"The Italian Mob's Toxic Waste Dumping Is Giving People Cancer"

"Never really known as a friendly group, the Italian mafia has been brutally murdering people for hundreds of years. Most of the time, these killings are quick—some henchmen waylay the target, squeeze a trigger a few times and make their getaway. Yet according to a new report released last week by the Italian National Institute of Health, a few local Italian mobs have been slowly killing dozens of innocent people for decades by way of a multibillion dollar toxic waste disposal racket.

In 2014, the Italian parliament mandated that the National Institute of Health conduct an investigation into the higher than normal rates of death and cancer in 55 municipalities of the Naples and Caserta regions of southern Italy. This region has garnered the nicknames “the Land of Fires” thanks to the frequency with which toxic waste is burned by the local Camorra mob, a practice which gave rise to the region’s other nickname: the Triangle of Death.

The Camorra mob has been running a multi-billion dollar racket in which they dispose of toxic waste for businesses in Italy’s industrial north since at least the early 1990s. By skirting environmental regulations the mob is able to dispose of these hazardous industrial materials for a fraction of the cost of legal disposal, and the industrialists in the north are smart enough to not ask questions about what happens to their garbage once it leaves their hands."

Daniel Oberhaus reports for Motherboard January 4, 2016.