# The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia

Alex Perry

You are born into it or marry in. Loyalty is absolute, bloodshed revered and you kill or go to your grave before betraying The Family. This code of omertà is how the 'Ndrangheta became the world’s most powerful mafia. The Good Mothers is the story of the women who broke the silence.We live in their buildings, work in their companies, shop in their stores, eat in their restaurants and elect politicians they fund. Founded more than 150 years ago by shepherding families in the toe of Italy, the ’Ndrangheta is today the world’s most powerful mafia, with a crushing presence in southern Italy, a market-moving size in global finance and a reach that extends to fifty countries around the world. And yet, remarkably, few of us have ever heard of it.The ’Ndrangheta’s power rests on a code of silence, omertà, enforced by a claustrophobic family hierarchy and murderous misogyny. Men and boys rule. Girls are married off as teenagers in arranged clan alliances. Beatings are routine. A woman who is ‘unfaithful’ – even to a dead husband – can expect her sons, brothers or father to kill her to erase the ‘family shame’.In 2009, when abused wife Lea Garofalo ‘disappears’ after giving evidence against her mafiosi husband, prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti realises the ’Ndrangheta’s bigotry may be its great flaw. The key to bringing down this criminal empire is to free its women and allow them to speak out and testify. When Alessandra finds two collaborators inside Italy’s biggest crime families, she must persuade them to cooperate, and save themselves and their children.The stakes could not be higher. Alessandra is fighting to save a nation. The mafiosi are fighting for their existence. The women are fighting for their lives. Not all will survive.

## Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Alex-Perry.com Ltd 2018

Cover image © Alamy

Cover design by Leo Nickolls

Maps by Martin Brown

Alex Perry asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008222109

Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008222123

Version: 2018-02-01

## Dedication

For the good daughters

and for Tess, always

## Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Author’s Note

ACT ONE: A VANISHING IN MILAN

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

ACT TWO: REBELLION IN ROSARNO

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

ACT THREE: ITALY AWAKES

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

Acknowledgements

Notes

Picture Section

Index

Also by Alex Perry

About the Author

About the Publisher


## Author’s Note

To assist the English reader, I have used anglicised place names: Florence not Firenze, for example. By contrast, I have observed Italian custom when it comes to individuals’ names. Maria Concetta Cacciola, for instance, becomes Concetta, or ’Cetta, at the second mention. In another difference from Anglo-Saxon custom, Italian women retain their father’s surname after marriage. Thus Lea Garofalo kept her name after she married Carlo Cosco but the couple’s daughter was called Denise Cosco.

ACT ONE

## I

The symbol of Milan is a giant serpent devouring a screaming child.[1] The first city of northern Italy has had other totems: a woolly boar, a golden Madonna and, more recently, the designer labels that make Milan the fashion capital of the world. But the eight-hundred-year-old image of a curled snake sinking its fangs into the writhing, blood-soaked body of an infant has remained its most popular emblem, adorning flags and bas reliefs on the city walls, the Alfa Romeo badge and the Inter Milan jersey. It’s an oddly menacing standard for a people more normally associated with family and food, and a strangely crude one for a city whose artistry reaches the sublime heights of da Vinci’s The Last Supper – and most Milanese generally profess ignorance of its meaning. In more candid moments, however, some will confess they suspect that the image owes its endurance to the way it illuminates a dark truth at the heart of their city: that the dynamism and accomplishment for which Milan is famous depends, among other things, on who you are prepared to destroy.

In the four days they spent in Milan in late November 2009 before her father killed her mother, then erased any trace of her from the world, Denise Cosco could almost believe her family had transcended its own special darkness. Denise was seventeen. Her mother was Lea Garofalo, a thirty-five-year-old mafioso’s daughter, and her father was Carlo Cosco, a thirty-nine-year-old cocaine smuggler. Lea had married Carlo at sixteen, had Denise at seventeen, witnessed Carlo and his brother kill a man in Milan at twenty-one and helped send Carlo to the city’s San Vittore prison at twenty-two. Denise had grown up on the run. For six years, from 1996 to 2002, Lea had hidden herself and her daughter away in the narrow, winding alleys of the medieval town of Bergamo in the foothills of the Alps. Lea had made it a game – two southern girls hiding out in Italy’s grey north – and in time the two had become each other’s worlds. When they walked Bergamo’s cobbled streets, an elfin pair holding hands and curling their dark hair behind their ears, people took them for sisters.

One night in 2000, Lea glanced out of their apartment to see her old Fiat on fire. In 2002, after a scooter was stolen and their front door set alight, Lea told Denise she had a new game for them – and walked hand-in-hand with her ten-year-old daughter into a carabinieri station where she announced to the startled desk officer that she would testify against the mafia in return for witness protection. From 2002 to 2008, mother and daughter had lived in government safe houses. For the past eight months, for reasons Denise understood only in part, they’d been on their own once more. Three times Carlo’s men had caught up with them. Three times Lea and Denise had escaped. But by spring 2009, Lea was exhausted, out of money and telling Denise they were down to two last options. Either they somehow found the cash to flee to Australia, or Lea had to make peace with Carlo.

If neither was likely, reconciliation with Carlo at least seemed possible. The state had dropped its efforts to prosecute him using Lea’s evidence, and while that infuriated her, it also meant she was no longer a threat to him. In April 2009, she sent her husband a message saying they should forgive and forget, and Carlo appeared to agree. The threats stopped and there were no more burned-out cars. Carlo began taking Denise on trips around the old country in Calabria. One September night he even talked Lea into a date and they drove down to the coast, talking into the early hours about the summer they’d met, all those years before.

So when in November 2009 Carlo invited his wife and daughter to spend a few days with him in Milan, and Denise, her hand over the phone, looked expectantly at her mother, Lea shrugged and said OK, they’d make a short break of it. Lea’s memories of Milan in winter were of a cold, dismal city, the trees like black lightning against the sky, the winds tumbling like avalanches through the streets, driving small monsoons of icy rain before them. But Denise would love Milan’s shops, Lea and Carlo needed to talk about Denise’s future and ever since the summer Lea had found herself wondering about Carlo again. Twenty years earlier, he had held her face in his gorilla hands and promised to take her away from the mafia and all the killing – and Lea had believed him chiefly because he seemed to believe himself. Lea still wore a gold bracelet and necklace Carlo had given her back then. There was also no doubt that Carlo loved Denise. Maybe Denise was right, thought Lea. Perhaps the three of them could start over. The idea that Carlo’s new geniality was part of some elaborate plot to catch her off-guard was just too far-fetched. There were easier ways to kill someone.

Lea Garofalo had outclassed Carlo Cosco from the start. Carlo had earned his position with the clans but Lea was born a mafia princess, a Garofalo from Pagliarelle, daughter of east coast ’Ndrangheta aristocrats. Carlo was as broad and handsome as a bear but Lea was altogether finer, her natural elegance accentuated by high cheekbones, a slim frame and her long, thick curly dark hair. Carlo’s stuttering grasp of Italian and his sullen, taciturn manner was never more noticeable than when he was with Lea, who spoke with the sophistication of a northerner and the passion of a southerner, laughing, arguing and crying all in the same five minutes. In any other world, it would have been the natural order of things for Lea to have walked out on Carlo a few years into their marriage and never looked back.

At least Carlo was making an effort not to gloat, thought Lea. He had a friend drop round 100 euros for the train tickets to Milan. When Lea and Denise pulled into the city’s central station, Mussolini’s opulent glass-and-marble monument to northern order and power, Carlo himself picked them up in a black Audi and took them to the Hotel Losanna, a cosy backstreet place a block from the Corso Sempione, Milan’s Champs-Elysées, and a short walk from their old family apartment on Viale Montello. And for the next four days, Carlo refused even to discuss the past. He didn’t mention the ’Ndrangheta or how Lea had broken omertà or the way she almost destroyed everything for which he and his brothers had worked. Instead, Denise said the three of them enjoyed a ‘quiet and pleasant’ mini-vacation, the kind of family holiday they’d never had. Milan’s Ferrari showrooms and Armani stores were a million miles from the goat pastures of Calabria, and Carlo seemed happy for his wife and daughter to enjoy it. With his coat tugged around his shoulders in the Milanese style, and Lea and Denise in jeans and thick down jackets, the three of them wandered the canals and the polished stone piazzas, eating pizza and cannoli and window-shopping in the nineteenth-century galleria across from Milan’s flamboyant Gothic Duomo. Carlo paid for everything: clothes for Denise, dinners for the three of them, coffees and gelatos. Carlo even fixed it for the two women to get their eyebrows done at a beauty salon owned by his friend Massimo. Another time, when Lea was out of hash, Carlo summoned a cousin, Carmine Venturino, and made sure she didn’t pay.

It wasn’t perfect, of course. Denise was busy nurturing a teenage addiction to cigarettes and an aversion to heavy Italian food. Carlo, seeing his wife and daughter for only the second time in thirteen years and noticing how alike they were, couldn’t help be transported back to the day, nineteen years earlier, when sixteen-year-old Lea had eloped with him to Milan. Meanwhile Lea was struggling to hold her nerve. She’d asked Carlo not to tell anyone she was in Milan but already he’d gone ahead and introduced her to Massimo and Carmine, and Carmine, for one, seemed more than just a friend to Carlo. She also had the recurrent feeling that they were being followed.

Lea found herself turning to an old habit. Denise’s mother had long needed a joint or two just to get to sleep at night and, as the butts Denise found in their room attested, she was now also smoking steadily through the day. Sleep and peace were good, of course, and a real rarity for Lea. But you had to wonder at the wisdom of getting stoned around Carlo, a mafioso who had spent the last thirteen years chasing her across Italy trying to kill her.

Still, the trip went better than Lea might have feared. Initially, she had asked Denise to stay with her when Carlo was around because, said Denise, ‘if I was there, nothing was going to happen to her.’ Soon, however, Lea felt safe enough to be left alone with her husband. On the night of 23 November, Denise went to bed early and Lea and Carlo ate out alone. If the years had tightened Lea’s nerves, time seemed to have relaxed Carlo. He was now a barrel of a man, with thick ears, a close-shaven head and a boxer’s nose, but his manner was gentle and attentive. When Lea mentioned Denise’s plan to go to Milan University, Carlo offered to keep an eye on her. When Carlo volunteered that he’d set aside €200,000 for his daughter and Lea scolded him for the tens of thousands he’d spent trying to track them down – ‘and for no reason, because you always arrived too late!’ – Carlo, unusually, took the slight well. After he paid the bill, Carlo took Lea on a drive through the city, the pair of them gliding through the empty streets in silence, just taking in the sights and each other’s company. So distracted was Carlo that he ran a red light, delighting Lea, who was treated to the sight of the big mafioso trying to wriggle out of a ticket.

Watching them together in those days – Lea smoking and laughing, Carlo rubbing his bruiser’s neck and letting a smile soften his frown – Denise said you could see they had been in love once. You might even believe it would work out for the three of them. The three ‘ate together’ as a family, Denise said later. Carlo was showing them how ‘caring and kind’ he was. And there was no denying Lea still had it. Even without a cent in her pocket, and despite everything that had happened, her mother was still a rare and beautiful thing, a Calabrian forest sprite with the same pure spirit that had marked her out from every other girl in Pagliarelle all those years ago. Carlo, Denise felt sure, had to be falling for Lea again. ‘I had absolutely no bad thoughts about my father,’ she said.

Lea and Denise’s last day in Milan was 24 November 2009. The two women were planning to take the 11.30 p.m. sleeper back to Calabria. In their room at the Losanna, Lea and Denise packed. To help take the bags to the station, Carlo brought round a big grey Chrysler he had borrowed from a friend.

As he loaded their cases, Carlo asked Denise whether she’d like to eat that evening with her cousins: Uncle Giuseppe, Aunt Renata and their two boys, eighteen-year-old Domenico and Andrea, fifteen. Denise should grab the chance to spend time with her family, said Carlo. A night alone would also give her parents the chance to discuss a few last things.

Denise agreed. She and Lea then walked into town to do some final shopping. It was an overcast day, only just above freezing, and a dull chill echoed off the granite buildings. CCTV later showed Lea in a black jacket with its furry collar turned in and Denise in a thick white jacket with her hood up and a black backpack over the top. Mother and daughter wandered around the arcades, warming themselves in cafés and grabbing lunch at a McDonald’s, just happy to be out together in the city and, for once, not looking over their shoulders.

An hour after dark, just before 6 p.m., Denise called Carlo. She and Lea were near the Arch of Peace in Sempione Park, not far from the hotel, she said. A few minutes later, Carlo arrived in the Chrysler, flicked on his hazard lights and reminded Denise through the driver’s window that she was expected for dinner with her cousins. Lea, who had already got in the car, didn’t want to go: even if she was getting on better with Carlo, she wanted nothing to do with his family. Carlo suggested he drop off Denise, then return to take Lea out for a quiet dinner. After everyone had eaten, Carlo and Lea would pick Denise up again and all three of them would head over to the station. The women agreed. ‘See you at the station, mama,’ said Denise to Lea as she jumped into the car. ‘Later,’ replied Lea, getting out. ‘I’m going to have a drink.’

Carlo drove Denise to No. 6 Viale Montello on the edge of Milan’s Chinatown. A large, grubby six-storey walk-up of more than a hundred apartments arranged around a drab internal courtyard, No. 6 Viale Montello had once belonged to the Maggiore Ospedale, one of Europe’s first public hospitals when it opened in 1456. But the place had fallen into disrepair and was later abandoned, and in the 1980s the ’Ndrangheta from Pagliarelle had taken it over as a live-in hub for their heroin and cocaine business. The ground floor was now filled with half a dozen cheap Chinese stores – groceries, laundries, tabacs – whose metal shutters were decorated with extravagant graffiti. Most of the apartments were home to immigrants from China, Romania, Albania, Poland, Eritrea and Nigeria, tenants whose own uncertain legal status ensured they were no friends of the law. The rest was given over to around a dozen mafia families. Carlo, Lea and Denise had lived in one apartment in the early 1990s. Carlo’s elder brothers Vito and Giuseppe were still installed in others with their wives and children. It was to these rooms that tons of cocaine and heroin were transported every year before being repackaged and shipped north into Europe.

