Mafia Is Giving Italians Cancer

The Mafia Is Giving Italians Cancer

…In the late 1980s, the mafia moved into a lucrative new area of business.

Soon farmers began to notice strange incidents in fields and forests. They had been given a new liquid fertilizer, yet it seemed so strong that it corroded metal tanks, leaked from lorries and stunted plants. One day a forestry official in Brescia gave a young journalist named Enrico Fontana a vial of this fertilizer and said “Smell what they are giving people to spread on agricultural land”. The reporter recoiled at the bitter stench: it was cyanide. So in 1990 he published two exposés in L’Espresso, a prominent news weekly, disclosing that organized crime was dumping dangerous materials on fields and in landfill sites.

Evidence to support his claims slowly began to mount. A mafia supergrass called Nunzio Perrella told investigators in Naples all about the new trade, leading to scores of arrests of gangsters and corrupt officials in March 1993. They were soon free, however. Yet the following year Fontana – now working on investigations for Legambiente, an environmental group – published a report called Garbage Inc., revealing the same people were trafficking illegal waste in other parts of Italy. There was a public outcry, a parliamentary commission and polluted parts of Campania were declared an officially degraded zone.

“We thought we had a result. Our job was done,” Fontana told me with a rueful smile as we sat drinking coffee in the sun outside Legambiente’s headquarters in Rome. “But then nothing happened. Nothing. What was missing was that we did not put together legal dumping with illegal dumping. And while it was obvious this was bad for the land, we did not notice any health outcomes at that stage, since they are not obvious immediately.”

Fontana coined the phrase ‘eco-mafia’ and began issuing annual reports into their actions. Yet he was unaware at the time of two other important developments. First, a police officer in Campania named Roberto Mancini stumbled on the scale of the mafia’s new activities, discovering they were hiding toxic waste from businesses in the industrial north among local household waste poured into landfill sites. He wrote a memo for his superiors detailing his findings. But the report was buried and Mancini was later transferred to Rome. With cruel irony, Mancini died two years ago from cancer, his career wrecked by attempts to unwittingly save thousands more from the same fate.

Then came the case of Carmine Schiavone, one of the most important supergrasses in Italian history. As a leader of the notorious Casalesi clan in Naples, he confessed to losing count of the number of people killed on his orders. His explosive testimonies revealed widespread bribery of politicians and eventually put 16 crime bosses behind bars for life, after trials that dragged on for years and left five witnesses dead. Yet Schiavone claimed to have broken the mafia code of silence out of fears for the environment. And his most devastating disclosures were given in private to a 1997 parliamentary committee in Rome about toxic waste dumping – and then astonishingly kept secret for almost 17 years.

“We are talking about millions of tonnes,” said Schiavone, who even claimed German nuclear waste was ferried to Campania. “I knew that people were doomed to die.” In front of the committee he described dumping operations taking place in the dead of night, guarded by men in military uniforms and with the connivance of senior police officers, politicians and businesspeople. The supergrass showed state officials the locations of sites because, he predicted with startling accuracy, nearby residents would be “dying of cancer within 20 years”.

[Former mafia leader Carmine] Schiavone claimed to have broken the mafia code of silence out of fears for the environment.

This illegal trade was a by-product of tax dodging in a country with one of the highest levels of evasion in western Europe. Businesses massaging their incomes had to mask the scale of their activities – and that meant hiding huge amounts of hazardous waste. By the turn of the century, so much was being dumped in Campania it could not be hidden easily among household rubbish, so the mafia began burning it. Trucks would turn up at night, waste would be emptied, then huge fires started – 6,300 times a year at one point. Locals lined doors with damp towels to keep out vile smells – and the area was branded the ‘Land of Fires’.

