by John Dickie
Between them, the De Stefano brothers’ ambitions in Reggio Calabria and the tensions between the triumvirs over the Mamma Santissima and the Colombo package would push the ’ndrangheta into war.
In September 1974, Mommo Piromalli hosted a meeting of the ’ndrangheta’s chiefs in Gioia Tauro. Among those in attendance were not just the other triumvirate members—don ’Ntoni Macrì from the Ionian coast and the bigamist Mico Tripodo from Reggio—but also don Mico’s pushy underlings, the De Stefano brothers. Unanimously, the bosses rejected an offer from major construction companies: a 3 per cent cut of profits from construction of the Gioia Tauro steelworks. The ’ndrangheta would not be happy unless its share was fattened out by contracts and subcontracts. Nonetheless tensions within the brotherhood in Reggio spilled over: Mico Tripodo and Giorgio De Stefano exchanged acid words, and only the intervention of don ’Ntoni Macrì—posing, as ever, as the peacemaker—prevented a violent confrontation.
Another attempt to preserve the peace in Reggio Calabria soon followed. This time the occasion was not a business meeting but a wedding reception in the Jolly Hotel in Gioia Tauro. The father of the bride was one of the Mazzaferro clan, close allies of Mommo Piromalli, and the celebrations were attended by chief cudgels from across Calabria. Fearing an ambush, Mico Tripodo did not attend, and paid for his absence by being insulted by the Comet’s younger brother Paolo. Again don ’Ntoni tried to calm the waters, and plans were laid for a third meeting on neutral territory—Naples.
But by this time it had become clear to all involved that any outbreak of fighting between the De Stefanos and don Mico Tripodo in Reggio Calabria would draw other ’ndrine in. Behind don Mico stood ’Ntoni Macrì. And behind the De Stefanos stood Mommo Piromalli in Gioia Tauro. So what had initially seemed like a local matter, a familiar confrontation between an older boss and younger men trying to oust him, had grown into a fracture dividing the whole ’ndrangheta into two alliances, both of them prepared for war. The equilibrium that the triumvirate had guaranteed for a decade and a half had been fatally destabilised.
On 24 November 1974, at around eight o’clock in the evening, two killers entered the fashionable Roof Garden bar, a notorious ’ndrangheta hang-out in Reggio Calabria’s piazza Indipendenza. Scanning the room, the two quickly identified the table where their targets were sitting. The first assassin pulled out a long-barrelled P38 and shot Giovanni De Stefano in the head from about a metre away. When the gun jammed, his accomplice raised another weapon and blasted two more bullets into Giovanni De Stefano’s prostrate form before firing at Giovanni’s brother Giorgio, ‘the Comet’. Although the Comet was badly wounded, he survived the Roof Garden assault; Giovanni died at the scene. Retaliation could not wait long. The conflict was now unstoppable.
Don ’Ntoni Macrì, now that he was too old to dance the tarantella, had the habit of playing bowls with his driver every day on the edge of town before heading back home to hold court. On 20 January 1975 he had just finished his game and climbed back into the car when an Alfa Romeo 1750 screeched to a halt in front of him. Four men got out and let rip with pistol and machine-gun fire. Siderno shut down for the old chief cudgel’s funeral, and some 5,000 people paid their respects.
The First ’Ndrangheta War, as it is now known, caused more fatalities than Sicily’s First Mafia War of the early 1960s. There were 233 murders in three years. Local feuds in Ciminà, Cittanova, Seminara and Taurianova added to the body count. There was savagery on all sides. In one phone tap, Mommo Piromalli was heard telling his wife how he fed one of his victims to the pigs: ‘L’anchi sulu restaru’ (‘Only his thigh bones were left over’), he explained. ‘Oh yes!’ she replied.
A score of the old bosses fell. The last (and the most important after ’Ntoni Macrì) was the bigamist and triumvir don Mico Tripodo. In the spring of 1976, he was arrested with his camorra friends in Mondragone and sent to Poggioreale prison in Naples. Five months later, on 26 August, two Neapolitan petty crooks cornered him in his cell and stabbed him twenty times on the orders of a camorra capo. The De Stefanos had shown that they too had friends in the Neapolitan underworld, and by using them to eliminate their boss and enemy Mico Tripodo, they brought the war to a close.
