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The “belly” of fields subject to landscape and seismic constraints, filled with hazardous waste. And all under the shadow of the mafia with lands and heavy machinery seized because they were traceable to a boss and his heirs. Five precautionary measures – two house arrests and three obligations to appear at the police station – were issued by the Gip of Palermo and carried out by the Carabinieri of the Bagheria Company, at the request of the Palermo Anti-Mafia District Directorate, for organized illicit waste trafficking. The provision is the result of a complex and meticulous activity by the Bagheria operational section, from December 2022 to February 2023, structured by traditional investigations corroborated by the use of sophisticated technical equipment: the investigation allowed to outline the operation of a company that was supposed to deal exclusively with construction and transport of special non-hazardous waste produced by third parties, but instead had set up an illegal landfill on its own land to carry out an organized activity of collection, transport, and concealment through burial of construction inert materials coming from active construction sites in Bagheria and neighboring municipalities.
In particular, in just 2 months of monitoring, at least 280 discharges of inert materials were documented, with an average of 7 per day carried out continuously, for a total of about 1,400 tons of inert material. The cost charged by the company to dispose of each load ranged from 70 to 100 euros for a profit of about 15,000 euros per month. The system not only allowed to reduce the company’s costs and obtain otherwise unattainable profits but also allowed various entrepreneurs who turned to the company in question to increase their earnings and pay fewer taxes by illegally disposing of their waste, as it was not traceable. As verified by military observation, control, and tailing services for the burial of inert materials, the suspects would deliberately desecrate their own agricultural land, turning them into real landfills. The waste burial activity, with trucks and bulldozers, depositing special waste on the ground and creating internal roads to facilitate heavy traffic, took place through 3 distinct terracing of land used as olive groves and planting other small trees, but which are nothing more than clumsy concealments of waste with topsoil. Particularly alarming were the incidents in which the waste was destroyed by fire, after being stacked by the drivers of the vehicles.
The company’s activity is therefore illegal and without any authorization not registered in the waste register and not listed in the list of landfills. A particularly significant aspect of the criminal activity concerns the area in question; in fact, the company continued to operate despite the entire territory being subject to landscape and seismic constraints, as well as being affected by a state of collapse. During the operation: 2 house arrest orders were executed against the managers of the Bagheria company dedicated to waste disposal; 3 obligations to appear at the police station, against the drivers of heavy vehicles and employees of the company; the preventive seizure of about 10,000 square meters of land owned by the company, 7 trucks, and 2 mini excavators. The lands and heavy machinery used were already under property seizure, issued in December 2022 by the Palermo Court, because they fell within the availability of Nicolò Testa, already convicted of mafia association and deceased on November 7.
The probative framework collected in the context of the asset investigations, coordinated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, was able to demonstrate how the assets in the possession, first of Nicolò Testa himself and then of his heirs, were actually the result of his illicit activities, thus allowing the Palermo court to issue the confiscation order, executed this morning by the Carabinieri Investigative Unit, concerning assets estimated at about 800,000 euros. In detail, an individual enterprise operating in the construction sector, with its related complex of company assets and 3 land parcels, were confiscated.
Discariche abusive a Bagheria nei terreni del boss, scattano 5 misure cautelari e la confisca dei beni
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