the same thing was true for the treasury agents and the policemen among them some were more corrupt than others because they not only took kickbacks from the clan and all the other benefits but they would even come and find you at night when you had left your tractor and trailer parked outside the fruit dump and they would come and ask for a little contribution for them as well a hundred bucks maybe so that you would have no reason to worry one of them once said to my father I’ll never forget it he said the following words I have a right to make a living too in this fruit dump all the offerings are for Saint Joseph and nothing for the Virgin Mary which meant that he was complaining that everyone was getting a piece of the pie but him that is the bribes were all going to the inspectors from the commission but all they got were crumbs so they were demanding money for themselves from the farmers like us and everyone else who just wanted to unload the fruit they were required to dump that they had to dump somewhere anyway

since the fruit dump was the repository for all the different kinds of fruit and vegetables that the government paid you to discard as a way of supporting prices you ran the risk during a single summer of spending as much as two months parked outside the collection center because for example you would start with peaches which just ten days after you started harvesting them already had dropped sharply in price so you already had to start dumping peaches just twenty days after that another variety of peach started ripening and those peaches met with the same fate then there were the vegetables of various kinds like cauliflower eggplant and you had to take those to the fruit dump too and then by the time you got to October when the apples started coming in not the regular apples but a different type of apple tiny and roundish which we call a nurca it’s a variety of apple found only in our region and the same thing would happen after the nurca harvest began so you’d spend the whole summer vomiting around those stinking dumps it turned your stomach

they made money and lots and lots of it that time when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded that time it was early in the year and in that period there were various crops that were pretty profitable asparagus and strawberries which have reasonably high prices and the clan understood that this was the moment to make a killing because in Italy all those products were being discarded everybody was carting all their asparagus and strawberries to the fruit dump because they had been found to be radioactive while in France for example they didn’t throw them away so down here in our region that year the clan reported that tons and tons of strawberries asparagus and other vegetables had been dumped at the collection centers that later when the AIMA realized that something didn’t add up the agency launched an investigation and found that to grow as much produce as had been recorded at the fruit dump would have taken a land area three times the size of the entire region of Campania so you can just guess how many millions and millions they pocketed in that operation