Or not quite to a close. On 7 November 1977, Giorgio ‘the Comet’ De Stefano took the risk of leaving his patch in Reggio Calabria to attend an important meeting of the ’ndrangheta’s upper echelons up on Aspromonte. Before proceedings got under way, he sat down on a rock to light a cigar. Suddenly, there came a shout: ‘Curnutu, tu sparasti a me frati’ (‘You cuckold, you shot my brother’); it was followed immediately by gunshots. The Comet, the apparent victor of the First ’Ndrangheta War, and the supposed epitome of the modern mafioso, had only been allowed a year to enjoy the fruits of his military success.
For a moment, it looked as if the Comet’s surviving brother Paolo De Stefano would push the ’ndrangheta into another war. But internal investigations soon discovered that the hit-man was a low-ranking affiliate called Giuseppe Suraci. Paolo De Stefano was told that Suraci just had a personal beef. The other bosses who had seen the Comet die placated Paolo De Stefano’s vengeful wrath by presenting him with Giuseppe Suraci’s severed head. This grisly gesture re-established the peace that had taken shape after the war of 1974–6.
We now know, however, that the version of the Comet’s murder told to Paolo De Stefano by the other ’ndrangheta bosses was an ingeniously crafted lie. The killer Giuseppe Suraci had not acted out of personal vendetta, but because he was ordered to by the De Stefanos’ allies in the First ’Ndrangheta War, the Piromallis. He was then beheaded to prevent him from being interrogated by Paolo De Stefano about why he had really killed his brother.
Head of a crime dynasty. Girolamo ‘Mommo’ Piromalli pictured in 1974, the year the First ’Ndrangheta War broke out. Don Mommo would emerge victorious.
By the time of the Comet’s death, Mommo Piromalli was semi-retired, leaving the clan’s day-to-day business to his younger brother Giuseppe. And Giuseppe had taken objection to the way Giorgio ‘the Comet’ De Stefano had extorted a bribe from a building contractor who was already under Piromalli protection. Thus the Comet had committed a sgarro: an insult to a mobster’s authority and honour. That sgarro was enough to draw a death sentence down on its perpetrator. The Piromallis had, deviously and ruthlessly, cut their upstart former allies down to size.
So it was Mommo Piromalli’s clan who were the real winners of the First ’Ndrangheta War. The core reason for the Piromallis’ success was their political shrewdness. Mommo Piromalli joined the triumvirate in keeping the equilibrium for as long as it suited him. He then proposed the Mamma Santissima when the time came to isolate his enemies. He used the Comet against his enemies too; and then used a trick to dispose of him.
Mommo Piromalli was the only member of the triumvirate that ruled the ’ndrangheta since the 1960s who died of natural causes. Cirrhosis of the liver carried him away in a prison hospital in 1979. He left behind him a clan more powerful than any in Calabria. Still to this day, the Piromallis are a major force. As, for that matter, are their allies in the First ’Ndrangheta War, the De Stefano family.
By the late 1970s, however, the Mamma Santissima had already been overtaken. As one ’ndrangheta defector has explained, the number of santisti rapidly increased, making it necessary to introduce new, higher gifts above their rank:
A few years after the Santa was recognised, there was a certain inflation in bestowing the rank of santista. Indeed there were no longer just the thirty-three santisti envisaged by the rules: more santisti were created to keep everyone who aspired to hold that rank happy. So in 1978–80 I heard that a new body was created, called the Vangelo (‘Gospel’). I was awarded the rank of vangelista (‘gospel-ist’) between 1978 and 1980 in Fossombrone prison.
In practical terms the Vangelo was restricted to a smaller number of people than the Santa, which had gone from thirty-three people to a much higher number. But then the same thing ha
ppened with the creation of the Trequartista (‘Three-quarterist’) and Quintino (‘Fifther’).
And so it went on: the business of tweaking and bending the ’ndrangheta’s traditional rules so as to suit the needs of the moment. In the mafia world, there is nothing more traditional than that. Tradition helps bind the mafias together. But it can also be used to prepare for civil war. The First ’Ndrangheta War was only a rehearsal for what was to come when narcotics propelled the Italian mafias to the greatest riches they had ever known.
