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NY Review, OCTOBER 24, 2019 ISSUE
Breaking the Silence in Calabria
by Alexander Stille
The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on the World’s
Most Powerful Mafia
by Alex Perry
William Morrow, 333 pp., $27.99
When I traveled to Calabria in the early 1990s, its mafia, known as the
’Ndrangheta, had a far more pervasive and suffocating hold on the region
than the Cosa Nostra had on Sicily or the Camorra had on Campania. In
the plains around the port city of Gioia Tauro, the livestock of local
mafia bosses, known as “sacred cows,” wandered freely and ate wherever
they pleased. In Taurianova, ’Ndranghetisi killed a man, cut off his
head, and used it for target practice in one of the main piazzas.
Throughout the region, I routinely saw trash rotting in the streets:
local ’Ndrangheta families had won contracts for trash removal, and
there was not much pressure on them to actually remove it.
The towns looked poor, but expensive luxury cars were frequently parked
in their centers, often illegally. A hapless, dedicated traffic cop had
been shot and killed for placing a parking ticket on one belonging to an
’Ndrangheta boss. In the evenings, when the towns were dark and quiet, I
had the impression that people had entirely surrendered and stayed
safely inside their houses.
When I returned to Calabria a couple of years ago, however, it seemed
radically different: there were anti-mafia groups and lively public
debates about the influence of the ’Ndrangheta. There was even a “No
Bull” movement to try to address the “sacred cow” problem. Mafia-type
organized crime depends in part on a social consensus made up of tacit
acquiescence, a culture of silence, and a mixture of fear and respect,
mingled with suspicion of legal authorities. That consensus had begun to
break down in Sicily twenty-five or thirty years ago when the ruthless
brutality of the Cosa Nostra became evident, while serious efforts by
police, prosecutors, and ordinary citizens to challenge its power gained
in credibility. The same thing appeared to be happening in Calabria.
The ’Ndrangheta, along with the Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, is one of
Italy’s major crime organizations, and although it is the least well
known of the three, it is likely the most powerful. The name
“’Ndrangheta” is believed to have been derived from the Greek word
andragathia, meaning goodness and manly virtue—Calabria in antiquity was
part of Magna Grecia, and many words in its local dialects come from
ancient Greek. An important part of the ’Ndrangheta’s strength is its
seeming impenetrability: by limiting its membership strictly to close
blood relatives, it reduces the likelihood of betrayal, since turning on
your partners in crime means turning on your own family. Each family is
linked to a town and its surrounding area, while also being part of a
larger hierarchical structure. Individual families enjoy a fair degree
of autonomy in running their affairs, but an elected leader (capo
crimine) is chosen to help adjudicate disputes among them in order to
minimize violence. The Cosa Nostra is also organized into “families,”
but while blood relations are important, membership is also open to
enterprising and violent young men outside of immediate kinship groups.
The Camorra is even more loosely structured, which has resulted in
almost constant jockeying for power, as well as a great deal of violence
and many defections.
The Cosa Nostra suffered huge setbacks during the late 1980s and 1990s:
its dominant clans murdered virtually all the public officials who
opposed them while carrying out a vicious extermination campaign against
other mafia families. This provoked a huge police crackdown, which was
backed by large public demonstrations, and it resulted in hundreds of
former members agreeing to testify in dozens of major trials. The
’Ndrangheta moved aggressively into the Cosa Nostra’s drug markets and,
taking advantage of widespread Calabrian immigration to four continents
(North and South America, Northern Europe, and Australia), it expanded
rapidly around the world while maintaining its compact clan structure.
It was, as the journalist Alex Perry writes in his excellent new book,
The Good Mothers, “a diabolical perversion of the Italian family, which
was the heart and essence of the nation.”
By shrewdly reinvesting drug profits in vast real estate holdings and
legitimate businesses, the ’Ndrangheta has been remarkably successful.
“The prosecutors’ best guess,” Perry writes, “was that every year the
organization amassed revenues of $50 billion to $100 billion, equivalent
to up to 3.5 percent of the Italian GDP, or twice the annual revenues of
Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Ferrari, and Maserati combined.” Once thought
by many to consist of poor rural bandits, kidnappers, and goat thieves,
the ’Ndrangheta has grown into one of the richest crime organizations in
the world.
