LECCE - The Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate have arrested 13 men for involvement in a criminal scheme relating to the illegal trafficking and disposal of over 600 tonnes of hazardous waste, according to police sources.

  The scheme, however, involved a supply line stretching the length of Italy, with waste being dumped and burned in quarries, farmland and countryside from Salento to the town of Lombardore in Piedmont.

  The group leading this scheme was crippled at dawn on Monday by the 13 arrests made by the Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate of Lecce as part of their operation All Black. Among those arrested were the supposed leader, Roberto Scarcia, 66.

  The other arrests were Luca Di Corrado, 41, and Davide D’Andria, 51 (both from Taranto); Francesco Sperti, 56, from Manduria; Claudio Lo Deserto, 66, from Lecce; Oronzo Marseglia, 57, from San Vito dei Normanni; Palmiro Mazzotta, 74, from Surbo; Luca Grassi, 48, from Lecce; Salvatore Coscarella, 76, from Cosenza and Nestore Coseglia, 55, from Mariano di Napoli. Biagio Campiglia, 42, from Salerno; Franco Giovinazzo, 51, from Reggio Calabria and Antonio Li Muli, 51, from Palermo have been put on house arrest.

  The group have been under investigation since at least 2018 for their hazardous dumping in unauthorised places, forged papers, fake companies and cloned authorisation permits. The charges against them include criminal association and illegal waste trafficking.

  Scarcia was recorded by police, on the phone to his wife in December 2018, talking about “people from Calabria planted in Padua… sons of whores” capable of making huge quantities of waste disappear.

  In another telephone conversation tapped by the police, one of the group is recorded as saying to the driver of a rubbish truck, “there’s a nice warehouse, you enter it, you go down a country road… no one sees shit.”

  There were in total 28 instances of illegal dumping, adding up to over 600 tonnes of waste material, of which at least 142 were hazardous. The investigations found several farmhouses treated like landfills, and quarries fill to the brim, causing untold environmental damage.

  The group had been selling illegal dumping sites, or taking payment to deal with a companies waste. They had originally been working with businesses in Lombardy and Milan, but soon the risks of the long, illegal journeys, the length of the country became too much and they shifted their sights to Calabria and Campania.

  According to the investigation, “the proximity of Scarcia to environments of organised crime in Calabria and Campania (as emerges from some phone-taps)” helped with this change in direction.

  The investigation also took note of several professional "mediators" and owners of companies in the waste management industry, who "consciously and repeatedly bent their professionalism for illegal practices in order to make large sums of money, to the detriment of the environment and public health.”

  In total 44 people and one company, N.D.N. Ecorecuperi of Caserta, are under investigation.

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