51
A BRIEF HISTORY OF JUNK
Then Zeus’ daughter Helen . . . drugged the wine with the herb nêpenthes, which banishes all care, sorrow, and anger. Whoever drinks wine thus drugged cannot shed a single tear all the rest of the day, not even though his father and mother both of them drop down dead, or he sees a brother or a son hewn in pieces before his very eyes.
HOMER, ODYSSEY IV, 220–21
OPIUM IS A VERY ANCIENT ORIENTAL DRUG THAT HAS APPALLED AND ENTHRALLED occidental civilisation since the ancient Greeks. The drug nêpenthes, which Helen administers in Homer’s Odyssey, is probably opium.
Heroin, by contrast, is a child of modern, global capitalism; it is a brand name that was first coined by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer at the end of the nineteenth century. What Bayer thought they were putting on the market was a new, safe version of the opium derivative morphine—one that did not carry the same risks of dependency. What they were actually selling was even more addictive than morphine. But it was so reassuringly packaged and so roundly endorsed by medical opinion that, for the next decade and more, even many children’s cough syrups contained it. No wonder that the United States could count over 200,000 heroin addicts by the time the First World War came to an end.
In China, the problem of opiate addiction was at least a century older. By the time heroin was invented, those Chinese hooked on smoking opium numbered in the millions. Throughout the nineteenth century, British merchants had ferried opium from India to the Celestial Kingdom. At the behest of those merchants, the British government fought two wars to force China to accept the free trade in a drug that was tearing holes in its social fabric. The Cambridge History of China calls the British opium trafficking business ‘the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times’.
In 1912, the United States, China and Britain all signed the first international treaty aimed at controlling narcotics production and distribution; in 1919 its provisions were included in the Treaty of Versailles that sealed the peace at the end of the First World War. A new era of drug control had dawned across the world. From now on, the main suppliers and distributors of heroin and other narcotics would not be pharmaceutical companies, merchants and governments (not openly, at least), but instead criminal syndicates.
The Sicilian mafia was among the earliest players in the world’s biggest consumer market for illegal heroin, the United States. With their bases in western Sicily and New York, their transatlantic commercial ties and their wide network of contacts in the United States, mafiosi were ideally placed to smuggle. Between the wars, morphine was hidden in hollowed-out oranges, or in crates of other Sicilian exports like anchovies, olive oil and cheese.
But the mafia’s heroin business remained artisanal. What is more, the market shrank. By 1924 the number of addicts to all narcotics in the United States was probably no greater than 110,000. The Second World War so badly disrupted supplies of opiates that, at its end, the number of addicts had plummeted to an estimated 20,000.
Trade resumed after the Second World War, as did the mafia’s involvement in it. Italy did not have much of a domestic consumer market for drugs at the time. Moreover, until 1951, pharmaceutical companies in the peninsula were able to produce heroin legally for medicinal purposes. Some of that legal heroin found its way to the United States for sale on the black market. Lucky Luciano, like several other mafiosi sent back to Italy after the war, was a heroin exporter. Nevertheless, heroin use remained restricted largely to America’s black and Puerto Rican ghettoes, and as a result the drug was just one business interest among many for mafiosi.
Heroin started to play a more prominent role in Sicilian criminal enterprise after 1956, when the Narcotics Control Act was introduced in the United States. Because the Act established severe new penalties for drug trafficking, the heroin traders of the New York mafia were keen to outsource as much work—and risk—as possible to their Old World cousins. As we have seen, a delegation from New York’s Bonanno family came to Palermo in 1957 for a high-level sit-down at the Hotel delle Palme. As a US Attorney would later remark, everyone at the hotel was a ‘narcotics track star’. There were other clear signs that Sicily had become a major heroin entrepôt. In 1961, the Guardia di Finanza (Tax Police) dismantled an international dope-smuggling ring that was based in Salemi, in the province of Trapani, but included Canadian and American Men of Honour. In February 1962, the First Mafia War was triggered when a mafia drug-dealing consortium comprising bosses from different Palermo Families fell out over a package of heroin destined for the United States. When Cosa Nostra in Palermo disbanded itself following the Ciaculli bomb in 1963, many of the most senior Men of Honour fled to the Americas to immerse themselves full-time in trafficking for the United States market. Thus in the drugs business, as in tobacco smuggling, the Sicilian mafia diaspora of the 1960s dramatically increased the geographical range and profitability of mafia enterprise.