Carlo left Denise with her Aunt Renata at 6.30 p.m. at Bar Barbara, a Chinese-run café on Piazza Baiamonti at the end of Viale Montello, then drove off to fetch Lea. Denise ordered an espresso. Renata said dinner was minestrone and cold cuts. Denise told her aunt she wasn’t all that hungry, so she and Renata went to an Asian supermarket a few doors down to buy her a small tray of sushi. Denise tried to pay but Renata wouldn’t hear of it.

Looking back, Denise would say it was around then that the make-believe stopped. Back at her cousin’s second-floor apartment in Viale Montello, Denise ate her sushi alone. Then she sat with Renata, Domenico and Andrea as they had their soup and meat in front of the TV. Far from the family get-together Carlo had described, her cousins were in and out all evening. Her Uncle Giuseppe wasn’t even home, which was doubly strange as there was a big game that night, AC Milan away to Barcelona. There was something else, too. When Denise had spent time with Renata before, she remembered thinking that her aunt was a jealous wife, always calling Giuseppe to ask where he was, who he was with, what he was doing and when he was coming home. That night, Denise noticed, Renata didn’t call Giuseppe once.

Denise, who after years on the run had developed a sixth sense for these things, began to feel something was off. Around 8 p.m. she called her mother. Lea’s phone was unobtainable. That was odd too. Lea always made sure her phone was charged. Denise sent her mother a text. ‘Something like “Where the hell are you?”’ Denise said later in court.

The big game started at 8.40 p.m. Barcelona scored quickly. Denise texted Lea a couple more times. Still no answer. Renata told Denise not to worry about smoking in front of the family – no one would tell Carlo – and as the evening wore on, Denise found she was chain-smoking. Her cousins groaned as Barcelona scored a second goal just before half-time. Sometime after 9 p.m., just when Denise was beginning to feel truly unnerved, Giuseppe stuck his head around the door, registered the score and Denise’s presence, then left again. A few minutes after that, Denise’s phone rang. It was Carlo. He would be over in a few minutes to pick Denise up to take her to the station. She should wait for him downstairs at her Uncle Vito’s first-floor apartment.

Denise kissed her cousins and her aunt goodbye, then took the stairs to Vito’s. Carlo hadn’t arrived so Vito’s wife, Giuseppina, made coffee. It was after 9.30 p.m. now – more than three hours since Denise had last heard from her mother – and she was fighting a rising sense of panic. After a while, Vito appeared at the door. Behind him, down the corridor, Denise caught a glimpse of her father at the entrance to another apartment. She hadn’t even known Carlo was in the building. Instead of fetching her, he was talking to his brother Giuseppe and two other men. Carlo glanced at his daughter, and called over that she should wait for him in the car. Denise went down to the street and found the Chrysler. Lea wasn’t in it. By now, it was 10 p.m. When Carlo got in, Denise asked him immediately: ‘Where’s my mother?’

‘I left her around the corner,’ replied Carlo. ‘She didn’t want to come in and see everyone.’

Carlo drove in silence to a street behind Viale Montello. Denise regarded him. He looked upset, she thought. The way he was driving, barely focusing on the road. ‘Scossato,’ she said later. Shaken.

When they turned the corner, Lea wasn’t there. Denise was about to speak when Carlo cut her off. Lea wasn’t waiting for them, said Carlo, because what had happened was that Lea had asked him for money and he had given her 200 euros but she had screamed at him that it wasn’t enough, so he had given her another 200 but she’d stormed off anyway. They hadn’t eaten dinner. Actually, said Carlo, he hadn’t eaten at all.

Carlo fell silent. Denise said nothing.

You know what your mother’s like, said Carlo. There’s nothing anyone can do.

Carefully, Denise asked her father, ‘Where is my mother now?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Carlo.

Denise thought her father was a terrible liar. ‘I didn’t believe him for a nanosecond,’ she said. ‘Not one word.’ All his kindness over the last few days, all the opening doors, fetching coats and driving them around – his whole Milanese bella figura act – all of it was gone. Carlo appeared to have regressed. He seemed raw, almost primal. He wouldn’t even look at her. And suddenly Denise understood. The dinner with her cousins. The calls to Lea that wouldn’t go through. The endless hanging around. The urgent discussion between the men in the apartment opposite. Lea had been right all along. Denise, who had begged her mother to let them go to Milan, had been catastrophically wrong. ‘I knew,’ said Denise. ‘I knew immediately.’

Denise understood two more things. First: it was already too late. Denise hadn’t spoken to her mother for three and a half hours. Lea never turned off her phone for that long and certainly not before telling Denise. It’s done, thought Denise. He’s already had time.

Second: confronting her father would be suicide. If she was to survive, in that moment she had to accept Lea’s fate and fix it in her mind not as possible or reversible but as certain and final. At the same time, she had to convince her father that she had no idea about what had happened, when in reality she had no doubt at all. ‘I understood there was very little I could do for my mother now,’ said Denise. ‘But I couldn’t let him understand me.’ Inwardly, Denise forced her mind into a tight, past-tense dead end. ‘They’ve done what they had to do,’ she told herself. ‘This was how it was always going to end. This was inevitable.’ Outwardly, she played herself as she might have been a few minutes earlier: a worried daughter looking for her missing mother. The speed of events helped. It was absurd, even unreal, how in a moment Denise had lost her mother, her best friend and the only person who had ever truly known her. She didn’t have to pretend to be struggling to catch up. She even had the feeling that if she willed it hard enough, she might bring Lea back to life.

It was in this state, with Carlo in a daze and Denise acting like there was still hope in the world, that father and daughter drove all over Milan. ‘We went to all the places we had been,’ said Denise. ‘Where we’d had a drink, where we’d eaten pizza, the hotel where we had stayed, over to Sempione Park. We went to a local café, a shopping centre, the McDonald’s where we had lunch and the train station, where my father bought two tickets for my mother and me. We went all over the city. I was phoning and texting my mother all the time. And of course, we found nothing and nobody.’

Around midnight, just after the train to Calabria had departed, Denise’s phone rang. Denise was startled to read the word ‘mama’ on the screen. But the voice on the other end belonged to her Aunt Marisa, Lea’s sister in Pagliarelle, and Denise remembered that she had borrowed her cousin’s phone before leaving for Milan.

Gathering herself, Denise told Marisa that Lea was nowhere to be found and that they had just missed their train back to Calabria. ‘Have you heard from her?’ Denise asked her aunt. ‘Did she call you?’

Aunt Marisa replied she had had a missed call from Lea sometime after 6.30 p.m. but hadn’t been able to reach her since. Marisa was calling to check that everything was all right. Denise replied that Lea’s phone had been dead all night.

‘They made her disappear,’ Marisa told Denise, just like that, with Carlo sitting right next to Denise in the car.

‘She was so matter-of-fact,’ Denise said. ‘Like she assumed we all expected it. Like we all felt the same.’

Denise and Carlo kept driving around Milan until 1.30 a.m. Finally, Denise said there was nowhere else to look and they should file a report with the police. Carlo drove her to a carabinieri station. The officer told Denise she had to wait forty-eight hours to make out a missing person’s report. With Carlo there, Denise couldn’t tell the officer that she and Lea had hidden for years from the man standing next to her, so she thanked the officer and they returned to Renata’s, where her aunt opened the door half-asleep in her dressing gown.

Renata was surprised to hear Lea was even in town. ‘We came up here together,’ Denise explained. ‘We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to cause any trouble.’ The three of them stood in the doorway for a second. Denise found herself looking at her father’s clothes. He’d had them on all evening. It had been in that jacket, thought Denise. That shirt. Those shoes.

Carlo broke the silence by saying he would keep looking for Lea a little while longer and headed back to his car. Renata said Denise could sleep in Andrea’s room. To reach it, Denise had to walk through Renata’s and Giuseppe’s bedroom. ‘I could see Giuseppe wasn’t there,’ she said later. ‘And I ignored it. I ignored everything for a year. I pretended nothing had happened. I ate with these people. I worked in their pizzeria. I went on holiday with them. I played with their children. Even when I knew what they had done. I had to be so careful with what I said. They were saying my mother was alive even after I hadn’t seen her for more than a year. I just made out like I didn’t know. But I knew.’

## II

In Calabria, Lea Garofalo’s disappearance needed no explanation. The mafia even had a term for people who, one day, just vanished: lupara bianca (‘white shotgun’), a killing which left no corpse, seen by no one. In Pagliarelle, the remote mountain village on the arch of Italy’s foot where Lea and Carlo were born, people knew never to speak Lea’s name again.

They wouldn’t be able to forget her entirely. Lea’s modest first-floor studio, its shutters and drainpipes painted bubblegum pink, was only yards from the main piazza. But the four hundred villagers of Pagliarelle had learned long ago to live with their ghosts. In three decades, thirty-five men and women had been murdered in mafia vendettas in Pagliarelle and the nearby town of Petilia Policastro, including Lea’s father Antonio, her uncle Giulio and her brother Floriano. In such a place, in such a family, Lea’s disappearance could seem inevitable, even a kind of resolution. Years later, her sister Marisa would look up at Lea’s first-floor window from the street below and say: ‘Lea wanted freedom. She never bowed her head. But for people who follow the ’Ndrangheta, this choice is considered very eccentric. Very serious. You want to be free? You pay with your life.’ Really, Marisa was saying, there was nothing anyone could do.[1]

Alessandra Cerreti knew many of her colleagues shared that view. When she arrived in Calabria from Milan seven months earlier as the province’s newest magistrate, she had been struck by how many Calabrians still accepted the ’Ndrangheta as an immutable fact of life. Outside southern Italy, the mafia was regarded as a movie or a novel, an entertaining, even glamorous legend that might once have held some historic truth but which, in a time of more sophisticated concerns such as financial crises or climate change or terrorism, felt like a fable from a bygone era. Not so in Calabria. Like their more famous cousins in Sicily and Naples, the ’Ndrangheta had been founded in the mid to late nineteenth century. But while the Sicilians, in particular, had seen their power steadily eroded by a state crackdown and popular resistance, the ’Ndrangheta had grown ever stronger. The organisation was still run by its original founders, 141 ancient shepherding and orange-farming families who ruled the isolated valleys and hill towns of Calabria. Its foot soldiers were also still quietly extorting billions of euros a year from Calabria’s shopkeepers, restaurant owners and gelato makers – and murdering the occasional hard-headed carabinieri or judge or politician who stood in their way. What had transformed the ’Ndrangheta, however, was a new internationalism. It now smuggled 70 to 80 per cent of the cocaine and heroin in Europe. It plundered the Italian state and the European Union for tens of billions more. It brokered illegal arms deals to criminals, rebels and terrorists around the world, including several sides in the Syrian civil war. By the prosecutors’ count, by 2009 the ’Ndrangheta’s empire took in fifty countries, a quarter of the planet, from Albania to Togo, linking a mob war in Toronto to a lawyer’s assassination in Melbourne, and the reported ownership of an entire Brussels neighbourhood to a cocaine-delivering pizzeria in Queens, New York, called Cucino a Modo Mio (‘Cooking My Way’). By the dawn of the second decade of the new millennium, the ’Ndrangheta was, by almost any measure, the most powerful criminal syndicate on earth.

If ruthless violence was the fuel of this global empire, astounding wealth was its result. The prosecutors’ best guess was that every year, the organisation amassed revenues of $50–$100 billion,[2] equivalent to up to 4.5 per cent of Italian GDP, or twice the annual revenues of Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Ferrari and Maserati combined. So much money was there that cleaning and hiding it required a whole second business. And so good had the Calabrians become at money laundering, pushing billions through restaurants and construction companies, small offshore banks and large financial institutions, even the Dutch flower market and the European chocolate trade, that Alessandra’s fellow prosecutors were picking up indications that other organised crime groups – Eastern Europeans, Russians, Asians, Africans, Latin Americans – were paying the ’Ndrangheta to do the same with their fortunes. That meant the ’Ndrangheta was managing the flow of hundreds of billions or even trillions of illicit dollars around the world.

And it was this, the ’Ndrangheta’s dispersal of global crime’s money across the planet, that ensured the Calabrians were in everyone’s lives. Billions of people lived in their buildings, worked in their companies, shopped in their stores, ate in their pizzerias, traded in their companies’shares, did business with their banks and elected politicians and parties they funded. As rich as the biggest businesses or banks or governments, ’Ndrangheta-managed money moved markets and changed lives from New York to London to Tokyo to São Paolo to Johannesburg. In the first two decades of the new millennium, it was hard to imagine another human enterprise with such influence over so many lives. Most remarkable of all: almost no one had ever heard of it.

The ’Ndrangheta – pronounced un-drung-get-a, a word derived from the Greek andraganthateai, meaning society of men of honour and valour – was a mystery even to many Italians.[3] In truth, this ignorance was due as much to perception as deception. Many northern Italians had trouble even imagining wealth or achievement in the south. And the contrast was striking. The north had Florence and Venice, prosciutto and parmigiana, Barolo and balsamic, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, AC Milan and Inter Milan, Lamborghini and Maserati, Gucci and Prada, Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Pavarotti, Puccini, Galileo, da Vinci, Dante, Machiavelli, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus and the Pope. The south had lemons, mozzarella and winter sun.

This was, Alessandra knew, the great lie of a united Italy. Two thousand years earlier, the south had been a fount of European civilisation. But by the time the northern general Giuseppe Garibaldi amalgamated the Italian peninsula into a single nation in 1861, he was attempting to join the literate, the industrial and the cultured with the feudal, the unschooled and the unsewered. The contradiction had proved too great. The north prospered in trade and commerce. The south deteriorated and millions of southerners left, emigrating to northern Europe, the Americas or Australia.

