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

The place felt like a war zone. And in a way it was. Covering the entire summit of a hill high above the port was a complex of sprawling villas and gardens once owned by the Piromalli clan, in whose territory the port lay. From here, the Piromallis had surveyed their empire like generals. The state had eventually confiscated the property but, since no one was willing to buy it, the houses and gardens were empty, an obstinate and unmissable reminder of where real power lay. Below the villa walls was a chapel and graveyard filled with baroque ’Ndranghetisti graves. Since it had been built without permits, the local authority had ordered the chapel demolished, only to discover that no local contractor was available to do the work.

In all of Gioia Tauro, a few lone entrepreneurs had taken a stand. One was Antonino de Masi, who in the 1990s decided to diversify the family agricultural machinery conglomerate into transport logistics. The business had foundered under ’Ndrangheta pressure and de Masi now pursued other ventures, such as marketing earthquake shelters and smokeless pizza ovens, both of which he had invented himself. But he refused to leave his offices. That simple act of defiance had cost him dearly. After receiving numerous death threats, de Masi had sent his family to live in northern Italy. De Masi himself was obliged to move around in an armoured car, flanked by two bodyguards. Two uniformed Italian army soldiers with automatic rifles and a camouflage jeep stood guard in his office car park. De Masi described himself as ‘living in enemy territory’.3

Why would the ’Ndrangheta ruin its own homeland? Because de Masi was right. As a wealthy businessman with the means to pursue his ambition and the courage not to ask the ’Ndrangheta’s permission, he was its sworn foe. It wasn’t that the ’Ndrangheta hated development. It was that it tolerated no power other than itself. Inside its territory, there could be no intrusion by the outside world and no escape from the world the ’Ndrangheta had created. Education, especially the kind that encouraged free thinking, was discouraged. The sort of exit offered by gainful employment with a figure like Antonino de Masi also had to be crushed. The ’Ndrangheta even restricted physical ways out of the place. There was just one bus a day to Reggio Calabria. Roads built by ’Ndrangheta construction firms didn’t connect to provincial highways, or to each other. Bridges over highways and rivers joined nothing to nowhere. The railway that connected Gioia Tauro to Europe stopped 1.5 kilometres short of the port, meaning all the cargo from one of Europe’s biggest Mediterranean container ports had to be loaded onto mafia-owned trucks and driven three minutes to the station. This was the suffocating magnificence of the ’Ndrangheta. The point wasn’t money. The point was power.

By 2010, the Calabrian anti-mafia prosecutors were finally piecing together quite how much influence the ’Ndrangheta had accumulated. Even veterans of la mattanza like Pignatone and Prestipino were astonished. Where once the ’Ndrangheta had been outmatched by Cosa Nostra in drug smuggling, it now dominated the entire European trade in illicit narcotics. Cocaine was produced and refined in Colombia, Peru or Bolivia, transported east, generally to Brazil or Venezuela, and from there across the Atlantic to Europe via the Caribbean or West Africa, before being landed in Holland, Denmark, Spain or Italy. Though other criminal groups were involved at each stage of its journey as producers and traffickers, the ’Ndrangheta had assumed a position of broker, overseer and employer across the entire supply chain.

Inventiveness was a consistent characteristic of this empire, especially in trafficking methods. For sea routes through the Caribbean, the ’Ndrangheta or their partners would conceal cocaine under trawlers full of frozen fish or inside tins of pineapple, or by sewing it into bananas or even dissolving it in bottles of whisky. Another trick was to secrete a load together with duplicate security tags inside a shipping container carrying other cargo. The drug could then be removed after crossing the Atlantic, generally in customs storage or at a refuelling stop, and the containers resealed with the copied tags and sent on their way without detection. To further confuse customs agents, two ships might rendezvous in the middle of the ocean and make a further swap between containers.

Aircraft offered further options. On commercial flights – across the Atlantic to West Africa, and from West Africa to Europe – the smugglers used passengers who would swallow up to thirty plastic bags, amounting to a total load of a kilo each. They would then pack as many as forty ‘swallowers’ onto a plane, sometimes using an entire class of African exchange students who could pay for several years at a foreign university with one trip. Plane crews, who generally sailed through customs without checks, were another good option. Mostly the traffickers would enlist individual stewards but on occasion they recruited entire crews, including the pilots. When private planes were available, freelance pilots flew small props fitted with custom-enlarged fuel tanks at low altitude thousands of miles across the Atlantic from Latin America to touch down in West Africa. A few times, the smugglers had used an ageing Boeing 727, which could take ten tons of cocaine at a time and which in 2009 had been found by the authorities in Mali in the middle of the Sahara, abandoned and torched by the traffickers after snapping its wheels on landing. The onward land route through the Sahara to the Mediterranean was perhaps the most dramatic drug lane of all, involving convoys of twenty to thirty 4×4s driving north for four or five days right across the desert, navigating by the stars and refuelling at a string of camouflaged outposts.4

