Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System

LAND OF FIRES

It’s not hard to imagine something, not hard to picture in your mind a person or gesture, or something that doesn’t exist. It’s not even complicated to imagine your own death. It’s far more difficult to imagine the economy in all its aspects: the finances, profit percentages, negotiations, debts, and investments. There are no faces to visualize, nothing precise to fix in your mind. You may be able to picture the impact of the economy, but not its cash flows, bank accounts, individual transactions. If you try to imagine it all, you risk shutting your eyes to concentrate and racking your brains till you start seeing those psychedelic distortions painted on the backs of your eyelids.

I kept trying to construct in my mind an image of the economy, something that could convey the idea of its process and production, its buying and selling. But it was impossible to come up with a flow chart, something of precise iconic compactness. Perhaps the only way to represent the workings of the economy is to understand what it leaves behind, to follow the trail of parts that fall away, like flaking of dead skin, as it marches onward.

The most concrete emblem of every economic cycle is the dump. Accumulating everything that ever was, dumps are the true aftermath of consumption, something more than the mark every product leaves on the surface of the earth. The south of Italy is the end of the line for the dregs of production, useless leftovers, and toxic waste. If all the trash that, according to the Italian environmental group Legambiente, escapes official inspection were collected in one place, it would form a mountain weighing 14 million tons and rising 47,900 feet from a base of three hectares. Mont Blanc rises 15,780 feet, Everest 29,015. So this heap of unregulated and unreported waste would be the highest mountain on earth. This is how I came to imagine the DNA of the economy, its commercial transactions and profit dividends, the additions and subtractions of accountants. It is as if this mountain had exploded and scattered over the south of Italy, in particular in Campania, Sicily, Calabria, and Puglia, the regions with the greatest number of environmental crimes. These same regions head the list for the largest criminal associations, the highest unemployment rate, and the greatest number of volunteers for the military and police forces. Always the same list, eternal and immutable. In the last thirty years, the area around Caserta, between the Garigliano River and Lake Patria—the land of the Mazzoni clan—has absorbed tons of ordinary and toxic waste.

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; 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.

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 videocassette 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 to 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!”