The World's Most Evil Gangs (25 page)

By contrast, crossing the border into Portugal might seem like the introduction to a peaceable paradise. In 2012 the annual index published by the Institute for Economics and Peace ranked Portugal the sixteenth most peaceable nation in the world. That is not to say it is devoid of crime; the country has always been prone to street offences like purse-snatching and pick-pocketing. But in common with other European countries, the atmosphere altered with the influx of new waves of migrants. Street gangs, particularly in greater Lisbon and Porto, became a source of deep discontent from the Nineties when immigrants arrived from diverse locations around the globe – in particular, the Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Brazil and former Portuguese territories in Africa. The gangs have been blamed for damaging commuter lines, petrol stations and violent attacks in nightclubs.

Ethnic gangs have caused even greater social upheavals in France where, just like Spain, pan-European crime has become an ‘imported’ problem. Since the summer of 2011 the French government has been working with Romanian authorities to repatriate 15,000 Roma travellers living in makeshift camps and squalid squats. They are deemed responsible for a tenth of all crime in France – half of which, said Interior Minister Claude Guéant, is down to children. ‘It is a cruel, unacceptable situation,’ he said. ‘These children are exploited by mafia bosses who draw them into delinquency and slavery. That cannot be allowed to continue.’ This sort of petty crime is particularly prevalent in busy public areas like the Gare du Nord in Paris. There, teams of young beggars and pickpockets work the concourse, while their Fagin-like masters lurk nearby. Many of these youngsters have been arrested several times but the authorities are powerless to act. A clampdown in 2012 saw
hundreds of new expulsion orders issued to the Roma travellers, and begging was banned on the Champs-Élysées and the more popular tourist spots of Paris.

A study by France’s Public Security Department (DCSP) in 2011 showed that the number of street gangs nationwide had inexplicably doubled since 2008. Almost 500 separate gangs were identified, mainly with memberships of no more than 20, who defend their territory aggressively. With no
identity-related
insignia, they tend to target schools, shopping malls and street corners, where they deal in drugs and commit petty theft. In a single year, 1,096 gang members were arrested, 438 of whom were minors. Among the most violent gangs are Tamil groups such as the Red Boys, the Viluthus and the Sathanai. In Paris, a 26-year-old Sri-Lankan was found after a gang fight with his head split in two and his hands cut off with an axe or a sabre. But the ethnic gangs are not all male. With names like the Tokyo Girls, Bana Danger and Momi Fiuu, ghetto gangs of black girls aged as young as 14 terrorise parts of Paris and cities as far away as Nice on the Riviera.

A disturbing link between the two cities emerged in a court case that ended in May 2013 with a seven-year jail sentence for a modern-day Fagin who masterminded the biggest child
pick-pocketing
gang seen in France, with 500 young girls threatened with beatings and even rape unless they each stole €300 a day. Bosnian gypsy Fehim Hamidovic, aged 60, was accused of running a Dickensian gang of Roma girls as young as 12 who were forced to steal cash and valuables from tourists or face cigarette burns or even more brutal abuse. At the time the ring was dismantled in 2010, police estimated it was responsible for 75 per cent of all thefts in Paris’s Metro system. Two girls, aged just 11 and 14, testified that they were responsible for
transferring the entire Paris group’s earnings to Nice. If the takings were less than €60,000 a week, then they would be ‘detained and beaten’.

Crime of a more organised nature has long plagued Nice and its neighbours, where the glittering Mediterranean coast traditionally offers rich pickings for Riviera rogues. From cat burglars to Corsican drug czars, from The Pink Panther to The French Connection, crime in the region from Marseilles to Monaco has often been falsely glamorised. The sprawling, multi-cultural melting pot that is Marseille is often portrayed as the crime capital of France, and gambling, prostitution and drugs have long funded the fearsome families running the city.

Oddly, before World War Two the smuggling of cheese from Italy was also lucrative. The mobsters who dominated the underworld in those days were mainly Corsican – Paul Carbone and his local sidekick François Spirito, both of whom collaborated with the Nazis. After the war their businesses fell to a new chief gangster, the Corsican Antoine Guerini, and his brothers. They developed what became known as The French Connection, with Marseille the centre for the export of drugs to the US.

