“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.
The Campania stakeholders often make use of the clans’ drug-trade routes to discover new territories to hollow out, new tombs to fill. The 2003 Midas investigation reported that waste disposal traffickers were already making contacts in Albania and Costa Rica. But every channel is open now: to the east, to Romania, where the Casalesi have hundreds and hundreds of hectares of land; to Africa, to Mozambique, Somalia, and Nigeria, where the clans have always had backing and contacts. During the tsunami, one of the things that shocked me was seeing the worried, tense faces of Franco’s colleagues. As soon as they saw the photos on the news, they turned pale, as if each one of them had a wife, a lover, or a child in danger. In truth, something much more precious was at risk: their business. After the tidal wave, hundreds of drums of hazardous or radioactive waste from the 1980s and 1990s were found on the beaches in Somalia, between Obbia and Warsheik. Media attention could have blocked the stockholders’ new deals and outlets. But the danger was immediately averted. The charity campaigns for refugees diverted attention from the barrels of poison floating alongside the cadavers. Even the ocean has become a place for endless dumping. Traffickers increasingly fill ship holds with waste, then simulate an accident, letting the ship sink. They make money twice: the insurance covers the accident and the waste is entombed in the deep.
The clans find space everywhere for waste, but the regional administration of Campania, run for ten years by an external commission because of Camorra infiltrations, was unable to dispose of its own trash. While waste from every part of Italy was finding its way illegally to Campania, Campania trash was being shipped to Germany at fifty times the removal price the clans offered their clients. Investigations indicate that in the Naples area alone, of eighteen waste management firms, fifteen are directly tied to the Camorra clans.
The south is flooded with trash and it seems impossible to find a solution. For years the waste has been made into eco-bales, enormous cubes of ground-up garbage wrapped in white. Just to dispose of the eco-bales already accumulated would take fifty-six years. The only solution ever proposed is incineration. Such as at Acerra, where the very idea of building an incinerator generated rebellion and fierce opposition. The clans are ambivalent about incinerators. On the one hand they’re opposed, since they would like to continue to live off landfills and fires, and the state of emergency also allows them to speculate on lands for eco-bale disposal, lands they themselves rent. Yet they’re ready to subcontract construction and management if an incinerator were to be approved. Although the judiciary investigations have not yet reached their conclusions, the people have. They’re terrorized, nervous, frightened. Afraid that in the clans’ hands, incinerators will become perpetual furnaces for half of Italy’s trash, and that all guarantees of environmental safety would be thwarted by the burning of poisons. Thousands of people are on the alert every time a defunct landfill is ordered reopened. Fearing that toxic waste passed off as ordinary trash will arrive from all over the place, they resist till the end rather than risk having their hometown become an uncontrolled depot for new dregs. When in February 2005 the regional commissioner attempted to reopen the landfill at Basso dell’Olmo near Salerno, townspeople spontaneously formed picket lines to impede the arrival of the trucks and block access to the dump. A continuous and constant defense, at all costs. Carmine Iuorio, thirty-four years old, died from exposure as he kept watch one terribly cold night. When they went to wake him in the morning, his beard was frozen and his lips were blue. He’d been dead for at least three hours.