Underlying the Sicilian mafia’s increasing commercial activism there also lay a new epidemic of heroin use in America. That epidemic gathered pace from the mid-1960s, as the drug-friendly counter-culture grew, and as American ground forces were deployed in Vietnam. During the war, Laos-based refiners linked to corrupt officers of the South Vietnamese Air Force controlled a fat heroin pipeline to Saigon. In 1971, US Army medical staff calculated that 10–15 per cent of all US troops were using heroin. By the same time, addicts back home in the American market had climbed to half a million—two and a half times the number recorded when heroin was a legal ingredient in many patent medicines. Dope was not a cottage industry anymore.
The world’s opium poppy fields are to be found almost exclusively in the highlands that snake across the southern edge of Asia: from the Anatolian Plateau of Turkey in the west, through Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, to end in the highly productive region known as the ‘Golden Triangle’, where Burma, Laos and Thailand meet. In the 1960s, most of America’s heroin came from Turkey, where the opium poppy could be cultivated legally, but where a large slice of production found its way onto the illegal market. Between Turkish farmers and American junkies there was a long, long chain of middlemen, smugglers and profiteers. Like the police and border guards paid to look the other way. And the camel drivers who fed plastic bags of opium paste to their animals in order to smuggle it over the Turkish border. Or the first-stage refiners, who boiled the raw opium paste with quicklime to precipitate out the morphine. Or the truck drivers who created secret compartments in loads of fruit and vegetables bound for Turkish markets in Germany. Or the technicians who refined the morphine into heroin—a delicate operation that involves heating it with acetic acid to a precise temperature for a precise time. At each of these stages, the price—and the profit margin—rose in geometric progression. Depending on where you were in the chain and, just as importantly, how many links of that chain you controlled, heroin could generate shepherd money or oil-magnate money.
At this stage of heroin’s history, Sicilian mafiosi were not the dominant suppliers to the United States. In the 1960s, the bulk of the heroin consumed in North America came through Corsican hands. The Corsicans were enterprising, with a worldwide network of contacts and a secure base for their refineries in Marseille. Here the Corsican clans won a political shield for their operations by hiring themselves out as strike-breakers and anti-communist thugs, turning the French port city into one of Europe’s great criminal capitals. By 1970, Marseille heroin had become famo
us among American addicts. Mafiosi provided access to a distribution network in the United States. Thus the Sicilians were an important but essentially subordinate part of a Corsican business.
The Corsican system was thrown into chaos in the early 1970s. With American public opinion alarmed by the rise in heroin addiction, particularly among combat troops, President Richard Nixon declared a ‘war on drugs’. The Turkey–Marseille–New York channel, known as the French Connection, was picked out as the war’s strategic objective. The US first offered the Turkish government generous financial persuasion to stop legal opium cultivation, which ceased after the harvest of 1972. Meanwhile, in France, the Corsicans were losing their friends in high places. In November 1971, a French secret-service agent who had been running heroin from Marseille with the Corsicans was indicted in the United States, creating a huge political scandal in France. Moreover, the growing heroin problem in French cities increased the pressure on government to order a clampdown. One by one, the Marseille refineries were shut down and the chemists were arrested.
The Sicilians, who occupied a less strategic segment of America’s heroin supply lines than did the Corsicans, looked to have been marginalised by the destruction of the French Connection. American junkies suffered a heroin drought, and the Sicilians occupied a smaller segment of that reduced market. In 1976, the long-awaited final report of Italy’s parliamentary inquiry into the mafia used evidence from drug seizures in the States in the early 1970s to argue that ‘much of the heroin destined for the United States market is no longer forwarded through Italy as it once was’. The war on drugs, it seemed, was being won.
In reality, all that had happened was that the law of supply and demand was taking its time to work through the global narcotics system. The scarcity of heroin on the American market pushed up the price, which made the risks of setting up new pipelines more worthwhile. Turkish production soon revived after the initial assault. Worse still, as American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, suppliers of morphine and heroin from the Golden Triangle were avidly seeking new outlets. Between the Asian suppliers and the desperate American addicts there were tempting new opportunities for brokers and refiners. Which is where the Sicilian mafia came in. After the French Connection came the Pizza Connection. Cosa Nostra was about to become addicted.