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

‘Very comfortable,’ they replied. ‘With what?’

‘With the rules,’ said the boss.

‘Very comfortable,’ came the reply once more.

The boss then ‘baptised’ the meeting in the name of the Honoured Society ‘as our ancestors Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso baptised it … with irons and chains’. He ceremoniously confiscated any weapons. The congregation confirmed their loyalty to the society on pain of ‘five or six dagger thrusts to the chest’. The boss then likened their common endeavour to ‘a ball that goes wandering around the world as cold as ice, as hot as fire and as fine as silk’. After the members of the circle affirmed three times that they were ready to accept a new member, they opened their ranks to admit the newcomer. The boss then cut a cross on Zagari’s finger so that it bled over a burning image of Saint Michael while he intoned: ‘As the fire burns this image, so shall you burn if you stain yourself with infamy.’

That was the cue for Zagari to take his oath: ‘I swear before the organised and faithful society, represented by our honoured and wise boss and by all the members, to carry out all the duties for which I am responsible and all those which are imposed on me – if necessary even with my blood.’

Finally, the boss kissed Zagari on both cheeks, recited the rules of the society and delivered a homily to humility, the island of Favignana and blood – which, in case anyone was lost, was the essence of the icy, fiery, silky and world-wandering ball he had mentioned earlier.

It was a wonder anyone kept a straight face, thought Alessandra. Certainly, the cod-medievalism of the ’Ndrangheta’s performances made serious historians choke. Dickie likened the ‘solemn ravings’ of its initiation ritual to a scout ceremony that crossed The Lord of the Flies with Monty Python. One of Italy’s most eminent mafia historians, Enzo Ciconte, was just as dismissive of the ’Ndrangheta’s ‘Red Riding Hood fantasies’.7 But Ciconte cautioned that ridiculous did not mean meaningless. ‘No group of people can last long just by using violence, just by killing, stealing and rustling – they need some sort of faith or ideology,’ he said. ‘The ’Ndrangheta had no tradition. They had to invent one.’

It was a good point, thought Alessandra. What mattered with faith was not plausibility but belief. Most of the main religions clung to unlikely myths and holy stories, which they called miracles or acts of God. Few of them were ever hurt by others laughing at them – quite the opposite. More to the point, a lie was just that: a fib, a fiction, a deceit. No one was claiming the ’Ndrangheta’s bosses believed it. After all, they were the ones telling it.

A better question was why the ’Ndrangheta chiefs found such decorous fantasies expedient. The answer was to be found in their spectacular rise. However contrived and derivative the cult of the ’Ndrangheta might appear to academic examination, it had gained the organisation the loyalty and secrecy of its members, the fear and respect of ordinary Calabrians and, as a result, a thick cloak of opacity under which it hid from the world. The ’Ndrangheta’s stories might have appealed to Calabrians because of their own distrust of the state or their sense of theatre, or simply because they were handed down from father to son with the solemn conviction of a sacred truth. The point was they worked. Myth was how the ’Ndrangheta assumed a moral purpose when it was self-evidently immoral, how it coloured itself romantic and divine when it was base and profane and how it convinced others it was their righteous champion even as it robbed and murdered them. Myth was how those inside the organisation were persuaded they were following a higher code and those outside it found themselves stumped by even the simplest questions, such as who was who. It was all an enormous lie. But it was a lie that explained how, almost without anyone noticing, a small group of families from the wild hills of Italy’s south had become the twenty-first century’s most formidable mafia.

Alessandra became fascinated by the intricacies of the deception. The ’Ndrangheta was an extraordinary puzzle, a multi-level mosaic. From transcripts of tapped phone calls and bugged conversations, she discovered ’Ndranghetisti had their own language, baccagghju, a slang based on Grecanico whose meaning was obscure to almost everyone but initiates. Even when they spoke Italian, ’Ndranghetisti used a code of metaphors to disguise their meaning. An ’Ndrangheta family in criminal partnership with another would describe itself as ‘walking with’ that other family. Rather than demand protection money outright, ’Ndranghetisti would request a ‘donation for the cousins’, an allusion to those men in jail whose families needed support. For a boss to describe a man as ‘disturbing’ or ‘troubling’ was for him to pass an oblique but unequivocal death sentence on him. The euphemisms could be highly contorted. Pizzo, the word for an extortion payment, was a term whose origin was the ‘piece’ of ground on which a nineteenth-century prisoner had slept in jail, which were ranked according to their proximity to the boss. Outside jail in the twentieth century, it had come to denote the tribute that a boss expected from real estate inside his territory.

