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From an empirical study relating to management of waste incineration in Sicily during the 2000th decade, this paper offers an analysis of informal practices in decision-making at the State level, and shows how the idea of the common good can be rigged and confiscated for their private interests by the holders of power. With the elements gathered during the investigation which reveals a cartel agreement between the successful bidders with the complicity of regional political and administrative leaders, we hypothesize a privatization of the state in terms of the appropriation and embezzlement by public actors for private purposes of the symbolic functions of State and its administrative apparatus. The fiction of the common good and state rhetoric are used so that individual interests become the interests of the State. This personal appropriation of the State institution creates a political split between the formal and the informal registers; and it is in this split that public policies are developed and the state is constructed on a day-to-day basis. Stress is particularly laid on how the law is mobilized to assemble and implement informal dealings in a social space where the decisions of the authorities and administrations are subjected to procedures of publicization and control.