That’s the way it goes. When dealing with the centuries-old saga of the Italian Mafia, there is and never will be a happy ending.
CHAPTER 28
’NDRANGHETA – TENTACLES OF THE ‘NEW’ MAFIA MONSTERS
The best way of describing the newest and toughest secret criminal society to emerge from the back streets of Italy is to quote local anti-mafia magistrate Roberto Di Palma, who said: ‘The ’Ndrangheta is like an octopus, and wherever there is money, you will find its tentacles.’ It is a prescient warning because all the evidence suggests that, while the Sicilian Mafia, like the US Mafia, has been fading into the shadows, the little-known ’Ndrangheta (pronounced ‘en-drang-ay-ta’) have been taking over as Italy’s Public Enemy Number One and must now be acknowledged as having become a criminal empire with global clout. With its public bloodbaths, assassinations, brutal feuds and insidious corruption, the Calabria-based ’Ndrangheta is said to be bigger, more deep-rooted and more influential than even the Sicilian-originated Mafia itself.
So how did an organisation that is less well known than the Cosa Nostra or the Naples-based Camorra become so powerful? The history of the ’Ndrangheta, whose name derives from an ancient Greek word for ‘defiance and valour’, can be traced back to the 1860s when a group of Sicilians were banished from the island by the Italian government. They settled across the Strait of Messina in the mainland region of Calabria and formed small criminal groups specialising in kidnapping and political corruption. At the time, they were still referred to as the Mafia or Camorra and sometimes the Picciotteria or Onorata Società (honoured society). In the folk culture surrounding ’Ndrangheta in Calabria, references are often found to the glamorous mediaeval Spanish secret society Garduña, though there is no historical evidence to substantiate a link between the two organisations. The first time the word ’Ndrangheta was mentioned before a wider audience was by the Calabrian writer Corrado Alvaro in the Corriere della Sera newspaper in September 1955.
Until 1975 the ’Ndrangheta restricted their Italian operations to Calabria, mainly involving themselves in extortion and blackmail. Within that region, the society grew to become a loose confederation of about 100 groups, called Cosche (or families), each of which claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town or village. These Cosche are connected family groups based on blood relationships and marriages. There are approximately 100 such families, with a core membership of between 4,000 and 7,000 – although with the spread of the society throughout Italy and beyond, the membership is likely to have topped 10,000. For instance, the ’Ndrangheta are now strong in the industrial north of Italy, in and around Turin and Milan.
A ’Ndrangheta crime family is called a locale (place) which may have branches, called ‘Adrian, in neighbouring towns or city districts. ‘Each ’Ndrina is autonomous on its territory and no formal authority stands above the ’Ndrina boss,’ according to Italy’s Antimafia Commission. Thus the ’Ndrina leader in control of a small town or a neighbourhood has dictatorial power, which is passed on through the generations. Sons are not just expected, but in most cases required, to follow their fathers into the family business, receiving from birth the title of Giovane d’onore (young man of honour).
Like similar secret societies, the ’Ndrangheta initiates its members with rituals that vary from clan to clan and are designed to bind them to silence for life. Even when the Italian government in 1999 legislated to make it easier to turn State’s evidence and become so-called pentiti (penitents) the ’Ndrangheta code of silence remained almost entirely intact, with only a handful of low to medium ranking mobsters turning state witness. The exception came in July 2013 when a police deal with informer Giuseppe Giampa, a mobster in the town of Lamezia Terme, led to 65 arrests, including doctors, lawyers and prison officers. Assets worth €200 million were seized from five businessmen. According to the Italian news agency Ansa, Giampa was suspected of ordering about 20 murders in a mob war for control of the town between 2005 and 2011. Until this breakthrough, the 1999 amnesty, which had wrought havoc within the ranks of Costa Nostra, had failed to make significant inroads among the seemingly impervious ranks of the Calabrian mobsters. Their brutal, old-fashioned code of conduct has made combating the new breed of Mafioso extremely difficult.