Deciphering the true meaning of ’Ndrangheta speak was a constant struggle. ‘You have to become more perceptive, more capable of decrypting,’ Alessandra would tell her husband over dinner in their apartment. ‘Mafiosi very rarely make a direct threat. Instead, they send messages with a dual meaning.’ Even the smallest gesture could carry the utmost importance. ‘They can order a murder just by looking at someone from the prisoner cage in court,’ she said.

One of the ’Ndrangheta’s most audacious lies was its relationship with the church. The ’Ndrangheta was plainly an unChristian organisation. But since it came from the most Roman Catholic of lands, it simply insisted the opposite was true. It invoked the saints, especially the Madonna and Saint Michael, the Archangel. It mimicked prayer and church services in its rituals. And it co-opted and bred priests. At mass, some priests in ’Ndrangheta areas would exhort their congregants to resist outsiders. On saints’ days, they directed celebrants to bow to statues of the Madonna before the capo’s house while at Easter, the honour of bearing statues of Jesus, Saint John and the Virgin was reserved for picciotti. The most stunning example of the ’Ndrangheta subverting Christianity happened on 2 September every year when crowds of thousands gathered at the small town of San Luca in the Aspromonte mountains for the festival of the Madonna di Polsi. Among the pilgrims were hundreds of ’Ndranghetisti, including the heads of all the clans, who since at least 1901 had used the event as a cover for the ’Ndrangheta’s AGM, the gran crimine. In plain sight, the bosses would sit at a table laden with pasta and goat sauce, present their annual accounts – what they had earned, who they had killed – and elect a new capo crimine for the coming year. ‘The church is very responsible in all of this,’ Alessandra would say. ‘It’s guilty of some terrible, terrible, terrible things.’

Though the organisation found Christianity useful, Alessandra concluded that at its core the ’Ndrangheta was more of a blood cult. Blood was the bond between families that was the ’Ndrangheta’s strength. The act of spilling blood was also revered as a source of fearsome power. That had led to some unforgiving ’Ndrangheta feuds. The Duisberg massacre of 2007 – which police identified as an attack on an ’Ndrangheta initiation celebration when a burned picture of Saint Michael was found in the pocket of the dead eighteen-year-old – was the latest atrocity in a quarrel between two clans from San Luca. The feud had begun in 1991 when a group of boys from one family threw rotten eggs at the window of a bar owned by another. Including Duisberg, nine people had since died. Many more had been injured. To avoid being shot, ’Ndranghetisti in San Luca would hide themselves in the boot of a car just to travel 100 yards. Killings were timed for maximum horror. The year before Duisberg, a boss from one clan was paralysed by a bullet that passed through his spine as he stood on a balcony cradling his new-born son. In revenge, a rival boss’s wife was shot dead in her family home on Christmas Day.

Why the ruthlessness? For the ’Ndrangheta, the answer was easy: to instil fear and reap power. For individual ’Ndranghetisti, the question was more vexed. Why be an ’Ndranghetista if your fate was to spend lengthy stretches in prison, inflict unspeakable violence on your neighbours and, in all probability, die young? Alessandra decided it came back to the lie. The ’Ndrangheta had used its fantasies about honour, sacrifice, loyalty and courage to build a prison around its young men, trapping them in a claustrophobic sect based on blood and butchery. Pride in the ’Ndrangheta’s rural heritage even encouraged some ’Ndranghetisti to imbue their violence with a rustic aesthetic. Pigs often featured. A family targeted for intimidation might discover the throats of all its male pigs had been slit. On one occasion, the carabinieri recorded an ’Ndranghetista boasting how he beat another man unconscious, then fed his living body to his own pigs. The bloodthirstiness could also be literal. More than once, men loyal to an assassinated boss were observed to rush to the scene of the killing, dip their handkerchiefs in the departed capo’s blood and press the dripping cloth to their lips.

