Blood Brotherhoods (118 page)

Camorra
capo
Michele Zagaria was captured in an underground bunker in his home town of Casapesenna, 2011. His organisation, the
casalesi
, became the most powerful in the Campania underworld in the 1990s.

Gomorrah
, and its author, have attracted criticism and even denunciation. Some of the sceptical voices (‘He only did it for the money!’) patently come from the camorra’s supporters, or from people who resent his success, or from the usual chorus that would prefer a decorous silence about organised crime. Less easy to dismiss out of hand are those who point out that
Gomorrah
’s style is overblown and occasionally pretentious, that it contains exaggerations, and that it merges fact with imagination and unfiltered hearsay. Saviano himself defines his work as a ‘no-fiction novel’, but most of his readers have read it as the unexpurgated truth.
Gomorrah
undoubtedly draws on investigative documents, like the Cassiopea case on the toxic-waste trade, or the major prosecution mounted against the leaders of the
casalesi
(known as the Spartacus trial). But now and again there are also stories that do not come from reliable sources—like the book’s arresting opening scene, which depicts the frozen cadavers of illegal Chinese immigrants spilling out from a container hoisted above the port of Naples. Other critics worry that Saviano’s personalised approach has helped turn him into an oracle or a guru. (Saviano is not the unique figure that the media outside Italy sometimes present him
as being: in the first nine months of 2012 alone, 262 Italian journalists were threatened in the course of their work, many of them by gangsters.)

Nevertheless, there is much that helps tip the balance clearly in favour of Saviano and against his detractors. In the wake of his success, many other anti-mafia voices won the kind of large audience that they would not otherwise have found. One instance is the magistrate Raffaele Cantone, who is from Giugliano in
casalesi
territory. His books distil the insights he gained between 1999 and 2007 when he conducted camorra investigations, and traced the
casalesi
’s business interests in the North. After
Gomorrah
, the
casalesi
gained a notoriety that they deserved, and that certainly damaged a criminal cartel that had previously done its best to remain invisible. In the years after the publication of
Gomorrah
, the authorities scored a number of successes against the
casalesi
, radically reducing their power. In December 2011, the last remaining historic boss of the
casalesi
, Michele Zagaria, was captured after a decade and a half as one of Italy’s most wanted. Fittingly, in his bunker, he had a copy of
Gomorrah
.

In short, Saviano’s book once more made the camorra into what it should always have been: a national scandal. Quite what future historians of Italy will make of the whole Saviano phenomenon is anyone’s guess. My sense is that his unusual form of celebrity is only the most prominent sign that, up and down Italy, a generation of citizens too young to even remember the ideological certainties of Cold War politics are finding new ways to express their civic engagement, their intolerance of corruption and organised crime. Saviano’s young readers are Campania’s best hope for the future.

 
75 

’N
DRANGHETA
: Snowstorm

H
EROIN WAS THE MAFIAS
’
ILLEGAL COMMODITY OF CHOICE IN THE
1970
S AND
1980
S
, but by the 1990s cocaine had overtaken it.

Since the late nineteenth century, cocaine has followed a similar trajectory to heroin: from medicine, to vice, to valuable criminal business. When it was first successfully extracted from coca leaves in the 1860s, it became a tonic: Pope Leo XIII was a heavy user of a cocaine-based drink called Vin Mariani, and even allowed his image to appear in adverts. In the early twentieth century, the drug was banned in its biggest consumer market, the United States. From then on, it became a source of profit for the underworld. But not until the late twentieth century did a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing supply, falling prices, and more widespread consumption make cocaine more popular than any other drug except cannabis. Soon cocaine prices fell enough for it to cease being a niche drug for the rich. In 2012 it was revealed that the inhabitants of Brescia, a city of just under 200,000 in Lombardy, are sniffing their way through $835,000 worth of white powder every single day. And Brescia is only a microcosm.

Cocaine is a less debilitating narcotic than heroin (at least in the short term); it can be consumed without the unsightly business of injection; it is more socially acceptable, and it even has the false reputation of being non-addictive. Try as they might, the authorities cannot create the same sense of emergency around cocaine as there was with heroin. Cosa Nostra, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta have found an inexhaustible new source of money.

Mafiosi
from all the major Italian criminal organisations indulge in trafficking cocaine, and since at least the 1980s they have often formed
business partnerships with one another to do so. Giacomo Lauro, a penitent from the ’ndrangheta who was heavily involved in international trafficking throughout the 1980s, has described his dealings with Sicilian
mafiosi
and with
camorristi
of the calibre of Antonio Bardellino. Already at that stage, Italian drug barons made sure that deals went through smoothly by exchanging hostages with the South American producers. A prominent family linked to the Calì cartel were permanently resident in Holland: they acted both as hostages and as business agents for the Colombians.

But in the 1990s, just as the era of mass cocaine consumption really began, the ’ndrangheta became the leading operator in the cocaine sector. Indeed, it is primarily to cocaine that the ’ndrangheta owes its reputation as Italy’s richest mafia today. Three police investigations into drug running tell a snapshot story of how the ’ndrangheta overtook Cosa Nostra as Italy’s major trafficking power.