Alessandra Cerreti, a prosecutor from Sicily, discovered a weakness in
the seemingly unbreakable bonds of loyalty among the ’Ndrangheta. After
taking a job in the Reggio Calabria prosecutor’s office, she cultivated
relationships with women who had been arrested or had shown some
willingness to speak to police. Cerreti realized, Alex Perry writes in
The Good Mothers,
that the ’Ndrangheta’s 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.
For men, the ’Ndrangheta offered wealth, power, and prestige along with
deadly risks. But for women it was a claustrophobic world with few
benefits: they were married off at an early age to young gangsters,
lived under constant surveillance, and were expected to produce children
who were faced with limited choices: for boys, kill, be killed, and
possibly go to prison; for girls, become ’Ndrangheta brides, as their
mothers had. Perry’s book follows the stories of three women who
rebelled against this life by testifying against their families.
One of the first who did so was Lea Garofalo. Her father was an
’Ndrangheta boss who was murdered when she was just eight months old,
setting off a feud that lasted throughout her childhood. Her uncle was
murdered when she was seven, and another relative was killed in front of
her when she was fifteen. Lea thought she could escape her family after
she fell in love with a local man then working in Milan, whom she
married at age sixteen. She then discovered that her husband, Carlo
Cosco, was actually a rising gangster working for her brother and
running an ’Ndrangheta operation in Milan that sold cocaine and heroin.
What for her had been true love was for him a shrewd career move:
marrying the boss’s sister.
After witnessing various acts of violence, including a murder in which
her husband was involved, Lea begged him to leave the ’Ndrangheta. When
he refused, she eventually went to the police and began to testify
against him and her brother. “You don’t live,” Lea told the carabinieri
in 2002. “You just survive in some way. You dream about
something—anything—because nothing’s worse than that life.”
The second and perhaps most significant female witness was Giuseppina
Pesce, a member of one of Calabria’s most important ’Ndrangheta
families. She stopped going to school at thirteen when she met her
future husband, whose father managed firearms for the Pesce clan’s
criminal network. She eloped with him at fourteen and gave birth to the
first of their three children at fifteen. Her husband was soon in
prison, but her own life was similarly confined: her family refused to
let her divorce, return to school, or even keep up her piano lessons. To
relieve her boredom, she began to do criminal work for the family,
passing messages and laundering money.
The third woman Perry discusses, Maria Concetta Cacciola, was a friend
of Giuseppina Pesce from their hometown, Rosarno, and like Giuseppina
she had met her husband, who was twenty-one at the time, when she was
thirteen. She had the first of their children at age fifteen, and she
conceived two of her children during conjugal visits to prison. Both
Giuseppina’s and Concetta’s husbands beat them.
“By their early twenties,” Perry writes, “Giuseppina and Concetta were
alone, married to jailbird husbands, and mothers to three children
each.” Since protecting the honor of an ’Ndrangheta wife was of the
greatest importance, the wives of convicted members were supported and
watched by family members. Concetta’s father acted as guardian of the
family’s reputation while her husband was in prison, once smacking her
to the ground after she returned later than expected from a shopping trip.
Not surprisingly, the Internet offered a kind of freedom for these
confined women, and Concetta began a relationship with a man she met
online. “In the land of the ’Ndrangheta, the Internet is an open window
in a closed world,” Cerreti told Perry. “It introduces women to a free
world. It tends to provoke a kind of emotional explosion.” Another
source told him, “There are cases of women falling in love with people
who treat them like human beings…they come to understand that they are
prisoners in their families.”
Giuseppina also began an extramarital affair. “He was the first man who
seemed to care for my children,” she later told Italian authorities. “He
was the first man to respect me as a woman, the first who ever loved
me.” At the same time, she knew that she was running a mortal risk. “In
my family, those who betray and dishonor the family must be punished by
death,” she later testified. “It is a law.” It was a measure of her
desperation that Giuseppina went ahead with the clandestine affair. She
was with her lover when police arrested her as part of a larger raid on
the Pesce clan. Knowing that she had more to fear from her family than
from prosecutors, she agreed to cooperate. Based on Giuseppina’s
testimony, the Italian government “would confiscate a total of $260
million in property from the Pesces and the ’Ndrangheta, including forty
businesses, four villas, forty-four apartments, 164 cars, sixty plots of
land, and two soccer teams,” as well as indict some sixty-four
’Ndrangheta defendants, Perry writes.
These women defected not only to gain their own freedom but in the hope
of giving their children a better life. Giuseppina’s family understood
this and realized that the way to get to her was through her kids. They
had been left with her in-laws back in Calabria while she was in prison.