Alessandra realised that the ’Ndrangheta’s phoney cult of blood, family and tradition also accounted for its oppression of its women. That misogynist tyranny was real enough. Driving through small town Calabria, Alessandra rarely saw women out of doors and almost never unaccompanied. Nevertheless, it was with a sinking sense of inevitability that she read that the ’Ndrangheta’s conservative values were yet another affectation.

As long ago as 1892, the ’Ndrangheta had admitted two women highwaymen into its ranks. John Dickie found court records from the 1930s showing that the picciotti once had a pronounced personal and professional attachment to prostitution as both pimps and johns. But it seemed that the ’Ndrangheta later dispensed with prostitution because, though the trade was lucrative, it was built on qualities like infidelity, loose discipline and double standards which were inimical to order and control. The closed, buttoned-up, isolated family culture of traditional Calabria, on the other hand, was perfect for organised crime. Family ties were also how the ’Ndrangheta fashioned a global criminal octopus out of the pattern of Calabrian emigration to the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Latin America in the 1920s.

The more she read, the more Alessandra realised that the ’Ndrangheta’s true genius had been in co-opting the Italian family. The more the ’Ndrangheta made itself indistinguishable from traditional, family-based Calabrian culture, the more anyone thinking of leaving the organisation had to consider that they would be abandoning all they knew and all they were. For most, it would be impossible to see beyond it.

But by basing itself around family, the ’Ndrangheta hadn’t merely been bolstering secrecy and loyalty. It had understood that family itself was a source of corruption. The undeniable love of a mother for a son or a daughter for a father – these were the sorts of bonds that ensured even the most law-abiding broke the law. Fathers would advantage their families however they could. Children would never betray their parents. Mothers, above all, would do anything to protect their children and wreak terrible revenge on those that harmed them. The ’Ndrangheta was the family augmented and accentuated into a perfect criminal entity. It was, of course, a diabolical transformation. The use of children was plainly child abuse, while to pervert the family in a country like Italy was to poison the soul of a nation. But it was also a masterstroke. If family was the basis of its power, and family was the essence of Italy, then family was how the ’Ndrangheta could corrupt the country.

For such a clan endeavour to work, Alessandra was convinced women had to have a role. And from her reading of case files and investigations, she soon discovered they had several. Women acted as messengers between men on the run or in jail, passing along tiny, folded notes – pizzini – written in a code of glyphs and addressed by the use of a code of numbers. If a man was killed or inaccessible in jail, his widow could become his de facto replacement and continue the family business. Some women acted as paymasters and bookkeepers.

Most significantly, women ensured the future of the ’Ndrangheta by producing the next generation of ’Ndranghetisti, raising children with an unbending belief in the code of honour, vendetta and omertà, and a violent loathing of outsiders who, the mothers whispered, were weak and without shame with their loose talk and looser women. ‘Without women performing this role, there would be no ’Ndrangheta,’ said Alessandra. Secrecy and power were the goals. Male misogyny and female subservience, forced or even willing, were the means.

What confirmed women’s influence inside the ’Ndrangheta was that, though they were often the victims of its violence, they also instigated some of it. Alessandra was astonished to hear about one mother from the Bellocco clan who outdid all the men for bloodthirstiness. The carabinieri had managed to bug a family meeting convened to discuss how best to avenge the death of one of their men, killed in a clan feud. The men proposed killing every male member of the rival ’ndrina. Then a woman spoke up. ‘Kill them all,’ she said. ‘Even the women. Even the kids.’ The woman wanted an entire family of thirty wiped from the face of the earth.

There was no way any of it worked without the mothers, thought Alessandra. And to a resourceful and open-minded prosecutor, that held out an enticing possibility. In the twenty-first century, there had to be other Lea Garofalos out there, mafia mothers who were unhappy with their lives and the destiny of their children. The mother, the madonna, was a holy figure in Italy and the ’Ndrangheta had corrupted her and bent her to its criminal will. There had to be women inside the organisation who hated the way they were being used. It had to be possible for Alessandra to offer these knowledgeable figures a different life and persuade them to betray their husbands and fathers. And imagine if she could. ‘It would break the chain,’ she told her fellow prosecutors. ‘It would remove the guardians of the ’Ndrangheta’s traditions. If they took their sons too, then they would be removing future soldiers. It would be very special, very important. It would impoverish the entire mafia family. It would undermine the whole culture and the mindset.’

