Blood Brotherhoods (70 page)

Many northerners resented the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals from the South. Southerners, they said, had too many children and grew tomatoes in the bathtub. News of mafia-related crime, or indeed any crime as long as it was committed by an immigrant, merely served to confirm those anti-southern prejudices. Mafia appeared to be a kind of ethnic affliction that made everyone from ‘down there’ proud, vengeful, violent and dishonest.

The truth is that mass migration from the South was not to blame for the mafias’ spread northwards.
Mafiosi
are a tiny minority of professional criminals; they are not typical southerners. There were plenty of places where immigrants arrived and the mafias did not follow. But migration did create many new opportunities for
mafiosi
—notably, as the flower-pickers
of Liguria illustrate, in gangmastering, when immigrants were forced to work for low wages, untaxed, and without the protection of the law. As Italy grew during the economic miracle and afterwards, such criminal opportunities expanded and multiplied.

The criminal opportunities most conducive to long-term mafia colonisation of the North came from the construction industry. The most notorious case is the winter sports resort of Bardonecchia, in the northern region of Piedmont; it is situated in the Alps just a few kilometres from the French border. Bardonecchia is where the inhabitants of Turin, Italy’s motor city and one of the capitals of the economic miracle, go to ski. Eventually, in 1995, Bardonecchia became the first town council in northern Italy to be dissolved by central government in Rome because of mafia infiltration. Strikingly, the mafia that had colonised Bardonecchia long before then was the ’ndrangheta. Italy’s least-known mafia, the one most frequently associated with a disappearing world of peasant penury, was quick to spot the illegal profits to be made from construction, and put itself in the vanguard of the new era of expansion in the North.

The story of Bardonecchia is like a sequence of time-lapse photographs in a nature documentary. Narrowly focused, as if on the growth of a single poisonous weed, it nevertheless exposes the secret workings of a whole ecosystem. Played in rapid sequence, the images from Bardonecchia take us far ahead in our story. They illustrate how, from small beginnings, and in the right circumstances, the mafias can establish what they call ‘territorial control’ from virtually nothing.

The first hint of the ’ndrangheta’s arrival in Bardonecchia came at past midnight, on 2 September 1963. A heavy rain was falling as Mario Corino, a young primary school teacher, turned into via Giolitti in the old part of town. He was approached by two men, both of them half hidden by umbrellas. The attack was swift -– so swift that Corino did not see what type of blunt instrument flashed towards him. He instinctively parried the first blow with his umbrella and his forearm; the second grazed his head before smashing into his shoulder. His screams drove the attackers away. Evidently this was only meant to be a warning.

Initial speculation linked the attack with Corino’s work as leader of the local branch of the Christian Democrat Party. More specifically, he had denounced what were politely called ‘irregularities’ in the local construction industry and the town plan. But within days the two men who attacked Corino had confessed, and the press was able to reassure itself that there was no political background to the assault. The culprits were both plasterers, paid by the square metre of wall they finished; they assaulted Corino
because they objected to his attempts to enforce rules against piecework on building sites. Case closed. Or so it seemed.

As it turned out, the original suspicions were correct. Moreover, the assault on Mario Corino was only the first symptom of something much more menacing. The problems began, as Mario Corino had suspected, with a building boom in the early 1960s: tourists and second-homers needed places to stay if they were going to enjoy Bardonecchia’s mountain air. Building firms needed cheap hands and a way round safety regulations and labour laws: they turned to ’ndrangheta gangmasters, who were more than happy to provide this service by recruiting from among the droves of Calabrian immigrants. The labourers in Bardonecchia, many of whom had criminal records and little chance of finding more regular employment, lived camped out in semi-squalor. By the early 1970s, an estimated 70–80 per cent of labour in the village was recruited through the mafia racket; many of those workers had to kick back part of their salary to the
capo
. Trades unions found it impossible to set up branches.

But long before then, the ’ndrangheta bosses had gone far beyond labour racketeering. First they set up their own companies to carry out subcontracting work: plastering and trucking were favourite niches. ’Ndrangheta-controlled construction firms were not far behind. Shadowy real-estate companies came and went from the record books. Then, at rival building sites, there were unexplained fires, machinery was vandalised and workers were threatened at gunpoint. Before long most of the honest building companies had been driven out of the market, or driven into the hands of the gangsters.

Meanwhile, the government had done its bit to fill the Calabrian mafia’s coffers by building a new highway and a tunnel through the mountains. The ’ndrangheta recruited some local politicians and administrators to help them win contracts and get round regulations. Barely a stone was turned without the say-so of the local
capo
. One city council employee would simply hand out the boss’s visiting card to anyone who applied for a licence to start up a new business—just to avoid any messy bureaucratic problems, he claimed. Mario Corino, the schoolteacher-cum-politician who had been attacked in 1963, led a heroic resistance to ’ndrangheta influence over local government when he became mayor in 1972. In 1975 the courts dismissed his alarm-calls as a politically motivated fiction: they said he was using the mafia as a pretext to throw mud at his rivals. Corino’s opponents would feign disbelief and outrage when any journalist suggested that there might be a mafia problem in the town. Yet, at the same time, energetic policemen would be mysteriously transferred to other parts of the country. In a phone
tap, the local boss was recorded as saying, ‘We are the root of everything here, you understand me?’

It was remarkable that Bardonecchia had to wait until as late as 1969 for its first mafia murder. Forty-four deaths would follow between 1970 and 1983. On 23 June 1983, the ’ndrangheta proved how high, and how brutally, it was prepared to strike. Not long before midnight, Bruno Caccia was walking his dog when he was approached by two men in a car; they shot him fourteen times, and then got out to fire three coups de grâce. Caccia was an upstanding investigating magistrate who had refused any dialogue with what was now a thoroughgoing ’ndrangheta power system.

