June 18, 2024, 4.21pm
2 min read
PALERMO – One morning in October 2023 the carabinieri of a patrol of the fire prevention and environmental crime service note some trucks pass along the provincial road 127, in Bagheria, and enter an agricultural fund. Then the flames and black smoke.
They intervene and identify some people. Two in particular, one driving a truck loaded with waste material and the other operating a mechanical shovel. Shortly afterwards Salvatore Testa arrives. The land belongs to him, or rather it belonged to him because it was confiscated a year earlier. It belonged to his father Nicola, a boss and entrepreneur who died a few months ago.
The first investigations
Salvatore Testa’s individual company deals with construction work and machine rental. It is not registered in the waste register. Not anymore, she’s been erased.
His brother Pasquale works together with Salvatore Testa. Both ended up under house arrest: “They continued their work of managing waste traffic undaunted by transporting and disposing of it on the land owned by the family”, writes the judge for preliminary investigations Walter Turturici.
Land under judicial administration
Yet the land and vehicles had been seized and were managed under judicial administration. There are records of the investigation the conversations between the lawyer-administrator, his accountant (they are not under investigation) and Salvatore Testa. The latter was “only authorized to speak with clients while the judicial administration signed the contractual commitments”.
And instead the Testas continued to use the land in the Scannicchia district as they pleased. An area at hydrogeological risk, close to the bed of the Eleuterio river. In theory it is under landscape restrictions, in practice over the years olive groves have been uprooted and three terraces created where waste has been piled up and then covered with earth. To avoid being noticed, they also planted trees.
“Continuity with the mafia father”
The Testas talked about “arrange that material down there” or to “flatten” with “the big one (the excavator ed.)”. Other times the waste was burned.
According to the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office, they would have acted “in line with their father’s mafia activity, ending up constituting a sort of projection of the control of the territory exercised by the Bagheria clan”.
On the other hand, the justice collaborators said that “Nicola Testa was the one who had to take care of all the excavations in the area”. The illegal landfill was profitable. Business owners queued up to illegally dump waste so as to reduce the costs of disposing of waste materials from construction sites.
Published on
June 18, 2024, 4.21pm