In time, the provinces south of Rome had come to be known as the Mezzogiorno, the land where the midday sun blazed overhead, a dry, torpid expanse of peasant farmers and small-boat fishermen stretching from Abruzzo through Naples to the island of Lampedusa, 110 kilometres from North Africa. For much of the south, such a sweeping description was a clumsy stereotype. But for Calabria, the toe, it was accurate. The Romans had called it Bruttium and for 300 kilometres from north to south, Calabria was little more than thorn-bush scrub and bare rock mountains interspersed with groves of gnarled olives and fields of fine grey dust. It was eerily empty: more than a century of emigration had ensured there were four times as many Calabrians and their descendants outside Italy as in their homeland. When she was driven out of Reggio and into the countryside, Alessandra passed a succession of empty towns, deserted villages and abandoned farms. It felt like the aftermath of a giant disaster – which, if you considered the centuries of grinding destitution, it was.

Still, there was a hard beauty to the place. High up in the mountains, wolves and wild boar roamed forests of beech, cedar and holly oak. Below the peaks, deep cracks in the rock opened up into precipitous ravines through which ice-cold rivers raged towards the sea. As the incline eased, woods gave way to vines and summer pastures, followed by estuary flats filled with lemon and orange orchards. In summer, the sun would scorch the earth, turning the soil to powder and the prickly thorn-grass to roasted gold. In winter, snow would cover the mountains and storms would batter the cliffs on the coast and drag away the beaches.

Alessandra wondered whether it was the violence of their land that bred such ferocity in Calabrians. They lived in ancient towns built on natural rock fortresses. In their fields, they grew burning chilli and intoxicating jasmine and raised big-horned cows and mountain goats which they roasted whole over hearths stoked with knotted vine wood. The men hunted boar with shotguns and swordfish with harpoons. The women spiced sardines with hot peppers and dried trout in the wind for months before turning the meat into a pungent brown stew. For Calabrians, there was also little divide between the holy and the profane. On saints’ days, morning processions would be followed by afternoon street feasts at which the women would serve giant plates of maccheroni with ’nduja, a hot, soft pepper sausage the colour of ground brick, washed down with a black wine that stained the lips and seared the throat. As the sun began to sink, the men would dance the Tarantella, named after the effects of the poisonous bite of the wolf spider. To the tune of a mandolin, the beat of a goatskin tambourine and a song about thwarted love or a mother’s love or the thrill of a hot spurt of blood from a stabbed traitor’s heart, the men would compete for hours to see who could dance fastest and longest. ‘The Greece of Italy’, wrote the newspapers, though in reality that was an insult to Greece. Unlike its Ionian neighbour, southern Italy’s legal economy hadn’t grown since the millennium. Unemployment among the young, at more than one in two, was among the worst in Europe.

The south had experienced one kind of development, however. Many southerners saw Garibaldi’s creation of a northern-dominated Italian state as an act of colonisation. Already damned for who they were, they cared little for northern opinions of what they did. Across the Mezzogiorno, from the birth of the Republic, brigands were commonplace. Some organised themselves into family groups. In the century and a half since unification, a few hundred families in Naples, Sicily and Calabria had grown rich. And as criminal rebels who claimed to be secretly subverting an occupying state, they used the intimacy and loyalty of family and a violent code of honour and righteous resistance to draw a veil of omertà over their wealth. Even in 2009, Calabria’s crime bosses still dressed like orange farmers. It was only in the last few years that the Italian government had begun to grasp that these brutish men, with their bird-faced women and tearaway sons, were among the world’s great criminal masterminds.

There was, at least, no mystery to who ran the ’Ndrangheta. The south’s lack of progress was social as much as material. Tradition held that each family was a miniature feudal kingdom in which men and boys reigned supreme. The men granted their women little authority or independence, nor even much of a life beyond an existence as vassals of family property and honour. Like medieval kings, fathers paired their girls off as teenagers to seal clan alliances. Beatings of daughters and wives were routine. To men, women were desirable but feckless, not to be trusted to stay faithful or direct their own lives but to be kept strictly in line for their own good. Women who were untrue, even to the memory of a husband dead for fifteen years, were killed, and it would be their fathers, brothers, sons and husbands who did it. Only blood could wash clean the family honour, the men would say. Often they burned the bodies or dissolved them in acid to be sure of erasing the family shame.

Such a perversion of family would have been extraordinary in any time or place. It was especially so in Italy, where family was close to sacred.[4] The severity of the misogyny prompted some prosecutors to compare the ’Ndrangheta with Islamist militants. Like ISIS or Boko Haram, ’Ndranghetisti routinely terrorised their women and slaughtered their enemies in the service of an immutable code of honour and righteousness.

So, yes, Calabria’s prosecutors would say, the life of an ’Ndrangheta woman like Lea Garofalo was tragic. And, yes, the ’Ndrangheta’s inhuman sexism was one more reason to destroy it. But that didn’t mean the women were much use in that fight. Almost from the day in April 2009 that Alessandra arrived from Milan, many of her colleagues told her the women in the mafia were just more of its victims. ‘The women don’t matter,’ they said.[5] When they heard of Lea’s disappearance, they conceded the news was heartbreaking, especially for those who had known Lea and Denise in witness protection. But Lea’s death was merely a symptom of the problem, they insisted. It had no bearing on the cause.

Alessandra disagreed. She claimed no special insight into family dynamics. Alessandra was forty-one, married without children, and her appearance – slim, meticulously dressed, with short straight hair in a sharp, boyish parting – emphasised cool professionalism. When it came to The Family, however, Alessandra argued that it was only logical that women would have a substantial role in a criminal organisation structured around kin. Family was the lifeblood of the mafia. Like an unseen, uncut umbilical cord, family was how the mafia delivered nourishing, fortifying power to itself. And at the heart of any family was a mother. Besides, argued Alessandra, if the women really didn’t matter, why would the men risk it all to kill them? The women had to be more than mere victims. As a Sicilian and a woman inside the Italian judiciary, Alessandra also knew something about patriarchies that belittled women even as they relied on them. Most judicial officials missed the importance of ’Ndrangheta women, she said, because most of them were men. ‘And Italian men underestimate all women,’ she said. ‘It’s a real problem.’

At the time Lea Garofalo went missing, evidence to support Alessandra’s views was on display in every Italian newspaper. For two years, the press had filled its pages with the lurid allegations and distinctly conservative attitudes of a state prosecutor in Perugia called Giuliano Mignini. Mignini had accused an American student, Amanda Knox – with the assistance of two men, one of whom was Knox’s boyfriend of five days – of murdering her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher. Mignini alleged the two men were in thrall to Knox’s satanic allure. Taking his lead from Mignini, a lawyer in the case described Knox as a ‘she-devil … Lucifer-like, demonic … given over to lust’. Fifty-nine years old, a devout Catholic and father of four daughters, Mignini later told a documentary maker that though the forensic evidence against Knox was scant, her ‘uninhibited’ character and ‘lack of morals’ had convinced him. ‘She would bring boys home,’ he mused. ‘Pleasure at any cost. This is at the heart of most crime.’[6]

In the end, Knox and her boyfriend were acquitted on appeal, twice, and the prosecutors castigated by Italy’s Supreme Court for presenting a case with ‘stunning flaws’. But at the time of Lea’s disappearance, Knox was days from being found guilty for the first time and Mignini’s version of events – that an unmarried American woman who had slept with seven men was just the kind of fiendish deviant to have sex slaves murder her roommate – was the accepted truth.

Alessandra didn’t lecture her colleagues on female emancipation. In their own lives they were free to hold whatever views they wished and she wasn’t about to let any of them think she was asking for special treatment. But when it came to cracking the omertà that cloaked Europe’s biggest mafia, Alessandra argued that the state had pragmatic reasons to care about the prejudice of gangsters. The ’Ndrangheta was as near perfect a criminal organisation as any of them would ever encounter. It had been around for a century and a half, employed thousands around the world and made tens of billions a year. It was not only the single biggest obstacle standing in the way of Italy finally becoming a modern, united nation, but also a diabolical perversion of the Italian family, which was the heart and essence of the nation. And yet until a few years earlier, the Italian state had been barely aware of its existence. When she arrived in Reggio Calabria, no one at the Palace of Justice could give Alessandra more than rough estimates of how many men the ’Ndrangheta employed or where it operated or even, to the nearest $50 billion a year, how much money it made. The kind of free will and independence that Lea Garofalo represented, and the murderous chauvinism rained down on her as a result, represented one of the few times the ’Ndrangheta had ever broken cover. At a time when prosecutors where just beginning to understand ‘how big the ’Ndrangheta had become and how much we had underestimated it,’ said Cerreti, Lea’s evidence against Carlo Cosco was also one of the prosecutors’ first ever peeks inside the organisation. The ’Ndrangheta’s violent bigotry wasn’t just a tragedy, said Alessandra. It was a grand flaw. With the right kind of nurturing, it might become an existential crisis. ‘Freeing their women,’ said Alessandra, ‘is the way to bring down the ’Ndrangheta.’

## III

Alessandra Cerreti was born on 29 April 1968 in the eastern Sicilian port of Messina.[1] In twenty-two years away, she’d only rarely visited her home town. Now she was living in Reggio Calabria, Messina’s sister city, three miles across the water, and rarely out of sight of it. She realised she’d never noticed how Messina changed through the day. At dawn, a pink light would lift its piazzas, boulevards and palm trees out of a purple gloom. At midday, the sun painted the scene in primary colours: blue sea, red roofs, yellow hills, and the white cone of Mount Etna to the south. Sunset was a languid affair, as the wind slackened and Messina sank back into the dusk under clouds edged with orange filigree. Night ushered in a Mediterranean glamour, a fathomless black set off by a necklace of white lights strung like pearls along the coast road.

It was a scene that had drawn artists and writers for generations. Those raised beside the Straits of Messina, however, have long understood that the truth of the place is in what lies beneath. The Straits are a narrow, plunging abyss formed when Africa and Europe collided fifty million years ago and Africa bent down towards the centre of the earth. In this underwater chasm, the rushing currents created when the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas meet make for some of the most disturbed waters in all the oceans. Boiling whirlpools and sucking vortexes trap yachts and fishing boats. Slewing tides send ferries and freighters skidding sideways towards the rocks. Those peering into the depths can see startled bug-eyed fish, and even sharks and whales, shot to the surface from the sea floor 250 metres below. The swirling winds of the Straits reflect this turmoil, inverting the normal pattern of hot air over cold to create an optical illusion called the Fata Morgana in which boats and land on the horizon appear to float upside down in the sky.

On land, human history has mirrored this natural upheaval. Reggio and Messina were founded by Greek colonists whose king, Italos, eventually gave the country its name. But for three millennia, the Straits have been continuously conquered and appropriated, first by Syracusans in 387 BC, then by Campanians, Romans, Vandals, Lombards, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Hohenstaufen German kings, Angevins, Aragonese, Spanish Habsburgs (twice), Ottomans, Barbary pirates, reactionary French Bourbons and Bonapartists, before finally, in 1860 and 1861, Reggio and Messina were captured by Giuseppe Garibaldi in the war that unified Italy. The wealth of its occupiers had given Messina and Reggio their ancient, yellow-stone harbours, their Arabic street names and an early artistry that found exquisite expression in the Riacce Bronzes, two sculptures of naked, bearded warriors dating from 450 BC discovered by a snorkeller off the Calabrian coast in 1972. But this early globalism also had its costs. It was through the Straits’ ports that the Black Death entered Europe from Asia in 1346, going on to wipe out two-thirds of the continent’s population. In 1743, by which time humanity’s numbers had barely recovered, plague returned a second time, killing 48,000 in Messina alone. Next to those disasters, the deadly earthquakes of 1783 and 1894 were largely forgotten, though not the quake and ensuing twelve-metre tsunami of 28 December 1908 which flattened both Reggio and Messina, killing 200,000 people. Rebuilt entirely, the twin cities were levelled again by Allied bombers in 1943.

Assailed by tempests, consumed by catastrophe, the people of the Straits could be forgiven for thinking they were cursed. Many used magic and folk wisdom to account for their suffering. In the Odyssey, Homer had written about two sea monsters which lived on opposing sides of the Straits. Surging out from Calabria, the six-headed Scylla would snatch sailors from the decks of their ships, while from Sicily Charybdis would suck entire boats under the waves with her insatiable thirst. People explained Etna’s deadly eruptions by describing the mountain as the home of Vulcan, or sometimes of Cyclops, both of them angry, thundering types with low opinions of mortals. The tremors people felt under their feet were said to be the shifting grip of Colapesce, the son of a fisherman who took a deep dive one day, saw that Sicily was held up by a single, crumbling column and stayed in the depths to prevent its collapse. The floating islands which appeared over Reggio, meanwhile, were thought to be glimpses of Avalon, to which the fairy-witch Morgan le Fay (after whom the Fata Morgana was named) spirited a dying King Arthur. Up there too, it was said, was The Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship doomed to sail the oceans for ever.

Alessandra would carry the feel of the Straits with her all her life. It was there in the way a winter’s chill would remind her of the morning breeze off the city docks or how the first days of summer would almost instantly change her forearms from alabaster to honey. It was there, too, in her distaste for the way people often seemed to prefer fiction over truth. While most children were delighted to find themselves growing up in a world of gods and castles in the sky, Alessandra was unmoved. Stories of monsters and fairies were entertaining, but they also obscured the deadly reality of the Straits. Every summer, she watched as Messina’s coastguards heaved a steady procession of dripping, blanketed stretchers onto the docks. How could these regrettable, preventable deaths be part of some mystical grand plan? There was little logic, either, in the other spurious legends that Sicilians would spin to glorify their island. In 1975, when Alessandra was five, a twenty-six-year-old from Messina called Giovanni Fiannacca swam to Calabria in 30 minutes and 50 seconds, a record that was to stand for forty years. Alessandra’s neighbours proclaimed Fiannacca the greatest distance swimmer in Sicily, perhaps even of all time. The reality, as most Siciliens knew, was that he had timed his crossing to coincide with a particularly strong east–west tide which would have carried a rubber duck to Calabria.