Once the drugs reached the Mediterranean, they might be taken from Tunisia to Europe on cruise ships or driven anti-clockwise around the coast, across Libya and Egypt and on through Israel and Turkey, a journey facilitated by border guards and army officers. To move cocaine across Europe required a high degree of subterfuge. Tons of cocaine were trucked from Gioia Tauro to Holland hidden under flowers destined for Europe’s biggest flower market, where florists served a second purpose as ’Ndrangheta money launderers. Payment going the other way was also disguised. Billions of euros in credit might be uploaded to hundreds of online betting accounts. One time, €7.5 million was sent in the form of 260 tons of Lindt chocolates.5

The prosecutors knew which ’ndrine were so trusted by the Colombians that they were allowed cocaine on credit. They knew which families had diversified into dealing arms. They’d investigated who used smuggling ships on their return journey to dump hazardous chemicals and nuclear waste by sinking boats off the coast of Somalia. Along the smuggling routes, the investigators knew which customs services, armies, rebels, Islamists, officials, ministers, prime ministers and presidents took a cut of the profits. Mozambique’s customs, the mid-point on an otherwise little travelled, entirely Portuguese-speaking route from Brazil to Portugal via Africa, had been bought almost whole. So had the entire government of Guinea-Bissau, a tiny West African state and another former Portuguese colony, where soldiers would clear traffic from public highways to allow narco-planes to land.

What gave the prosecutors most pause was how, as the rewards of power had multiplied, so had the struggle for it. As 2010 dawned, West Africa was in the midst of an unprecedented wave of coups, civil wars, revolutions and assassinations driven by the struggle to get rich from drug smuggling. Surveying the chaos created by cocaine, the prosecutors realised the ’Ndrangheta hadn’t just ruined Calabria and undermined the Italian state but had done the same to large parts of the planet. This lent new urgency to their mission. This wasn’t the old story about how drugs messed you up. This was about how the ’Ndrangheta’s drugs had messed up the lives of hundreds of millions of people in countries on the other side of the world, places which few Europeans had even heard of.

Nor was even that the most worrying part. By 2010, Calabria’s anti-mafia prosecutors were picking up indications that the ’Ndrangheta’s money-laundering operations were undermining the world’s financial markets and even the sovereignty of nations. Giuseppe Lombardo, a prosecutor who specialised in tracking its money, said that alongside the ’Ndrangheta’s growth had come increased financial sophistication. Faced with a need to launder ever-increasing amounts of money and observing how the world’s stock markets were increasingly lightly regulated, a few ’Ndrangheta families had made a first few forays into the world of international finance in the mid-1980s. A generation later, what had begun as an experiment in diversification and legitimisation was now a giant multinational asset management business run by ’Ndrangheta lawyers, accountants and bankers in Milan, London and New York through a maze of offshore financial centres that specialised in secrecy and low tax: Cyprus, Malta, Gibraltar, Mauritius, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Holland, the British Virgin Islands and other British dependencies. The global recession of 2007–9 had been a particular boon. As legitimate finance dried up, businesses, banks, stock markets and even political parties found themselves suddenly short of money. For the ’Ndrangheta, this credit crunch had proved to be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to convert criminal power into legal economic and political might around the world.

The ’Ndrangheta was driven by two motivations. It needed to safely launder its riches. And it wanted to become so indispensable to the international economy that tackling it would be an act of self-harm for any government. According to Lombardo, the ’Ndrangheta had largely succeeded in both endeavours. ‘They have become one of the main interlocutors in the criminal field,’ he said. ‘But much more broadly, they have become a world power.’

Initially, said Lombardo, the ’Ndrangheta had bought politicians who offered state protection, and created a network of accountants, lawyers, traders and other facilitators inside the banking system which allowed the ’Ndrangheta to clean and invest its money. But in a crucial second stage, the ’Ndrangheta had opened its financial structure to organised crime groups around the world: Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, but also Chinese triads, Nigerians, Russians, Colombians, Mexicans and criminal groups from every part of the planet. ‘The ’Ndrangheta plays the role of service agent to the other mafias,’ said Lombardo. ‘They make this network of financial professionals working for them available to other mafias. And after that, when it comes to finances, all the mafias move together as one big mafia.’

That meant the ’Ndrangheta had hundreds of billions of euros at its command. Such a tsunami of money had elevated it to a ‘fundamental and indispensable position in the global market’, said Lombardo, one that was ‘more or less essential for the smooth functioning of the global economic system’. This new centrality afforded the ’Ndrangheta the level of protection it sought. It also offered it an opportunity to indulge in typical mafia behaviour – bullying, intimidating, extorting and blackmailing – on a whole new scale. Lombardo had indications that the ’Ndrangheta regularly manipulated stock prices or markets to its advantage and had even caused mini financial crashes to create buying opportunities for itself.

