WeeklySA_AdminRACKETEERING: This is an essential account on a mafia organisation, Ndrangheta, a multinational operation active in 40 countries on five continents, spearheading wanton acts of murder, extortion, elections rigging, tax evasion, kidnappings…
By Jacob Mawela
“Are you going to write that in the newspaper?” A local of the coastal village of Calabria, enquired of a newcomer, a young Dutch journalist from Amsterdam who had recently taken residence in the idyllic neighbourhood in southern Italy.
The enquirer, a man named Toto had been in a lengthy coma resulting from a car accident and upon regaining consciousness, claimed to anyone who’d listen that he’d seen God, and was exhorting journalist Sanne de Boer to write about his experience. Shortly after the duo’s encounter, a 34-year-old-man from a nearby street was shot dead in front of his house by two masked men, in what was reported to have been a mafia hit. The deceased’s uncle, a newspaper reported, was a leader of a Ndrangheta (the name of the Calabrian mafia) clan in a neighbouring village, who had been killed a few weeks earlier by hitmen riding a scooter.
De Boer had hardly been living for long in her adopted village when, one September evening, its quiet was shattered by the sight of a burning car belonging to a young woman who worked for the municipality.
Ostensibly, the arson attack had been a ‘message’ intended for her cooperation in a matter related to the issuing of building permits. Afterwards, the shaken owner never even bothered to report the incident to the carabinieri (police) for fear of reprisal.
On Christmas Day in 2006, just four days before De Boer’s arrival in Calabria, armed intruders barged into a house in San Luca and proceeded to fire on occupants indulging in the festivities, killing a young mother named Maria Strangio. Strangio’s husband, the leader of a Ndrangheta clan in the Calabrian village, had been the intended target but survived.
Then, one evening in 2007, six young men were found dead at the entrance of an Italian restaurant named Da Bruno managed by the Calabrian mafia clan in Duisburg, Germany – a massacre alleged to have been the outcome of the then 16-year-long vendetta around San Luca between the Pelle-Vottari and Nirta-Strangio clans.
Maria Strangio’s murder – along with those of the six young men – appeared to lend credence to media speculation linking them to a vendetta among the clans. And, it was these seemingly unrelated incidents which triggered the newshound to delve into what is recognised as Italy’s most powerful crime organisation known as: ‘Ndrangheta’.
It would be at the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi, a traditional venue of Ndrangheta gatherings in nearby San Luca, that the vendetta between the rival clans was called to a halt – with the Calabrian police reporting that the occasion was marked by ‘dancing and shaking hands’ by everyone!
Fortuitously, having initially been wooed by the region’s pastoral romanticism of local lifestyle of woodstoves and homemade soppressata sausages, among others – De Boer had substituted her native country for a region and way of life steeped in Mafiopoli – meaning, ‘a society governed by the mafia’.
Mafiapoli, the title of this book, derives most of its content not from the author’s experiences during the period she resided in the region, but rather from the current and hindsight collection of occurrences and history gleaned from interviews she conducted with a spectrum of people. Those interviewed included clan members, victims, prosecutors, collaboratore di giustizia (informants) about the ‘Ndrangheta’ –a criminal organisation whose existence throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries has come to adversely affect the lives of Italians, including other nationalities, residing in their homeland as well as across the European Union and the far-off lands such as Canada and Australia.
According to Professor Enzo Ciconte, a Calabrian historian, the region’s organised crime harks back to the 1820s, with the term ‘Ndrangheta’ gaining currency in the 20th century by way of distinguishing the organisation from the Neapolitan Camorra (whose name was already in use by 1735) and the Cosa Nostra (whose term dates back to the 1820s). The word, ‘mafia’ – referring to what the Camorra was called in Sicily – wasn’t in use until 1861.
‘Ndrangheta’ is a way of life which integrates phrases, symbols, rituals such as omertá (code of silence); sorella d’omertá (silent sister – implying women’s inaccessibility to undergoing Ndrangheta initiations); il Crimine (the Crime – a board of leaders who decide on matters appertaining to the entire organisation) and Madonna della Montagna (Madonna of the Mountain – the most valued saint to every member of the organisation).
Initiated picciottos (young men) pledge to hold the clan’s interests above those of their parents, brothers or sisters thus: “From now on, you are my family,” they swear. “The punishment for making a mistake is death.” The author interviewed brave Italians who, akin to Peppino Impastato, who resolved to defy the criminals’ hegemony. Individuals such as Gaetano Saffioti, an entrepreneur, who, after being subjected to 22 years of extortion for pizzo (protection money) amounting to 2.8 million euros, surreptitiously gathered damning evidence against the organisation, leading to the arrest of 48 Ndranghetists in 2002.
Another was Maria Concetta Cacciola, a mother of three from Rosarno who broke the omertá by exposing her family’s extortion and loansharking activities to the authorities, leading to her placement onto the witness protection programme, which she later left, resulting in her death, aged 30, allegedly at the hands of her own family.
Other vital participants were two state prosecutors, Alessandra Cerreti – referred to as ‘that puttana’ (that whore) by Michele Cacciola during the saga regarding his daughter’s betrayal – and Nicola Gratteri, who has become the face of the fight against the Calabrian mafia. Both are at the forefront of exposing the culprits’ excesses which have led to lengthy convictions.
The first foreign journalist based in Calabria to write about the ‘Ndrangheta’, De Boer got to compare notes with Petra Reski, a German investigative journalist who had already written a book about the mafia, The Honoured Society. While De Boer was being asked if it was dangerous to write about the mafia, Reski – who in 1989 covered the so-called Palermo Spring (in which she reported on the maxi-trial against Cosa Nostra, instigated by Falcone and Borsellino) in Sicily and where she encountered Letizia Battaglia, the photographer renown for her documentation of mafia-related killings in Palermo – was already embroiled in litigation, censorship and threats instituted by Italian businessmen implicated in her book.
Conversely, organised crime’s tentacles also reached De Boer’s Netherlands, with the contract murder of fellow journalist Peter R. de Vries, in Amsterdam in July 2021 – for his collaboration in the trial of a mafia leader named Ridouan Taghi.
Such has been the impact of the organisation’s increasingly violent ways that in 2014, subsequent to the death of a three-year-old child caught in its crossfire, Pope Francis visited Calabria where his homily before a quarter million audience culminated with this no-nonsense remark: “The Ndrangheta is this: the worship of evil and contempt for the common good!”
‘Ndrangheta’ is a multinational operation active, according to Interpol, in 40 countries on five continents. It is involved in murder, extortion, elections rigging, tax evasion, kidnappings, incuding that of the 16-year-old grandson of oil magnate John Paul Getty, for whose release from five months of captivity a ransom of almost R37 million was paid. Its tentacles stretch to construction, hospitality, transportation, contraband, narco trafficking, retail, agriculture, wine smuggling, food trade (olive oil, bread, etc.).
De Boer’s Mafiopoli is an essential account regarding an organisation which sprang from obscurity to an omnipresence lending credence to the assertion that all our lives are affected by its reign!
* A Trade Paperback, MAFIOPOLI is published by Octopus and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers. Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R435
