The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia

The next morning, Carlo, Denise and a friend of Carlo’s, Rosario Curcio, saw a lawyer in town. Carlo told the lawyer he wanted to see Denise’s statements. The lawyer asked Denise what she’d told the carabinieri. Denise repeated what she had told Carlo: that she and her mother had come up to Milan to spend a few days with her father and Lea had vanished on their last night. She began crying. The lawyer said he could arrange to have Lea’s disappearance publicised on national television. There was a show, Chi l’ha Visto? (Have You Seen Them?), which appealed for information on missing people. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ cried Carlo. The lawyer didn’t get it at all. Carlo stood up and walked out, leaving Denise crying in the lawyer’s office.

After Denise recovered, she, Carlo and Rosario drove to a beauty salon owned by Rosario’s girlfriend, Elisa. Carlo took Rosario aside for another quiet talk. Elisa asked Denise what was going on. Denise burst into tears once more and told Elisa that her mother had gone missing two nights before. Elisa said that was strange because Rosario had vanished for a few hours the same evening. They’d had a date, said Elisa, but Rosario had cancelled, then switched off his phone. When she finally got through to him around 9 p.m., he’d told Elisa something about having to fix a car with Carmine. It didn’t make sense. Why the sudden rush to fix a car? Why at night? Denise was about to say something when Carlo interrupted to say he was taking Denise back to Viale Montello. She slept in her cousin’s room for a third night.

The next day, three days since Lea had disappeared, Denise detected an improvement in Carlo’s mood. He announced that he and Denise would drive to Reggio Emilia, not far from Bologna, to stay the night with another cousin. They left in the early afternoon. While her father drove, Denise watched silently as the winter sun flashed through the poplar trees like a searchlight through the bars of a fence. How could her mother just vanish? How could anyone be there one minute, and there be no sign of her the next? How would she ever talk to her father again?

In Reggio Emilia, Denise went to bed early while Carlo and his cousin went out for dinner. The following morning, Carlo drove Denise back to Milan, changed cars to a blue BMW and announced that he and Denise were leaving immediately for Calabria with two other friends. As they were packing, Carmine arrived to say goodbye. Denise was struck by his expression. Stiff and formal, she thought. Something about the way he wouldn’t look her in the eye.

From the back seat of the BMW, Denise watched as Milan’s grand piazzas and chic boutiques gave way to the flat, grey farmland north of Florence, then the rust-coloured hills of Tuscany and Umbria and finally, as the sun sank into the sea to the west, the towering black volcanoes around Naples and Pompeii. It was dark by the time they crossed into Calabria. Denise felt the road change from smooth asphalt to worn, undulating waves. The car negotiated an almost endless succession of roadworks, then plunged into the steep valley of Cosenza, skimming the cliffs as it wound down into the abyss before hitting the valley floor.

Soon Denise felt the car turn left and accelerate back up into the hills. She registered the tighter turns and the sound of tyres scrabbling on loose stones. The cold of the window dried her tear tracks to a salty crust. As the car filled with the smell of pines, the conversation between the three men took on a giddy, jubilant tone. ‘The only thing in my head was my mother,’ she said. ‘I was just sitting in the back, crying. But the others – they were so happy. Chatting and smiling and joking and laughing out loud.’

After an hour of climbing, the car crested a mountain pass and began to descend. At the edge of a forest, by the side of a stream, they came to a small village. They were heading to the one place where Carlo could be sure Denise would never speak out of turn again. Pagliarelle.

‘Pagliarelle’ comes from the word pagliari, meaning shelter. The name commemorated how for thousands of years, as the winter snows melted, Calabria’s shepherds would lead their sheep and goats up a track into the mountains and find a stream on whose banks they would graze their animals for weeks at a time. Keeping one eye out for wolves and another on the sea on the horizon, the men would collect pinewood, barbecue goat meat, drink wine and sleep in a handful of open-sided shacks that they roofed with fir and clay. In the twentieth century, the track leading from the nearby town of Petilia Policastro was tarred, electricity arrived and the shepherds’ rest grew into a modest settlement of grey-stone, red-tiled townhouses gathered around a small central square. The name survived, as did the stream, which was channelled into a fountain in the piazza where, as children, their mothers would send Lea and Carlo to fill buckets for the day.

