Italy mobsters block efforts to clean up toxic trash heaps

Raffaele del Giudice was a crusader. Squeezed into a sports jacket and a beat-up Fiat, he roamed the illegal trash dumps of southern Italy, covering his nose against the stench and exposing what he considers the ecological crime of the century.

Then people started being threatened. Ostracized. Killed. Del Giudice called off his crusade.

Because when you go up against trash here in Campania province, you are going up against a powerful, vicious mafia known as the Camorra. The Naples-based Camorra controls the import, transport and disposal of millions of tons of rubbish, an extremely lucrative business in which the group follows its own rules, ignores regulations on toxic waste and contaminates once-fertile farmland, country fields, forests and rivers.

Beyond the ugliness of it all, evidence now suggests that the garbage is poisoning the food chain and may be causing cancer, birth defects and other health problems.

Del Giudice calls it Italy's Chernobyl.

There are few more dramatic, and putrid, symbols of the mafia's persistent power in Italy and the government's -- some would say willful -- impotence in the face of it. It's almost a cliche: Tony Soprano, after all, was in "waste management."

For most of the last year, Campania suffocated under towering mountains of festering, uncollected garbage. Dumps, legal and illegal, were full to overflowing. Until cleanup crews finally made their move in July, seas of trash blocked roads and doorways and swallowed sidewalks and parks. The Camorra periodically paid Gypsy boys to set fire to portions of the waste, creating Dantesque scenes of a land ablaze, villages and towns filled with toxic smoke.

The blighted condition of southern Italy has earned sanctions from the European Union and condemnation from international health organizations. It ignited violent protests this year and contributed to the downfall of the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi in the spring.

This is not a new problem. For more than 15 years, with the government spending more than $2 billion and appointing seven "trash czars," the problem hasn't gone away. It doesn't get fixed because the mafiosi , and politicians in their pocket, don't want it to be.

"For years the waste has been accumulating, nothing has been done to clean it up, and the consequences are lethal," said Donato Ceglie, the leading "eco-mafia" prosecutor in this region. "They have poisoned the land. They have poisoned the water. And it is getting worse. The trash is still arriving."