Chicago-style gang warfare arrived there in the 1970s when police estimated that more than £70 million a year was being raked in from drugs, casino rackets, prostitution and extortion. In 1970 alone, more than 100 people died in a wave of shootings that began with the jailing of 70-year-old crime czar ‘Mimi’ Guerini for his part in a gangland murder.

The spate of killings was stepped up in 1977 after the shooting of ex-jockey Jacques ‘Tomcat’ Imbert, who owed his nickname to his reputation for having nine lives. Imbert, who ran a nightclub in the small Riviera resort of Cassis, was shot
23 times by three hitmen from a rival gang. He survived, though he lost an eye and was permanently crippled. A month after Imbert’s shooting, one of his three attackers was executed at a cemetery while visiting his son’s grave. Next day the second man was killed in the street. The third man was murdered a few weeks later, shot as his car stopped at traffic lights.

The battle for power on the Riviera erupted into bloody violence again in 1978 when nine people were gunned down in a Marseille bar, riddled with 91 bullets. Five of the victims had police records but the other four were thought to be innocent customers, shot to keep them quiet. Police, who were working closely with the FBI, said they believed the killings were ‘Mafia-linked’.

Despite the mix of drugs, gambling and prostitution that has dominated the Marseille Mob scene, Jacques ‘Tomcat’ Imbert was still at large in the city after four decades, having avoided any serious convictions and serving only short prison terms. Describing himself as ‘retired’, he told a reporter in late 2012: ‘The cops always came to ask me about the jobs I didn’t do. For the ones I did do, I never saw anyone.’ A legend on the streets of Marseille, he said he felt secure enough not to need bodyguards and to be able to drink in bars with his back to the door. As he pointed out, who’d want to kill a man who had come back from the dead?

Meanwhile, France’s second city is still battling waves of murderous warfare. Local Marseille politicians even asked for the army to be sent in to tackle the gangs, who nowadays go equipped with Kalashnikovs and other combat weapons. A police spokesman in 2012 described the situation as ‘terrifying and inhuman because the violence has no limits’.

This may be a digression, but when dealing with the French
propensity to glamorise the shadier side of life, it is an opportunity to be reminded briefly of the career of the most notorious Gallic gangster of them all. He was the dashing Jacques Mesrine who, after an early round of bank robberies in Canada, returned to his homeland with the boast that he would become ‘the world’s most famous crook’.

In 1973 Mesrine and his gang committed a dozen armed robberies, netting millions. When captured that year, he escaped from a court in Compiègne with a gun that an accomplice had hidden in a lavatory – and using the judge as a human shield. Mesrine nurtured the image of a dashing and gallant vagabond, telling a girl bank clerk who had pressed the alarm button: ‘Don’t worry, I like to work to music.’ In court again in 1977, he and a gang member escaped by squirting soapy water into the eyes of their guard, donning his uniform and fleeing over a wall. In 1978 he robbed the flat of a judge who had previously sentenced him to 20 years’ jail. When police came running up the stairs, he fooled them by shouting, ‘Quick, Mesrine’s in there’, and sped past them into the night. On 2 November 1979, police watched as Mesrine, then aged 42, walked with his girlfriend from his swanky Paris apartment to his BMW. Once in the car, the cops took no chances. Twenty-one bullets shattered his windscreen. Mesrine died instantly – though his legend lives on.

It would be neat to end this chapter on the dark but disparate threads of European lawlessness with this story of a dashing anti-hero. Sadly, the reality of modern-day Continental criminality is depressingly lacking in glamour. The clearest indication of how times have changed in the realms of European gangsterism is not on the smart streets of western capital cities but on the tacky avenues of Buzescu, Romania,
lined with tasteless palaces. Buzescu, a town about 50 miles south of the capital Bucharest, has only 5,000 inhabitants but 30 registered scrap metal dealers. It is a hub from which copper, bronze and lead are transported around the world. This is where the proceeds end up from the theft across Europe of metal worth millions – from rail lines, telecom networks, power stations, churches and even war memorials. In Buzescu, the Roma community is among the country’s wealthiest, its gang leaders building huge gaudy mansions, with turrets, pillars and gold-painted roof tiles. Horses and carts rumble by outside but on the driveways stand BMWs, Porsches and Mercedes.