It is unlikely that there was a grand strategy behind the mafias’ move north. Rocco Lo Presti, the
’ndranghetista
who led his organisation’s rise to power in Bardonecchia during the building boom of the 1960s, had been there since the mid-1950s. It seems he came as a humble migrant, albeit one with some fearsome relatives. But he was less interested in getting a job than he was in handling counterfeit banknotes. Thereafter,
mafiosi
came north for many reasons: to hide from the police or their enemies; to set up temporary narcotics trading posts; to quietly launder and invest their ill-gotten gains, or to capitalise on criminal opportunities opened up by pioneers like Rocco Lo Presti. The full-scale colonisation of a town like Bardonecchia created a pattern to be followed elsewhere. In one bugged conversation, one of Rocco Lo Presti’s friends was heard giving him a verbal pat on the back: ‘Bardonecchia is Calabrian,’ he said. The irony in this remark was that many of the entrepreneurs, administrators and politicians who had helped turn Bardonecchia Calabrian were as Piedmontese as Barolo wine and
agnolotti
.

In the political sphere, organised crime has always been a problem that affected the North and centre as well as the South. From soon after the birth of Italy as a unified state in 1861, coalition governments in Rome had to recruit clusters of supporters among southern MPs; and southern MPs—some of them, at least—used racketeers to hustle votes. Yet after the economic miracle, thanks primarily to infiltration of the construction industry, the mafias became a national problem in two dramatically new ways. On the one hand, as we have seen, the North became a theatre of operations for southern mobsters. On the other hand, the South became a theatre of cooperation between northern big industry and the mafias. For example, companies from the industrialised North were also dealing on friendly terms with the ’ndrangheta back in Calabria, where concrete proved even more lucrative than it was in Piedmont.

In the 1960s there began a major road-building programme. Its emblem was the so-called ‘Motorway of the Sun’ that ran down Italy from north to south. The last stretch of that motorway, covering the 443 kilometres from Salerno to Reggio Calabria, carried the burden of enormous hopes: a century on from Italian unification, the ‘Salerno–Reggio Calabria’ (as it is universally known) would finally end the deep South’s isolation from the national transport network. Grand exploits of civil engineering were required to traverse the region’s forbidding geology: no fewer than 55 tunnels and 144 viaducts, some of which soar over 200 metres above the forests at the valley floor.

Today the Salerno–Reggio Calabria is notorious—a prodigy of chaotic planning, pork-barrelling and broken political promises. It is still not finished nearly half a century after it was begun. Rather than taking the most logical and direct route along the coast, the Salerno–Reggio Calabria cuts tortuously inland to visit the electoral fiefdoms of long-forgotten ministers. At times the motorway’s only purpose seems to be to join a chain of permanent construction sites. Long stretches are so narrow and winding that they have a 40-kilometre-per-hour speed limit. Jams are so frequent that the roadside is permanently lined with chemical toilets to allow desperate motorists to relieve themselves. During peak times, ambulances are parked ready to intervene. In 2002, magistrates in Catanzaro sequestered a whole section of recently modernised motorway because it was so shoddily built as to be acutely dangerous. The Bishop of Salerno recently called Europe’s worst motorway a Via Crucis. The Salerno–Reggio Calabria shows the Italian state at its most incompetent.

Since the 1960s, the ’ndrangheta has profited handsomely from the mess. Yet very early on in the story of the Salerno–Reggio Calabria it became clear to law enforcement officers on the ground that the ’ndrangheta carried only part of the blame. One senior
Carabiniere
officer stationed in Reggio Calabria was interviewed by a national newspaper in 1970:

When northern entrepreneurs come down to Calabria to get their projects started, the first thing they do is to go to see the man they have been told is the mafia boss. They pay him a visit out of duty, as if they were calling on the Prefect. They solicit his protection, and pay for it by giving the
capomafia
’s friends the sub-contract for earth moving, and by taking on
mafiosi
as guards on their building sites.

Non-Calabrian construction entrepreneurs would offer other favours too: testimonies in favour of
mafiosi
in court; failing to report the many thefts of explosives from their building sites; offering guarantees to the bank when
’ndranghetisti
bought construction machinery on credit. The northern entrepreneurs would then fail to complete their work on time, and blame the local mafia for the delays. Those delays would then allow the entrepreneurs to charge the government more money, money of which the mafia would naturally receive its share. Along the Calabrian stretches of the Salerno–Reggio Calabria, the ’ndrangheta was educated into the ways of a particularly cynical brand of capitalism.

Construction is acutely vulnerable to the mafia’s most rudimentary methods. Buildings and roads have to be built
somewhere
. And in any given somewhere, by merely smashing up machinery or intimidating labour,
mafiosi
can force construction companies to sit down and negotiate. Nor, once those negotiations have borne fruit, does it require any great entrepreneurial nous for a boss to buy a few dumper trucks and set up an earth-moving company to take on some generously subcontracted business. More insidiously still,
mafiosi
do not find it hard to convince companies of the advantages that a friendship with organised crime can bring. An entrepreneur does not need to be exceptionally greedy or cynical to lapse into collusion with murderers. He just needs a preference for bending the rules, paying his workers in cash, and dodging red tape. And once he starts operating outside the law, who does he turn to when his machines are wrecked or his builders duffed up? His relief when he does a deal and the harassment stops merges easily with the satisfaction that comes when it is a competitor’s turn to suffer. The truth is that there is often a
demand
for the mafias’ services—a demand that the mafias themselves are past masters at cultivating.