It was here, high up in the frozen, granite mountains of eastern Calabria, that Denise found herself walking a tightrope of pretence in the weeks after Lea’s disappearance. Lea hadn’t just been Denise’s mother. After so many years alone together, she had defined Denise’s life. Now Denise found herself back in the place that her mother had tried to escape for so long, adrift among the people she was sure had killed her. It was impossible to know how to behave. With no body and no funeral, Denise couldn’t mourn. Carlo was telling people that Lea had run off, maybe to Australia, and Denise found herself having to make believe that her murderous father hadn’t really killed her courageous mother at all but that, rather, her fickle mother had abandoned her husband and only child and jetted off to a new life in the sun. Denise knew the way she looked so much like Lea – the same hair, the same cheekbones – made her an immediate object of suspicion. Worse, Carlo was making so much of Denise’s return. After years of problems with his wife and daughter, the boss finally had both his women where they belonged – and he wanted everyone to know. Ten days after Lea’s disappearance, Carlo organised an eighteenth birthday party for Denise, inviting hundreds of people from Pagliarelle and Petilia Policastro and even buying Denise a car. When Denise refused to go, Carlo went ahead with the party anyway.

Mostly, Denise spent her days trying to learn from her Aunt Marisa, with whom she was now living. Ever since Lea had first denounced the ’Ndrangheta in 1996, Marisa had been forced to pull off a daily performance in Pagliarelle. Convincing an entire village they needed to have no doubts about her had required Marisa not just to tell lies but to live them too. In her mind, Marisa suffocated any affection she had for Lea and focused instead on the resentment she felt towards her sister for the trouble she had caused. Denise realised she would have to learn to hate her mother, too. ‘I knew my aunt and her family,’ said Denise. ‘I knew how they thought. My idea was to understand their mentality and see if I could also work out how to live there. I didn’t want to end up like my mother. I wanted to keep living.’

V

Denise wasn’t the only one living a lie in Pagliarelle. Watching Lea’s daughter offered the carabinieri one of their best leads for finding out what had happened to Lea. But any reminder of the state’s relationship with Lea, or any hint that it might continue with her daughter, would be enough to condemn Denise. The carabinieri decided the state’s only visible presence in Pagliarelle should remain the lone village policeman. Unseen and unheard, however, scores of officers would watch Pagliarelle day and night.

Over the years, the challenge posed by the mafia had compelled Italy’s security services to innovate. To pursue violent ’Ndranghetisti through mountain terrain had led the Calabrian carabinieri to form a unique Special Forces-style squad, the cacciatori (‘hunters’), a unit made up of snipers, bomb disposal experts, heavy weapons operators, helicopter pilots and Alpinists. The sight of a cacciatori helicopter gunship flying low over the Aspromonte mountains was a corrective to anyone who doubted the state was fighting a war in southern Italy.

But even the cacciatori’s resources paled next to those commanded by Italy’s covert intelligence units. Around the world, only a few specialised police units are permitted to eavesdrop on suspects’ telephone calls or spy on them electronically. In Italy, a measure of the mafia threat was that all three police forces – the domestic police, the militaristic carabinieri and the Guardian di Finanza, which specialised in economic crime – had surveillance divisions that employed thousands. In 2009, the Italian state was tapping a total of 119,553 phones and listening to 11,119 bugs. Almost no type of reconnaissance was forbidden. To establish targets’ whereabouts, plain-clothes officers followed them, filmed them through hidden mini cameras and larger zoom lenses set up at a distance – several miles across the valley, in the case of Pagliarelle – and tracked their phones’ GPS signal. To find out what the subjects were saying, they hacked their text messages, phone calls, emails and social media chats.

