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Mafia Sinks Ships Containing Toxic Waste
Hugh Pickens writes "For years there have been rumors that the mafia was sinking ships with nuclear and other waste on board as part of a money-making racket. Now, BBC reports on a sunken vessel that has been found 30km off the coast of Italy. Murky pictures taken by a robot camera show the vessel intact, and alongside it are a number of yellow barrels with labels indicating the contents are toxic. The ship's location was revealed by Francesco Fonti, an ex-member of Calabria's feared 'Ndrangheta crime group, who confessed to using explosives to sink this vessel and two others as part of an illegal operation to bypass rules on the disposal of toxic waste. Experts are now examining samples taken from the wreck, and an official says that if the samples prove to be radioactive then a search for up to 30 other sunken vessels believed scuttled by the mafia would begin immediately. 'The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,' says Silvestro Greco, head of Calabria's environment agency."
spicy meatball!
Fuck. Me. I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a person with no moral fibre at all. I can't imagine it, must be weird.
Toxic waste sleeps with the fishes...
So then what? Nothing happens to these people? If they are connected to this mess and convicted they should press them into service as part of the clean up process of all this crap. Make them work cleaning up the lethal crap they felt no qualms about exposing everyone else to.
"If it makes me $1000, I'll do it. That it will harm 10.000.000 people, it doesn't matter".
That said, nuclear waste is not necessarily the most dangerous imaginable. Believe it or not, the humble dioxines can be more dangerous. If for no other reason, because they accumulate in the body without ever leaving it (except for liposuction).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Just imagine those waify PETA chicks getting all mad and kicking the big bruiser mafia guys asses!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
I don't have a hard time imagining crooked corporations paying to have their chemical waste disposed under the table like this, but who has nuclear waste that would do this? At least here in the US I can't see a power plant getting away with this - they have to keep close account of their material and it is audited pretty closely as well. That would leave mostly medical and scientific sources. I suppose they don't dispose of that directly so the company they paid to take care of it must be crooked.
The people that made this decision deserve to fry. Too bad it is impossible to create a justice system that I would actually trust to make those sort of decisions.
EPA doesn't apply. The EPA is a United States government agency with no jurisdiction whatsoever in Italy.
EPA's Italian counterpart, however, does have jurisdiction and probably someone in that organization received some nice bribes.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yes, because obviously the Italian Mafia in ITALY has to have permission from the EPA, in the U.S.A., to do anything.
If they are connected to this mess and convicted
Good luck with that, as they say. If it's anything like NYC, Justice will pretty much need two separate news crews, six NYPD detectives, nineteen passersby, and a televangelist to witness one of the "made men" machinegun down a busload of out-of-town nuns at high noon in Times Square on the day before Election Day to be served.
Then the appeals process begins...
Is it possible that these mafia people are stupid? Imagine we can reprocess nuclear waste, in many of the ways that slashdotters will include below. Now this nuclear waste conveniently stored underwater, is fuel that we can use to power our toys with. This is assuming that there wasn't any damage to the containers, and a big cleanup isn't required. Hopefully, when the world comes to its senses, and makes better use of its resources, we won't have these kinds of problems. (It always drives me crazy that there are organizations that will burn or throw away or sequester potentially useful materials. Sure mercury is poisonous. Extract it from your waste, and sell it to someone that needs it. The same with CO2, and even radon. I wonder about gold production from mining landfills.)
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
This has long been suspected, and there's a connection to Somali piracy. The mysterious blogger "TokyoTom" has an excellent summary of the research indicating that European companies were using the lack of a government in Somali to dump toxic waste illegally near the coast of Somali, which really wreaked havoc after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, which washed a lot of the crap onshore and caused mass illness.
There were always suspicious that this illegal dumping was a money source for the Mafia, although even legit businesses seem to have no problem with it. I don't defend Somali pirates, but people forget that it originated from fishers trying to get illegal dumpers to leave the area, then to try to get compensation for what the dumpers did. This doesn't justify piracy, but it does give lie to the notion that they lack a legitimate grievance and are simply out for money, and it helps to explain why they enjoy such support from Somalians.
I'm surprised the Mafia didn't screw up so bad sooner.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Don't you have to have some kind of license from the EPA to dispose of toxic waste? Did the producers of the waste not verify the license? There are not that many places to dispose of toxic waste. I am sure it was more than just the guys in the mafia who were in on this. I think the producers of the waste should be responsible for the clean up.
Well... First of all I don't think the EPA has jurisdiction over Italy.
Second, they're the Mafia, I don't think they worry all that much about legality.