On the night of 6–7 January 1988, a Panamanian-registered merchant ship called
Big John
was intercepted off the western coast of Sicily. Hidden in its cargo of fertiliser were 596 kilograms of pure Colombian cocaine—just as an informer within the drug ring responsible had told Giovanni Falcone there would be. Cosa Nostra, it turned out, had paid in the region of twelve million dollars for the drugs, depositing the money with the Medellín cartel’s emissary in Milan. The
Big John
investigation showed that Cosa Nostra, now firmly in the fist of Shorty Riina, was trying to turn Sicily into what Spain had been hitherto: the major port of entry for South American drugs bound for the European market. The confiscation of the
Big John
’s cargo was not just a big financial loss for the Sicilians: it was a huge embarrassment too. When the news broke, American Cosa Nostra learned that its Sicilian sister organisation had cut it out of the cocaine trade, and was now dealing direct with the Colombian producers. From now on, mafia cocaine brokers in the New World would be looking for more trustworthy business partners.

The second illustrative case involves the discovery, in March 1994, of 5,500 kilograms of 82 per cent pure cocaine in a container lorry near the northern Italian city of Turin. The man who exported the load from South America had a name that should sound familiar: Alfonso Caruana, of the Cuntrera-Caruana clan, the Sicilian
mafiosi
who had moved to the Americas and become key members of the Transatlantic Syndicate during the 1970s heroin boom. Significantly, however, Caruana’s cocaine was not destined for his Sicilian brethren. Cosa Nostra was in turmoil following the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, Shorty’s attack on the Italian state, and an unprecedented flood in penitents. Instead the shipment had been paid for and imported by an investment club comprising the biggest crime families
in Calabria. With Cosa Nostra looking increasingly untrustworthy to its international narcotics partners, and with most of the larger camorra clans in the process of breaking up, the ’ndrangheta was left in prime position to take advantage of the most important commercial opportunity international organised crime had seen for years.

In 2002 investigators from the Italian tax police, the
Guardia di Finanza
, broke into the coded communications used by an international cocaine-trafficking ring comprising both Sicilian and Calabrian gangsters. The bugged conversations told a tale of two brokers. The first was a Sicilian by the name of Salvatore Miceli: a Man of Honour from the Salemi Family—and Cosa Nostra’s agent. The second was a Calabrian by the name of Roberto ‘Bebè’ Pannunzi; he had been brought up among the long-established Italian criminal networks of Canada, and he was the ’ndrangheta’s agent. The names of both men had already cropped up again and again in connection with international cocaine deals. The two were old friends as well as business partners: the Calabrian had acted as godfather to the Sicilian’s son. But it emerged from the phone taps that, in the early 2000s, the Sicilian managed to lose three separate cargoes of cocaine on circuitous routes between South America, Greece, Spain, Holland, Namibia and Sicily. Understandably, everyone else involved in the trade was furious. The Sicilian had forfeited his credibility, and risked forfeiting his life. Investigators intercepted a telephone call he made to his son: ‘We’ve lost face here . . . we’ve lost everything . . . any minute they’re going to have a go at me . . . everyone has abandoned me.’

Soon afterwards, the Sicilian was kidnapped and held prisoner on a plantation deep in the South American forest. The Colombians wanted their money back. His life was only saved following reassurances issued by the Calabrian, Roberto ‘Bebè’ Pannunzi. But henceforth the ’ndrangheta decided to cut Cosa Nostra out of its affairs altogether. In 2002, the Calabrian broker moved to Medellín, to join a number of
’ndranghetisti
who were already based there. The twin messages in the story were clear to all. First, that cocaine was being sourced directly in Colombia for the European market. And second, that Cosa Nostra was now, at best, the junior partner in relations with the South American cocaine barons.

Back home in Calabria, the ’ndrangheta received a major boost to its trafficking operations in the early 1990s when work was finally completed on the gargantuan container-transhipment port at Gioia Tauro. The port was the only concrete legacy of the ‘Colombo package’—the parcel of industrial investment that was promised in the wake of the urban revolt in Reggio
Calabria in 1970. Despite intensive security measures, cocaine has been passing through the port of Gioia Tauro ever since it opened: as a result of a stepping up of surveillance, more than 2,000 kilograms were confiscated in 2011. Quite what percentage of the total volume of cocaine imports this figure represents is anyone’s guess.

Cocaine containers. The colossal transhipment port at Gioia Tauro in Calabria is a major entry point for the ’ndrangheta’s narcotics.

Yet the port of Gioia Tauro is only one of many options for
’ndranghetisti
seeking a route into Europe for their cocaine. The ’ndrangheta has men stationed in a number of major European ports, notably in Spain, Belgium and Holland. Circa 2003, when the European authorities tried to crack down on imports from South America, the Calabrians also began to use various African countries as cocaine staging posts. Large consignments would be brought into Senegal, Togo, the Ivory Coast or Ghana by ship, and then divided into smaller packages for importation into Italy by boat, plane or drug mule.

The ’ndrangheta also has more local distribution networks. We have already seen how, since the 1950s, the ’ndrangheta has been the most successful of any of the southern Italian mafias at setting up colonies in northern Italy. Today, there are thought to be as many as fifty ’ndrangheta Locals in northern Italy. Given that, by Calabrian mafia law, it takes at least forty-nine Men of Honour to form a Local, that figure suggests there are at least 2,450 members in the North. From gangmastering, construction and kidnapping, those northern Locals have graduated to wholesale cocaine dealing, while intensifying their penetration of local government and the economy.