Blood Brotherhoods (120 page)

Boss of the Crime? Domenico Oppedisano, arrested in 2010, is alleged to have been elected to the highest office in the ’ndrangheta.

So what does the Crime do, exactly? And how powerful is the
capocrimine
? According to the prosecuting magistrates, and the judges who have ruled on the case so far, comparisons with the Commission of Cosa Nostra, and with a dictatorial super-boss like Shorty Riina, are a long way wide of the mark. Domenico Oppedisano is no Shorty. For one thing, his new job, like all the other positions in the Crime, was only due to last for a fixed term, and not for life. Oppedisano was chosen as a wise old head, an expert on tradition and procedure, a settler of disputes. The Crime has the power to suspend a Local from the organisation, to recognise a newly established Local, or to decide between two rival candidates for the job of chief cudgel in a Local. As a recent ’ndrangheta penitent explains, the Crime has no power to intervene in day-to-day criminal business:

In Calabria they get together, but not to say, ‘What are we going to do?’ or ‘Shall we bring in that cargo from Colombia?’ They get together exclusively to choose the offices . . . But not to set out what we should do, or who we should kill. Those are decisions that are taken by the towns and villages, the Locals.

The ’ndrangheta has an internal political life that is even more procedurally and politically complicated than Cosa Nostra’s. The
Carabinieri
were able to record long and involved discussions over which Locals should get positions on the Crime. However, everyone involved acknowledged that it was right and proper that the top jobs should circulate between the three precincts into which criminal territory in the province of Reggio Calabria is divided: the plain of Gioia Tauro, the Ionian coast and the city of Reggio Calabria. Domenico Oppedisano, it turns out, was a compromise candidate—chosen because he carried little personal power and would offend no one.

One of the most remarkable features of Operation Crime, and the cluster of other investigations centring on it, is that it shows how the ’ndrangheta’s political life embraces affiliates up and down Italy. With one or two exceptions, each of the Locals in northern Italy is the clone of a mother-Local in Calabria. One penitent provided a lively image for the relationship: ‘a woman gives birth, but the umbilical cord is never cut’. That ‘umbilical cord’ consists of the close kinship ties between members of the same clans. But the link is also constitutional. Locals outside Calabria have to refer back to the Crime to settle disputes, win approval for the award of senior ‘flowers’, or have new Locals authorised. (Unauthorised Locals are known as Bastards.)

Locals in Lombardy, Italy’s most populous and economically dynamic region, have their own representative assembly, known as ‘Lombardia’. In 2008, Carmelo Novella, the chief of the Lombardia, tried to break away from the Crime, awarding senior flowers without approval, and setting up new Locals himself. On 14 July 2008, he paid the price for his unilateral declaration of independence when he was shot dead in his favourite bar. The Crime then set up a temporary body, known as a Control Chamber, to pilot Lombardy through the crisis. The man put in charge of the Control Chamber, Pino Neri, was a Freemason and convicted drug dealer who was born in Calabria but studied for a law degree at Pavia University near Milan. His final-year dissertation was on, of all things, the ’ndrangheta. On 31 October 2009, the town of Paderno Dugnano near Milan was the venue for a meeting at which Neri put forward a solution to the constitutional issues with the Lombardia. In a cultural centre named in honour of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the Lombardy bosses all raised their hands to approve the plan. The
Carabinieri
made a film of the whole event that is now, inevitably, on YouTube. At the time of writing, Pino Neri has been convicted and sentenced to eighteen years for his leading role in the ’ndrangheta in Lombardy. It is as yet unclear whether he will appeal.

There is much that still needs to be clarified about the ’ndrangheta’s internal political life. Investigators believe, for example, that Locals stationed around the world habitually report back to the Crime. The most startling instance is the most distant: in Australia there are reputed to be nine Locals. One of them is based in Stirling, a town of 200,000 people near Perth. In 2009, according to the Italian authorities, the boss of the Stirling Local, a property developer and former mayor called Tony Vallelonga, was bugged when he came back to Calabria to consult a member of the Crime. Vallelonga has declared himself angry and baffled by the allegations of his involvement, which were public in 2011. To date, he has not been extradited.