The image of a landfill, pit, or quarry is increasingly a concrete and visible synonym for deadly danger for nearby residents. The Giugliano-Villaricca-Qualiano triangle near Naples has come to be known as the Land of Fires. Thirty-nine landfills, twenty-seven of which contain hazardous waste. An area with a 30 percent annual increase in landfills. When a site approaches capacity, the trash is set on fire. A tried and true method. Gypsy boys are the best at it. The clans give them 50 euros for each mound burned. The technique is simple. They circumscribe each hill with videocas
sette tapes, pour alcohol and gas all over it, twist the tape ends to form an enormous fuse, then move away, putting a cigarette lighter to the fuse. In a few seconds there’s a forest of flames, as if they’d launched napalm bombs. They throw foundry remnants, glue, and naphtha dregs into the fire. Dense black smoke and flames contaminate every inch of land with dioxins. The local agriculture, which used to export fruit and vegetables as far as Scandinavia, is collapsing. Plants sprout diseased, and the land grows infertile. But this disaster and the farmers’ rage are only the umpteenth advantage for the Camorra: desperate landowners sell off their fields, and the clans acquire new landfill sites at low—very low—costs. Meanwhile people are constantly dying of tumors. A slow and silent massacre, difficult to monitor since those who want to live as long as possible flee to the hospitals in the north. The Italian Superior Health Institute has reported that the cancer mortality rate in Campania cities with substantial toxic waste sites has increased by 21 percent in recent years. The lungs fester, the trachea starts to redden, a trip to the hospital for a CAT scan, where the black spots betray the presence of a tumor. Ask the ill of Campania where they’re from and they’ll often reveal the entire path of toxic waste.
I once decided to cross the Land of Fires on foot. I tied a handkerchief over my mouth and nose, the way the Gypsy boys do when they set fires. We looked like a gang of cowboys in a desert of burned garbage. I walked through lands devoured by dioxins, dumped on by trucks, and so gutted by fire that the holes would never completely be erased.
The smoke around me wasn’t dense, but more like a sticky patina on the skin, making me feel damp. Not far from the fires was a series of houses, each one sitting on an enormous X of reinforced concrete. Homes resting on closed landfills and unauthorized dumps, their potential exhausted now that they’d been filled to the point of exploding and everything combustible had been burned. Yet the clans managed to reconvert them to building zones. After all, officially they were pasture and farmlands. And so they built charming clusters of small villas. The terrain was unstable, however; landslides could occur and chasms suddenly open, so a fretwork of reinforced concrete propped up the dwellings, securing them. The houses were affordable. Everyone knew they were standing on tons of trash, but given the chance to own their own home, office clerks, factory workers, and retirees don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
The Land of Fires looks like a constant and repeated apocalypse— routine—as if nothing else could surprise it in its disgust of leachate and old tires. Investigations have revealed the clans’ method for safeguarding their activity from interference by policemen and forest rangers. An ancient method, used by guerrilla warriors and partisans in every corner of the world. Shepherds grazing their sheep, goats, a few cows, are used as lookouts. Rather than watching over their flocks, the best are hired to watch out for intruders. They sound the alarm as soon as they spot a suspicious car. Glances and cell phones are unassailable weapons. I often see them wandering about, trailed by their shriveled and obedient flocks; once I joined them to see where the kids practice driving trucks. The 2003 inquiry Eldorado found that minors are increasingly employed for these operations. Truck drivers no longer want to haul loads all the way to the dump site; they don’t feel safe coming in close contact with toxic waste. It was a driver, after all, who set off the first important inquiry into waste trafficking in 1991. Mario Tamburrino had gone to the hospital with eyes like egg yolks, so swollen his lids couldn’t close. He had gone completely blind, and the outer layer of skin on his hands had burned away, as if gasoline had been ignited on his palms. A drum of toxins had opened near his face; that was enough to blind him and nearly burn him alive. A dry burn, for there were no flames. After that incident the truck drivers asked to use tractor trailers; with the drums at a distance behind the kingpin, they’d never even have to touch them. The most dangerous trucks are the ones hauling adulterated compost, fertilizer mixed with toxins. Just inhaling the fumes could permanently damage the entire respiratory system. The final step— unloading the drums onto smaller trucks to be taken directly to the pit—is the riskiest. No one wants to do it. Piled one on top of another, the drums often get dented, allowing fumes to escape. So when the tractor trailers arrive, the drivers don’t even get out. They let the kids unload and haul the drums to their final destination. A shepherd showed me a slope where the kids practice driving before a shipment arrives. Two pillows under their butts so as to reach the pedals, they learn how to brake on the way down. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old. Two hundred fifty euros a trip. They’re recruited in a bar. The bar owner knows and doesn’t dare protest, but he offers his opinion to anyone who’ll listen as he serves espresso and cappuccino.
