remaining profitable sectors surveyed

Still don’t trust the banks? Don’t like the idea of nationalisation? Here’s one solution

The Nuvalettas, in co-operation with the Nettuno and Polverino subclans, also altered narcotraffic investment strategies, creating a popular shareholding system for cocaine. A 2004 investigation revealed that the clan was allowing everyone to participate in the acquisition of cocaine via intermediaries. If you invested your 600 euro pension in cocaine, you’d double your money in a month. The only guarantee was the middleman’s word, but the investment proved regularly advantageous and the profit far outweighed the risk, especially when comparing it with bank interest…By involving the lower middle class, far removed from criminal activity but tired of trusting the banks, the Camorra clans increased the amount of capital available for general investment.

From Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s gripping account of Neapolitan organised crime. Participants in this uniquely profitable scheme were also required to store a small amount of cocaine in their modest homes. So any local politician campaigning on a drug crackdown platform was also unlikely to get many votes from the local Daily Mail reading classes. But where did the investment capital go? Everywhere, pretty much. But partly into waste disposal.

The 2003 Midas investigation reported that waste disposal traffickers were also making contacts in Costa Rica and Albania. But every channel is now open…to Africa, to Mozambique, Somalia and Nigeria, where the clans have always had backing and contacts…After the tidal wave (of 2004), hundreds of drums of hazardous or radioactive waste from the 1980s and 1990s were found on the beaches of Somalia, between Obbia and Warsheik.

And today’s news brings us this:

Somali pirates have accused European firms of dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast and are demanding an $8m ransom for the return of a Ukranian ship they captured, saying the money will go towards cleaning up the waste.

The ransom demand is a means of "reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our country for nearly 20 years", Januna Ali Jama, a spokesman for the pirates, based in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, said.

"The Somali coastline has been destroyed, and we believe this money is nothing compared to the devastation that we have seen on the seas."

The pirates are holding the MV Faina, a Ukrainian ship carrying tanks and military hardware, off Somalia's northern coast.

It would be a bit naïve to take on the Somali pirates’ own justification for their actions. But we are maybe on to something here. Saviano relates that around the time of the collapse of communism, various Camorristi ventured eastwards and bought up entire arms depots, the contents of which were then shipped mainly to the horn of Africa and the Middle East. So it’s quite interesting that a ship full of weapons from the Ukraine was seized. Maybe the Camorritsti are being introduced to some new partners.