In another life, in another land, Alessandra might have forgiven these illusions and the credulous adults who repeated them. But her home was the birthplace of Cosa Nostra. By the 1970s, the Sicilian mafia was operating all but unopposed on the island. It was a state-within-a-state, extracting taxes via extortion, dividing up public contracts among mafia companies, settling disputes, delivering punishments – and lying, cheating and murdering to preserve its position. Yet no one said a thing. To inquisitive outsiders, Sicilians would claim the mafia was a fable, a cliché or even a groundless slur. Among themselves, proponents would characterise it in more mythic terms, as an ancient Sicilian brotherhood built on courage, honour and sacrifice. Never mind that it was the mafia itself which cooked up these romantic legends and embellished them with more recent folklore, such as their story about how mafiosi rode Allied tanks to liberate Sicily in the Second World War. Never mind that in their hearts most Sicilians knew they were being lied to. Just as the islanders found it hard to accept the indifference shown to their city by Nature and Man, so most preferred not to confront the truth that their fellow Sicilians had grown rich by robbing and killing them.

Alessandra lamented her neighbours’ complicity in these deceptions, even as she understood it. Decades later, reading sensational newspaper accounts of mafia adventures, she would react the same way she had as a child. The facts about the tyranny and the killing were plain. Why dress them up as something else? What Alessandra truly detested, however, was the way outsiders assisted the mafia’s myth-making. A year after she was born, Mario Puzo, an American pulp magazine writer, sold the screenplay adapted from his book, The Godfather, to Paramount for $100,000. Two years later, Francis Ford Coppola was directing Al Pacino in the movie on location in Savoca, twenty-five miles south of Messina.

The film, one of the most successful of all time, contained elements of truth. The Corleone family was a crime syndicate from south of Palermo. There also had been a disagreement inside the mafia in the 1950s over whether to enter narcotics trafficking, a dispute which did lead to an internal war. What Alessandra found unforgivable was the way Hollywood used southern Italians’ daily tragedy as a device to make its dramas more compelling. She shared none of Coppola’s empathy for the men who murdered their wives and girlfriends. She could make no sense of the women either, passive, giddy creatures who allowed their men to lead them from love to betrayal to an early death. Nor did she recognise any of the film’s sombre majesty or mournful grandiloquence in the blood that stained the gutters as she walked to school. When Alessandra was ten, two ambitious bosses, Salvatore Riina (‘the butcher of Corleone’) and Bernardo Provenzano (‘the tractor’, so-called because, in the words of one informer, ‘he mows people down’), began what became an all-out mafia war by assassinating several Sicilian rivals.[2] The decade and a half that followed, spanning most of Alessandra’s adolescence, became known as la mattanza, ‘the slaughter’. More than 1,700 Sicilians died. Mafiosi were shot in their cars, in restaurants, as they walked down the street. In a single day in Palermo in November 1982, twelve mafiosi were killed in twelve separate assassinations. Yet through it all, foreign tourists would arrive in Messina asking for directions to The Godfather’s village. No, thought Alessandra. This was a hideous, wilful delusion. It was a lie. It had to be corrected.

When Alessandra was eight, her teacher asked her class to write an essay about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Let your minds wander, said the teacher. You can be anything at all, anywhere in the world. Excited by the chance to escape Messina’s violence and fear, most of Alessandra’s classmates wrote whimsies about becoming princesses or moving to America or flying a rocket to the moon. Alessandra said she would be staying put. I want to be an anti-mafia prosecutor, she wrote. I want to put gangsters behind bars.

It was to pursue her ambition that in 1987, at the age of nineteen, Alessandra took the train north to become a law student. Pulling into Rome’s central station the next day, she found herself in a different nation. But Alessandra quickly assimilated. She graduated from Milan University in 1990, qualified as a magistrate in 1997 and quickly became a specialist in organised crime. Over the next twelve years, she investigated the ’Ndrangheta’s expansion across northern Italy, assisted the prosecution of billion-euro tax evasion in the art world, sat as a judge in a high-profile terrorist recruitment case and, on a quiet weekend, married a rising anti-mafia carabinieri officer.[3]

No one was surprised that Alessandra married into the job. Few outsiders would tolerate the life of a mafia prosecutor’s spouse. The wide autonomy Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutors enjoyed in their investigations was about the only freedom they possessed. The constant threat to her life required Alessandra to exist in isolation behind a wall of steel – literally, in the case of her office door and her armour-plated car – and for her to be escorted by four bodyguards twenty-four hours a day. Spontaneity was out of the question; all her movements were planned a day in advance. A normal life – meeting friends and family, eating out, shopping – was next to impossible. ‘We go nowhere with crowds because of the risk to others,’ said Alessandra. For the same reason, she and her husband – whose identity she kept secret – had long ago decided against children. ‘I would have to fear for them,’ she said. ‘As we are, I have no fear for me or my husband.’

Alessandra didn’t relish the sacrifices the job demanded. But she had come to accept them as useful to developing the character she needed to face the mafia. Her response to the mafia’s romanticism and glamour remained what it had been in Messina: an insistence on the facts. To some, Alessandra knew, she could seem cold and aloof, living a grey half-life ruled by procedure, discipline and evidence. She told herself she needed this distance – from mafiosi, from their victims, even from life – to preserve her perspective. Passion and blood and family and tragedy – that was the mafia, and the mafia was enemy. She had to be the opposite: intellectual, forensic and dispassionate.

By forty-one, what once had been girlish obstinacy had matured into poise, stoicism and self-possession. In her office in the Palace of Justice, Alessandra kept her desk clear and her office spartan. Besides a photograph of the legendary Sicilian prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, she hung only a graphite drawing of Lady Justice and a pastel of the Straits of Messina. Among her staff, the young female prosecutor’s icy focus was a favourite topic of discussion. She wasn’t scared or emotional, as some of the men had predicted. Rather, she was unwavering, scrupulous and unnervingly calm – legale, they said – her rebukes all the more crushing for their dispassion, her smiles all the more disarming for their unexpectedness.

Inside this narrow, monotone life, Alessandra permitted herself a few indulgences. Every August she and her husband took off on a foreign holiday without their bodyguards, telling no one where they were going – ‘the only time I can be free,’ she said. On a shelf in her office, she kept a collection of snow globes sent to her by friends from their travels in Europe. Alessandra also liked to dress well. To court, she wore slim dark suits over a plain white blouse. To the office, she wore woollen winter shawls with leather boots, or stretch jeans with a biker’s jacket, or heels with a sleeveless summer dress, her toes and fingernails painted chocolate in winter and tangerine in summer. This was not about looking good to the world. Anti-mafia prosecutors were rarely seen by anyone. Rather, this was about freedom. To do her job and not be defined by it, to accept its restrictions and not be beaten by them, to face the threats of ten thousand mafiosi and respond with a woman’s grace and elegance – that was true style and, in a world of male brutality, a display of adamant and unyielding femininity.

Throughout her time in the north, Alessandra had kept a close watch on the southern battle against the mafia. It had been a long and bloody fight. After the state intervened to try to stem la mattanza in the 1980s, judges, policemen, carabinieri, politicians and prosecutors became targets too. On 23 May 1992, the mafia detonated half a ton of explosives under an elevated highway outside the city on which Giovanni Falcone, Italy’s most celebrated anti-mafia prosecutor, was driving with his wife and three police bodyguards. The explosion was so big it registered on Sicily’s earthquake monitors. Hearing the news of Falcone’s assassination, his co-prosecutor Paolo Borsellino, who had grown up in the same Palermo neighbourhood and had always been somewhat in Falcone’s shadow, remarked, ‘Giovanni beat me again.’ Two months later, Borsellino and five policemen were killed by a car bomb outside the home of Borsellino’s mother in Palermo. Six houses were levelled and fifty-one cars, vans and trucks set on fire.

Falcone’s death was to Italians what President John F. Kennedy’s was to Americans: everyone can remember where they were when they heard the news. To the tight group of Sicilians like Alessandra who had taken up the fight against Cosa Nostra, the loss of their two champions was deeply personal. At the time, Alessandra was a twenty-four-year-old law graduate in Rome who had just begun training to be a magistrate. Falcone’s and Borsellino’s sacrifice only made the two prosecutors seem more heroic. ‘They were the inspiration for a generation,’ she said. ‘Their deaths made us stronger.’ To this day, the two prosecutors remain the titans against whom all Italian prosecutors measure themselves. A picture of either Falcone or Borsellino, and generally both, hangs on the wall of every anti-mafia prosecutor’s office in Italy, often accompanied by a famous Falcone one-liner. ‘The mafia is a human phenomenon and, like all human phenomena, it had a beginning, an evolution and will also have an end,’ was one favourite. ‘He who doesn’t fear death dies only once,’ was another.

In time, even Cosa Nostra would acknowledge that the murders had been a miscalculation. They gave the prosecutors’ political masters no choice but to abandon attempts to negotiate a peace with the mafia and try to crush it instead. Tens of thousands of soldiers were dispatched to Sicily. The two prosecutors’ deaths also prompted renewed appreciation of their achievements. The chief accomplishment of Falcone, Borsellino and their two fellow prosecutors, Giuseppe di Lello and Leonardo Guarnotta, was finally to disprove the grand Sicilian lie. After decades of denial, Cosa Nostra was exposed not as a myth or a movie but a global criminal organisation, headquartered in Sicily, with extensive links to business and politics in Italy and around the world. The climax of their investigations, the Maxi Trial, saw 475 mafiosi in court, accused of offences ranging from extortion to drug smuggling to 120 murders.

How had Falcone and Borsellino succeeded? Many of their accomplishments hinged on a new 1982 law, the crime of mafia association, which outlawed a mere relationship with the mafia, even without evidence of a criminal act. That effectively made it a crime just to be born into a mafia family and was aimed squarely at the omertà and close blood relations on which the mafia was built. The new legislation worked. First a handful, then scores, then hundreds of mafiosi turned pentiti (literally ‘penitents’). A host of otherwise innocent family members did the same. From their evidence, Italy’s prosecutors were able to construct a picture of Cosa Nostra’s internal structure for the first time.

The Sicilians’ other innovation was to abandon the mercurial autonomy traditionally enjoyed by individual prosecutors. Independence from political masters, who were often the target of anti-mafia investigations, remained essential. But prosecutors’ habitual individualism had often found expression in less helpful fashion, such as fighting each other for position. By contrast, Palermo’s anti-mafia prosecutors worked as an indivisible team, the ‘anti-mafia pool’, as they called themselves, which shared information, diffused responsibility and co-signed all warrants. In that way, they ensured their work was coordinated and efficient, and never depended on the continuing good health of any one of them.

So it was that in the months after the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, other prosecutors – first Gian Carlo Caselli; then the Sicilians Piero Grasso, Giuseppe Pignatone and his deputy Michele Prestipino – picked up where their storied predecessors left off. And in a further decade and a half, the Palermo prosecutors and Palermo’s elite flying squad largely finished what their predecessors had started. By the mid-2000s, nearly all Cosa Nostra’s bosses were in jail, its links to senior politicians were exposed and its rackets, while they still existed, were a shadow of what they had once been. Capping the prosecutors’ success, in April 2006 at a small, sparsely furnished cottage outside Corleone, Pignatone and Prestipino were present for the arrest of Cosa Nostra’s remaining capo tutti, seventy-three-year-old Bernardo Provenzano, who had been on the run for forty-three years.

On visits back to Sicily, Alessandra saw the transformation in her homeland. In the streets of Palermo and Messina, a new popular movement called Addiopizzo (‘Goodbye Pizzo’, mafia slang for extortion) united shopkeepers, farmers and restaurateurs in a refusal to pay protection. Thousands of anti-mafia protesters marched arm-in-arm through the streets. Cosa Nostra, in its weakened state, was unable to respond. When mafiosi firebombed an anti-mafia trattoria in Palermo, the city’s residents found the owners new premises on a busy junction in the centre of town where they opened up again and quickly became one of the city’s most celebrated destinations. In time, Palermo and Messina could boast city-centre shops run by an activist group called Libera (‘Free’), which sold olive oil, sauces, wine and pasta made exclusively by farmers who refused to pay protection to Cosa Nostra.

But as the war on Cosa Nostra wound down, a fresh threat took its place. During la mattanza, across the water in Calabria the ’Ndrangheta had initially toyed with joining Cosa Nostra’s war on the state, and even killed a couple of policemen for itself. But the Calabrians soon realised that with the Sicilians and the government so distracted, the strategic play was not to side with Cosa Nostra but to take its narco-business. The ’Ndrangheta paid the Sicilians’ debts to the Colombian cocaine cartels, effectively buying them out as the Latin Americans’ smuggling partners.

Carlo Cosco arrived in the north in 1987, the same year as Alessandra. Carlo’s intention was not to fit into northern Italy, however, but to conquer it – and his timing was perfect. The ’Ndrangheta was pushing its drug empire north across Europe. Milan, Cosco’s new patch, was a key beachhead in that expansion. And there had never been a business like cocaine smuggling in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s. After saturating the US market, South American producers were looking to other territories for growth. Europe, with twice the population of North America and a similar standard of living but, in the 1980s, a quarter of its cocaine consumption, was the obvious opportunity. With the ’Ndrangheta’s help, the cartels flooded the continent with cocaine. By 2010, the European cocaine market, at 124 tons a year, was close to matching the American one. In Spain and Britain, the drug became as middle class as Volvos and weekend farmers’ markets.

