by John Dickie
Nevertheless, there is much that helps tip the balance clearly in favour of Saviano and against his detractors. In the wake of his success, many other anti-mafia voices won the kind of large audience that they would not otherwise have found. One instance is the magistrate Raffaele Cantone, who is from Giugliano in casalesi territory. His books distil the insights he gained between 1999 and 2007 when he conducted camorra investigations, and traced the casalesi’s business interests in the North. After Gomorrah, the casalesi gained a notoriety that they deserved, and that certainly damaged a criminal cartel that had previously done its best to remain invisible. In the years after the publication of Gomorrah, the authorities scored a number of successes against the casalesi, radically reducing their power. In December 2011, the last remaining historic boss of the casalesi, Michele Zagaria, was captured after a decade and a half as one of Italy’s most wanted. Fittingly, in his bunker, he had a copy of Gomorrah.
In short, Saviano’s book once more made the camorra into what it should always have been: a national scandal. Quite what future historians of Italy will make of the whole Saviano phenomenon is anyone’s guess. My sense is that his unusual form of celebrity is only the most prominent sign that, up and down Italy, a generation of citizens too young to even remember the ideological certainties of Cold War politics are finding new ways to express their civic engagement, their intolerance of corruption and organised crime. Saviano’s young readers are Campania’s best hope for the future.
75
’NDRANGHETA: Snowstorm
HEROIN WAS THE MAFIAS’ ILLEGAL COMMODITY OF CHOICE IN THE 1970S AND 1980S, but by the 1990s cocaine had overtaken it.
Since the late nineteenth century, cocaine has followed a similar trajectory to heroin: from medicine, to vice, to valuable criminal business. When it was first successfully extracted from coca leaves in the 1860s, it became a tonic: Pope Leo XIII was a heavy user of a cocaine-based drink called Vin Mariani, and even allowed his image to appear in adverts. In the early twentieth century, the drug was banned in its biggest consumer market, the United States. From then on, it became a source of profit for the underworld. But not until the late twentieth century did a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing supply, falling prices, and more widespread consumption make cocaine more popular than any other drug except cannabis. Soon cocaine prices fell enough for it to cease being a niche drug for the rich. In 2012 it was revealed that the inhabitants of Brescia, a city of just under 200,000 in Lombardy, are sniffing their way through $835,000 worth of white powder every single day. And Brescia is only a microcosm.
Cocaine is a less debilitating narcotic than heroin (at least in the short term); it can be consumed without the unsightly business of injection; it is more socially acceptable, and it even has the false reputation of being non-addictive. Try as they might, the authorities cannot create the same sense of emergency around cocaine as there was with heroin. Cosa Nostra, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta have found an inexhaustible new source of money.
Mafiosi from all the major Italian criminal organisations indulge in trafficking cocaine, and since at least the 1980s they have often formed business partnerships with one another to do so. Giacomo Lauro, a penitent from the ’ndrangheta who was heavily involved in international trafficking throughout the 1980s, has described his dealings with Sicilian mafiosi and with camorristi of the calibre of Antonio Bardellino. Already at that stage, Italian drug barons made sure that deals went through smoothly by exchanging hostages with the South American producers. A prominent family linked to the Calì cartel were permanently resident in Holland: they acted both as hostages and as business agents for the Colombians.
But in the 1990s, just as the era of mass cocaine consumption really began, the ’ndrangheta became the leading operator in the cocaine sector. Indeed, it is primarily to cocaine that the ’ndrangheta owes its reputation as Italy’s richest mafia today. Three police investigations into drug running tell a snapshot story of how the ’ndrangheta overtook Cosa Nostra as Italy’s major trafficking power.
On the night of 6–7 January 1988, a Panamanian-registered merchant ship called Big John was intercepted off the western coast of Sicily. Hidden in its cargo of fertiliser were 596 kilograms of pure Colombian cocaine—just as an informer within the drug ring responsible had told Giovanni Falcone there would be. Cosa Nostra, it turned out, had paid in the region of twelve million dollars for the drugs, depositing the money with the Medellín cartel’s emissary in Milan. The Big John investigation showed that Cosa Nostra, now firmly in the fist of Shorty Riina, was trying to turn Sicily into what Spain had been hitherto: the major port of entry for South American drugs bound for the European market. The confiscation of the Big John’s cargo was not just a big financial loss for the Sicilians: it was a huge embarrassment too. When the news broke, American Cosa Nostra learned that its Sicilian sister organisation had cut it out of the cocaine trade, and was now dealing direct with the Colombian producers. From now on, mafia cocaine brokers in the New World would be looking for more trustworthy business partners.