Across the other side of Europe, in the theft-ravaged Belgian city of Charleroi, magistrate Philippe Dujardin lamented in 2013: ‘In Romania whole neighbourhoods are built with money from the National Belgian Railway Company. The people who live there are leaders of a veritable mafia.’ And in Britain, where metal theft is thought to cost £1 billion a year, copper continues to be ripped from railways, endangering thousands of travellers, and plaques with the names of the fallen vanish overnight from war memorials.

S
icilian Mafia leader Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina was the man who ordered the most infamous ‘hit’ in Italian criminal history. On 23 May 1992 a half-ton bomb was placed in a drainage pipe under a motorway between Palermo and its international airport. Riina’s men hid in a building above the road and waited. Just before 6pm a convoy of six cars approached. As they passed an old fridge, left at the side of the road as a marker, Mafioso soldier Giovanni Brusca pressed a switch. A vast explosion ripped upwards through the tarmac, catapulting the first car into the air until it landed 70 metres away, among olive trees. The second car, despite being reinforced and
bulletproofed
, had its engine blown away and the rest of the car plunged into the crater made by the bomb. The third car was damaged but intact. Killed in the lead car were three bodyguards: Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro and Vito
Schifani. They had been guarding the principal occupant of the second car, Giovanni Falcone, who died alongside his wife Francesca. The explosion had been so powerful that it registered on local earthquake monitors.

The death of Giovanni Falcone shocked the nation. Most adult Italians remember where they were when they heard the news. Several public figures declared themselves ashamed to be Italian. For Falcone was the country’s bravest, most determined law enforcer. The Sicilian Mafia’s nemesis, his death not only demonstrated the organisation’s continued power, it also finally destroyed the myth that had lingered in southern Italy that the ancient secret society was run, as the clichéd claim went, by ‘men of honour’.

The Mafia’s romanticised roots are as shadowy as its rotten modern-day operations. Even the derivation of the name itself is unknown. It may come from a Sicilian dialect term for bravado or possibly from an Arabic word,
mehia
, which means boastful. All that is certain about the Mafia’s origins is that it was formed in the thirteenth century as a patriotic underground movement to resist Sicily’s unwelcome rulers, the French. And on Easter Monday 1282, these freedom fighters led a bloody massacre of the foreign invaders as the bells of the capital, Palermo, rang for vespers.

Over the centuries this secret brotherhood flourished, dedicated to protecting the local populace from the despotic rulers of the island. Similar societies were subsequently founded on the mainland – the four principal crime organisations now being the Sicilian Mafia, or Cosa Nostra as they also call themselves, the Camorra in Naples, the Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia, and the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria. Almost inevitably, all abused their autocratic powers to exploit
and subjugate their people rather than protect them. But the real boom years followed the Allied armies’ invasion of Sicily as a stepping stone to the Italian mainland in World War Two. Sicilian families in particular took advantage of the transatlantic drugs trade. Now its evil influence is worldwide – despite attempts by brave politicians, judges and policemen to stamp them out in their home territory.

Most famous, even heroic, among these was Giovanni Falcone. Born in a poor district of Palermo in 1939, Falcone recalled growing up horrified by the violence in his hometown. He became a lawyer and, at just 27, a prosecutor specialising in fraud cases. A senior magistrate, Rocco Chinnici, took him under his wing and had him investigate Sicilian construction companies and local politicians who had demanded kickbacks for granting licences. Falcone was offered bribes and subjected to threats but ignored both and obtained several convictions. One of his successes was the 1984 conviction of the Christian Democrat mayor of Palermo, Vito Ciancimino, the first Italian politician formally to be found guilty of membership of the Mafia. Falcone also helped gather evidence of transatlantic connections by the local Inzerillo and Spatola clans to the Gambino mobsters in America. The exposure of the global scale of Mafia activities was one of his principal achievements. Thanks to this evidence, Sicily’s chief magistrate, Gaetano Costa, signed 80 arrest warrants – but also signed his own instant death sentence. Costa was killed in August 1980, the third local prosecutor to be murdered in a decade.

As the Mafia’s international operations grew, so too did the ruthlessness of its methods. Also assassinated was Palermo police chief Boris Guiliano, who had been on the verge of a
major breakthrough in his investigations. It marked the beginning of a new era of violence. Falcone became a member of a select anti-Mafia pool of judges and prosecutors formed by his mentor Rocco Chinnici. In joining the group, he knew he would be a target but said the threat of death was ‘not more important to me than the button of my jacket – I’m a real Sicilian!’ In 1982 Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the Carabinieri general who had smashed apart Italy’s terrorist Red Brigades, was sent to Sicily to coordinate the central government’s
anti-Mafia
policy. Only 100 days after taking office as prefect of Palermo, he was machine-gunned to death in the street. When Judge Chinnici was also killed – blown up by a car bomb in 1983 – Falcone became effective head of the anti-Mafia pool and the authorities in Rome gave him beefed-up powers to take revenge for the murders.