In the estimate of Italy’s prosecutors, the ’Ndrangheta accounted for three-quarters of that. So rich, and so fast, did the ’Ndrangheta grow, it was hard to keep track. On wiretaps, carabinieri overheard ’Ndranghetisti talking about buried sacks of cash rotting in the hills, and writing off the loss of a few million here or there as inconsequential. At Gioia Tauro port on Calabria’s west coast, officers were seizing hundreds of kilos of cocaine at a time from shipping containers but reckoned that they found less than 10 per cent of what was passing through. A glimpse of quite how big the ’Ndrangheta had grown came in the early hours of 15 August 2007 – the Ascension Day national holiday in Italy – when two ’Ndrangheta gunmen shot and killed four men and two boys aged eighteen and sixteen connected to a rival clan outside a pizzeria in Duisberg, in Germany’s industrial heartland. Northern Europe was apparently now ’Ndrangheta territory.

Italy, and Europe, had a new mafia war to fight. And though its empire was now global, the ’Ndrangheta remained as attached to Calabria as Cosa Nostra had been to Sicily. In April 2008, two of the prosecutors who had humbled the Sicilian mafia, Giuseppe Pignatone, now sixty, and Michele Prestipino, fifty, had their requests for transfer to Calabria accepted. Their friend and ally in the Palermo flying squad, Renato Cortese, went with them. As the three cast around for a team who might do to the ’Ndrangheta what had been done to Cosa Nostra, they realised they faced a problem. Many Italian prosecutors baulked at the idea of an assignment to what was universally regarded as both a backwater and enemy territory. In 2008, only twelve of the eighteen prosecutor positions in Calabria were filled and the province had just five anti-mafia specialists. In Milan, however, Alessandra applied. She was ready to return to the south, she told her bosses. She understood the work would be ‘riskier’ and more ‘difficult and complicated’. That just made it all the more urgent.[4]

In April 2009, Alessandra and her husband packed up their apartment in Milan and flew south, following the sun down the west coast of Italy. As the plane started its descent, Alessandra saw the Aeolian Islands to the west, then Sicily and the snows of Etna to the south, then the streets of Messina below. As she passed over the broad blue of the Straits, she regarded the white foam trails of the rusty freighters as they rounded the tip of the Italian peninsula and turned north to Naples, Genoa, Marseilles and Barcelona. Not for the first time, it occurred to Alessandra that the lazy arc of this shore would, from a suitable distance, form the shape of a very large toe.

Alessandra’s new security detail met her at Reggio airport. They took the expressway into town as a two-car convoy. The road climbed high above the city, skirting the dusty terraces that led up into the Calabrian hinterland. Below were the cobbled streets and crumbling apartment blocks whose names were familiar to Alessandra from dozens of investigations into shootings and fire-bombings. Somewhere down there, too, were the bunkers, entire underground homes where ’Ndrangheta bosses would hide for years, surfacing through hidden doors and tunnels to order new killings and plan new business.

As they reached the northern end of Reggio, the two cars took an off-ramp and plunged down into the city, dropping through twisting hairpins, bumping over ruts and potholes, plunging ever lower through tumbling, narrow streets before bottoming out just behind the seafront. Once on the flat, the drivers accelerated and flashed through the streets, past abandoned hotels, boarded-up cinemas and empty villas before turning back up towards the hills and sweeping through the gates of a carabinieri barracks. In its 3,500 years of existence, Reggio had been a Mediterranean power, the birthplace of the kingdom of Italia, a Norman fortress and a Riviera resort. Now it was bandit country. Entire neighbourhoods were off-limits to carabinieri or prosecutors. For Alessandra, home for the next five years would be a bare-walled officer’s apartment jammed into the barracks roof with a view of the Straits of Messina.

## IV

Denise slept for an hour and a half the night Lea disappeared.[1] The next morning, 25 November 2009, she ate breakfast with her Aunt Renata, walked with her to the kindergarten where she worked, then spent the morning silently smoking cigarettes with Andrea and Domenico in a nearby piazza. In the afternoon, Carlo phoned and told her to meet him at Bar Barbara. On the way there, Denise ran into a cousin from Lea’s side of the family, Francesco Ceraudo, who lived in Genoa. She told Francesco that Lea was missing and asked him if he had seen her. Francesco blanched. ‘Do you know anything?’ Denise asked. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said, and walked on.

The entire Cosco clan were in Bar Barbara: Carlo, his brothers Vito and Giuseppe, and Aunt Renata. Giuseppe and Renata were playing video poker in the corner. Giuseppe won 50 euros and, clumsily, gave the winnings to Denise. After a while, the carabinieri called Denise on her mobile and said they needed to speak to her. During the call, a squad car pulled up outside. Vito asked what was happening. ‘Lea’s missing,’ Carlo told him.

The Coscos weren’t about to let one of their own go to the carabinieri alone. Vito dropped Carlo and Denise at the station around 8.30 p.m., and father and daughter entered together. Inside, however, carabiniere Marshal Christian Persurich told Carlo he had to talk to Denise unaided. Persurich showed Denise to an interview room. He informed her that in Calabria her Aunt Marisa had reported Lea missing. Marisa had also told the carabinieri that Lea had testified against the ’Ndrangheta and that she and Denise had spent time in witness protection. Lea had now been missing for more than twenty-four hours. Persurich needed the whole story. Denise should take her time and leave nothing out. The interview would be strictly confidential.

Denise nodded. ‘If my mother’s missing,’ she began, ‘then it’s probably because she’s been killed by my father.’

Marshal Persurich interviewed Denise for five hours, finishing just before 2 a.m. Denise emerged to find Carlo pacing the waiting room, demanding that the officers let him read her statement. Seeing his daughter, Carlo confronted her. ‘What did you tell these people?!’

‘You asked us to Milan,’ Denise replied blankly. ‘We spent a few days together. You were meant to pick her up. But you couldn’t find her. Then we looked for her all over.’

Carlo looked unconvinced. Five hours for that?

On the way back to her cousin’s, Carlo and Denise stopped at a restaurant, the Green Dragon, named after the symbol of Milan. Inside was Carmine Venturino, the cousin who had given Lea some hash to smoke. Carmine had a babyish face and looked like a born truant, and Denise had liked him from the moment she met him at a wedding in Calabria the previous summer. But that night they had nothing to say to each other. After Carmine and Carlo had a brief, hushed discussion, Carlo walked his daughter back to Viale Montello. There, Denise slept in Andrea’s room for a second night.

The next morning, Carlo, Denise and a friend of Carlo’s, Rosario Curcio, saw a lawyer in town. Carlo told the lawyer he wanted to see Denise’s statements. The lawyer asked Denise what she’d told the carabinieri. Denise repeated what she had told Carlo: that she and her mother had come up to Milan to spend a few days with her father and Lea had vanished on their last night. She began crying. The lawyer said he could arrange to have Lea’s disappearance publicised on national television. There was a show, Chi l’ha Visto? (Have You Seen Them?), which appealed for information on missing people. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ cried Carlo. The lawyer didn’t get it at all. Carlo stood up and walked out, leaving Denise crying in the lawyer’s office.

After Denise recovered, she, Carlo and Rosario drove to a beauty salon owned by Rosario’s girlfriend, Elisa. Carlo took Rosario aside for another quiet talk. Elisa asked Denise what was going on. Denise burst into tears once more and told Elisa that her mother had gone missing two nights before. Elisa said that was strange because Rosario had vanished for a few hours the same evening. They’d had a date, said Elisa, but Rosario had cancelled, then switched off his phone. When she finally got through to him around 9 p.m., he’d told Elisa something about having to fix a car with Carmine. It didn’t make sense. Why the sudden rush to fix a car? Why at night? Denise was about to say something when Carlo interrupted to say he was taking Denise back to Viale Montello. She slept in her cousin’s room for a third night.

The next day, three days since Lea had disappeared, Denise detected an improvement in Carlo’s mood. He announced that he and Denise would drive to Reggio Emilia, not far from Bologna, to stay the night with another cousin. They left in the early afternoon. While her father drove, Denise watched silently as the winter sun flashed through the poplar trees like a searchlight through the bars of a fence. How could her mother just vanish? How could anyone be there one minute, and there be no sign of her the next? How would she ever talk to her father again?

In Reggio Emilia, Denise went to bed early while Carlo and his cousin went out for dinner. The following morning, Carlo drove Denise back to Milan, changed cars to a blue BMW and announced that he and Denise were leaving immediately for Calabria with two other friends. As they were packing, Carmine arrived to say goodbye. Denise was struck by his expression. Stiff and formal, she thought. Something about the way he wouldn’t look her in the eye.

From the back seat of the BMW, Denise watched as Milan’s grand piazzas and chic boutiques gave way to the flat, grey farmland north of Florence, then the rust-coloured hills of Tuscany and Umbria and finally, as the sun sank into the sea to the west, the towering black volcanoes around Naples and Pompeii. It was dark by the time they crossed into Calabria. Denise felt the road change from smooth asphalt to worn, undulating waves. The car negotiated an almost endless succession of roadworks, then plunged into the steep valley of Cosenza, skimming the cliffs as it wound down into the abyss before hitting the valley floor.

Soon Denise felt the car turn left and accelerate back up into the hills. She registered the tighter turns and the sound of tyres scrabbling on loose stones. The cold of the window dried her tear tracks to a salty crust. As the car filled with the smell of pines, the conversation between the three men took on a giddy, jubilant tone. ‘The only thing in my head was my mother,’ she said. ‘I was just sitting in the back, crying. But the others – they were so happy. Chatting and smiling and joking and laughing out loud.’

After an hour of climbing, the car crested a mountain pass and began to descend. At the edge of a forest, by the side of a stream, they came to a small village. They were heading to the one place where Carlo could be sure Denise would never speak out of turn again. Pagliarelle.

‘Pagliarelle’ comes from the word pagliari, meaning shelter. The name commemorated how for thousands of years, as the winter snows melted, Calabria’s shepherds would lead their sheep and goats up a track into the mountains and find a stream on whose banks they would graze their animals for weeks at a time. Keeping one eye out for wolves and another on the sea on the horizon, the men would collect pinewood, barbecue goat meat, drink wine and sleep in a handful of open-sided shacks that they roofed with fir and clay. In the twentieth century, the track leading from the nearby town of Petilia Policastro was tarred, electricity arrived and the shepherds’ rest grew into a modest settlement of grey-stone, red-tiled townhouses gathered around a small central square. The name survived, as did the stream, which was channelled into a fountain in the piazza where, as children, their mothers would send Lea and Carlo to fill buckets for the day.

It was here, high up in the frozen, granite mountains of eastern Calabria, that Denise found herself walking a tightrope of pretence in the weeks after Lea’s disappearance. Lea hadn’t just been Denise’s mother. After so many years alone together, she had defined Denise’s life. Now Denise found herself back in the place that her mother had tried to escape for so long, adrift among the people she was sure had killed her. It was impossible to know how to behave. With no body and no funeral, Denise couldn’t mourn. Carlo was telling people that Lea had run off, maybe to Australia, and Denise found herself having to make believe that her murderous father hadn’t really killed her courageous mother at all but that, rather, her fickle mother had abandoned her husband and only child and jetted off to a new life in the sun. Denise knew the way she looked so much like Lea – the same hair, the same cheekbones – made her an immediate object of suspicion. Worse, Carlo was making so much of Denise’s return. After years of problems with his wife and daughter, the boss finally had both his women where they belonged – and he wanted everyone to know. Ten days after Lea’s disappearance, Carlo organised an eighteenth birthday party for Denise, inviting hundreds of people from Pagliarelle and Petilia Policastro and even buying Denise a car. When Denise refused to go, Carlo went ahead with the party anyway.

Mostly, Denise spent her days trying to learn from her Aunt Marisa, with whom she was now living. Ever since Lea had first denounced the ’Ndrangheta in 1996, Marisa had been forced to pull off a daily performance in Pagliarelle. Convincing an entire village they needed to have no doubts about her had required Marisa not just to tell lies but to live them too. In her mind, Marisa suffocated any affection she had for Lea and focused instead on the resentment she felt towards her sister for the trouble she had caused. Denise realised she would have to learn to hate her mother, too. ‘I knew my aunt and her family,’ said Denise. ‘I knew how they thought. My idea was to understand their mentality and see if I could also work out how to live there. I didn’t want to end up like my mother. I wanted to keep living.’

## V

Denise wasn’t the only one living a lie in Pagliarelle. Watching Lea’s daughter offered the carabinieri one of their best leads for finding out what had happened to Lea. But any reminder of the state’s relationship with Lea, or any hint that it might continue with her daughter, would be enough to condemn Denise. The carabinieri decided the state’s only visible presence in Pagliarelle should remain the lone village policeman. Unseen and unheard, however, scores of officers would watch Pagliarelle day and night.

Over the years, the challenge posed by the mafia had compelled Italy’s security services to innovate. To pursue violent ’Ndranghetisti through mountain terrain had led the Calabrian carabinieri to form a unique Special Forces-style squad, the cacciatori (‘hunters’), a unit made up of snipers, bomb disposal experts, heavy weapons operators, helicopter pilots and Alpinists. The sight of a cacciatori helicopter gunship flying low over the Aspromonte mountains was a corrective to anyone who doubted the state was fighting a war in southern Italy.

But even the cacciatori’s resources paled next to those commanded by Italy’s covert intelligence units. Around the world, only a few specialised police units are permitted to eavesdrop on suspects’ telephone calls or spy on them electronically. In Italy, a measure of the mafia threat was that all three police forces – the domestic police, the militaristic carabinieri and the Guardian di Finanza, which specialised in economic crime – had surveillance divisions that employed thousands. In 2009, the Italian state was tapping a total of 119,553 phones and listening to 11,119 bugs. Almost no type of reconnaissance was forbidden. To establish targets’ whereabouts, plain-clothes officers followed them, filmed them through hidden mini cameras and larger zoom lenses set up at a distance – several miles across the valley, in the case of Pagliarelle – and tracked their phones’ GPS signal. To find out what the subjects were saying, they hacked their text messages, phone calls, emails and social media chats.

