Earlier this month, the arrest near Naples of one of Italy's top mob fugitives flew largely beneath the mainstream news cycle. Italian police arrested brothers Salvatore, Carmine, and Pasquale Russo, all leading players in the Camorra organized-crime syndicate, during the first weekend of November, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Among the businesses that the syndicate was alleged to have been involved in was trash collecting, dumping garbage from Italy's northern areas into unregulated landfills around Naples.

Of course, this hardly means doing environmental work is a priority among mobsters. The costs necessary to comply with environmental regulations is what makes hauling garbage worth doing for legitimate businesses—and criminal organizations profit by operating below the radar.

That makes this brand of crime particularly harmful. As illegal hauling and dumping evolve, the environmental problems they cause get worse.

Legitimate trash-collecting requires haulers to pay a fee to legal landfills based on the volume of garbage they seek to dispose of. That fee, called a “tipping fee” in industry parlance, covers the landfill's upkeep, maintenance, and profit margin, along with the cost of the eventual closing of the dump, explained Bill Einreinhofer, a former television journalist who has closely covered organized crime in the past. Haulers price the landfill's tipping fee into the cost of their contracts with clients, usually municipalities.

In a criminal enterprise, haulers charge clients non-existent tipping fees because illegal landfills don't bother maintaining standards, safely disposing of garbage, or sealing off closed dump sites as legitimate sites do.

“Illegal dumps are money machines,” said Einreinhofer. “Cram as much waste as you can into a given marshland or valley. Anything and everything. Household trash, toxic chemicals, flammable liquids, the occasional victim of a mob hit. Then walk away from it. When the time comes to clean the mess up, taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.”

Estimates on the number of illegal landfills in the United States vary widely, and regulators are challenged to keep pace while at the same time enforcing their standards at legal landfills, Einreinhofer said. It's not an unfamiliar place for organized crime, and there is a reason that the trash-hauling mobster is somewhat of a stereotype.

In the late 1990s, reports surfaced that said high-ranking members of both the Lucchese and Genovese crime families, active in New York organized crime, sought to control little-used land in Pennsylvania to use as grounds for illegal landfilling. Years after that, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was widely praised for taking back some control of the trash-collecting industry from criminal enterprises that had controlled it since as far back as the 1950s.

Organized crime also participates in the fraudulent removal of hazardous or toxic waste, materials such as paints and batteries that the EPA keeps out of legal landfills. In fact, that crime's relationship with RICO, the federal law that seeks to prosecute participants in organized crime networks, has evolved significantly since the early 1980s. Einreinhofer said back then, criminals would fill up tanker trucks with hazardous chemicals, puncture a hole in the tanker, and drive from state to state for days while their loads leaked out onto the highways.

Since then, that practice has escalated to become more profitable and better organized.

Of the estimated 1,750 legal landfills in the United States, 480 participate in the Environmental Protection Agency's Landfill Gas Energy projects, an initiative to convert their high concentrations of methane gas into green energy. The EPA says the initiative generates 12 billion kilowatt-hours of elecrticity per year, or the rough equivalent of $1 billion of energy.

It also estimates an additional 520 landfills hold the potential for LGE development—but estimating the number of would-be LGE projects illegal landfilling replaces would amount to guesswork.

Some observers point to the privatization of the municipal solid waste system in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, as a case study in how organized crime's involvement in waste removal can cause widespread environmental failures on top of the other societal ills that come with profitable organized crime.

“The 'garbage business' [in Tbilisi] became closed, non-competitive and monopolized, which has resulted in making the system deplorable while providing very poor service to the public,” states a report (.pdf) by the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center.

“At the same time, it disregards public health by mixing food waste with hazardous waste and dumping it in open landfills close to city.”

Green Technology Daily's New York City columnist Andrew Graham (bio) is a writer and media contact in New York. He is on Twitter and writes a blog about global affairs.

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