In Reggio, almost an entire floor of the gracious building that served as the city’s carabinieri headquarters had been transformed into a humming indoor field of electronic espionage. At the centre was a control room from which chases and operations were coordinated. Around it were twenty smaller offices, each dedicated to a different surveillance operation. Every room was packed with scores of screens, servers, modems and snaking thick black wires. Working without interruption in six-hour shifts that ran continuously, day and night, officers in Reggio and an identical team in Milan had been following bosses like Carlo for years. Chosen for their facility with dialects and their ability to inhabit the skin of their subjects, the operators knew their subjects so well they could decipher the meaning of their words from a euphemism or even an inflection in their voice. The Calabrian teams also had a particular skill with bugs. They planted devices in cars, homes and gardens. They bugged a basement laundry whose underground, signal-cutting location made it a favourite ’Ndrangheta meeting place. They bugged an orange orchard where a boss liked to hold meetings, and for the same reason bugged a forest. One time they even bugged a road where one boss took walks, ripping up the asphalt and re-laying it with tar embedded with listening devices.

Such entrepreneurialism brought results. In early 2008, the squad hunting ’Ndrangheta supremo Pasquale Condello, by then fifty-seven and on the run for eighteen years, observed that every two weeks, as though he were on a schedule, Condello’s nephew would shake his surveillance in the centre of Reggio, swapping from the back of one motorbike to another in a series of choreographed changes. The carabinieri were convinced the manoeuvres were in preparation for meeting Condello. One day, an officer noticed that the nephew always wore the same crash helmet. A few nights later, a carabinieri officer punctured the silencer on a car, then drove it up and down outside the nephew’s house to cover the sound of a second officer breaking in and switching the helmet with an identical one implanted with a tracer. When it was time for the next rendezvous, the carabinieri followed the nephew through his usual multi-ride acrobatics then, using the tracer, to a small pink house in a back alley on the south side of Reggio Calabria. Surrounded by more than a hundred cacciatori, Condello surrendered without a fight.

This was the front line on which Alessandra had imagined herself working when she transferred to Calabria. But a staffing shortfall meant that on arrival she was assigned to Reggio as a city judge. Her knowledge of Milan and Calabria and her interest in ’Ndrangheta women notwithstanding, she was forced to watch the Lea Garofalo case unfold from afar.

Still, there were advantages to such a gentle start. For one, the undemanding hours allowed plenty of time to learn the lay of the land. Alessandra kept pace with active investigations by chatting to officers at the carabinieri’s headquarters, a short walk from the Palace of Justice. At other moments, she researched the ’Ndrangheta’s history. In her office, she assembled piles of case files, carabinieri surveillance transcripts, pentiti statements, academic papers, history books and even accounts of Calabrian folklore.

To a Sicilian like Alessandra, the origins of the ’Ndrangheta felt familiar. The organisation was at its strongest away from the big cities in the hundreds of small mountain hamlets like Pagliarelle nestling in the valleys that led away from the coast. As in Sicily, many of these settlements had been the cradle of some of Europe’s first civilisations. Alessandra read how paintings of bulls dating from 12,000 BC had been found in Calabrian caves. By 530 BC, Pythagoras was teaching mathematics in Kroton (later Crotone) on the plain below Pagliarelle while the citizens of nearby Sybaris were drinking wine piped to their homes by vinoducts. Like Sicilians, Calabrians had their own archaic language, in this case Grecanico, a Greek dialect left over from the Middle Ages when Calabria had been part of the Byzantine Empire.

Something else that Calabria had in common with Sicily: from the beginning, it was a land apart. Many of the valleys were accessible only from the sea, naturally isolated behind steep mountainsides, thick pine forests and, in winter, snows that could cut off villages for months. For thousands of years, there had been no one to defend the families who lived in these valleys. They tended olive trees, fished the ocean and scanned the horizon as invading armies sailed by from Rome, Germany, Arabia, Spain, France, Italy and America. They were poor, resilient and resolutely autonomous, and as Italy’s north steadily eclipsed the south, their estrangement from the rest of the Italian peninsula only grew. When in 1861 a group of northerners began to send bureaucrats, teachers and carabinieri into the valleys to proclaim the rule of a newly united Italy, it was the families who repudiated, thwarted and occasionally killed the colonisers.

At first, the families had no connection to the mafia. The phenomenon of organised crime first emerged in Italy in the 1820s with the Camorra in Naples and then in the 1840s and 1850s with what became Cosa Nostra in Sicily. In both cases, ordinary criminals found themselves in jail with educated, bourgeois revolutionaries who were fighting foreign domination and feudalism, and who often organised themselves in masonic sects. As patriots, the rebels taught the future mafiosi the importance of a righteous cause. As freemasons, they taught them hierarchy, and the power of legend and ceremony.