His new role made Falcone a prisoner in his home town. For most of the next decade, he worked in a bomb-proof bunker underneath Palermo’s law courts, his desk dominated by electronic devices and video screens showing the approaches to his office. His home was similarly protected and whenever he ventured out, he was escorted by a convoy of armoured police cars. But through the Eighties, he managed to recruit a brave and brilliant team of prosecutors – and it was their work which eventually led to the most dramatic victory against the island’s gangsters. Falcone, along with fellow magistrate Paolo Borsellino, drew up 8,000 pages of indictments for some of the most serious professional criminals known to the world, among them leaders of the Corleone clan and Michele Greco, alleged Boss of Bosses, known as ‘the Pope’.

In what was known as the ‘Mafia Maxi-Trial’, held in a fortified courthouse through 1986–87, hundreds of
convictions, mostly for murder or drug trafficking, were made possible by informers. The most important of these so-called pentiti was Tommaso Buscetta, a jailed member of the island’s Porta Nuevo family, who was later put under a witness protection programme in America. Buscetta refused to confide in anyone other than Falcone, and when persuaded to spill the beans, he warned Falcone: ‘This will make you famous – and bring your death.’ In his evidence, Buscetta revealed the existence and workings of the Sicilian Mafia Commisssion, enabling Falcone to argue that Cosa Nostra was a unified hierarchical structure whose leaders could be held responsible for crimes committed on their behalf. The trial culminated in the conviction of 342 Mafiosi, sent down for a total of 2,665 years, including 19 life sentences. Sadly for Falcone, a series of appeal court acquittals based on the validity of ‘supergrass’ evidence meant that most of them were later freed. Undaunted, Falcone explained to a journalist: ‘Each investigation reveals a little more of the map of the Mafia. But it is a Hydra, with many more heads to replace the old you manage to cut off. You can never say you have won.’

After his successes in the Maxi Trial, the seriousness of Tommaso Buscetta’s warnings became clear. Despite the care he took with his safety, in 1989 as he relaxed outside his beach house, a security guard noticed an abandoned sports bag at the water’s edge. It contained 58 sticks of plastic explosives, primed to explode if picked up. After the incident, he told a friend: ‘My life is mapped out. It is my destiny to take a bullet by the Mafia some day. The only thing I don’t know is when.’

In 1991 the tireless gangbuster left Sicily to take up a job in Rome’s Ministry of Justice but was under no illusion about the continuing threat to his life. He described the Mafia as ‘a
panther with an elephantine memory’. The Mafia had already retaliated violently against others they saw as having harmed them. In 1988 they murdered Palermo appeal judge Alberto Giacomelli and his son, allegedly on the orders of ‘Toto’ Riina. In 1991 another prosecutor, Rosario Livatino, was killed, the same year as a politician and an anti-Mafia businessman were murdered.

Falcone’s own horrific murder in May 1992 was followed by a day of mourning ordered by the government in Rome. Thousands gathered at Palermo’s Basilica of San Domenico for the funeral, which was broadcast live nationally, all regular television programmes having been suspended. Meanwhile, Salvatore Riina reportedly threw a party, toasting Falcone’s death with champagne.

Only two months after Falcone’s death, the Mafia caught up with his closest friend and colleague, Paolo Borsellino, and dealt with him in the same brutal fashion. A similar car bomb was detonated as Borsellino drove to his mother’s home in Palermo, killing not only the valiant law enforcer but five policemen. In his last video interview, given just two days before his friend’s murder, Borsellino had spoken about the possible link between Cosa Nostra and rich Italian businessmen such as future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The interview has since received little coverage on Italian television, much of which is owned by Berlusconi, who also controlled the state channel during his mandates as prime minister.