The fires intensified environmental damage and spread the health consequences. Soon doctors began to notice an upturn in birth defects and cancers, which they would discuss in bafflement over meal breaks. Among them was Alfredo Mazza, a lively Neapolitan – then training to become a cardiologist – who enjoys the cut and thrust of political campaigning. “Lots of people were becoming ill,” he said. “I knew young people who were sick from school, some friends died, lots of people in this area were dying. People said to me: you are a doctor from this area – you must take on this battle.”

Mazza asked health authorities for the cancer data for an eastern region of Campania with high levels of dumping – and when he received the results, he believed it showed evidence of links between environmental degradation and a rising incidence of tumors. Male death rates from bladder and liver cancer in this rural district were about twice national rates, for instance, and female mortality from liver cancer was more than three times the Italian average. And while improved diagnosis and treatment were boosting survival rates elsewhere, local medics were seeing rising mortality and younger patients. “The age was important,” he said. “Cancer is usually found in older people, but these were younger people dying.”

The pugnacious young doctor took the devastating data to a local prosecutor and demanded action, but was fobbed off. So he wrote to the Lancet, which published his landmark work in September 2004 in what was to be the first of many reports into the Land of Fires. The article provoked a furore, fuelling local protests over a planned new incinerator, yet led to little real action from the authorities – although Mazza told me he learned later from a friend that Italian intelligence began monitoring him as a ‘troublemaker’.

Now an established heart consultant who has published subsequent studies into the health consequences of hazardous waste, Mazza admits it is impossible to prove precise links between toxic materials, tumors and congenital malformations. But he believes they are only just beginning to see the full scale of health problems. “We are living in the Triangle of Death. These areas suffered terrible damage for many years. Yet still we do not know how many areas are affected, how bad the damage will be or how long it will last.”

Two years after his Lancet report, the tales of gangsters driving across Italy to dump lorries filled with toxic waste in rivers and bury contaminated containers under lush fields reached a wider audience when highlighted in Gomorrah, the ground-breaking mafia exposé by journalist Roberto Saviano. Among the 6 million buyers of the book was an oncologist in Naples named Antonio Marfella, long baffled by both his increasing number of patients and their decreasing age. He knew this was a global phenomenon, yet the speed of change seemed alarmingly fast in Campania.

Marfella held a senior post as head consultant at the Fondazione G Pascale in Napoli, a 235-bed hospital that is the region’s only cancer centre. He said they started seeing the surge in cases around the turn of the century, with the average patient age plummeting from 60 years old to under 40. Suddenly once-rare bone cancer cases became commonplace in children, and the age of most breast cancer patients fell below 40, which is when screening starts in Italy. “Although we are a city on the sea and not industrial, it was like we were living in one of the world’s worst industrialized areas,” he said.

Naples had long been infamous for inept management of its rubbish, with landfill sites filling up strangely fast. Indeed, even as Marfella turned the book’s pages in 2007 there were protests in the streets from residents fed up with the stench of rubbish rotting in the summer heat. Suddenly the white-haired consultant began to understand what was going on around him: “It opened up a vision that seemed unbelievable,” he said. “We knew there was mismanagement of household waste, but we did not know that organized crime had gone outside its usual activities of drug dealing and prostitution into hazardous waste.”

In the nearby town of Acerra, dead and deformed sheep had begun appearing. Then the 50-year-old shepherd tending this flock turned up at the hospital with such aggressive cancer riddling his bones and his blood that doctors could not determine where it had started; one month later he was dead. His daughter asked for tests on his body and these revealed unusually high levels of dioxins. After it emerged his sheep had been tested four times with similarly disturbing results, she launched a court case for damages.

Marfella gave expert evidence in court, which led to a request to speak about the situation in the Italian parliament in January 2008. “I said there were the same levels of toxins in these agricultural areas as were found in industrial sites, which was a paradox. I said it was like postindustrial sites – and I suggested a hypothesis I believed from Gomorrah.” Yet he was demoted on his return from Rome for being ‘alarmist’, a decision that has cost him thousands of pounds a year in lost income.

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