck by a new smell. In many parts of the land north of Naples, the stench of rubbish fills the air—rubbish that has become the contemporary camorra’s most important new source of wealth.

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  CAMORRA: An Italian Chernobyl

  WHEN THE SECOND REPUBLIC WAS BORN, NAPLES AND THE CAMPANIA REGION WERE in the midst of a garbage crisis. No scheme to recycle the waste from homes and shops had yet got off the ground. Dumps were full to overflowing. Worrying signs of health problems among the population near the dumps were beginning to emerge.

  Early in 1994, the government declared an emergency and appointed a ‘Commissariat’ to manage the day-to-day collection and disposal while the regional government prepared a long-term solution. But no long-term solution emerged: it was the usual story of political stasis and confusion. At that point, in 1996, the Commissariat was given the task of planning Campania’s way out of the emergency, and the power to override normal planning restrictions and local government controls in order to put the plan into place.

  The resulting scheme seemed sleek. Municipal trash was to be sorted and disposed of in stages. First, recyclables would be creamed off at the point of collection. Then there was to be a further, centralised sifting to extract both biodegradable matter and any dangerous substances. The next stage involved mashing and compacting what was left into so-called ‘ecobales’ that could be used as fuel. And finally those ecobales would be burned to generate clean electricity. Seven plants to produce ecobales would need to be built, and two new incinerator-generators. Once they were up and running, it was claimed, Campania would have a perfect cycle of environmentally friendly refuse collection and reuse. No one heeded the waste-management experts who said that the scheme was unrealistic and based on principles that had already failed elsewhere.

  The solution to Campania’s rubbish emergency rapidly turned into an environmental disaster. The rubbish-collection cycle was dysfunctional at every stage.

  Eighteen consortia were set up in the 1990s to manage collection and recycling in different parts of the region. But for a variety of reasons they did not do their job: trash entered the waste-management system in an undifferentiated state.

  At that point in the cycle the most serious problems started. An alliance of four companies, known as FIBE, won the contract to build the ecobale plants and the incinerator-generators. The main reasons FIBE won were the low cost and high speed of their proposals: this was an emergency, after all. FIBE was offered a contract with the Campania regional government that contained inadequate penalty clauses.

  FIBE companies promised they would have the incinerator-generators up and running by the end of 2000. But by that date, they had not even obtained planning permission. Only one of the incinerator-generators had been completed by the end of 2007. Plans for the second incinerator-generator were finally cancelled in 2012.

  FIBE companies were also given pretty much a free rein in choosing where to build their plants. The first incinerator-generator was built in Acerra, in northern Campania, just a few hundred metres away from a large children’s hospital. The second was originally to be sited only twenty kilometres away from the first. This was a part of the country famous for being the centre of buffalo-milk mozzarella production. But even before the first incinerator-generator was built, the area already hosted more than its fair share of legal and illegal dumps, and dioxin poisoning had been discovered in farm animals and crops. The incinerator-generator that was actually built was quickly shown to be working badly, spreading gases over a ten-kilometre radius.

  The seven ecobale plants were even worse: a parliamentary report found that the ecobales they produced were just large plastic-wrapped cubes of unsifted rubbish that were too damp and too filled with poisons to incinerate, even if the incinerators had been working. Nothing could be done except stockpile them. Across Campania, grey and white ziggurats of ecobales began to climb skywards. The regional rubbish Commissar told parliament in 2004 that every month 40,000 square metres of land was being used up to store ecobales.

  Periodically, throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, Campania’s broken-down garbage-disposal system seized up entirely. At the worst point in 2007–8, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste from homes and shops accumulated in the streets. The authorities responded by forcibly reopening rubbish dumps that had already been deemed to be full. Local people, justifiably worried about the impact on their quality of life, staged angry protests. News cameras from around the world relayed the pictures of both the trash-mountains and the protests, causing untold damage to the reputation of Naples, Campania and Italy. Only in the last couple of years have the authorities begun to get a grip on the situation, it seems, although many piles of ecobales remain to scar the landscape.