The deaths of Falcone and Borsellino caused widespread revulsion against the Mafia and led to a major crackdown by the authorities, resulting in the swift capture of Riina and many of his Corleone family associates. Riina was sentenced
to life imprisonment for sanctioning the murders of Borsellino and Falcone, as well as dozens of other slayings. Riina’s hitman Giovanni Busca, who personally detonated the bomb that killed Falcone, was also jailed and later became an informant. He revealed how easy it had been to live a normal life in Sicily despite being on the Carabinieri’s ‘Most Wanted’ list. Riina, for instance, had enjoyed his 30 years as a ‘fugitive’ living openly at home in Palermo, visiting his local hospital for treatments and registering all four of his children under their real names.

Following the arrests and a further government crackdown against the Sicilian Mafia, a campaign of terrorism erupted on the mainland. This appeared to have been the result of a secret summit of the remaining bosses to formulate a shock campaign aimed at scaring the Italian government into a retreat. It resulted in a series of bomb attacks in 1993 in Rome, Florence and Milan that left ten people dead and 93 injured, as well as damaging centres of cultural heritage such as Florence’s Uffizi Gallery.

Only when control of Cosa Nostra fell to a new Godfather, Bernardo Provenzano, in 1995 did the violence ease, with a softly-softly policy known as ‘pax mafiosi’. Provenzano himself was arrested in 2006. The vacuum after the caging of ‘Toto’ Riina and Provenzano was taken up by Matteo Messina Denaro, a young bespectacled multiple murderer with a reported weakness for sports cars, designer watches and sharp suits. Born in Sicily’s Trapani province in 1962, Denaro, nicknamed ‘Diabolik’ after an Italian cartoon character, was said to be running a resurgent Cosa Nostra empire. Now known as the Don of Dons, he is believed to have personally executed at least 50 people and ordered the deaths of scores more.

Denaro cemented his blood thirsty reputation during the 1993 bombings – he chillingly boasted: ‘I filled a cemetery all by myself’ – and has been on the run ever since. He is one of the world’s Top Ten most wanted criminals and yet, incredibly, all that the police have to go on is a black and white photograph taken more than 20 years ago. Giacomo Di Girolamo, author of
The Invisible
, a book on the mobster, says: ‘Denaro is a modern Mafia boss, the opposite of the traditional image of the Godfather. He has numerous lovers and a child out of marriage. He knows which businesses to get involved in, and this is primarily drugs.’ His estimated £2.5 billion worth has been steadily built up through lucrative deals with Colombian drug barons and masterminding the import of heroin and cocaine into Europe. It is believed that if there was an attempt to revive the Cupola, a kind of consultative committee of regional bosses that met from time to time to resolve internal disputes and forge long-term strategy, it would see Messina Denaro as unrivalled chairman of the board.

It was the fear of this precise threat – the revival of the Cupola – that in December 2008 saw sweeping raids by more than 1,200 Carabinieri officers stretching from Sicily to Tuscany. They arrested 94 people, many of them veteran Mafiosi including Salvatore Lombardo, the 87-year-old boss of the town of Montelepre, in Palermo province. Investigators say those seized had been trying to re-establish the authority of the Cupola to solidify the Mafia’s power structure after a leadership void caused by the high-profile arrests of dons like Provenzano. Leading anti-Mob magistrate Pietro Grasso said operations over recent years had Cosa Nostra ‘on its knees’. This latest round up, Grasso said, ‘keeps it from getting up.’ Few observers were that confident.

It is true that most of Italy’s organised crime network has been ordering up fewer hits, the number of which peaked in 1982 when there were more than 700 murders in Palermo and surrounding towns alone. This face of the organisation may appear less violent but it’s no less sinister, according to Giuseppe Cipriani, who became mayor of the fabled Mafia stronghold, Corleone, in the wake of the assassination of the two magistrates. ‘The Mafia changed strategy, that’s all,’ he said. ‘They just sat down and decided it at the table. It doesn’t mean they might not start bringing back the bombs.’

In recent years it has become difficult to judge the power of the original Sicilian Mafia, whose influence was global but many of whose leaders are now in prison or in hiding. But where a crime vacuum opens up, there are always crooks to see a new business opportunity – and many of the cleverest to take advantage of this situation have been from rival Mafia organisations on the mainland. The weakened Cosa Nostra has had to yield most of the illegal drug trade to their rivals the ’Ndrangheta from neighbouring Calabria – now the country’s biggest crime organisation (as reported in the next chapter) and estimated to control the import of 80 per cent of all cocaine sold on the streets of Europe. But business boomed at home too …