In Reggio, almost an entire floor of the gracious building that served as the city’s carabinieri headquarters had been transformed into a humming indoor field of electronic espionage. At the centre was a control room from which chases and operations were coordinated. Around it were twenty smaller offices, each dedicated to a different surveillance operation. Every room was packed with scores of screens, servers, modems and snaking thick black wires. Working without interruption in six-hour shifts that ran continuously, day and night, officers in Reggio and an identical team in Milan had been following bosses like Carlo for years. Chosen for their facility with dialects and their ability to inhabit the skin of their subjects, the operators knew their subjects so well they could decipher the meaning of their words from a euphemism or even an inflection in their voice. The Calabrian teams also had a particular skill with bugs. They planted devices in cars, homes and gardens. They bugged a basement laundry whose underground, signal-cutting location made it a favourite ’Ndrangheta meeting place. They bugged an orange orchard where a boss liked to hold meetings, and for the same reason bugged a forest. One time they even bugged a road where one boss took walks, ripping up the asphalt and re-laying it with tar embedded with listening devices.

Such entrepreneurialism brought results. In early 2008, the squad hunting ’Ndrangheta supremo Pasquale Condello, by then fifty-seven and on the run for eighteen years, observed that every two weeks, as though he were on a schedule, Condello’s nephew would shake his surveillance in the centre of Reggio, swapping from the back of one motorbike to another in a series of choreographed changes. The carabinieri were convinced the manoeuvres were in preparation for meeting Condello. One day, an officer noticed that the nephew always wore the same crash helmet. A few nights later, a carabinieri officer punctured the silencer on a car, then drove it up and down outside the nephew’s house to cover the sound of a second officer breaking in and switching the helmet with an identical one implanted with a tracer. When it was time for the next rendezvous, the carabinieri followed the nephew through his usual multi-ride acrobatics then, using the tracer, to a small pink house in a back alley on the south side of Reggio Calabria. Surrounded by more than a hundred cacciatori, Condello surrendered without a fight.

This was the front line on which Alessandra had imagined herself working when she transferred to Calabria. But a staffing shortfall meant that on arrival she was assigned to Reggio as a city judge. Her knowledge of Milan and Calabria and her interest in ’Ndrangheta women notwithstanding, she was forced to watch the Lea Garofalo case unfold from afar.

Still, there were advantages to such a gentle start. For one, the undemanding hours allowed plenty of time to learn the lay of the land. Alessandra kept pace with active investigations by chatting to officers at the carabinieri’s headquarters, a short walk from the Palace of Justice. At other moments, she researched the ’Ndrangheta’s history. In her office, she assembled piles of case files, carabinieri surveillance transcripts, pentiti statements, academic papers, history books and even accounts of Calabrian folklore.

To a Sicilian like Alessandra, the origins of the ’Ndrangheta felt familiar. The organisation was at its strongest away from the big cities in the hundreds of small mountain hamlets like Pagliarelle nestling in the valleys that led away from the coast. As in Sicily, many of these settlements had been the cradle of some of Europe’s first civilisations. Alessandra read how paintings of bulls dating from 12,000 BC had been found in Calabrian caves. By 530 BC, Pythagoras was teaching mathematics in Kroton (later Crotone) on the plain below Pagliarelle while the citizens of nearby Sybaris were drinking wine piped to their homes by vinoducts. Like Sicilians, Calabrians had their own archaic language, in this case Grecanico, a Greek dialect left over from the Middle Ages when Calabria had been part of the Byzantine Empire.

Something else that Calabria had in common with Sicily: from the beginning, it was a land apart. Many of the valleys were accessible only from the sea, naturally isolated behind steep mountainsides, thick pine forests and, in winter, snows that could cut off villages for months. For thousands of years, there had been no one to defend the families who lived in these valleys. They tended olive trees, fished the ocean and scanned the horizon as invading armies sailed by from Rome, Germany, Arabia, Spain, France, Italy and America. They were poor, resilient and resolutely autonomous, and as Italy’s north steadily eclipsed the south, their estrangement from the rest of the Italian peninsula only grew. When in 1861 a group of northerners began to send bureaucrats, teachers and carabinieri into the valleys to proclaim the rule of a newly united Italy, it was the families who repudiated, thwarted and occasionally killed the colonisers.

At first, the families had no connection to the mafia. The phenomenon of organised crime first emerged in Italy in the 1820s with the Camorra in Naples and then in the 1840s and 1850s with what became Cosa Nostra in Sicily. In both cases, ordinary criminals found themselves in jail with educated, bourgeois revolutionaries who were fighting foreign domination and feudalism, and who often organised themselves in masonic sects. As patriots, the rebels taught the future mafiosi the importance of a righteous cause. As freemasons, they taught them hierarchy, and the power of legend and ceremony.

When Sicily simultaneously unified with the north of Italy and ended feudalism, the ensuing chaos gave Sicily’s criminals a chance to put these new lessons to work. Though the northern dukes and generals leading unification described it as an act of modernisation, many southerners regarded it as another foreign conquest. Adding to the discontent, the immediate effect of the advent of private property in Sicily was a rash of property disputes. To protect themselves, landowners, towns and villages set up vigilante groups who, for a fee, protected their assets, hunted down thieves and settled disputes. To be effective, these groups required men who could intimidate others. Jail-hardened criminals were a natural choice.

Soon these bands of enforcers were calling themselves mafiosi, a term derived from the Sicilian word mafiusu, meaning swagger or bravado. Their new name was, in effect, a rebranding. Violent criminals had always been able to inspire fear. The mafiosi wanted respect, too. While they didn’t deny a criminal self-interest, the mafiosi insisted theirs was an honourable endeavour: protecting poor southerners from rapacious landowners and an oppressive north. Of course, Sicilians soon learned that the people from whom they needed most protection were the mafiosi themselves. The protection ‘racket’ was born.

When organised crime reached Calabria a generation or two later, Alessandra read, it had repeated many of the same patterns. Like Cosa Nostra, Calabria’s mafia began in jail. One of Calabria’s main administrative centres was Palmi, a hill town with views out over the east coast that, as the provincial capital of the Gioia Tauro piano, the estuary plain, possessed a police station, a courtroom and a prison. In the spring of 1888, gangs of hoodlums, many of them graduates of the town jail, began staging knife fights in Palmi’s taverns, brothels and piazzas. As the heat rose with the coming summer, it seemed to stoke a violent hooliganism among the ex-cons, who began rampaging through the streets, slashing citizens with knives and razors, extorting money from gamblers, prostitutes and landowners, rustling cattle and goats, and even threatening magistrates, the police and newspaper editors.

In those early days, the prototype gangsters called themselves camorristi, a straight copy of the Naples mafia, or picciotti, a word that the British historian John Dickie translates as ‘lads with attitude’.[1] If they were united, it was chiefly by their dandyish style: tattoos, extravagant quiffs, silk scarves knotted at the neck and trousers that were tight at the thighs and flared at the ankle. In his history of the three big Italian mafias, Mafia Brotherhoods, Dickie describes how picciotto culture spread across Calabria in months.[2] Like all young male fashions, it might have died just as rapidly had it not penetrated the hill valleys. There the families had little taste for the picciotti’s dress. But the remote and defensive interior of Calabria was fertile territory for a movement whose methods were mostly physical and whose distrust of the state was pronounced. And just as they ran everything in the valleys, the families were soon running the piccioterria.

A central goal for all mafias was to create a consensus around power. Whenever the question of power arose – political, economic, social, divine – the answer had to be the mafia. It was the peculiar luck of the Italian mafias that circumstances conspired to graft their enterprise onto the most durable of southern Italian power structures: the family. In Sicily, the mafia came to be known as Cosa Nostra, meaning ‘our thing’, and Our Thing was, really, Our Family Secret, an outsmarting of the northern state built on the intimacy and obedience of kin. Likewise in Calabria, the valley families gave the picciotti a ready-made hierarchy, order, legitimacy and secrecy. It was this – loyalty to blood and homeland – that was the foundation of all the horrors to come.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Calabria’s street hoodlums had been organised into local cells called ’ndrine, each with their own turf, ranks and boss. At first, picciotti were useful for small matters: appropriating a neighbour’s field for the boss’s cows, resisting rent demands from fussing landlords or extracting protection money from the neighbourhood trattoria. Highway robbery, smuggling, kidnapping and loan-sharking were lucrative earners for more enterprising picciotti. Bosses also took on additional duties like adjudicating property disputes or defending women’s honour.

But as the picciotti endured successive crackdowns by the authorities, some wondered how they might turn the tables on the state. If the source of the wider world’s power came from money, they reasoned, then maybe the way to attack that outside world was to venture out into it, steal its money and take its power?

The Calabrian mafia was soon using its money to buy favours from the carabinieri and the judiciary. After that came bribes to political parties, mayors’ offices, the state bureaucracy and the Italian parliament. In time, the families were also able to infiltrate these institutions with their own men. The insiders then defrauded and embezzled, diverting public funds to mafia-owned contracting businesses such as construction firms, refuse collectors and dockers. Elections were rigged and more allegiances bought. Those who could not be corrupted or intimidated were beaten, firebombed or killed.

All this felt familiar to a Sicilian like Alessandra. But the Calabrians outdid their peers in two respects. Where the Sicilians recruited from a particular area, the Calabrians relied on family: almost without exception, picciotti were either born into an ’ndrina or married into it. And while the Sicilians certainly spun stories about themselves, the Calabrians dreamed up legends that wove together honour, religion, family and southern Italian separatism into an elaborate and almost impenetrable veil of misdirection.

By the early twentieth century, ’Ndranghetisti were tracing their origins to three medieval knights-errant. These figures crop up in mafia creation myths from Asia to Africa to Europe.[3] In the ’Ndrangheta version, the knights were Spanish brothers – Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso – who had fled their homeland after avenging their sister’s rape. Landing on the tiny island of Favignana off Sicily’s west coast and taking shelter in damp and cold sea caverns, the trio nursed a sense of righteous grievance and steadfast family loyalty for twenty-nine long and uncomfortably damp years. Eventually their discussions became the basis for a brotherhood founded on mutual defence. With the Honoured Society sworn to protect all members, and they it, no outsider would ever think of shaming the brothers and their families again. And when the brothers felt ready to take their creation to the world, Mastrosso travelled to Naples to set up the Camorra in the name of the Madonna, Osso sailed to Sicily and founded Cosa Nostra in the name of Saint George and Carcagnosso took a land between his two brothers – Calabria – where he established the ’Ndrangheta in the name of Saint Michael, the Archangel.

The story is, of course, bunkum. The Calabrian mafia is not hundreds of years old but barely a hundred and fifty. The story of the three knights also seems copied from that of the Garduña, a mythical fifteenth-century Spanish criminal society whose founding legend would have been familiar to ’Ndranghetisti from the time when Spain ruled Calabria. The irony is that most historians have concluded the Garduña was itself a fabrication.[4] This, then, was mafiosi trying to fool others with a piece of gangster fiction which had, in fact, fooled them.

This was far from the only example of mafia make-believe, however. The ’Ndrangheta’s ancient-sounding name did not derive from a venerable heritage but, as Dickie uncovered, was a modern artifice that first surfaced in police reports in the 1920s and in newspaper stories in the 1950s.[5] Alessandra found more recent mafia fictions in the form of internet videos ripping off scenes from American gangster movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas and set to Calabrian folk songs. The lyrics to these melodies were hardly poetry but no less chilling for that:

Keep the honour of the family.

Avenge my father.

I have to get good with guns and knives

Because I can’t stop thinking about it.

The pain in my heart –

It can only be stopped if I avenge my father.

Then there were the ‘ancient’ rituals. For a boss’s son, Alessandra read, these could begin soon after birth. A new-born boy would be laid kicking and screaming on a bed, a key next to his left hand and a knife by his right, denoting the state and the mafia. An ’Ndrangheta mother’s first duty was to ensure, with a few careful nudges, that her boy grasped the knife and sealed his destiny. In Tired of Killing: The Autobiography of a Repentant ’Ndranghetista, Alessandra read about the early life of Antonio Zagari, the son of an ’Ndrangheta boss who turned super-grass in 1990.[6] In his book, Zagari described a probation of two years, during which a teenage picciotto was expected to prove his worth by committing crimes and even killing, as well as learning by heart the fable of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso and a set of rules and social prescriptions. After that came a formal initiation ceremony. The ritual began when Zagari was led into a darkened room in which a group of ’Ndranghetisti were standing in a circle. At first, Zagari was excluded. The boss addressed the ’Ndranghetisti, asking if they were ‘comfortable’.

‘Very comfortable,’ they replied. ‘With what?’

‘With the rules,’ said the boss.

‘Very comfortable,’ came the reply once more.

The boss then ‘baptised’ the meeting in the name of the Honoured Society ‘as our ancestors Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso baptised it … with irons and chains’. He ceremoniously confiscated any weapons. The congregation confirmed their loyalty to the society on pain of ‘five or six dagger thrusts to the chest’. The boss then likened their common endeavour to ‘a ball that goes wandering around the world as cold as ice, as hot as fire and as fine as silk’. After the members of the circle affirmed three times that they were ready to accept a new member, they opened their ranks to admit the newcomer. The boss then cut a cross on Zagari’s finger so that it bled over a burning image of Saint Michael while he intoned: ‘As the fire burns this image, so shall you burn if you stain yourself with infamy.’

That was the cue for Zagari to take his oath: ‘I swear before the organised and faithful society, represented by our honoured and wise boss and by all the members, to carry out all the duties for which I am responsible and all those which are imposed on me – if necessary even with my blood.’

Finally, the boss kissed Zagari on both cheeks, recited the rules of the society and delivered a homily to humility, the island of Favignana and blood – which, in case anyone was lost, was the essence of the icy, fiery, silky and world-wandering ball he had mentioned earlier.

