Blood Brotherhoods (119 page)

Nor is this a problem confined to Italy. Since the 1960s, thousands of Calabrians have also migrated to other countries in Europe in search of work. Concealed among the honest majority there were
’ndranghetisti
who have set up a network of cells that no other mafia can match. The starkest illustration of the ’ndrangheta’s European influence is not directly related to cocaine: it is the story of Gaetano Saffioti, a businessman specialising in concrete who, having paid extortion money to the Calabrian mafia for years, rebelled in 2002 and handed video evidence over to investigators that put dozens of
’ndranghetisti
behind bars. Since that time, Saffioti has lived with an armed escort and has not won a single contract in Calabria. When he tried to trade outside of his home region he was thwarted. Seven of his lorries were burned in Carrara, Tuscany. Even more insidiously, he faced a silent boycott everywhere he went in Italy: potential clients would be ‘advised’ that it was not a good idea to be seen with the Calabrian whistle-blower. Saffioti went further afield in search of business. In 2002–3 his machinery was also burned in France and Spain, and in other European countries the same whispering campaign against him was in force. He now does most of his trade with the Arab world where, he says, there is greater commercial freedom for someone like him.

The ’ndrangheta’s reach is not limited to the old continent. Calabrian
mafiosi
have had an uninterrupted presence in Canada since before the First World War. In 1911, Joe Musolino—the cousin of Giuseppe Musolino, the ‘King of Aspromonte’—was arrested for leading a gang of extortionists in Ontario. Australia is another example: the ’ndrangheta has been down under since before the Second World War. Back in the early 1930s, Calabrian gangsters who infiltrated the booming sugar-cane plantations of North Queensland were able to order up a killer from Sydney, some 2,500 kilometres away. This was the equivalent of sending someone from Reggio Calabria to London to commit a murder. Needless to say, longstanding international contacts such as these also afford today’s
’ndranghetisti
unrivalled opportunities for laundering and investing their cocaine profits.

Given the ’ndrangheta’s global network of cells, it is hardly surprising that journalists in Italy often refer to it as a ‘cocaine multinational’ or an ‘international holding company’. But this is an oversimplification. Just as was the case with Cosa Nostra in the golden era of heroin trafficking in the 1970s and 1980s, the ’ndrangheta’s cocaine business is not a single economic venture. There is no one centre from which the drug trade is run, and no overall cocaine kingpin. Indeed, if there were, the world’s police forces would find it a great deal easier to clamp down. Narcotics traders need to keep their business as secret as possible; they constantly change their routes and routines as the authorities close in, or as rivals emerge. Recent investigations
indicate that the ’ndrangheta’s trafficking operations are even more flexible and wide-ranging than were Cosa Nostra’s in the days of the Pizza Connection. Calabrian
mafiosi
have created an intricate and constantly changing pattern of cells and networks, of more-or-less-temporary consortia and partnerships. In the early 1980s, Shorty Riina’s men fought the bloodiest mafia civil war in history for control of the heroin route to the United States. To date, there has been no comparable conflict in Calabria. One of the reasons for that is that the cocaine business is just too diversified for any Calabrian boss, however powerful, to even dream of monopolising it.

Yet the ’ndrangheta in Calabria, in the rest of Italy, throughout the world, is by no means confused or centreless. Of that, we have recently become much more certain, because of one of the most important investigations in ’ndrangheta history. In 2010, the
Carabinieri
succeeded in secretly filming the Crime . . .