The explanation for the ’Ndrangheta’s impenetrable nature is partly adherence to its peasant roots. Although the city of Reggio Calabria is the provincial capital, the society’s membership is concentrated in poor villages such as Platì, Locri, Africo, Altomonte and San Luca. The latter village is considered to be the society’s stronghold – ’Ndrangheta’s answer to Corleone, the Sicilian village made famous by the Godfather movies. San Luca is home to one of its most powerful clans, made up of the allied families of Strangio-Nirta and Pelle-Vottari-Romeo.
If the tentacles of the ’Ndrangheta now stretch across Calabria and the world, San Luca is where the head is. A winding maze of sloping alleyways, the village feels outwardly normal. Then one might notice the ever-watchful ‘sentinelle’, youths astride mopeds or motorcycles who act as look-outs. There are also the scattered, bullet-ridden garbage bins that locals use for target practice. Then, on passing the local cemetery, a visitor may spot the growing number of newer plaques, the memorials to recent murderous feuds – boosted by a new generation of ’Ndrangheta ‘foot soldiers’, who were invested at a lavish ceremony hosted by local clan bosses.
Out into the countryside and down a cactus-flanked mountain path one comes to the Shrine of our Lady of Polsi. This has long been the place of pilgrimage for ’Ndrangheta, with bosses from outside Calabria, travelling from as far afield as Canada and Australia, regularly attending meetings. At least since the 1950s, the chiefs of the ’Ndrangheta locali have met regularly here during the September Feast. These annual meetings, known as the ‘crimine’, have traditionally served as a forum to discuss future strategies and settle disputes among the locali. Each year, a new crimine boss is elected to host the meeting and mediate over the activities of all ’Ndrangheta groups. This capo crimine has limited authority, it appears, because he dare not interfere in clan feuds and is unable to control the level of inter-family violence.
In this regard, the ’Ndrangheta resembles the Sicilian Mafia as it once was. It is murderously confrontational. Disputes between even minor village-based clans can lead to public bloodbaths. On a larger scale, the so-called Second ’Ndrangheta War of 1985–91 between the Condello-Imerti-Serraino-Rosmini clans and the Destefano-Tegano-Libri-Latella clans cost more than 700 lives. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that so little is known about ’Ndrangheta in the world outside Calabria. Until recently, its highest profile activities were four decades ago when the prevailing faction began to kidnap rich people from northern Italy for large ransoms. The grandson of the richest man on earth became one of their victims.
John Paul Getty III, a tall, freckle-faced youth of 16, was kidnapped in the Piazza Farnese in Rome on 10 July 1973. When a ransom note arrived, his family suspected the drama was a ploy by the rebellious teenager, who had joked about staging his own kidnapping to extract money from his frugal grandfather, oil tycoon John Paul Getty. A second ransom note demanding $17 million arrived belatedly, because of an Italian postal strike. But matters then got serious.
The boy’s father, John Paul Getty II, asked Getty Senior for the money – but he refused, arguing that to give in to the criminals would encourage the kidnapping of his other 14 grandchildren. This refusal condemned the boy to be chained to a stake, blindfolded for five months. Eventually the gang cut off their hostage’s right ear as evidence of their willingness to kill him. In November 1973 an envelope containing the ear and a lock of hair was delivered to a newspaper with a threat of further mutilation unless a reduced sum of $3.2 million was paid. The message that accompanied the delivery read: ‘This is Paul’s ear. If we don’t get some money within ten days, then the other ear will arrive. In other words, he will arrive in little bits’.
The notoriously fr
ugal Getty Sr. now agreed to contribute to the ransom, although only $2.2 million because that was the maximum sum that was tax deductible. He offered to loan the rest to his son but only at an agreed rate of interest. Still anxious to reduce his outgoings, Getty Sr. then negotiated a deal direct with the kidnappers and got his grandson back for about $2.9 million. The teenager was found alive in southern Italy shortly afterwards, in December 1973.