Recent investigations have not only laid bare some previously puzzling aspects of the organisation’s internal political system; they have also revealed new evidence about Calabrian mafia women. The ’ndrangheta’s smallest cells, or
’ndrine
, are small groups of male affiliates—often relatives. Clustered around them is a network of male and female relatives by blood and marriage. Some of the ’ndrangheta’s womenfolk can have great influence within the kinship groups; they can, as it were, ‘borrow’ power from their male relatives. Such power goes beyond the usual women’s work of inciting their men to vengeance and raising children in the cult of violence, and may even involve more than hiding weapons and ferrying messages to prisoners. A few ’ndrangheta women have even been entrusted with the gang’s common fund. There is also evidence that one or two particularly enterprising
women have earned a special status in the ’ndrangheta, and with it the title of ‘sister of
omertà
’.

Despite the clout that some ’ndrangheta women have, they are entirely
absent
from the command structures identified by Operation Crime: there are no women officers in the Locals, and women are not allowed to be ritually affiliated. Put another way, women may be born or marry into Calabrian gangster bloodlines, but they cannot be part of the ’ndrangheta as an organisation.

Like the other two mafias, the ’ndrangheta weaves together family bonds and organisational ties in a particular way. The ’ndrangheta is as heavily rooted in families as is the camorra; yet like Cosa Nostra, it is also a sworn brotherhood of male criminals, a highly structured Freemasonry of delinquency. This specific blend of characteristics seems to make women in the ’ndrangheta’s orbit acutely vulnerable: it would appear that they are liable to suffer even more abuse than their peers in Campania or Sicily. Using evidence from women close to the ’ndrangheta who have confided in the law, magistrates in Reggio Calabria have recently begun to look again at some twenty murder investigations concerning women who had either vanished, or whose deaths had previously been dismissed as either inexplicable or as suicide. A submerged history of ’ndrangheta honour killings may be about to surface. One of the victims was Maria Teresa Gallucci. In 1994, in the northern port city of Genoa, gunmen burst into her flat and shot her dead, along with her mother and niece who just happened to be with her at the time. Maria Teresa was the widow of an
’ndranghetista
. Her crime, in the mob’s eyes, was to have offended her husband’s memory by starting a relationship with another man.

A similarly disturbing case concerns Domenica Legato, who was found dying in the street outside her family home in 2007. She fell from the balcony, her family said. One female ’ndrangheta penitent thinks that this was a disguised murder. Knife wounds found on her hands may suggest that she was resisting an attack just before her death. Domenica too was an ’ndrangheta widow who had found a new love. It should be stressed, however, that the case was treated as suicide at the time, and no new investigation has been ordered as I write.

Perhaps the most chilling case of all is that of Maria Concetta Cacciola, a mother of three whose husband was an
’ndranghetista
serving a long jail sentence. Maria Concetta turned to the
Carabinieri
in Rosarno in May 2011 after being beaten up by her father, who had discovered that she had started a platonic relationship with another man over the Internet. Maria Concetta was eventually discovered in appalling agony, having drunk hydrochloric acid. Suicide again, the family claimed. Concetta’s father, brother
and mother are currently on trial for the abuse that resulted in her death, although
not
for her murder. There has been a great deal of public comment about whether that charge reflects what really happened to Concetta.

Tragedies like these inevitably raise historical questions. For how long, before the awakening of judicial interest in the roles of mafia women in the 1990s, have such horrors been part of the everyday life of the ’ndrangheta? In the early phase of the Calabrian mafia’s history, as we have seen, pimping was a key business. Thus when the ’ndrangheta began, a great many of the women closest to the gangs were prostitutes. Beating, disfigurement and murder were the Calabrian gangster’s favourite tools for managing his working girls. Between the two world wars, the ’ndrangheta learned that it was in its long-term interests to eschew pimping and use women in different ways: notably as pawns on the chessboard of dynastic marriage. If the cases of Maria Teresa Gallucci, Domenica Legato, and Maria Concetta Cacciola are anything to go by, then this long-term transformation of women’s roles in the ’ndrangheta has not liberated them from the threat of being injured, maimed or killed in the cause of masculine honour.

