The story concerns the Pellini brothers, Acerra entrepreneurs sentenced to seven years in prison for environmental disaster and illegal trafficking of waste in 2017. For years, according to the sentences, industrial mud, solvents, founders of foundry, paints, lead, arsenic, cadmium and hydrocarbons spoke in the countryside, transforming their activity into a 200 million euro deal. Money reinvested in companies, properties, land, vehicles, even boats and helicopters.
That heritage had been seized and confiscated. But the Court of Cassation canceled – without postponement – the Confiscation Decree, because the Court of Appeal of Naples had filed the reasons beyond the limits of the law (18 months).
To talk about it is Roberto Saviano in an interesting article on the Corsera.
In 2025, the Cassation canceled the confiscation. Not because innocent, but for a formal defect: the appeal sentence had been filed too late. The prosecutor tried to remedy with a new kidnapping, but the risk of another cancellation looms. A piece on a huge mistake.
Saviano binds this case to the recent release of bosses Moccia, also due to the start of the terms, and interprets it as the sign of a wider defeat: twenty years of struggles to defend the land of fires seem to have dissolved in jammed procedures and late decisions.
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By now it is under the light of the sun as the illegal disposal supply chain has been a perfect machine for decades: companies in the North paid the Camorra to “solve” the problem of toxic waste at torn prices, without any treatment.
The pollution, concentrated in the heart of Campania, has also left behind a heavy suspicion on health: between 2013 and 2018, in Acerra the incidence of tumors was 1,047 cases every 10,000 inhabitants, against a national average of about 697.
Saviano’s analysis is hard: it was not possible to create a ruling class capable of protecting the territory, political credibility has crumbled and today – between freed bosses and returned assets – the risk is to have to say “goodbye” not only to a season of civil commitment, but also to the hope of redemption of the land of fires.
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