Third, I kind of thought that the whole reason this was a story was because it was illegal.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
i hope they soon realize the next time they order fish in a restaurant that the fish comes from the same ocean that they sunk those ships, all that water circulates so pollution one part of the ocean gets around to the rest...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
To get a good impression of 'Ndrangheta's involvement with toxic waste, go see Gomorra. Excellent movie, even though it is somewhat depressing to realize that is based on reality.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
The line between major corporations and the mafia is a grey one. Do we really think that if a major corporation could get away with this, that they wouldn't do it, if it contributed significantly to their bottom line? Corporate behavior is all about cost-benifit analysis. The mafia operates by a slightly different risk profile. It also seems likely that what we think of as the mafia owns substantial portions of equity in our major corporations.
Why do I think this comment is appropriate to the discussion? Because I watch the behavior of legitimate corporations and see similarities. Gold mining companies often create huge pools of arsenic waste. The oil sands companies in Canada create huge and persistent pools of massively polluted water, sucking away and polluting water that would have otherwise gone for agriculture or human consumption. Major shipping companies routinely dump their oil laden bilge water in the open ocean. How exactly does this behavior not fall under the category of "organized crime"?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,' says Silvestro Greco, head of Calabria's environment agency.
Isn't that like saying "OMG, this chainsaw massacre crime scene is just .00000000000000000001% of the earth's surface, so if there's 5 dismembered bodies here just imagine how many more there could be elsewhere?! You should totally give my Agency more money."
For years one of Haiti's largest industries was the receiving of waste too toxic for even the most high-tech of US processors to handle. Of course that was one of Baby Doc's businesses, and equally obviously there was no waste-processing facility adequate for the task in Haiti, but that never stopped DOW or any of the other mega-corps that paid them to take the stuff away. The EPA only cares if the waste is going to be disposed of in the US, if it's going elsewhere they don't really care much. Their responsibility stops at the edge of their jurisdiction. I rather suspect that most of the European environmental bureaucracies function much the same, with exceptions for obvious issues like acid rain.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
This is something I think about all the time.
It could be argued that we are all immoral, because we are not interested in the consequences of our actions. The mafia crook dynamiting the ship with toxic waste isn't much different from an "waste resources" executive who bargains to send toxic waste to countries who need the money. One is exalted, one reviled, yet they both basically do the same thing. The executive simply pretends that the waste is properly disposed of in another country. The mafia crook doesn't kid himself. He knows the truth, and accepts it.
Which person is more immoral? Where does accountability figure into the equation? And where in a capitalist equation do you enter the morality quotient? Who enforces it?
These questions are simply not asked, because no one really wants the answer. For me, voluntary ignorance is immoral, and represents one of the great evils in the world today.
Usually overcharging says more about the tourist than about the shopkeeper. Some people invite getting fleeced by being douchebags. I travel most of the year and have covered about half the globe already, and I'm never overcharged. That's probably because I learn some of the local language, stick to local norms of courtesy, and do some basic research instead of just being a blatant, obnoxious and naïve foreigner.
Because, in Southern Italy, the mafia has taken over a lot of the roles more commonly associated with a government (given that they are not a government, this presumably makes Southern Italy a Libertarian Utopia). Removing them is not easy when they are entrenched into every layer of society. In some places they actually receive higher approval ratings than the government; they don't interfere too much with the general populous and the protection money that they pay actually does buy them protection (what the Mafia will do to you if you rob a shop that is under their protection is a lot more of a deterrent to petty thieves than what the police will do to you, and the Mafia are a lot more likely to catch you because they also control the fences you would use to shift the stolen goods).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So if you go to the middle east there are regularly news reports about how the west (possibly with some specifics), are dumping toxic/radioactive waste off the coast of Somalia/Egypt/Iraq/Pakistan/other muslim country with a coast. And we - in the west- tend to regard these as nonsense. But now we're finding out that we are getting toxic waste dumped off the coast of western countries - that seems like it might be tip of the iceberg. Somalia isn't nearly as likely as italy to catch these things (albeit rather slowly), who knows what we could find in the deep waters off countries that don't have the ability to patrol their own coasts.
That's not my experience from 14 or so years ago. Italy was fantastic, and Italians good natured and friendly. Prior to the adoption of the Euro Italy was also a big bang for your buck. Not so much anymore, but still filled with more art, history, culture and food than most places.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I'm sure Italy would be delighted if you could provide them an example of any country that has been able to clean out its own local mob so they could copy their methods. Do you know one?
Growing up in the '60s-'70s my parents bought many of the Life magazine's series of science books. I distinctly remember the photo of sailors rolling barrels off the deck of a ship, captioned something like "The US Navy safely disposes of its nuclear waste by depositing it in deep ocean trenches." Even at seven or eight years old I knew that was a truly stupid idea.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Why the Mafia Loves Garbage.
I read that as "we need more funding" talk.
but but but we've only examined 0.7 percent of the worlds seas, pay us shitloads and we'll take a peek at the rest. think of all the children who could be attacked by radioactive sha..... best. thought. ever. Radioactive sharks with frikken lasers? we are so fucked... just give them the money and tell them to crack on with cleaning up the toxic waste, before it's too late!