Alessandra was refining her theory. The way to destroy The Family, she was beginning to realise, was through its mamas.

VI

In January 2010, Pignatone and Prestipino finally gave Alessandra the job she wanted.1 From the New Year, she would be lead anti-mafia prosecutor for Calabria’s west coast, taking in the villages on the Gioia Tauro piano, the town of Rosarno and the port of Gioia Tauro. She would report directly to Pignatone and Prestipino. She would also have a second prosecutor as her junior, Giovanni Musarò, a thirty-seven-year-old on his first big posting.

Like Alessandra, Musarò was attracted by Pignatone’s and Prestipino’s dynamism. ‘I was very young, they had this huge experience from Palermo and they brought with them a completely different way of working,’ he said. Borrowing from Falcone and Borsellino, the old model of prosecutors as ‘lonely heroes’ was out, said Giovanni. The new watchword was collaboration. ‘They put a great effort into creating a team, sharing information with colleagues and behaving like a democracy,’ he said. Each member brought different strengths. ‘Alessandra was driven by ethics and very determined. Pignatone had a great ability to predict events. Prestipino was very clever and very pragmatic. He knew all his investigations and all his investigators. He was able to go to each of us and say: “Maybe go to Alessandra and you’ll find this. Or maybe go here and ask this investigator, and they’ll help you with this.”’

For Alessandra, the prize was her new territory. Palmi, on the southern end of the Gioia Tauro estuary, was where the ’Ndrangheta was born. A century and a half later, the piano remained the heart of the empire. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at the place, thought Alessandra. The ’Ndrangheta was richer than most global corporations and in Rosarno even the most minor ’Ndrangheta family was thought to have three, four or five million euros stashed away. Yet somehow in a country of amber cornfields, olive hills and blue mountains sprinkled with red-roofed villages and magnificent Roman and Renaissance cities, the ’Ndrangheta had contrived to make their towns into verrucae of unkempt, concrete ugliness. Touring Rosarno for the first time, Alessandra felt like she’d arrived after an apocalypse. Everything looked scorched. The trees were blackened and their leaves orange and brittle. The single park was just chalky pebbles and dry spiky weeds. The streets, whose asphalt resembled spilled lava, were strewn with refuse. Everything was covered with crude graffiti. And the town was dead. Shops were shut or deserted. Many of the breezeblock houses were unfinished and empty, their gardens building sites and their glassless windows as vacant as the eyes of a skull. In the main piazza, no one sat on the benches, no one ate in the restaurants. To one side, a children’s playground consisted of a rusted swing, a broken slide and a shattered piece of concrete littered with wrappers, cigarette butts and broken glass. Alessandra could feel it. The fear. The omertà.

Unpicking the paradox of how this desperate place could be home to such a rich criminal empire was key to the story of the ’Ndrangheta’s modern rise. It began at 3 a.m. on 10 July 1973, when a small gang of ’Ndrangheta toughs from the villages around Gioia Tauro kidnapped John Paul Getty III, the sixteen-year-old grandson of the billionaire John Paul Getty, from outside his home in Piazza Farnese in central Rome. The gang held the boy in the Calabrian mountains for five months. His father, who had been in a heroin-induced haze at the time his son was taken, initially thought the kidnapping was a hoax staged by his son to obtain money. The kidnappers called the family patriarch, John Paul Getty Snr, and threatened to cut off his grandson’s fingers unless they received a ransom of $17 million. The elder Getty refused, arguing: ‘If I pay one penny now, I’ll have fourteen kidnapped grandchildren.’ To press their case, the gang cut off John Paul III’s left ear and sent it to a newspaper in Rome. It was accompanied by a note threatening that the second ear would be arriving in ten days unless the ransom was paid. Getty Snr relented and paid $2.2 million, the maximum his accountants advised him was tax-efficient. He loaned the final ransom balance of $700,000 to his son, the boy’s father, at 4 per cent interest.