When Sicily simultaneously unified with the north of Italy and ended feudalism, the ensuing chaos gave Sicily’s criminals a chance to put these new lessons to work. Though the northern dukes and generals leading unification described it as an act of modernisation, many southerners regarded it as another foreign conquest. Adding to the discontent, the immediate effect of the advent of private property in Sicily was a rash of property disputes. To protect themselves, landowners, towns and villages set up vigilante groups who, for a fee, protected their assets, hunted down thieves and settled disputes. To be effective, these groups required men who could intimidate others. Jail-hardened criminals were a natural choice.

Soon these bands of enforcers were calling themselves mafiosi, a term derived from the Sicilian word mafiusu, meaning swagger or bravado. Their new name was, in effect, a rebranding. Violent criminals had always been able to inspire fear. The mafiosi wanted respect, too. While they didn’t deny a criminal self-interest, the mafiosi insisted theirs was an honourable endeavour: protecting poor southerners from rapacious landowners and an oppressive north. Of course, Sicilians soon learned that the people from whom they needed most protection were the mafiosi themselves. The protection ‘racket’ was born.

When organised crime reached Calabria a generation or two later, Alessandra read, it had repeated many of the same patterns. Like Cosa Nostra, Calabria’s mafia began in jail. One of Calabria’s main administrative centres was Palmi, a hill town with views out over the east coast that, as the provincial capital of the Gioia Tauro piano, the estuary plain, possessed a police station, a courtroom and a prison. In the spring of 1888, gangs of hoodlums, many of them graduates of the town jail, began staging knife fights in Palmi’s taverns, brothels and piazzas. As the heat rose with the coming summer, it seemed to stoke a violent hooliganism among the ex-cons, who began rampaging through the streets, slashing citizens with knives and razors, extorting money from gamblers, prostitutes and landowners, rustling cattle and goats, and even threatening magistrates, the police and newspaper editors.

In those early days, the prototype gangsters called themselves camorristi, a straight copy of the Naples mafia, or picciotti, a word that the British historian John Dickie translates as ‘lads with attitude’.1 If they were united, it was chiefly by their dandyish style: tattoos, extravagant quiffs, silk scarves knotted at the neck and trousers that were tight at the thighs and flared at the ankle. In his history of the three big Italian mafias, Mafia Brotherhoods, Dickie describes how picciotto culture spread across Calabria in months.2 Like all young male fashions, it might have died just as rapidly had it not penetrated the hill valleys. There the families had little taste for the picciotti’s dress. But the remote and defensive interior of Calabria was fertile territory for a movement whose methods were mostly physical and whose distrust of the state was pronounced. And just as they ran everything in the valleys, the families were soon running the piccioterria.

A central goal for all mafias was to create a consensus around power. Whenever the question of power arose – political, economic, social, divine – the answer had to be the mafia. It was the peculiar luck of the Italian mafias that circumstances conspired to graft their enterprise onto the most durable of southern Italian power structures: the family. In Sicily, the mafia came to be known as Cosa Nostra, meaning ‘our thing’, and Our Thing was, really, Our Family Secret, an outsmarting of the northern state built on the intimacy and obedience of kin. Likewise in Calabria, the valley families gave the picciotti a ready-made hierarchy, order, legitimacy and secrecy. It was this – loyalty to blood and homeland – that was the foundation of all the horrors to come.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Calabria’s street hoodlums had been organised into local cells called ’ndrine, each with their own turf, ranks and boss. At first, picciotti were useful for small matters: appropriating a neighbour’s field for the boss’s cows, resisting rent demands from fussing landlords or extracting protection money from the neighbourhood trattoria. Highway robbery, smuggling, kidnapping and loan-sharking were lucrative earners for more enterprising picciotti. Bosses also took on additional duties like adjudicating property disputes or defending women’s honour.