Initially, the world’s media described the kidnappers as local small-time crooks. Indeed, when nine of them were arrested, one was found to be a carpenter, another a hospital orderly, another a minor ex-convict. But the identity of a fourth, an olive-oil dealer from Calabria, gave a clue to the real villains – for the rest were high-ranking members of the ’Ndrangheta, including the flamboyant Saverio ‘Saro’ Mammoliti (whose story is such a sensational saga of ’Ndrangheta showmanship that it will be told at length later in this chapter). Only two of the accused were convicted and sent to prison; the others, including the ’Ndrangheta bosses, were acquitted for lack of evidence. Most of the money was never recovered. It is believed to have been invested in construction machinery and trucks, which helped win all the transportation contracts for the Calabrian container port of Gioia Tauro.
This is significant because although the ’Ndrangheta began in the dirt-poor villages of Calabria, its leaders have become adept at the world of high finance. Back in 2007, its business volume was estimated at almost €44 billion a year, almost 3 per cent of Italy’s GDP, according to the European Institute of Political, Economic and Social Studies. This turnover was generated largely by drug trafficking but also from ostensibly legal businesses such as construction, restaurants and supermarkets.
Today, drugs remain its most profitable activity, with an estimated 62 per cent of the total turnover. But although murders and bombings tend to make the headlines, the ’Ndrangheta are also engaged in counterfeiting, gambling, fraud, theft, labour racketeering, weapons smuggling, loan-sharking, alien smuggling and kidnapping. They have a growing grip on Italy’s financial and economic nerve centres, controlling banks, restaurants, shopping centres, construction companies, betting shops, luxury boutiques, supermarkets, night-clubs, discotheques and gaming arcades throughout Milan and Lombardy, according to Laura Barbaini, the Milan prosecutor leading an investigation into the Calabrian Mafia.
According to a report by the Italian DIA (Department of the Police of Italy against organised crime) and Guardia di Finanza (Financial Police and Customs Police): ‘The ’Ndrangheta is now one of the most powerful criminal organisations in the world.’ The report says its drugs monopoly means that 80 per cent of Europe’s cocaine passes through ’Ndrangheta handlers in the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro. According to Alberto Cisterna, prosecutor in Reggio Calabria: ‘The ’Ndrangheta’s drug smuggling techniques are endlessly inventive and ingenious.’
A former chairman of the parliamentary Antimafia Commission, Francesco Forgione estimated that only a third of the ’Ndrangheta’s illicit profits are ploughed back into crime, and two thirds are invested in ‘legitimate’ businesses. The logical next step, he said, may be for the ’Ndrangheta to dominate the politicians themselves. And he complained that law enforcement to control the spread of the crooked Calabrians is hampered by a lack of both human and financial resources.
The ’Ndrangheta has become ‘as adept at money laundering and online transactions as it once was with sawn-off shotguns and extortion rackets in the wilds of Calabria,’ says Mario Venditti, an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Milan. One of the best examples of fraud is with EU money. Brussels has been willing to hand over vast sums to Calabria and other Mafia-plagued regions of Italy over the years, despite the very real risk of taxpayers’ cash ending up in criminal hands.
Since 2007, the EU has authorised some €3 billion to Calabria alone, ostensibly to develop one of Italy’s most backward and isolated areas. Yet hefty slices of that cash have gone to the ‘gangsters in business suits’, who are thought to have taken ‘pizzo’, or illicit tax, on the building of everything from roads to wind farms. According to a 2008 report by the Antimafia Commission, the vast container port of Gioia Tauro received €40 million in EU development grants in the 1990s – helping it to become one of the major importers of drugs into Europe, with direct links to Colombian and Mexican cartels.
The extent of its grip on public life has now been laid bare in Reggio Calabria, where, according to a local joke, the weather is the only thing that cannot be bribed. In an unprecedented move, the Italian interior ministry in 2012 suspended all 30 city councillors amid fears of ‘Mafia contagion’ and dispatched three commissioners from Rome to take over. It followed the arrest of three councillors and the boss of a local garbage company who was suspected of colluding with ’Ndrangheta bosses to inflate the cost of public works contracts. Dozens of Calabrian town councils were already under similar ‘direct rule’ but this was first time it had happened to an entire provincial administration.
The Calabrian Mafiosi, says Giacomo Amadori, an investigative reporter, have ‘swapped rough rural clothes and flat caps for slick city suits’. But they retain the ‘blood ties’ that originally knitted the clans together in Calabria. To foil investigators and phone taps, they use impenetrable dialect, and even a whistled code used by shepherds in the Aspromonte Mountains around their Reggio Calabria stronghold.