  The monnezza scandal (named after the Neapolitan for garbage) is still subject to legal proceedings: a number of politicians, entrepreneurs and administrators have been charged with fraud or negligence. Irrespective of the precise criminal blame, the story is one of shambolic politics, irresponsible business (including northern business), bad planning, mismanagement, and inadequate monitoring. The problems started at the top: the Commissariat supposed to keep tabs on the whole system stands accused of cronyism and inflated expenses as well as a manifest failure to make sure that the rubbish cycle actually worked.

  The monnezza affair bears many similarities to the chaos of reconstruction following the 1980 earthquake. For one thing, both of them created opportunities for organised crime. The camorra was late to enter the construction industry when compared to Cosa Nostra and the ’ndrangheta. While Sicilian gangsters were heavily involved in the building boom of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Calabrians followed suit in the 1960s and 1970s, only following the 1980 earthquake did camorristi start earning serious money from concrete. But when it came to rubbish, the camorra clans became pioneers and protagonists. ‘Eco-mafia’ is a term coined by Italian environmentalists to refer to the damage the underworld inflicts on Italy’s natural and other resources—from illegal building to the traffic in architectural treasures. The waste sector is the most lucrative eco-mafia activity, and one of the biggest growth areas in criminal enterprise in the last two decades.

  As with construction, the camorra infiltrated the rubbish system in a variety of ways, starting with the eighteen consortia set up to manage recycling in different parts of the region. Many of the people employed in these consortia were drawn from militant lobby groups of unemployed people. Some of those lobby groups, which date back to the 1970s, have been linked to the camorra: their leaders have been shown to have extracted bribes from members in return for the promise of a job; quite a few of the members have criminal records. In 2004, the regional rubbish Commissar told a parliamentary inquiry that: ‘It’s a miracle even if 200 of the 2,316 people [employed by the recycling consortia] actually do any work.’ It is estimated that, by the end of 2007, more than forty of the lorries bought to transport recycled rubbish had been stolen.

  Cash from trash. Shocking mismanagement of the rubbish system created lucrative opportunities for the camorra, Naples, 2008.

  The camorra also moved in on the subcontracts and sub-subcontracts handed out for moving the ecobales around. Since the days of the post-earthquake construction boom, the camorra has had a near-monopoly on earth-moving. There is evidence of camorra profiteering on the deals that were rushed through to buy land where ecobales could be stored.

  In some places, notably around Chiaiano, young camorristi took control of the protests against reopening old garbage dumps. Inevitably, the demonstrations turned violent. There were probably two reasons why the camorra became involved. First, because their bosses had an economic interest in perpe
tuating the emergency. And second, because they wanted to pose as community leaders, champions of NIMBYism. Much of the trouble was concentrated at a dump not far from Marano, the base of the Nuvoletta clan. A banner was hoisted above the entrance to the town: ‘The state is absent, but we are here’. Nobody needed to be told who this ‘we’ was.

  Mondragone, the buffalo-milk mozzarella capital on the northern coast of Campania, was the base for a waste-management company called Eco4 that was at the centre of a thoroughgoing infiltration of the rubbish cycle by the clans: an illicit circuit of votes, jobs, inflated invoices, rigged contracts and bribes tied together politicians, administrators, entrepreneurs and camorristi. In the summer of 2007, one of the Eco4 directors implicated in the case, Michele Orsi, started to give evidence to magistrates. The following May he went out with his young daughter to buy a bottle of Coca-Cola and was shot eighteen times. Other witnesses in the Eco4 case implicated a senior politician close to Silvio Berlusconi. In 2009, Nicola Cosentino was both Junior Minister for Finance and the coordinator of Berlusconi’s party in the Campania region when magistrates asked parliament for authorisation to proceed against him for working with the camorra. Berlusconi’s governing majority turned down the request. The following year parliament refused to give investigators permission to use phone-tap evidence against Cosentino, although he did resign from his government job later that year when he was involved in another scandal. In January 2012 parliament again sheltered him from arrest under camorra-related charges. Cosentino claimed that he was the victim of ‘media, political and judicial aggression’.