Police eventually brought them to a safe location where they were
reunited with their mother, but when her in-laws sent the children their
clothing they slipped in the cell phone of Angela, the eldest girl.
Giuseppina’s daughter began speaking regularly to her aunt, uncle, and
grandmother, who reminded her of everything she was missing out on back
home. “Tell your mother you want to be with us,” her aunt told her. “If
she wants to go on, she should go on alone. But you come back to us.”
This created great tension between Giuseppina and her daughter, who
accused her mother of making her and her siblings abandon their lives
for selfish reasons. The daughter stopped eating and became unwell.
Eventually the in-laws lured Giuseppina onto the phone and explained
that her husband was prepared to forgive her and that there would be no
retribution for her actions. They put her in touch with a defense lawyer
who prepared a statement, which Giuseppina copied by hand, claiming that
she had been pressured into making a series of false statements during a
period of weakness and ill health. When Cerreti arrived for a meeting
with Giuseppina, she suddenly refused to sign the nearly two thousand
pages of testimony she had given over the previous six months. “I had
made the choice to make my daughter’s life better, but collaborating had
ended up hurting my daughter,” she said.
Cerreti invoked a minor rule of the witness protection program in order
to detain Giuseppina before she could return to Calabria. Isolated and
alarmed by the profusion of letters from her family, whose overemphatic
expressions of support seemed like veiled threats, she decided once
again to collaborate with prosecutors.
Giuseppina was the only one of the three women to survive. Concetta
Cacciola was enticed back home through similar manipulation of her
children and died under suspicious circumstances after drinking a bottle
of hydrochloric acid. Her family was conveniently absent at the time of
her death, though they normally kept her under constant watch, and
prosecutors were convinced that no one could force herself to drink a
liter of hydrochloric acid. Although not convicted of murder, her family
was found responsible for causing her death. Ironically, they
unintentionally incriminated themselves by saying that she had died of
shame, implying, in effect, that they regarded cooperating with police
as a crime worthy of death—a view they impressed on their daughter.
Lea Garofalo also struggled to live under the strictures of Italy’s
witness protection program with an increasingly restless teenage
daughter. She eventually got back in touch with her husband, who had
been released from prison. He lured the family back to Milan for what
seemed to be a reconciliation. Instead he arranged to have her murdered
and her body burned so it would appear that she had run away. Her
daughter Denise testified against her father, and in a remarkable turn
of events, the henchman who had been charged with destroying Lea’s body
had fallen in love with Denise. He incriminated himself and Lea’s
husband and helped authorities find her remains, allowing prosecutors to
secure a murder conviction.
The information that Lea, Concetta, and Giuseppina provided about the
organizational structure of the ’Ndrangheta not only led to arrests and
prosecutions. The public trials dealing with Lea’s and Concetta’s
murders as well as the trials made possible by all three women’s
testimony helped to stimulate an awakening of Calabrian civil society.
There were large demonstrations of solidarity on their behalf—their
faces appeared on posters, T-shirts, and banners—suggesting that the
’Ndrangheta’s hegemony had been broken.
Perry’s narrow focus in his book on these three women, however, leads
him to emphasize the personal and cultural dimensions of the
’Ndrangheta, and as a result he gives insufficient attention to the
economic and political power of organized crime in southern Italy. In
1994 Giuseppe Piromalli, the boss of Gioia Tauro, stood up in open court
and announced that he would be supporting Silvio Berlusconi in the
upcoming elections. Piromalli’s statement may have been an attempt to
influence the vote, a signal to the political world, or simply an
expression of his power; whichever it was, Berlusconi’s new Forza Italia
party waged an aggressive campaign in Calabria, often directed against
anti-mafia prosecutors whom it accused of overreaching and damaging the
region’s economy. Perry mentions that the ’Ndrangheta has politicians in
its pockets, but we don’t grasp the importance of this because they were
not part of the Garofalo, Pesce, and Cacciola cases.
The economic gap between Italy’s prosperous north and center and its
underdeveloped southern third has been a persistent problem since the
country’s unification in the late nineteenth century. Even today,
Calabria is the poorest of Italy’s twenty regions, with a standard of
living half that of the north and an unemployment rate of 22 percent.
Direct foreign investment is nearly nonexistent in southern Italy:
corruption, organized crime, and poor infrastructure make operating
there expensive and dangerous.
