The plant never became operative because it was built on unstable terrain, subject to landslides, despite the warnings of the head of the local civil engineer office who died in a strange car accident.

[5][6] The port inside the plant was subsequently used to offload arms and drug shipments from the Middle East against the payment of a fee to the Iamonte clan which controlled the territory.

The stock originated from the vessel Laura C. which was sunk by a British submarine in 1941 near Saline Ioniche while carrying some 700 metric tonnes of explosives from Naples to North Africa.

Apparently part of it was recuperated by the clan and might have been used for the bomb that killed Antimafia judge Giovanni Falcone in May 1992 and the bombing campaign by the Sicilian Mafia in 1993 in the Via dei Georgofili in Florence, in Via Palestro in Milan and in the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano and Via San Teodoro in Rome, which left 10 people dead and 93 injured as well as damage to centres of cultural heritage such as the Uffizi Gallery.

He stayed in Desio with his relative Natale Moscato, a local town councillor for urban planning with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).