The second illustrative case involves the discovery, in March 1994, of 5,500 kilograms of 82 per cent pure cocaine in a container lorry near the northern Italian city of Turin. The man who exported the load from South America had a name that should sound familiar: Alfonso Caruana, of the Cuntrera-Caruana clan, the Sicilian mafiosi who had moved to the Americas and become key members of the Transatlantic Syndicate during the 1970s heroin boom. Significantly, however, Caruana’s cocaine was not destined for his Sicilian brethren. Cosa Nostra was in turmoil following the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, Shorty’s attack on the Italian state, and an unprecedented flood in penitents. Instead the shipment had been paid for and imported by an investment club comprising the biggest crime families in Calabria. With Cosa Nostra looking increasingly untrustworthy to its international narcotics partners, and with most of the larger camorra clans in the process of breaking up, the ’ndrangheta was left in prime position to take advantage of the most important commercial opportunity international organised crime had seen for years.
In 2002 investigators from the Italian tax police, the Guardia di Finanza, broke into the coded communications used by an international cocaine-trafficking ring comprising both Sicilian and Calabrian gangsters. The bugged conversations told a tale of two brokers. The first was a Sicilian by the name of Salvatore Miceli: a Man of Honour from the Salemi Family—and Cosa Nostra’s agent. The second was a Calabrian by the name of Roberto ‘Bebè’ Pannunzi; he had been brought up among the long-established Italian criminal networks of Canada, and he was the ’ndrangheta’s agent. The names of both men had already cropped up again and again in connection with international cocaine deals. The two were old friends as well as business partners: the Calabrian had acted as godfather to the Sicilian’s son. But it emerged from the phone taps that, in the early 2000s, the Sicilian managed to lose three separate cargoes of cocaine on circuitous routes between South America, Greece, Spain, Holland, Namibia and Sicily. Understandably, everyone else involved in the trade was furious. The Sicilian had forfeited his credibility, and risked forfeiting his life. Investigators intercepted a telephone call he made to his son: ‘We’ve lost face here . . . we’ve lost everything . . . any minute they’re going to have a go at me . . . everyone has abandoned me.’
Soon afterwards, the Sicilian was kidnapped and held prisoner on a plantation deep in the South American forest. The Colombians wanted their money back. His life was only saved following reassurances issued by the Calabrian, Roberto ‘Bebè’ Pannunzi. But henceforth the ’ndrangheta decided to cut Cosa Nostra out of its affairs altogether. In 2002, the Calabrian broker moved to Medellín, to join a number of ’ndranghetisti who were already based there. The twin messages in the story were clear to all. First, that cocaine was being sourced directly in Colombia for the European market. And second, that Cosa Nostra was now, at best, the junior partner in relations with the South American cocaine barons.
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sp; Back home in Calabria, the ’ndrangheta received a major boost to its trafficking operations in the early 1990s when work was finally completed on the gargantuan container-transhipment port at Gioia Tauro. The port was the only concrete legacy of the ‘Colombo package’—the parcel of industrial investment that was promised in the wake of the urban revolt in Reggio Calabria in 1970. Despite intensive security measures, cocaine has been passing through the port of Gioia Tauro ever since it opened: as a result of a stepping up of surveillance, more than 2,000 kilograms were confiscated in 2011. Quite what percentage of the total volume of cocaine imports this figure represents is anyone’s guess.
Cocaine containers. The colossal transhipment port at Gioia Tauro in Calabria is a major entry point for the ’ndrangheta’s narcotics.
Yet the port of Gioia Tauro is only one of many options for ’ndranghetisti seeking a route into Europe for their cocaine. The ’ndrangheta has men stationed in a number of major European ports, notably in Spain, Belgium and Holland. Circa 2003, when the European authorities tried to crack down on imports from South America, the Calabrians also began to use various African countries as cocaine staging posts. Large consignments would be brought into Senegal, Togo, the Ivory Coast or Ghana by ship, and then divided into smaller packages for importation into Italy by boat, plane or drug mule.
The ’ndrangheta also has more local distribution networks. We have already seen how, since the 1950s, the ’ndrangheta has been the most successful of any of the southern Italian mafias at setting up colonies in northern Italy. Today, there are thought to be as many as fifty ’ndrangheta Locals in northern Italy. Given that, by Calabrian mafia law, it takes at least forty-nine Men of Honour to form a Local, that figure suggests there are at least 2,450 members in the North. From gangmastering, construction and kidnapping, those northern Locals have graduated to wholesale cocaine dealing, while intensifying their penetration of local government and the economy.
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
’NDRANGHETA: The Crime
ITALY HAS NEVER BEEN SHORT OF INFORMATION ON THE SICILIAN MAFIA. THE 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.