It was a wonder anyone kept a straight face, thought Alessandra. Certainly, the cod-medievalism of the ’Ndrangheta’s performances made serious historians choke. Dickie likened the ‘solemn ravings’ of its initiation ritual to a scout ceremony that crossed The Lord of the Flies with Monty Python. One of Italy’s most eminent mafia historians, Enzo Ciconte, was just as dismissive of the ’Ndrangheta’s ‘Red Riding Hood fantasies’.[7] But Ciconte cautioned that ridiculous did not mean meaningless. ‘No group of people can last long just by using violence, just by killing, stealing and rustling – they need some sort of faith or ideology,’ he said. ‘The ’Ndrangheta had no tradition. They had to invent one.’

It was a good point, thought Alessandra. What mattered with faith was not plausibility but belief. Most of the main religions clung to unlikely myths and holy stories, which they called miracles or acts of God. Few of them were ever hurt by others laughing at them – quite the opposite. More to the point, a lie was just that: a fib, a fiction, a deceit. No one was claiming the ’Ndrangheta’s bosses believed it. After all, they were the ones telling it.

A better question was why the ’Ndrangheta chiefs found such decorous fantasies expedient. The answer was to be found in their spectacular rise. However contrived and derivative the cult of the ’Ndrangheta might appear to academic examination, it had gained the organisation the loyalty and secrecy of its members, the fear and respect of ordinary Calabrians and, as a result, a thick cloak of opacity under which it hid from the world. The ’Ndrangheta’s stories might have appealed to Calabrians because of their own distrust of the state or their sense of theatre, or simply because they were handed down from father to son with the solemn conviction of a sacred truth. The point was they worked. Myth was how the ’Ndrangheta assumed a moral purpose when it was self-evidently immoral, how it coloured itself romantic and divine when it was base and profane and how it convinced others it was their righteous champion even as it robbed and murdered them. Myth was how those inside the organisation were persuaded they were following a higher code and those outside it found themselves stumped by even the simplest questions, such as who was who. It was all an enormous lie. But it was a lie that explained how, almost without anyone noticing, a small group of families from the wild hills of Italy’s south had become the twenty-first century’s most formidable mafia.

Alessandra became fascinated by the intricacies of the deception. The ’Ndrangheta was an extraordinary puzzle, a multi-level mosaic. From transcripts of tapped phone calls and bugged conversations, she discovered ’Ndranghetisti had their own language, baccagghju, a slang based on Grecanico whose meaning was obscure to almost everyone but initiates. Even when they spoke Italian, ’Ndranghetisti used a code of metaphors to disguise their meaning. An ’Ndrangheta family in criminal partnership with another would describe itself as ‘walking with’ that other family. Rather than demand protection money outright, ’Ndranghetisti would request a ‘donation for the cousins’, an allusion to those men in jail whose families needed support. For a boss to describe a man as ‘disturbing’ or ‘troubling’ was for him to pass an oblique but unequivocal death sentence on him. The euphemisms could be highly contorted. Pizzo, the word for an extortion payment, was a term whose origin was the ‘piece’ of ground on which a nineteenth-century prisoner had slept in jail, which were ranked according to their proximity to the boss. Outside jail in the twentieth century, it had come to denote the tribute that a boss expected from real estate inside his territory.

Deciphering the true meaning of ’Ndrangheta speak was a constant struggle. ‘You have to become more perceptive, more capable of decrypting,’ Alessandra would tell her husband over dinner in their apartment. ‘Mafiosi very rarely make a direct threat. Instead, they send messages with a dual meaning.’ Even the smallest gesture could carry the utmost importance. ‘They can order a murder just by looking at someone from the prisoner cage in court,’ she said.

One of the ’Ndrangheta’s most audacious lies was its relationship with the church. The ’Ndrangheta was plainly an unChristian organisation. But since it came from the most Roman Catholic of lands, it simply insisted the opposite was true. It invoked the saints, especially the Madonna and Saint Michael, the Archangel. It mimicked prayer and church services in its rituals. And it co-opted and bred priests. At mass, some priests in ’Ndrangheta areas would exhort their congregants to resist outsiders. On saints’ days, they directed celebrants to bow to statues of the Madonna before the capo’s house while at Easter, the honour of bearing statues of Jesus, Saint John and the Virgin was reserved for picciotti. The most stunning example of the ’Ndrangheta subverting Christianity happened on 2 September every year when crowds of thousands gathered at the small town of San Luca in the Aspromonte mountains for the festival of the Madonna di Polsi. Among the pilgrims were hundreds of ’Ndranghetisti, including the heads of all the clans, who since at least 1901 had used the event as a cover for the ’Ndrangheta’s AGM, the gran crimine. In plain sight, the bosses would sit at a table laden with pasta and goat sauce, present their annual accounts – what they had earned, who they had killed – and elect a new capo crimine for the coming year. ‘The church is very responsible in all of this,’ Alessandra would say. ‘It’s guilty of some terrible, terrible, terrible things.’

Though the organisation found Christianity useful, Alessandra concluded that at its core the ’Ndrangheta was more of a blood cult. Blood was the bond between families that was the ’Ndrangheta’s strength. The act of spilling blood was also revered as a source of fearsome power. That had led to some unforgiving ’Ndrangheta feuds. The Duisberg massacre of 2007 – which police identified as an attack on an ’Ndrangheta initiation celebration when a burned picture of Saint Michael was found in the pocket of the dead eighteen-year-old – was the latest atrocity in a quarrel between two clans from San Luca. The feud had begun in 1991 when a group of boys from one family threw rotten eggs at the window of a bar owned by another. Including Duisberg, nine people had since died. Many more had been injured. To avoid being shot, ’Ndranghetisti in San Luca would hide themselves in the boot of a car just to travel 100 yards. Killings were timed for maximum horror. The year before Duisberg, a boss from one clan was paralysed by a bullet that passed through his spine as he stood on a balcony cradling his new-born son. In revenge, a rival boss’s wife was shot dead in her family home on Christmas Day.

Why the ruthlessness? For the ’Ndrangheta, the answer was easy: to instil fear and reap power. For individual ’Ndranghetisti, the question was more vexed. Why be an ’Ndranghetista if your fate was to spend lengthy stretches in prison, inflict unspeakable violence on your neighbours and, in all probability, die young? Alessandra decided it came back to the lie. The ’Ndrangheta had used its fantasies about honour, sacrifice, loyalty and courage to build a prison around its young men, trapping them in a claustrophobic sect based on blood and butchery. Pride in the ’Ndrangheta’s rural heritage even encouraged some ’Ndranghetisti to imbue their violence with a rustic aesthetic. Pigs often featured. A family targeted for intimidation might discover the throats of all its male pigs had been slit. On one occasion, the carabinieri recorded an ’Ndranghetista boasting how he beat another man unconscious, then fed his living body to his own pigs. The bloodthirstiness could also be literal. More than once, men loyal to an assassinated boss were observed to rush to the scene of the killing, dip their handkerchiefs in the departed capo’s blood and press the dripping cloth to their lips.

Alessandra realised that the ’Ndrangheta’s phoney 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. Nevertheless, it was with a sinking sense of inevitability that she read that the ’Ndrangheta’s conservative values were yet another affectation.

As long ago as 1892, the ’Ndrangheta had admitted two women highwaymen into its ranks. John Dickie found court records from the 1930s showing that the picciotti once had a pronounced personal and professional attachment to prostitution as both pimps and johns. But it seemed that the ’Ndrangheta later dispensed with prostitution because, though the trade was lucrative, it was built on qualities like infidelity, loose discipline and double standards which were inimical to order and control. The closed, buttoned-up, isolated family culture of traditional Calabria, on the other hand, was perfect for organised crime. Family ties were also how the ’Ndrangheta fashioned a global criminal octopus out of the pattern of Calabrian emigration to the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Latin America in the 1920s.

The more she read, the more Alessandra realised that the ’Ndrangheta’s true genius had been in co-opting the Italian family. The more the ’Ndrangheta made itself indistinguishable from traditional, family-based Calabrian culture, the more anyone thinking of leaving the organisation had to consider that they would be abandoning all they knew and all they were. For most, it would be impossible to see beyond it.

But by basing itself around family, the ’Ndrangheta hadn’t merely been bolstering secrecy and loyalty. It had understood that family itself was a source of corruption. The undeniable love of a mother for a son or a daughter for a father – these were the sorts of bonds that ensured even the most law-abiding broke the law. Fathers would advantage their families however they could. Children would never betray their parents. Mothers, above all, would do anything to protect their children and wreak terrible revenge on those that harmed them. The ’Ndrangheta was the family augmented and accentuated into a perfect criminal entity. It was, of course, a diabolical transformation. The use of children was plainly child abuse, while to pervert the family in a country like Italy was to poison the soul of a nation. But it was also a masterstroke. If family was the basis of its power, and family was the essence of Italy, then family was how the ’Ndrangheta could corrupt the country.

For such a clan endeavour to work, Alessandra was convinced women had to have a role. And from her reading of case files and investigations, she soon discovered they had several. Women acted as messengers between men on the run or in jail, passing along tiny, folded notes – pizzini – written in a code of glyphs and addressed by the use of a code of numbers. If a man was killed or inaccessible in jail, his widow could become his de facto replacement and continue the family business. Some women acted as paymasters and bookkeepers.

Most significantly, women ensured the future of the ’Ndrangheta by producing the next generation of ’Ndranghetisti, raising children with an unbending belief in the code of honour, vendetta and omertà, and a violent loathing of outsiders who, the mothers whispered, were weak and without shame with their loose talk and looser women. ‘Without women performing this role, there would be no ’Ndrangheta,’ said Alessandra. Secrecy and power were the goals. Male misogyny and female subservience, forced or even willing, were the means.

What confirmed women’s influence inside the ’Ndrangheta was that, though they were often the victims of its violence, they also instigated some of it. Alessandra was astonished to hear about one mother from the Bellocco clan who outdid all the men for bloodthirstiness. The carabinieri had managed to bug a family meeting convened to discuss how best to avenge the death of one of their men, killed in a clan feud. The men proposed killing every male member of the rival ’ndrina. Then a woman spoke up. ‘Kill them all,’ she said. ‘Even the women. Even the kids.’ The woman wanted an entire family of thirty wiped from the face of the earth.

There was no way any of it worked without the mothers, thought Alessandra. And to a resourceful and open-minded prosecutor, that held out an enticing possibility. In the twenty-first century, there had to be other Lea Garofalos out there, mafia mothers who were unhappy with their lives and the destiny of their children. The mother, the madonna, was a holy figure in Italy and the ’Ndrangheta had corrupted her and bent her to its criminal will. There had to be women inside the organisation who hated the way they were being used. It had to be possible for Alessandra to offer these knowledgeable figures a different life and persuade them to betray their husbands and fathers. And imagine if she could. ‘It would break the chain,’ she told her fellow prosecutors. ‘It would remove the guardians of the ’Ndrangheta’s traditions. If they took their sons too, then they would be removing future soldiers. It would be very special, very important. It would impoverish the entire mafia family. It would undermine the whole culture and the mindset.’

Alessandra was refining her theory. The way to destroy The Family, she was beginning to realise, was through its mamas.

## VI

In January 2010, Pignatone and Prestipino finally gave Alessandra the job she wanted.[1] From the New Year, she would be lead anti-mafia prosecutor for Calabria’s west coast, taking in the villages on the Gioia Tauro piano, the town of Rosarno and the port of Gioia Tauro. She would report directly to Pignatone and Prestipino. She would also have a second prosecutor as her junior, Giovanni Musarò, a thirty-seven-year-old on his first big posting.

Like Alessandra, Musarò was attracted by Pignatone’s and Prestipino’s dynamism. ‘I was very young, they had this huge experience from Palermo and they brought with them a completely different way of working,’ he said. Borrowing from Falcone and Borsellino, the old model of prosecutors as ‘lonely heroes’ was out, said Giovanni. The new watchword was collaboration. ‘They put a great effort into creating a team, sharing information with colleagues and behaving like a democracy,’ he said. Each member brought different strengths. ‘Alessandra was driven by ethics and very determined. Pignatone had a great ability to predict events. Prestipino was very clever and very pragmatic. He knew all his investigations and all his investigators. He was able to go to each of us and say: “Maybe go to Alessandra and you’ll find this. Or maybe go here and ask this investigator, and they’ll help you with this.”’

For Alessandra, the prize was her new territory. Palmi, on the southern end of the Gioia Tauro estuary, was where the ’Ndrangheta was born. A century and a half later, the piano remained the heart of the empire. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at the place, thought Alessandra. The ’Ndrangheta was richer than most global corporations and in Rosarno even the most minor ’Ndrangheta family was thought to have three, four or five million euros stashed away. Yet somehow in a country of amber cornfields, olive hills and blue mountains sprinkled with red-roofed villages and magnificent Roman and Renaissance cities, the ’Ndrangheta had contrived to make their towns into verrucae of unkempt, concrete ugliness. Touring Rosarno for the first time, Alessandra felt like she’d arrived after an apocalypse. Everything looked scorched. The trees were blackened and their leaves orange and brittle. The single park was just chalky pebbles and dry spiky weeds. The streets, whose asphalt resembled spilled lava, were strewn with refuse. Everything was covered with crude graffiti. And the town was dead. Shops were shut or deserted. Many of the breezeblock houses were unfinished and empty, their gardens building sites and their glassless windows as vacant as the eyes of a skull. In the main piazza, no one sat on the benches, no one ate in the restaurants. To one side, a children’s playground consisted of a rusted swing, a broken slide and a shattered piece of concrete littered with wrappers, cigarette butts and broken glass. Alessandra could feel it. The fear. The omertà.