“That stuff they make them haul, the more they breathe it in, the sooner they’ll drop dead. They send them to die, not to drive.”
The more the young drivers hear it said that theirs is a dangerous and deadly job, the more they feel up to such an important mission. They stick out their chests, arrogance glinting behind their sunglasses. They feel fine, better all the time. None of them could imagine, not for an instant, that in ten years time they’ll be getting chemotherapy, vomiting up bile, their stomachs, livers, and intestines reduced to a pulp.
It kept on raining. The ground, unable to absorb anything else, quickly turned soggy. The shepherds, unperturbed, went and sat like three emaciated holy men under a makeshift shelter of sheet metal. They kept their eyes on the road while the sheep sought safety by clambering up on a trash heap. One of the shepherds used his walking stick to tilt the roof so that it wouldn’t buckle under the weight of the rain and come crashing down on their heads. I was soaked to the skin, but all that water wasn’t enough to extinguish the burning sensation rising from my stomach and radiating up my neck. I tried to fathom whether human feelings were able to withstand such a vast power machine, if it was possible to act in a way, in any way, that would permit me to live outside of the dynamics of power. I tormented myself trying to grasp if it was possible to try to understand, to discover, to know, without being devoured or destroyed. Or if the choice was between knowing and being compromised, or ignoring—and thus living serenely. Perhaps the only option was to forget, to not see. To listen to the official version of things, to half-listen, distractedly, and respond with nothing more than a sigh. I asked myself if there was anything that held out the possibility of a happy life, or if perhaps I just had to stop dreaming of emancipation and anarchic freedoms and throw myself into the arena, stick a semiautomatic in my underwear and start doing business for real. Convince myself to be part of the connective fabric of my day, to gamble everything, to command and be commanded, to become a beast of profit, a raptor of finance, a samurai of the clans; to turn my life into a battlefield where you don’t hope to survive but merely to go down after a good fight.
I was born in the land of the Camorra, in the territory with the most homicides in Europe, where savagery is interwoven with commerce, where nothing has value except what generates power. Where everything has the taste of a final battle. It seemed impossible to have a moment of peace, not to live constantly in a war where every gesture is a surrender, where every necessity is transformed into weakness, where everything needs to be fought for tooth and nail. In the land of the Camorra, opposing the clans is not a class struggle, an affirmation of a right, or a reappropriation of one’s civic duty. It’s not the realization of one’s honor or the preservation of one’s pride. It’s something more basic, more ferociously carnal. In the land of the Camorra, knowing the clans’ mechanisms for success, their modes of extraction, their investments, means understanding how everything works today everywhere, not merely here. To set oneself against the clans becomes a war of survival, as if existence itself—the food you eat, the lips you kiss, the music you listen to, the pages you read—were merely a way to survive, not the meaning of life. Knowing is thus no longer a sign of moral engagement. Knowing—understanding—becomes a necessity. The only necessity if you want t
o consider yourself worthy of breathing.
My feet were deep in the mire. The water had risen to my thighs. I could feel my heels sinking. A huge refrigerator floated in front of me. I threw myself on it, clutching it tightly with my arms, and let myself be carried. I thought of the final scene of Papillon, based on the novel by Henri Charrière and starring Steve McQueen. I felt like Papillon, who escapes French Guiana on the tide, floating away on a sack of coconuts. It was an absurd thought, but at certain moments there’s nothing else to do but humor your own delirium as something you don’t chose but simply endure. I wanted to shout, to scream, to tear my lungs out like Papillon. I wanted to howl from deep down in my gut, my throat exploding with all the voice left in me: “Hey, you bastards, I’m still here!”
Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah
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