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."

Comments

Re:No moral fibre

[oldspewey]

It's not that hard to imagine. Surely there is some part of you - some element(s) of your behaviour - that are driven by profit rather than regard for your fellow humans. It doesn't have to be big, consequential stuff; just think about those times when you're likely to act in your own self interest rather than the greater social good.

Now, imagine that those motivations make up 90% of your consciousness rather than the (hopefully smaller) percentage they currently do. It's an exercise in relativism, in thinking in degrees rather than absolutes.

Now spend some time exploring hypothetical situations and imagining how you would react. There's no need to change the basic elements of your personality, just tweak the motivational balance. Are you there? Can you imagine it?

Congratulations! You're a sociopath!

Re:No moral fibre

[TechForensics]

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.

My wife's a psychologist and we have discussed such people. The answer to what it's like to be one is depressingly simple. They have no morals to trouble them at all; no conscience, no guilt. They're happy as if they had ethics and compassion.

There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.

Re:No moral fibre

[Nursie]

Don't forget the element of excuses and justifications!

What can one little ship matter in such a big sea? Those government types are always making bizarre laws and nothing *that* bad ever happens anyway, does it?

Sure, it's gonna be fine! I'll just get rid of this for you, it's no big deal...

Here's Your Justice Thingee

[RobotRunAmok]

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...

Connection to Somali piracy

[DriedClexler]

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.

Re:No moral fibre

[sakdoctor]

I'd start a record label.

Re:Tonight...

[RivenAleem]

Tomorrow you sleep with the fish-crab-dolphin hybrid monsters

Corporations and the Mafia

[catchblue22]

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"?

Re:Corporations and the Mafia

[masonc]

A few years ago, Royal Caribbean cruise line was found by the US coastguard to have fitted bilge bypass valves on their ships, allowing them to dump oily bilge water at sea with being detected, or so they thought. They were fined heavily for this. They didn't just do it as an afterthought or by accident, they intentionally refitted the ship to be able to do it, meaning the corporation actively intended to pollute the waters they were making their living from. Maybe the scale is different, but the intent is the same.

Re:Corporations and the Mafia

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Both exhibit hugely damaging behavior; but there are structural differences worth noting.

In broad strokes, organized crime exploits the niches created by legal prohibitions, while corporations exploit the niches created by legal allowances.

Bootlegging, drug running, cigarette smuggling, and illicit waste disposal are all activities that are profitable because they are either illegal, and thus have no legitimate competitors, or have legitimate competitors that operate under considerable restrictions or high taxes. In order to exploit these niches, mafias put resources into stealth and subversion of the law enforcement apparatus(bribing cops, planting informants, intimidating witnesses, etc.). They don't tend to try to alter the law(indeed, the law creates their profitable niche); but simply to evade, subvert, or blunt its enforcement on them.

Corporate activities tend to focus much more on subverting the law, rather than subverting the law enforcement. Lobbying for softball legislation(in particular, if an industry supports federal regulation of something, that probably means that some state's law pisses them off, and they want it preempted), exploiting loopholes(spinning off shell subsidiaries as owners of all your severely polluted sites, say), moving from country to country to find the most favorable regulatory conditions, buying supreme court justices, and the like; are all about exploiting, and where possible modifying, the structure of the law.

The two aren't completely distinct, obviously, and both use a mix of tactics(not a few corporations have used outright violence from time to time, and most mafias have substantial interests in legal areas of business); but there behaviors are hardly identical, even if the results sometimes are.

Strange Reasoning..

[kevinNCSU]

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."

Re:No moral fibre

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The particulars are, to a significant degree, matters of convention; but there is a big difference between people who convention has an inner hold on, and people who observe convention only under external compulsion, if at all.

Re:No moral fibre

[MightyMartian]

Hundreds of years ago society did not agree with the specific rule, but it did agree with the general rule. If you examine the moral rules from society to society you will discover that they all follow the same general rules even though the specific rules vary (there may be some exceptions, but those are immoral societies).

This is a classic No True Scotsman fallacy

1. All societies follow generally similar moral rules.
2. Any society that doesn't is not moral.

Re:No moral fibre

[Chris Mattern]

You guys just stopped bleeding from the last time you did it (ask the French about Algeria). It's not *our* fault if you screwed it up.