 
76 

’N
DRANGHETA
: The Crime

I
TALY HAS NEVER BEEN SHORT OF INFORMATION ON THE
S
ICILIAN MAFIA
. T
HE NOISE
of public debate—sometimes loud, and often unproductive—has been a constant accompaniment to every phase of organised crime history on the island. There has only ever been one period when absolute silence was the rule: the last decade of Fascism, when Mussolini muted all coverage of mafia stories in the press. The post-war period has seen the quantity of information increase exponentially. Already, between 1963 and 1976, the first parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia generated a final report comprising three fat books, plus a further thirty-four volumes of supporting evidence. These days, I would be surprised if the various local and national anti-mafia bodies set up by Giovanni Falcone did not generate more material than that every single year. Today, in mafia affairs, as in every other facet of society, we are in an era of information abundance. It took six years, between 1986 and 1992, for Italy’s historic refusal to contemplate the existence of the Sicilian mafia to be destroyed in the courts by Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino’s maxi-trial. These days, the police and
Carabinieri
nonchalantly demonstrate its existence every day, in every home in Italy, by posting compelling footage of their operations on YouTube. Everyone can see and hear what the
Carabinieri
of Operation Perseus saw and heard when Palermo’s bosses got together to re-establish the
kind of
Commission in 2008.

Nor is there any shortage of news, comment and documentation about the camorra. Once post-war Naples overcame its reluctance to use the ‘c’ word, the deeds of
camorristi
were widely reported—at least locally, at least
for those who cared. For a while in the 2000s, thanks to Roberto Saviano’s
Gomorrah
, Neapolitan gangland stories were national headline news.

By no means everything about the camorra that makes it into the public domain deserves to be taken seriously. As has always been the case, camorra dramas are often acted out in public, and the culture of the camorra intermingles with some trends in Neapolitan culture. Some of the local newspapers in Campania have been criticised for acting as bulletin boards for the clans. Then there are the ‘neo-melodic’ singers, whose work is sometimes a scarcely disguised apologia for the camorra. In 2010 neo-melodic musician Tony Marciano recorded ‘We Mustn’t Surrender’, in which he impersonates a fugitive from justice railing against penitents who have ‘lost their
omertà
’ and ‘brought down an empire’. In July 2012 Marciano was arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking. The arrest warrant describes him as being very close to the Gionta clan, ‘so much so that he was constantly invited to private celebrations planned by that organisation’s supporters and members’. Marciano’s only comment when the
Carabinieri
took him away was, ‘I wouldn’t get this many TV cameras if I was putting on a concert.’

For much of its history, the ’ndrangheta has been the odd mafia out: it has failed to capture consistent public attention. Some basic facts help explain why. Calabria is comparatively small: Sicily has a population of 5.05 million, Campania 5.8 million, whereas there are only 2.2 million in the toe of the boot. Calabria is also politically marginal, and its media fragmented: the region’s main newspaper, the
Gazzetta del Sud
, is not even based in Calabria, but is instead published across the Straits in Messina, Sicily. For a long time, viewed from Turin or Trieste, the cyclical violence between ’ndrangheta clans in Calabria was all too easily dismissed as something atavistic, incurable and irrelevant. The spate of kidnappings in the 1970s and 1980s only created concern about organised crime in Calabria because many of the victims were northern. Kidnappings apart, what space there was for mafia stories in national news bulletins was taken up by goings-on in Palermo or Naples. Meanwhile, the ’ndrangheta thrived on neglect.

One of the most significant developments of the last few years is that the nation’s habitual indifference towards the ’ndrangheta threat has begun to dissipate. The ’ndrangheta’s own actions have played a key part in that trend. In October 2005, the Deputy Speaker of the Calabrian Regional Assembly, Francesco Fortugno, was murdered in Locri: the highest-profile politician to be killed by any mafia in the twenty-first century.

Events in the German steel town of Duisburg in 2007 attracted even more attention. In the early hours of 15 August, six men of Calabrian origin, the youngest of them a boy of sixteen, were executed as they sat in a car and a van outside an Italian restaurant. Their deaths were the final act
of a sixteen-year-long feud between two branches of the ’ndrangheta, both based in San Luca, up on Aspromonte. The momentum of the feud had spun out of Italy to take in the clans’ satellites in Germany.