The biggest historical questions of all are raised by Operation Crime. How long have we, and indeed the world, been living in ignorance while the ’ndrangheta existed in this form? Readers of this book will know that I believe that the Crime is not an innovation, and that ’ndrangheta has
always
been one brotherhood of crime, with a rich internal political life focused on coordinating institutions (whenever circumstances allowed those institutions to function). Since the 1880s, all ’ndrangheta cells across Calabria have always had roughly the same structure, and have used recognisably similar rituals. By far the most likely explanation for this fact is that the ’ndrangheta has always had a Crime, or something like it.

The footage of the Crime taken by the
Carabinieri
in 2009 is enough to give a historian goose bumps. There has never been such a direct record of the ’ndrangheta’s annual gathering. Over the last century and more, fragmentary evidence about the Polsi summit has recurred, and rumours have proliferated. But until Operation Crime no one had managed to puzzle out the exact constitutional function of whatever body it was that met regularly on the upper reaches of Aspromonte. To this day, there is no legal precedent in Italy that states unequivocally that the ’ndrangheta actually exists, as a single brotherhood, with a single structure and a single coordinating body, rather than as a loose collection of gangs who sometimes form temporary alliances. The underlying aim of Operation Crime is to establish just such a precedent. In other words, the ’ndrangheta still awaits the kind of definitive legal description of its workings that Falcone and Borsellino’s maxi-trial
produced for Cosa Nostra. As was the case with the Sicilian mafia in the 1980s, Italy has only just begun properly to recognise a criminal conspiracy that has almost certainly existed for more than a century.

The ’ndrangheta is without doubt contemporary Italy’s most powerful mafia. The beneficiary of years of disregard by the state and public opinion, it has a remorseless grip on its home territory, an unparalleled capacity to colonise other regions and other countries, and vast reserves of narco-wealth that allow it to penetrate the lawful economy and financial institutions. Yet it remains a largely unexplored frontier for investigators. Calabria has yet to develop the rich anti-mafia culture that now flourishes in Sicily. The number of entrepreneurs who have rebelled against protection rackets is tiny. In all kinds of ways, Calabria is a generation behind Sicily when it comes to the fight against organised crime.

 
77 

W
ELCOME TO THE GREY ZONE

T
HERE IS ONE MEMBER OF
C
OSA
N
OSTRA
’
S PRO-MASSACRE WING WHO STILL REMAINS
at large—one boss whose power dates back to the rise of the
corleonesi
. His name is Matteo Messina Denaro. Now fifty years old, he has been on the run for twenty years. According to the Ministry of the Interior, he is wanted for ‘mafia association, murder, massacre, devastation, possession of explosives, robbery, and more besides’. Messina Denaro is mafia aristocracy, the son of a great boss. But in some other ways he is less conventional. He has a long-term Austrian girlfriend, and some of his captured communications reveal that he professes no religious faith. His base is in Sicily’s westernmost province, Trapani. That fact prevents him taking charge of Cosa Nostra in its capital, Palermo. But he has always had a network of supporters there, particularly in the Brancaccio precinct. And during Operation Perseus it became clear that Messina Denaro was an important influence in the debates within Cosa Nostra over the setting up of the
kind of
Commission in Palermo. Quite whether Messina Denaro is the last of the old bosses of Cosa Nostra, or the first of a new breed, is hard to tell.

Over the last few years, Sicilians have grown used to the scenes when a major mafia fugitive is arrested. Police and
Carabinieri
in ski masks and bulletproof vests punch the air and sound their horns as they bring their captive back to base. Crowds gather outside police HQ to cheer and sing ‘We are the real Sicily’. Then there comes the first sight of the captive himself, blinking impassively in the photographers’ flashes, as everyone mentally compares his face to the police facial composite.

It is to be hoped that those scenes will soon be repeated in celebration of Matteo Messina Denaro’s capture. For when the Castelvetrano boss is finally caught, it will indeed mark yet another historic victory over an old evil.