I'm so proud that once in a while Italy makes the Slashdot headlines.
Actually, I think the emphasis was a bit wrong on "ethics" and "morals". A more correct definition is that some people lack "empathy". See, psychopathy.
Morals and ethics can be see as an agreed upon code, but empathy is something built in and arguably hard-wired. See, mirror neurons.
In effect, most of those morals and ethics -- and the real reason why most people go along with them -- are based on that empathy. We're hard-wired to be nice to our fellow humans. Well, about 97% of us, anyway. We don't kill basically because at a hard-wired level something says "well, _I_ wouldn't like to be killed." We don't steal for the same reason. Etc.
To address your objection: We agree to not have sex with a 14 year old, basically because nowadays we understand that it would cause some psychological harm and that it would make her parents very unhappy. And we're nicer than that.
But it's a bit deeper, actually. It's not just about direct harm, it's that we tend to understand that others have the same needs on Maslow's pyramid, so to speak. Even without knowing what those are. We tend to realize that others need to feel safe too, for example. Or that they need their private space too. Etc.
Basically while the actual social contract may vary and is subjective, it's based upon something which doesn't. Sure, we may find different solutions to the same problem, but that problem is real and pretty objective. (You can actually see it on an MRI scan, if you want something which isn't dependent of subjective interpretations.)
A second factor is that, essentially, we're social animals and want to belong in a group of our peers. (See Maslow's pyramid again.) We want to be accepted, maybe even appreciated, etc. We're prepared to work out a compromise to that end, so the group can function or even exist.
There are rules and morals and ethics which, basically, solve _that_ problem. They're how the group organizes itself, so it can exist as a group. I won't stress you, if you won't stress me, and all that, in a nutshell.
That's something that all the moral relativists seem to miss. They dig up some seemingly arbitrary rule, like "don't have sex with too young people", and wave it as a banner for the idea that all rules are just arbitrary conventions. But they miss the foundation for that body of rules, and the purpose they serve. But I digress.
Sociopaths are amoral basically because they lack that foundation which makes the other people be moral and ethical. The difference is basically at a different level than the morals and ethics themselves.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
As an Italian, I can tell you have avoided the crimes-ridden areas (though you were savvy enough to dodge the tourist traps). Naples, for example, is not Bogotá, but is proceeding in that direction; in fact, the local mafia (camorra) is routinely dumping toxic waste in landfills for a business, much similarly to what the 'ndrangheta did in this case.
There are differences between the main mafias: the Sicilian one (the "original" mafia) is structured and hierarchical. In a Sicilian village you can leave the keys in your car, and no one will steal it. However, sometimes when you turn the key the car may explode, if you irritated the wrong person or asked the wrong questions.
'Ndrangheta, in Calabria, is family-based (meaning blood-tied). Small groups with internal hierarchy, but no comprehensive power structure.
The one most dangerous for your immediate safety is camorra (Campania), clan-based and very violent. There was recently a nice film about it. Being pickpocketed in Naples is almost part of the tourist experience, but recently drive-by's have appeared.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Betraying my ignorance on EPA laws...
At what point does it become "waste", though? Who gets tagged as the "generator", in cases where one man's garbage is another man's treasure?
Lard, Inc. manufactures vegetable oil, and sells it to McBurgerjoint, who uses it to cook food. McBurgerjoint sells its used cooking oil to BioHippie Inc, which filters it and sells it as diesel fuel to GasNGo, which sells it to consumers. GasNGo goes out of business and dumps a bunch of the biodiesel in a lake. Who pays?
Coalectric Power burns coal in a power plant, producting fly ash. They give the fly ash to Concretorama, who use it as a minor concrete additive. Concretorama sells the concrete to Skylimit Construction, who build a skyscraper with it. The skyscraper eventually gets dynamited, and the concrete rubble is used as landfill. 20 years later, the concrete is found to be contaminated with heavy metals from the fly ash. Who pays?
The book McMafia has some interesting views on the protection rackets that appeared in the former Soviet Union countries in the 1990s. One common theme is that the protection money charged by these organisations was actually quite reasonable - around 7.5% - lower than corporate taxation in the West (there was no corporation tax, or functioning government in the Western sense, in these countries). The protection rackets would also negotiate and arbitrate on your behalf with other businesses, and produce an agreed upon contractual solution to any conflicts. If there were a later dispute over terms, the Mafia-type group would judge it, and make sure the judgement were enforced.
In essence, for 7.5% tax the Mafia groups provided a functioning corporate security service, arbitration and legal system. Another interesting view is that this whole system actually worked - if your car was stolen, and you had it insured with the mob, there was a >90% chance that it would be returned to you. Business contracts would actually be quickly enforced (once the Mafia said "this is the way we understood the contract", that was that). The problems only began to arise once groups began to fight over the drugs and sex trade, which led to many assassinations, and instability in the business world.
It's a fascinating book.