Most remarkable was what the prosecutor had discovered about the mafia’s taste for government debt. ‘I found a huge amount of capital deployed by the mafia to buy government bonds and Treasury debt,’ he said. At first, this revelation confused Lombardo. There was no sound financial imperative to buy bonds: yields were typically low and far better opportunities were available in other financial instruments. But then he realised the ’Ndrangheta’s motivations were more than merely financial. ‘They don’t need to become any richer,’ he said. ‘They’re rich enough. But alongside the goal of making money is the goal of limiting national sovereignty.’ The ’Ndrangheta had always sought to undermine Italian state power and authority. Now it was doing the same across the world. It did this by buying up large tranches of foreign countries’ debt, then threatening those countries with dumping their debt and prompting a financial default. A debtor nation’s only option was to allow the ’Ndrangheta to use its territory as a base and a money-laundering location. So far, the prosecutors had collected evidence that the ’Ndrangheta had blackmailed Thailand and Indonesia in this way. Lombardo expected China and India to be next. ‘This is about conditioning the global economic system, conditioning the global citizenry and conditioning the political choices of nations,’ he said. ‘This is how the ’Ndrangheta become the rulers not just of territory in Italy but whole other countries.’

Lombardo’s investigations revealed the ’Ndrangheta not merely as a menace to southern Italy but a global monster. Though other mafias were better known, the ’Ndrangheta was the most powerful. In the name of profit and power, it was sowing the seeds of war, chaos and corruption from Rio to Rotterdam to Reykjavík. It was the dark underside of globalisation made real in flesh and blood. Of paramount importance to Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutors, however, Calabria remained the key to the entire enterprise. Any big business decision – to expand territory, to enter a new business, to eliminate a rival – was referred back to the old country. In their bunkers buried beneath Reggio Calabria and Rosarno and the orange groves of Gioia Tauro plain, the bosses were deciding the fate of nations. As she read through the latest case files, it dawned on Alessandra that with their new crackdown on the ’Ndrangheta, the prosecutors held the destiny of hundreds of millions of people, pehaps even billions, in their hands.

The stimuli to the Italian state’s new campaign against the mafia were various: the outcry at the Duisberg massacre of 2007, the 2008 election of a new government publicly committed to ending the threat from organised crime and, the same year, the arrival in Calabria of Giuseppe Pignatone and Michele Prestipino, the destroyers of Cosa Nostra. The fight against the mafia was quickly reinvigorated with fresh energy and resources. Over 2008 and 2009 the carabinieri bugged millions of conversations. ’Ndranghetisti still habitually spoke in riddles and metaphors, and in isolation the meaning of any one conversation was obscure. But taken together and over time, the mass of recordings added up to a true revelation: the authorities’ first ever complete picture of the internal structure and dynamics of the ’Ndrangheta.

There were several surprises. Hitherto, the prosecutors had understood the ’Ndrangheta as a loose alliance of family firms, each with its own territory. Surveillance of Reggio Calabria and the surrounding towns and villages revealed that the horizontal structure of hundreds of ’ndrine, each run autonomously by a family boss, was still the ’Ndrangheta’s foundation. But it emerged that above it was a new vertical, unifying hierarchy of eleven ranks. Several ’ndrine together made a grouping called a locale or società, managed by a paramount chief, assisted by an accountant and a ‘head of crime’ who oversaw all illegal activities. Above the locali were three regional authorities called mandamenti, one each for the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts and another for Reggio Calabria. Together these three groups made up a council variously called la provincial or il crimine or – something that made Alessandra do a double-take – La Mama. Overseeing all of it was a capo crimine, or boss of bosses, who could convene a court, or tribunale, of senior bosses to judge a peer accused of transgressing the code.6 ‘We’d always thought of the ’Ndrangheta as a lot of local, smaller organisations,’ said Alessandra. ‘Suddenly we realised it had a federal structure and was being run almost like a military organisation.’

In the 1990s, carabinieri had picked up word of an attempt by the ’Ndrangheta to unite the clans. That had ultimately failed. From what the carabinieri were hearing now, this time the reorganisation had succeeded. Why? The old arguments in favour of better coordination to improve efficiency and discipline still stood. But in 2009 the carabinieri were detecting a more ominous motivation: to coordinate a concerted assault on the authorities through a series of assassinations and bombings. On 31 October 2009, the carabinieri filmed an especially brazen ’Ndrangheta summit outside Milan at which twenty-two bosses raised their glasses to toast the new city boss inside a memorial dedicated to Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.7 The ’Ndrangheta was abandoning its decades-old policy of discreet infiltration in favour of direct confrontation. Why the change? From what the carabinieri

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