Over the past half-century, the Italian government has tried to
compensate for this disparity by directing a steady flow of tax dollars
to the south in the form of public works projects, pensions,
unemployment benefits, government jobs, and subsidies to the health care
system. This has to some degree mitigated the extremely high levels of
unemployment and has prevented social unrest. But it also has created
endless opportunities for corrupt politicians and violent criminals to
enrich themselves by skimming money from government appropriations,
directing contracts and subcontracts to ’Ndrangheta-controlled firms,
and awarding jobs and pensions to their own people. It has fed, in other
words, the vicious cycle that keeps out legitimate business.
In the 1970s the Christian Democratic Italian government (with the
active encouragement of the left) appropriated (and wasted) tens of
billions of dollars to build one of the country’s largest steel plants
in Calabria, but the project was abandoned because of a crisis in the
steel industry. Similarly, construction of a huge coal-driven
electricity plant was started and abandoned. Both projects were the
product of a political desire to create development rather than to meet
any real market demand; they served, unintentionally, to greatly enrich
the local ’Ndrangheta families. When I visited the area in 1992, the
local prosecutor, Agostino Cordova, recounted to me how during the
construction of the port facility dynamite would go off at night as the
’Ndrangheta clans fought to take over the operation. “When the
dynamiting stopped, we knew the clans had won.”
The government ultimately completed construction of a huge seaport at
Gioia Tauro (the sixth largest in the Mediterranean), which was
originally meant to serve the steel plant. But according to a 2006
Italian government report, 80 percent of Europe’s cocaine arrives in
Gioia Tauro. Perry notes that “the railway that connected Gioia Tauro to
Europe stopped 1.5 kilometers short of the port, meaning all the
cargo”—legal and illegal—“from one of the biggest Mediterranean
container ports had to be loaded onto mafia-owned trucks and driven
three minutes to the station.” The port’s legitimate business has
struggled in recent years, no doubt a result of mafia control. Local
governments have often been unable to stop criminal activity: between
1991 and 2006, the city councils of some eighty municipalities in
Calabria—including Gioia Tauro, Reggio Calabria, and Rosarno (Giuseppina
and Concetta’s hometown)—were dissolved by the Italian government
because they were found to be controlled by the ’Ndrangheta.
According to Perry the ’Ndrangheta’s power remains essentially intact,
but he doesn’t give a full picture of its size and complexity. The
’Ndranghetisti we meet in The Good Mothers are simply crude, violent
thugs. Yet the ’Ndrangheta has mutated into a highly sophisticated
organization with well-educated gangsters who are comfortable in the
world of international commerce and launder money through corporations,
real estate, and offshore banking centers. According to investigators,
its core business is exporting cocaine from South America to the rest of
the world, but it also deals in real estate in Germany and Austria,
hotels and casinos in Russia, diamonds in South Africa, toxic waste in
Somalia, heroin in Turkey and Lebanon, and slot machines in Malta—a
global reach made possible by a network of cooperating lawyers and bankers.
While mafia prosecutions are useful, they are a bit like cutting the
grass: the influence of organized crime usually grows back. Perry
explains that even as prosecutors enjoy important victories in court,
they sense that the organization is slipping through their grasp:
The prosecutors often felt like they were in a losing race against time.
Hundreds of billions of ’Ndrangheta euros and dollars had been already
successfully laundered beyond reach or reproach…. Franco Roberti, head
of Italy’s anti-mafia and antiterrorism office, lamented the lack of
cooperation his investigators received in London or New York or Hong
Kong, let alone the centers of secret banking on paradise islands around
the world. Foreign governments “don’t want to believe that the problem
of the ’Ndrangheta is their problem, too,” he said. “They want to
believe that their money doesn’t stink.”
The cases that Perry writes about enabled prosecutors to put 127
’Ndranghetisti on trial, proved that the group was operating in about
120 locations around the world, and broke the culture of silence
surrounding it. “By the end of 2015, the judiciary could count 164
pentiti [former Mafiosi turned state’s witnesses] and twenty-nine
witnesses who had testified against the ’Ndrangheta,” Perry writes. But
as Cerreti tells Perry, “We can’t fight the ’Ndrangheta just by putting
people in jail…. We need a cultural change. We need a change in people’s
minds.” Unfortunately, the problem goes deeper than culture: it involves
changing the economic structure of southern Italy, reducing its extreme
dependence on public money, and creating a healthy private economy
there. That would involve a painful, complex period of transition that
no political party in Italy has the stomach to undertake.
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