John Paul Getty III never recovered from his abduction or his grandfather’s indifference. He died at fifty-four, an alcoholic and drug addict in a wheelchair, having been crippled at the age of twenty-five by a near-lethal combination of Valium, methadone and cocktails. But for the west coast ’Ndrangheta, these grubby beginnings were the seeds of an empire. They went on to stage 150 more kidnappings. In Gioia Tauro, they used the ransom money to buy construction trucks. ’Ndrangheta men inside local government ensured these trucks were contracted for the building of a steel plant near Gioia Tauro port. When the government abandoned that project as uneconomic, the trucks went to work on a bigger site: the expansion of the port itself.

State construction contracts – building motorways, high-speed rail links, and even wind and solar farms, while loan-sharking at extortionate rates to force rivals out of business – went on to become a giant, profitable ’Ndrangheta business in its own right. By the time Alessandra was posted to the west coast, a project to widen and repair the arterial highway running from western Calabria up Italy’s coast to Salerno had somehow ended up costing the state $10 billion in three decades for what was still little more than a succession of roadworks.2 The biggest earner, however, was Gioia Tauro port itself. Once its expansion was finished, the port was the largest container facility in Italy and the sixth largest on the Mediterranean, with a capacity to load and unload millions of containers a year on a quay that ran for three and a half kilometres and was backed by an avenue of towering cranes. The ’Ndrangheta, as the only power in the area, had total control. The group ‘taxed’ every container passing through the port at $1.50 a time. It charged the port operators fees amounting to half their profits, an annual income that ran into several billion dollars. It used the port to send weapons around the world. And in the 1980s and 1990s, during la mattanza, it was through Gioia Tauro that the ’Ndrangheta built its cocaine empire.

But aside from a single street of new houses in San Luca nicknamed Via John Paul Getty in a small town to the south, there was no sign of the ’Ndrangheta’s wealth. To the ’Ndrangheta, a façade of poverty was crucial to the lie. It helped it escape the attention of the state and added credibility to its claim to be championing a deprived south against an oppressive north. The ’Ndrangheta went to mulish lengths to service its pretence. When Alessandra first visited Rosarno, Domenico Oppedisano, a seventy-eight-year-old ’Ndrangheta big shot, could still be seen in his battered trilby and dusty suit, driving around in a three-wheeled van and delivering his oranges and lemons to market.

For the 97 per cent of Gioia Tauro’s population who were not ’Ndrangheta, however, the deprivation was real. Calabria was the poorest province in Italy. Incomes were around half those in the north, unemployment ran at 28 per cent and even in 2009 roasted dormice were considered a delicacy. The provincial government, meanwhile, was so dysfunctional that in 2008 a US embassy fact-finding mission concluded that, were it an independent state, Calabria would be a failed one.

As she was driven around the estuary delta between Rosarno and the port, Alessandra found it easy to guess who had ruined it. The area was latticed by a series of two-lane highways connected by a spaghetti of looping off-ramps and roundabouts, a modern industrial grid built with tens of millions of euros donated by the European Union and the Italian government. Economists and bureaucrats in Brussels, it seemed, had imagined a new warehousing zone to support the port that would single-handedly reverse the economic fortunes of one of Europe’s poorest areas. Initially, ’Ndrangheta construction companies had been happy to take what public money was on offer. Then the ’Ndrangheta squashed the project. Threats, violence and demands for crippling protection payments had ensured all but one of the international transport and logistics businesses proposed for the site had either closed or never opened. Weeds and thickets of bamboo edged far out into the road. Tarmac roads and concrete bays cracked and splintered in the sun. Giant bougainvilleas surfed out over the walls of empty business parks. Once-luxuriant palms were grotesquely overgrown, their green starbursts turned sickly yellow by a layer of sticky dust. Street lights were ubiquitous but lifeless, connected to a field of large black solar panels fast disappearing under long grass. Rusted signs, some peppered with shotgun blasts, pointed the way to now-defunct enterprises whose gates were decorated with sun-bleached strings of international flags. In front of one grand entrance, a giant brass globe on a spike stood at a crazy angle, a dream of world domination turning, continent by continent, into a small pile of rusted metal on the ground. The only sign of life was a herd of goats grazing in drainage ditches choked with poppies, buttercups and pink and purple flowers and, to one side, a tented camp of several thousand African migrants, whom the authorities, or possibly the ’Ndrangheta, had peevishly kept off site.