Grim as it sounds to say it, the Duisburg massacre happened at a good time and in a good place. With Tractor Provenzano’s arrest the year before, Cosa Nostra had fallen down the news agenda, leaving space for the ’ndrangheta story to fill. For most Italians, the idea that the ’ndrangheta had spread far beyond the wooded slopes of Aspromonte came as a surprise; to hear that it had strong bases in Germany was a shock.

Important indicators of Italy’s newfound concern about the ’ndrangheta soon followed. In 2008, a Calabrian centre-left politician became the author of the parliamentary inquiry’s first full-scale report on the ’ndrangheta—roughly one hundred and thirty years after it emerged from the prison system. The Calabrian mob’s visibility around the world has grown too: in June of the same year, President Bush included it in the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, a kind of blacklist of traffickers.

2010 was an important year both for acts of high-level intimidation by the ’ndrangheta, and for a response from the Italian state. In January, a bomb detonated outside the Prosecutors’ Office in Reggio Calabria—no one was hurt. Eighteen days later a car full of weapons and explosives was found on the morning of a visit to Reggio Calabria by the President of the Republic. Other warning messages followed, including a bazooka left near the offices of the Chief Prosecutor. Later in 2010, the text of the Rognoni–La Torre law, the equivalent of the USA’s RICO legislation, was finally modified to include the ’ndrangheta explicitly.

At long last, the ’ndrangheta is news. In 1979, only one book was published in Italian with the word ’ndrangheta in the title. In 1980, there were none at all. In both 2010 and 2011, the total was comfortably over twenty. I have even heard people complain that there are
too many
books published on Calabrian organised crime these days. How short some memories are. The pioneering historians, and the brave Calabrian magistrates and journalists who have been trying to document the ’ndrangheta emergency for decades, and who are now finally getting the national readership they deserve, are not among those grumbling.

The investigating magistrates of Reggio Calabria’s District Anti-mafia Directorate (the ‘pool’, in other words) have recently been producing results to match the public’s awakened curiosity. Just as in Sicily, the extraordinary surveillance work carried out by the
Carabinieri
can be seen by all on YouTube. The most historically resonant film shows a group of men, mostly middle-aged, and all dressed as if they were just ambling down the road for a game of cards and a glass of wine at their local
circolo
. They are shown
stopping in front of a small white statue of the Madonna and Child perched on top of a two-metre stone column. For anyone who has been to Polsi, the site is unmistakable: this is the medieval Sanctuary of the Madonna of the Mountain on Aspromonte. According to prosecutors—and so far the courts have wholly endorsed their case—what happens next is a sacred moment in the life cycle of the ’ndrangheta. Each year, early in September, chief cudgels from across Calabria mingle with pilgrims at the Sanctuary to ratify the appointment of the Calabrian mafia’s senior officers. Once they have all assembled before the Madonna statue, the men on the grainy film slowly form into a circle, and listen intently as the oldest among them sets out his credentials:

What we have here just wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for me . . . I was awarded the Santa four years before anyone. Then they gave me the Vangelo . . . There’s a rule: the
offices
can’t be given out whenever we want, but only twice a year, and we have to do it together. We need to be all together! The Crime doesn’t belong to anyone: it belongs to everyone!

The Santa and Vangelo are the ’ndrangheta’s senior ‘gifts’—permanent badges of status, each marked by a special initiation ritual. (The institution of the Santa, or Mamma Santissima [‘Most Holy Mother’] triggered the First ’Ndrangheta War in 1974.) These ‘gifts’ give their bearer access to the higher positions, or
offices
, in the ’ndrangheta’s ruling body, the Crime, which is also known as the Province. The man filmed addressing the ring of
’ndranghetisti
at Polsi in September 2009 was seventy-nine-year-old Domenico Oppedisano, who had just been elected
capocrimine
(boss of the Crime), the most senior post in the ’ndrangheta. (Oppedisano has been convicted and sentenced to ten years. An appeal is under way.)