Security concerns have now led to the creation by the ’Ndrangheta of a secret society within the secret society. The membership of the so-called ‘La Santa’ is known only to fellow members. Contrary to ’Ndrangheta traditions, these ‘santisti’ are allowed to establish close connections with state representatives and even affiliate them with the Santa. Italian investigators believe these connections are often established through Freemasonry – which ‘santisti’ are permitted to join, thereby breaking another rule of the traditional code.
By such means, and with the probability of corrupt political protection, the ’Ndrangheta is now so invisible that it has spread around the world unnoticed. ’Ndrina are operating in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Eastern Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States. An exasperated Florida district attorney complained that, of all organised criminal groups, the ’Ndrangheta has proved the most difficult to understand, let alone penetrate. It is, he said, ‘invisible, like the dark side of the moon.’
In June 2012 an Italian prosecutor felt it necessary to warn Australia about the standing of ’Ndrangheta in that country due to the murder of an Australian detective by saying: ‘The ’Ndrangheta is the organisation that runs the international cocaine market. It doesn’t do its business in Calabria but around the world. It has infiltrated all economic sectors and it controls voting and political candidates at a national and international level. I urge the Australians not to underestimate this organisation. Otherwise it will be too late.’
It was certainly too late for Detective-Sergeant Geoffrey Bowen. On 22 March 1994, the day before the start of a court case against a ’Ndrangheta leader named Dominic Perre, Bowen was brutally murdered by a parcel bomb that had reached his Adelaide National Crime Authority (NCA) office without being detected.
Bowen was a senior detective with the NCA who was exclusively involved with Operation Cerberus; the investigation into Italian organised crime in Australia instituted to answer the question: ‘Does the Mafia exist in Australia, and if so, indicate to what extent?’ Bowen himself was quite certain of ’Ndrangheta’s existence, having established that some Italian immigrants showed extraordinary allegiance to two seemingly insignificant Calabrian villages – Plati, which is often described as the ‘heart of ’Ndrangheta’ and San Luca, the ‘soul’ or the ‘cradle of ’Ndrangheta’. These villages had come to international notice decades earlier when the area had earned the title of ‘Kidnap Capital’ due to local criminals who specialised in kidnapping members of wealthy, northern Italian families and holding them in caves in the surrounding mountains. Some of the proceeds of the ransoms, it was discov
ered, had been sent to Australia and ‘invested’ in the lucrative business of cultivating marijuana.
Detective-Sergeant Bowen took control of the investigation in August 1993 after the discovery of a huge marijuana crop in the Northern Territory. Police described the extent of criminality involved as probably Australia’s ‘most complex’. Eleven men, all of Calabrian descent, were subsequently charged, with Bowen concluding that Domenic Perre was the financier and organiser of the crop of 15,000 plants and associated drug workshops. His home was raided and subsequently a charge laid by Bowen against Perre for possession of an illegal listening advice. The court date for the charge was set for 3 March 1994.
The bomb went off the day before the hearing. Domenic Perre was arrested for the murder of Bowen and the attempted murder of Peter Wallis, an NCA lawyer who was seriously hurt in the blast. But the evidence was deemed insufficient and later that year, charges were dropped. Despite numerous police reviews of the case – and a 1999 coroner’s inquest that found Perre had planted the bomb – the murder still remained officially ‘unsolved’.
So what makes a ’Ndrina member? Who are these ‘untouchables’ who have grown from groupings of dispossessed, semi-literate village thugs into members of an international conglomerate that is estimated to have an annual income in Europe alone of €44 billion?
This brings us back to the gangster mentioned earlier in the infamous Getty kidnapping case. Saverio ‘Saro’ Mammoliti was a member of a ’Ndrina family from the Calabrian town of Castellace. When his father was killed in a feud with a rival clan, Saro and his three brothers took over the role of gang leaders. They expanded their territory and wealth by forcing neighbours to sell them their land at miniscule prices – or sometimes simply stealing it by fencing it off.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 28