  However, by far the most worrying aspect of eco-mafia crime in Campania is not directly related to the rubbish emergency and the ecobales affair. In the early 1990s, evidence began to emerge that camorristi were illegally dumping millions of tonnes of toxic waste from hospitals and a variety of industries such as steel, paint, fertiliser, leather and plastics. The poisons found to be involved included asbestos, arsenic, lead and cadmium. The picture was confirmed by the investigation known as Operation Cassiopea between 1999 and 2003. Although the camorra’s trucks transported and dumped the waste in Campania, they were only the end point of a national system. Agents for camorra-backed waste-management firms toured the north and centre of the country, offering to make companies’ dangerous by-products vanish for as little as a tenth of the cost of legal disposal. Obliging politicians and bureaucrats along the toxic-waste route made sure that the paperwork was in order. The camorristi tipped the waste anywhere and everywhere in the territory they controlled, ranging from ordinary municipal dumps to roadside ditches. Some of the toxic waste was blended with other substances to make ‘compost’. In many cases the waste was placed on top of a layer of car tyres and burned to destroy the evidence, thus poisoning the air as well as the soil and the water table. The camorra also dumped toxic waste into the quarries situated in the hillier parts of the Terra di Lavoro, from which they extracted the sand and gravel for their concrete plants. Many of these quarries were also illegal. In 2005, a judge described the disappearance of whole mountains in what he called a ‘meteorite effect’. Hence the harm from one eco-mafia crime was multiplied by that from another.

  The profits of this trade were enormous. One toxic-waste dealer who turned state’s evidence handed over a property portfolio that included forty-five apartments and a hotel, to a total value of $65 million.

  Many of those charged in the trial that resulted from the Cassiopea investigation confessed. Despite that, in September 2011, a judge decided not to carry on with the case because inordinate delays in procedure meant that the crimes would inevitably have fallen under Italy’s statute of limitations: according to Italian law, it all happened too long ago for guilty verdicts to be reached. The toxic waste strewn across the Terra di Lavoro recognises no such time restrictions. Generations of citizens living on this sullied land will pay the price for what the magistrate in charge of the Cassiopea investigation called an ‘Italian Chernobyl’.

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  GOMORRAH

  THE PEAK OF THE NAPLES RUBBISH CRISIS IN 2007–8 COINCIDED WITH THE STARTLING success of a book that has made the camorra better known around the world than it has been since before the First World War. Gomorrah (the title is a pun) was published in 2006 by a little-known twenty-six-year-old writer and journalist called Roberto Saviano.

  Before Gomorrah, the fragmented camorra had once more become the subject of bewildered indifference outside Campania. Reporters who tried to keep the public informed about outbreaks of savagery like the Scampia Blood Feud found that the faces, names and underworld connections proliferated far beyond the tolerance of even the most dogged lay reader.

  Gomorrah is, at first glance, an unlikely book to have reawoken public concern about the apparent chaos in Campania. It is a hybrid: a series of unsettling essays that are part autobiography, part undercover reportage, part political polemic, part history. Compelling as they are, none of these ingredients holds Gomorrah together. The secret of its remorseless grip on Italian readers resides in the way Saviano puts his own sensibility at the centre of the story. His is a kaleidoscopic and immediate personal testimony rooted in a visceral rage and revulsion. He is not content to observe the holes punched in bulletproof glass by an AK-47; he is morbidly drawn to rub his finger against the edges until it bleeds. He feels the salty swill of nausea rise in his throat as yet another teenage hoodlum is scooped into a body bag from a pool of gore in the street during the Scampia Blood Feud. Anger clutches at his chest like asthma when the umpteenth building worker dies on an illegal construction site. The ground seethes beneath him as he explores a landscape contaminated for decades by illegally dumped carcinogens.