But as the picciotti endured successive crackdowns by the authorities, some wondered how they might turn the tables on the state. If the source of the wider world’s power came from money, they reasoned, then maybe the way to attack that outside world was to venture out into it, steal its money and take its power?

The Calabrian mafia was soon using its money to buy favours from the carabinieri and the judiciary. After that came bribes to political parties, mayors’ offices, the state bureaucracy and the Italian parliament. In time, the families were also able to infiltrate these institutions with their own men. The insiders then defrauded and embezzled, diverting public funds to mafia-owned contracting businesses such as construction firms, refuse collectors and dockers. Elections were rigged and more allegiances bought. Those who could not be corrupted or intimidated were beaten, firebombed or killed.

All this felt familiar to a Sicilian like Alessandra. But the Calabrians outdid their peers in two respects. Where the Sicilians recruited from a particular area, the Calabrians relied on family: almost without exception, picciotti were either born into an ’ndrina or married into it. And while the Sicilians certainly spun stories about themselves, the Calabrians dreamed up legends that wove together honour, religion, family and southern Italian separatism into an elaborate and almost impenetrable veil of misdirection.

By the early twentieth century, ’Ndranghetisti were tracing their origins to three medieval knights-errant. These figures crop up in mafia creation myths from Asia to Africa to Europe.3 In the ’Ndrangheta version, the knights were Spanish brothers – Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso – who had fled their homeland after avenging their sister’s rape. Landing on the tiny island of Favignana off Sicily’s west coast and taking shelter in damp and cold sea caverns, the trio nursed a sense of righteous grievance and steadfast family loyalty for twenty-nine long and uncomfortably damp years. Eventually their discussions became the basis for a brotherhood founded on mutual defence. With the Honoured Society sworn to protect all members, and they it, no outsider would ever think of shaming the brothers and their families again. And when the brothers felt ready to take their creation to the world, Mastrosso travelled to Naples to set up the Camorra in the name of the Madonna, Osso sailed to Sicily and founded Cosa Nostra in the name of Saint George and Carcagnosso took a land between his two brothers – Calabria – where he established the ’Ndrangheta in the name of Saint Michael, the Archangel.

The story is, of course, bunkum. The Calabrian mafia is not hundreds of years old but barely a hundred and fifty. The story of the three knights also seems copied from that of the Garduña, a mythical fifteenth-century Spanish criminal society whose founding legend would have been familiar to ’Ndranghetisti from the time when Spain ruled Calabria. The irony is that most historians have concluded the Garduña was itself a fabrication.4 This, then, was mafiosi trying to fool others with a piece of gangster fiction which had, in fact, fooled them.

This was far from the only example of mafia make-believe, however. The ’Ndrangheta’s ancient-sounding name did not derive from a venerable heritage but, as Dickie uncovered, was a modern artifice that first surfaced in police reports in the 1920s and in newspaper stories in the 1950s.5 Alessandra found more recent mafia fictions in the form of internet videos ripping off scenes from American gangster movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas and set to Calabrian folk songs. The lyrics to these melodies were hardly poetry but no less chilling for that:

Keep the honour of the family.

Avenge my father.

I have to get good with guns and knives

Because I can’t stop thinking about it.

The pain in my heart –

It can only be stopped if I avenge my father.

Then there were the ‘ancient’ rituals. For a boss’s son, Alessandra read, these could begin soon after birth. A new-born boy would be laid kicking and screaming on a bed, a key next to his left hand and a knife by his right, denoting the state and the mafia. An ’Ndrangheta mother’s first duty was to ensure, with a few careful nudges, that her boy grasped the knife and sealed his destiny. In Tired of Killing: The Autobiography of a Repentant ’Ndranghetista, Alessandra read about the early life of Antonio Zagari, the son of an ’Ndrangheta boss who turned super-grass in 1990.6 In his book, Zagari described a probation of two years, during which a teenage picciotto was expected to prove his worth by committing crimes and even killing, as well as learning by heart the fable of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso and a set of rules and social prescriptions. After that came a formal initiation ceremony. The ritual began when Zagari was led into a darkened room in which a group of ’Ndranghetisti were standing in a circle. At first, Zagari was excluded. The boss addressed the ’Ndranghetisti, asking if they were ‘comfortable’.