What the political centre-right and centre-left tried to do was disastrous and sketchy. Many mistakes were committed, wrong decisions were made. From 1998 to 2008 around 780 million euros a year were spent in compensation, consulting fees and land rental – about 8 billion euros over ten years, practically a fiscal appropriation! Antonio Rastrelli, President of the Campania Region from 1995 to 1999, is guilty of having come up with an ill-conceived, half-baked plan for waste disposal, which provided for incineration plants only, without worrying about segregated collection. His successor, Antonio Bassolino, is politically responsible for having signed a call for bids that would never work, since it was staked on economic expediency rather than on the plant’s technological guarantees, and for not having kept watch. But what’s worse is that Bassolino signed the agreement between the Waste Management Task Force and Impregeco, a company founded in 2002 by an alliance between the Ce4 consortium (an entity that the public prosecutor of Naples theorizes is at the complete command of the Casalesi clan via the Orsi brothers) and two other consortia in the Naples area (the NA1 and Na3). Its goal was to form a united alternative to the FIBE consortium (a subsidiary of the Impregilo group), which had won the contract for waste disposal in Campania. According to prosecutors, this was a plan devised by Nicola Cosentino and the Casalesi, who by so doing thought to bring the entire waste-management cycle into their own hands. Bassolino defended himself by saying that he had no knowledge of it: ‘My role and my numerous obligations did not allow me to have specific, technical knowledge of the events.’

In 2006, Guido Bertolaso was called upon to resolve the problem. Bertolaso proposed building a landfill in the World Wildlife Fund nature reserve in Serre and shortly afterwards resigned. Giovanni De Gennaro then arrived on the scene as a transitional commissioner. Strictly military in temperament, he carried out orders, bringing them to completion and opening as many landfills as possible: Terzigno, San Tammaro, Sant’Angelo Trimonte, Savignano Irpino, Macchia Soprano and even in Serre, in the WWF reserve. In 2008, Bertolaso returned. When it came to making decisions potentially dangerous to the health and welfare of the citizens and the region, he had always preferred to focus on the immediate results. The landfills of Villaricca and the heaps of eco-bales are a concrete, visual demonstration of his failure. All of them, with different responsibilities, have failed. No one has ever really dealt with the reclamation of the contaminated lands. And the irony of it is that organized crime has already set its sights on this issue. The people who helped pollute the land now intend to make more money by reclaiming it.