The World's Most Evil Gangs (26 page)

The modern mobsters have kept the Italian police busy in very different ways from the old days. They now find themselves investigating fraudulent businesses – including tailoring for top Milan fashion houses, pirating of DVDs and handbags, fishing of endangered bluefin tuna, brewing genetically-modified beer and ‘green initiative’ recycling. Even Italian food icons like olive oil and Parma ham have not remained sacrosanct. Coldiretti, the Italian farmers’ union,
reported in 2008 that the Sicilian Mafia was adding flavouring to colza oil, often used to lubricate machinery, before relabelling it as olive oil. Fake Parma hams and other beef products falsely branded as ‘gourmet Chianina breed’ are confiscated in industrial quantities by Italian police. All four of Italy’s biggest gangs – the ’Ndrangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita, the Camorra and the Cosa Nostra – invested huge stakes in this new and lucrative business. Pirated handbags and DVDs accounted for £5 billion of Mafia income and the food industry netted the underworld £5.2 billion, according to Tano Grasso, head of Italy’s anti-racketeering commission. Perhaps unsurprising then that the Mafia is estimated to be the biggest business in Italy, with organised crime netting bosses the equivalent of approximately 7 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Italy’s famous fashion industry is rife with fraudulent Mafia investment. Roberto Saviano, an investigative journalist and anti-Mafia campaigner, disclosed how leading fashion houses regularly outsource orders to sweatshop tailors controlled by the Camorra. Mob tailors will win legitimate contracts and be supplied with the necessary raw materials – while others are allowed to flood the market with counterfeit clothes.

In Naples, the gang bosses line their pockets by illegally fishing for endangered bluefin tuna. But the Camorra, who supposedly ‘managed’ 2,500 illegal bakeries, have not had it all their own way: a group of Neapolitan shopkeepers organised an unprecedented rebellion against the racketeers in 2011, with local bakeries as well as butchers and grocers summoning up the courage to try to loosen the Camorra’s stranglehold on the city. ‘We decided we couldn’t go on,’ explained spokesman Salvatore Russo, a grocer in the city
centre. ‘They would demand money and those who didn’t pay were shot in the legs, or beaten up, or stolen from. We’ve marked out our position, we’ve dug a moat, but it’s going to take a lot more to win the war.’

That’s what Roberto Saviano discovered after writing a book about the Camorra. In it, he revealed that the ruthless Casalesi clan made hundreds of millions of euros each year by illegally dumping waste, much of it toxic, in addition to extortion rackets, drug trafficking, smuggling of illegal migrants and arms dealing. The journalist, whose exposé
Gomorrah
and the successful movie it spawned made him a household name, had to flee his home when he learned that the organisation’s dons had ordered his death. Saviano fought back by hauling them into the dock and in 2012, six years after he was forced into hiding, he appeared in a high-security Naples courtroom to look his enemies in the eye. He confronted Camorra bosses Francesco Bidognetti and Antonio Iovine via video link so that he could sue them and two of their lawyers for threats and defamation. The gang leaders were already behind bars, along with other members of the Camorra’s Casalesi clan, after being rounded up for a string of offences. The last of the fugitives, Michele Zagaria, was found in an underground bunker beneath his home north of Naples in 2011. All were sentenced to life in solitary confinement in prisons hundreds of miles from Naples.

With so many of the old-style Mafia leaders in jail or on the run, a new phenomenon has been observed – the rise of the female gangster. As
Time
magazine reported: ‘Today’s Mafia is transforming itself, and two new character types are emerging: the college graduate in a tailored suit who wields nothing sharper than his felt-tip pen, and the “Signora Boss”
who has stepped from the proverbial kitchen to the front lines of Italy’s organised crime network. More women are moving into positions of real power, often filling in for their husbands and brothers who are in prison or on the run.’ For instance, Ninetta Bagarella, wife of jailed Corleone boss ‘Toto’ Riina, who directed Cosa Nostra for a decade, is thought to be the brains that complemented her husband’s brutality. ‘These women’s roles go well beyond raising a family,’ said Corleone’s Mayor Cipriani. ‘Women in the Mafia not only have acquired authorisation, they are now the ones who do the authorising.’

Across on the mainland, a 30-year feud between rival families of the Camorra crime Syndicate led to an explosion of female violence in 2002. After exchanging slaps and threats at the local beauty parlour in a Naples suburb, several female relatives from the Graziano family cornered a carload of women from the Cava clan and opened fire with automatic weapons. Three of the Cava women were killed and two were seriously wounded. After toasting their success with male relatives, the Graziano women were taken into custody by local police, whose wiretaps had captured details of the feud.

It is to be hoped that such senseless blood-letting is a thing of the past. These days the mobster’s prime focus is on butter, not guns. And to make the profits multiply, top bosses have turned to that prototype man in the tailored suit. He is the true motor for the New Mafia, toting a business or economics degree – but still having a ‘family’ connection. An Italian governmental financial report of December 2012 described the Mafia as ‘the country’s richest firm’ with a turnover of more than £116 billion a year. Giovanni Colussi, a
Rome-based
expert on organised crime, best summed up thus: ‘The
Mafia adapts, it can even change its core business, but it always remains the Mafia. It can’t become another thing.’

One would not wish to end this chapter – one that has recorded so many murders and misery – on a flippant note. However, a newspaper story that is at first glance inconsequential nevertheless reveals the power that Mafia leaders still hold over the beleaguered citizens of southern Italy. In February 2013 a local don was arrested after trying to force an entire community to vote for his daughter on a TV talent show. Domenico Ferrara – his nickname in Neapolitan dialect is
O’ Muccuso
(the Snotty One) and
Zi’ Mimmi
(Uncle Mimmi) – handed out mobile phones so locals could cast multiple votes for 13-year-old Vania. Significantly, he made sure the phones were returned so he could check his orders had been carried out. But the votes of the terrified community of Villarica, Naples, were only enough to propel Vania to second place in the final of the show,
I’ll Leave You With A Song
. Details of the fix emerged as police arrested Ferrara and eight of his clan on suspicion of drug trafficking. A raid on his house uncovered 320 mobile phones. Police chief Captain Francesco Piroddi said: ‘The Ferrara clan exercised complete control over the district of Villaricca. This number of phones cannot be explained away.’

In 2010 another Italian talent show,
Songs and Hopes
, had been condemned after a contestant, the daughter of another Camorra boss, dedicated to her father the song ‘You Are the Best Daddy In The World and I Wouldn’t Change You For Anything’. At the end of the live broadcast, the girl was seen embracing her father, Gaetano Marino, who was sitting in the front row. It was a touching moment for the proud papa … who returned to his home in the resort of Terracina to be gunned down in a classic gangland hit.

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.

T
he 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 frugal 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.