  Saviano had every right to make his own feelings so important to his account of the camorra (or ‘the System’, as he taught Italians to call it). For he hails from Casal di Principe, in the heart of the most notorious part of the Terra di Lavoro. After the eclipse of Carmine ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri in 1992, the local clan, the casalesi, became the dominant force in the camorra. The core group of casalesi were a highly proficient team of killers deployed against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata in the 1980s—the ‘Israelis’ to the Professor’s ‘Arabs’. The group evolved into a federation of four criminal families. In 1988, the casalesi did away with their own boss, Antonio Bardellino. After a bloody civil war, they were able to take over his concrete and cocaine interests. They also branched into agricultural fraud and buffalo-milk mozzarella. The casalesi established a local monopoly on the distribution of some major food brands. Moreover, the Eco4 waste-management business was one of their front companies. The casalesi were also the clan responsible for creating the ‘Italian Chernobyl’ on their own territory with their traffic in toxic refuse. According to a penitent from the casalesi, when one of the clan’s affiliates expressed doubts to his boss, he received a dismissive reply: ‘Who gives a toss if we pollute the water table? We drink mineral water anyway.’

  By September 2006, Gomorrah had already won prizes as well as tens of thousands of readers, particularly among the young. At that point Saviano returned to his home town to take part in a demonstration in favour of the rule of law. Speaking in the piazza from a raised table in front of an azure backcloth, he was moved to call out to the bosses by name: ‘Iovine, Schiavone, Zagaria—you aren’t worth a thing!’ He then addressed the crowd: ‘Their power rests on your fear! They must leave this land!’ No one should underestimate the bravery of these words: as Saviano knew, relatives of casalesi bosses were watching him from the piazza.

  Within days, the authorities received intimations of what was to be the first of several credible threats against Saviano’s life. Ever since then, he has lived under armed escort. Gratifyingly, his predicament boosted sales: the latest estimates are that Gomorrah has sold well over two million copies in Italy, and has been translated into fifty-two languages. In 2008, a film dramatisation of Gomorrah—which in my view is even better than the book—won the Grand Prize at t
he Cannes Film Festival and went on to bring Saviano’s vision to a bigger audience still. Gomorrah’s author is now a major celebrity: millions tune in to watch his televised lectures, and his articles reliably boost the circulation of the newspapers that host them.

  Camorra capo Michele Zagaria was captured in an underground bunker in his home town of Casapesenna, 2011. His organisation, the casalesi, became the most powerful in the Campania underworld in the 1990s.

  Gomorrah, and its author, have attracted criticism and even denunciation. Some of the sceptical voices (‘He only did it for the money!’) patently come from the camorra’s supporters, or from people who resent his success, or from the usual chorus that would prefer a decorous silence about organised crime. Less easy to dismiss out of hand are those who point out that Gomorrah’s style is overblown and occasionally pretentious, that it contains exaggerations, and that it merges fact with imagination and unfiltered hearsay. Saviano himself defines his work as a ‘no-fiction novel’, but most of his readers have read it as the unexpurgated truth. Gomorrah undoubtedly draws on investigative documents, like the Cassiopea case on the toxic-waste trade, or the major prosecution mounted against the leaders of the casalesi (known as the Spartacus trial). But now and again there are also stories that do not come from reliable sources—like the book’s arresting opening scene, which depicts the frozen cadavers of illegal Chinese immigrants spilling out from a container hoisted above the port of Naples. Other critics worry that Saviano’s personalised approach has helped turn him into an oracle or a guru. (Saviano is not the unique figure that the media outside Italy sometimes present him as being: in the first nine months of 2012 alone, 262 Italian journalists were threatened in the course of their work, many of them by gangsters.)