Unpicking the paradox of how this desperate place could be home to such a rich criminal empire was key to the story of the ’Ndrangheta’s modern rise. It began at 3 a.m. on 10 July 1973, when a small gang of ’Ndrangheta toughs from the villages around Gioia Tauro kidnapped John Paul Getty III, the sixteen-year-old grandson of the billionaire John Paul Getty, from outside his home in Piazza Farnese in central Rome. The gang held the boy in the Calabrian mountains for five months. His father, who had been in a heroin-induced haze at the time his son was taken, initially thought the kidnapping was a hoax staged by his son to obtain money. The kidnappers called the family patriarch, John Paul Getty Snr, and threatened to cut off his grandson’s fingers unless they received a ransom of $17 million. The elder Getty refused, arguing: ‘If I pay one penny now, I’ll have fourteen kidnapped grandchildren.’ To press their case, the gang cut off John Paul III’s left ear and sent it to a newspaper in Rome. It was accompanied by a note threatening that the second ear would be arriving in ten days unless the ransom was paid. Getty Snr relented and paid $2.2 million, the maximum his accountants advised him was tax-efficient. He loaned the final ransom balance of $700,000 to his son, the boy’s father, at 4 per cent interest.

John Paul Getty III never recovered from his abduction or his grandfather’s indifference. He died at fifty-four, an alcoholic and drug addict in a wheelchair, having been crippled at the age of twenty-five by a near-lethal combination of Valium, methadone and cocktails. But for the west coast ’Ndrangheta, these grubby beginnings were the seeds of an empire. They went on to stage 150 more kidnappings. In Gioia Tauro, they used the ransom money to buy construction trucks. ’Ndrangheta men inside local government ensured these trucks were contracted for the building of a steel plant near Gioia Tauro port. When the government abandoned that project as uneconomic, the trucks went to work on a bigger site: the expansion of the port itself.

State construction contracts – building motorways, high-speed rail links, and even wind and solar farms, while loan-sharking at extortionate rates to force rivals out of business – went on to become a giant, profitable ’Ndrangheta business in its own right. By the time Alessandra was posted to the west coast, a project to widen and repair the arterial highway running from western Calabria up Italy’s coast to Salerno had somehow ended up costing the state $10 billion in three decades for what was still little more than a succession of roadworks.[2] The biggest earner, however, was Gioia Tauro port itself. Once its expansion was finished, the port was the largest container facility in Italy and the sixth largest on the Mediterranean, with a capacity to load and unload millions of containers a year on a quay that ran for three and a half kilometres and was backed by an avenue of towering cranes. The ’Ndrangheta, as the only power in the area, had total control. The group ‘taxed’ every container passing through the port at $1.50 a time. It charged the port operators fees amounting to half their profits, an annual income that ran into several billion dollars. It used the port to send weapons around the world. And in the 1980s and 1990s, during la mattanza, it was through Gioia Tauro that the ’Ndrangheta built its cocaine empire.

But aside from a single street of new houses in San Luca nicknamed Via John Paul Getty in a small town to the south, there was no sign of the ’Ndrangheta’s wealth. To the ’Ndrangheta, a façade of poverty was crucial to the lie. It helped it escape the attention of the state and added credibility to its claim to be championing a deprived south against an oppressive north. The ’Ndrangheta went to mulish lengths to service its pretence. When Alessandra first visited Rosarno, Domenico Oppedisano, a seventy-eight-year-old ’Ndrangheta big shot, could still be seen in his battered trilby and dusty suit, driving around in a three-wheeled van and delivering his oranges and lemons to market.

For the 97 per cent of Gioia Tauro’s population who were not ’Ndrangheta, however, the deprivation was real. Calabria was the poorest province in Italy. Incomes were around half those in the north, unemployment ran at 28 per cent and even in 2009 roasted dormice were considered a delicacy. The provincial government, meanwhile, was so dysfunctional that in 2008 a US embassy fact-finding mission concluded that, were it an independent state, Calabria would be a failed one.

As she was driven around the estuary delta between Rosarno and the port, Alessandra found it easy to guess who had ruined it. The area was latticed by a series of two-lane highways connected by a spaghetti of looping off-ramps and roundabouts, a modern industrial grid built with tens of millions of euros donated by the European Union and the Italian government. Economists and bureaucrats in Brussels, it seemed, had imagined a new warehousing zone to support the port that would single-handedly reverse the economic fortunes of one of Europe’s poorest areas. Initially, ’Ndrangheta construction companies had been happy to take what public money was on offer. Then the ’Ndrangheta squashed the project. Threats, violence and demands for crippling protection payments had ensured all but one of the international transport and logistics businesses proposed for the site had either closed or never opened. Weeds and thickets of bamboo edged far out into the road. Tarmac roads and concrete bays cracked and splintered in the sun. Giant bougainvilleas surfed out over the walls of empty business parks. Once-luxuriant palms were grotesquely overgrown, their green starbursts turned sickly yellow by a layer of sticky dust. Street lights were ubiquitous but lifeless, connected to a field of large black solar panels fast disappearing under long grass. Rusted signs, some peppered with shotgun blasts, pointed the way to now-defunct enterprises whose gates were decorated with sun-bleached strings of international flags. In front of one grand entrance, a giant brass globe on a spike stood at a crazy angle, a dream of world domination turning, continent by continent, into a small pile of rusted metal on the ground. The only sign of life was a herd of goats grazing in drainage ditches choked with poppies, buttercups and pink and purple flowers and, to one side, a tented camp of several thousand African migrants, whom the authorities, or possibly the ’Ndrangheta, had peevishly kept off site.

The place felt like a war zone. And in a way it was. Covering the entire summit of a hill high above the port was a complex of sprawling villas and gardens once owned by the Piromalli clan, in whose territory the port lay. From here, the Piromallis had surveyed their empire like generals. The state had eventually confiscated the property but, since no one was willing to buy it, the houses and gardens were empty, an obstinate and unmissable reminder of where real power lay. Below the villa walls was a chapel and graveyard filled with baroque ’Ndranghetisti graves. Since it had been built without permits, the local authority had ordered the chapel demolished, only to discover that no local contractor was available to do the work.

In all of Gioia Tauro, a few lone entrepreneurs had taken a stand. One was Antonino de Masi, who in the 1990s decided to diversify the family agricultural machinery conglomerate into transport logistics. The business had foundered under ’Ndrangheta pressure and de Masi now pursued other ventures, such as marketing earthquake shelters and smokeless pizza ovens, both of which he had invented himself. But he refused to leave his offices. That simple act of defiance had cost him dearly. After receiving numerous death threats, de Masi had sent his family to live in northern Italy. De Masi himself was obliged to move around in an armoured car, flanked by two bodyguards. Two uniformed Italian army soldiers with automatic rifles and a camouflage jeep stood guard in his office car park. De Masi described himself as ‘living in enemy territory’.[3]

Why would the ’Ndrangheta ruin its own homeland? Because de Masi was right. As a wealthy businessman with the means to pursue his ambition and the courage not to ask the ’Ndrangheta’s permission, he was its sworn foe. It wasn’t that the ’Ndrangheta hated development. It was that it tolerated no power other than itself. Inside its territory, there could be no intrusion by the outside world and no escape from the world the ’Ndrangheta had created. Education, especially the kind that encouraged free thinking, was discouraged. The sort of exit offered by gainful employment with a figure like Antonino de Masi also had to be crushed. The ’Ndrangheta even restricted physical ways out of the place. There was just one bus a day to Reggio Calabria. Roads built by ’Ndrangheta construction firms didn’t connect to provincial highways, or to each other. Bridges over highways and rivers joined nothing to nowhere. The railway that connected Gioia Tauro to Europe stopped 1.5 kilometres short of the port, meaning all the cargo from one of Europe’s biggest Mediterranean container ports had to be loaded onto mafia-owned trucks and driven three minutes to the station. This was the suffocating magnificence of the ’Ndrangheta. The point wasn’t money. The point was power.

By 2010, the Calabrian anti-mafia prosecutors were finally piecing together quite how much influence the ’Ndrangheta had accumulated. Even veterans of la mattanza like Pignatone and Prestipino were astonished. Where once the ’Ndrangheta had been outmatched by Cosa Nostra in drug smuggling, it now dominated the entire European trade in illicit narcotics. Cocaine was produced and refined in Colombia, Peru or Bolivia, transported east, generally to Brazil or Venezuela, and from there across the Atlantic to Europe via the Caribbean or West Africa, before being landed in Holland, Denmark, Spain or Italy. Though other criminal groups were involved at each stage of its journey as producers and traffickers, the ’Ndrangheta had assumed a position of broker, overseer and employer across the entire supply chain.

Inventiveness was a consistent characteristic of this empire, especially in trafficking methods. For sea routes through the Caribbean, the ’Ndrangheta or their partners would conceal cocaine under trawlers full of frozen fish or inside tins of pineapple, or by sewing it into bananas or even dissolving it in bottles of whisky. Another trick was to secrete a load together with duplicate security tags inside a shipping container carrying other cargo. The drug could then be removed after crossing the Atlantic, generally in customs storage or at a refuelling stop, and the containers resealed with the copied tags and sent on their way without detection. To further confuse customs agents, two ships might rendezvous in the middle of the ocean and make a further swap between containers.

Aircraft offered further options. On commercial flights – across the Atlantic to West Africa, and from West Africa to Europe – the smugglers used passengers who would swallow up to thirty plastic bags, amounting to a total load of a kilo each. They would then pack as many as forty ‘swallowers’ onto a plane, sometimes using an entire class of African exchange students who could pay for several years at a foreign university with one trip. Plane crews, who generally sailed through customs without checks, were another good option. Mostly the traffickers would enlist individual stewards but on occasion they recruited entire crews, including the pilots. When private planes were available, freelance pilots flew small props fitted with custom-enlarged fuel tanks at low altitude thousands of miles across the Atlantic from Latin America to touch down in West Africa. A few times, the smugglers had used an ageing Boeing 727, which could take ten tons of cocaine at a time and which in 2009 had been found by the authorities in Mali in the middle of the Sahara, abandoned and torched by the traffickers after snapping its wheels on landing. The onward land route through the Sahara to the Mediterranean was perhaps the most dramatic drug lane of all, involving convoys of twenty to thirty 4×4s driving north for four or five days right across the desert, navigating by the stars and refuelling at a string of camouflaged outposts.[4]

Once the drugs reached the Mediterranean, they might be taken from Tunisia to Europe on cruise ships or driven anti-clockwise around the coast, across Libya and Egypt and on through Israel and Turkey, a journey facilitated by border guards and army officers. To move cocaine across Europe required a high degree of subterfuge. Tons of cocaine were trucked from Gioia Tauro to Holland hidden under flowers destined for Europe’s biggest flower market, where florists served a second purpose as ’Ndrangheta money launderers. Payment going the other way was also disguised. Billions of euros in credit might be uploaded to hundreds of online betting accounts. One time, €7.5 million was sent in the form of 260 tons of Lindt chocolates.[5]

The prosecutors knew which ’ndrine were so trusted by the Colombians that they were allowed cocaine on credit. They knew which families had diversified into dealing arms. They’d investigated who used smuggling ships on their return journey to dump hazardous chemicals and nuclear waste by sinking boats off the coast of Somalia. Along the smuggling routes, the investigators knew which customs services, armies, rebels, Islamists, officials, ministers, prime ministers and presidents took a cut of the profits. Mozambique’s customs, the mid-point on an otherwise little travelled, entirely Portuguese-speaking route from Brazil to Portugal via Africa, had been bought almost whole. So had the entire government of Guinea-Bissau, a tiny West African state and another former Portuguese colony, where soldiers would clear traffic from public highways to allow narco-planes to land.

What gave the prosecutors most pause was how, as the rewards of power had multiplied, so had the struggle for it. As 2010 dawned, West Africa was in the midst of an unprecedented wave of coups, civil wars, revolutions and assassinations driven by the struggle to get rich from drug smuggling. Surveying the chaos created by cocaine, the prosecutors realised the ’Ndrangheta hadn’t just ruined Calabria and undermined the Italian state but had done the same to large parts of the planet. This lent new urgency to their mission. This wasn’t the old story about how drugs messed you up. This was about how the ’Ndrangheta’s drugs had messed up the lives of hundreds of millions of people in countries on the other side of the world, places which few Europeans had even heard of.

Nor was even that the most worrying part. By 2010, Calabria’s anti-mafia prosecutors were picking up indications that the ’Ndrangheta’s money-laundering operations were undermining the world’s financial markets and even the sovereignty of nations. Giuseppe Lombardo, a prosecutor who specialised in tracking its money, said that alongside the ’Ndrangheta’s growth had come increased financial sophistication. Faced with a need to launder ever-increasing amounts of money and observing how the world’s stock markets were increasingly lightly regulated, a few ’Ndrangheta families had made a first few forays into the world of international finance in the mid-1980s. A generation later, what had begun as an experiment in diversification and legitimisation was now a giant multinational asset management business run by ’Ndrangheta lawyers, accountants and bankers in Milan, London and New York through a maze of offshore financial centres that specialised in secrecy and low tax: Cyprus, Malta, Gibraltar, Mauritius, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Holland, the British Virgin Islands and other British dependencies. The global recession of 2007–9 had been a particular boon. As legitimate finance dried up, businesses, banks, stock markets and even political parties found themselves suddenly short of money. For the ’Ndrangheta, this credit crunch had proved to be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to convert criminal power into legal economic and political might around the world.

The ’Ndrangheta was driven by two motivations. It needed to safely launder its riches. And it wanted to become so indispensable to the international economy that tackling it would be an act of self-harm for any government. According to Lombardo, the ’Ndrangheta had largely succeeded in both endeavours. ‘They have become one of the main interlocutors in the criminal field,’ he said. ‘But much more broadly, they have become a world power.’

Initially, said Lombardo, the ’Ndrangheta had bought politicians who offered state protection, and created a network of accountants, lawyers, traders and other facilitators inside the banking system which allowed the ’Ndrangheta to clean and invest its money. But in a crucial second stage, the ’Ndrangheta had opened its financial structure to organised crime groups around the world: Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, but also Chinese triads, Nigerians, Russians, Colombians, Mexicans and criminal groups from every part of the planet. ‘The ’Ndrangheta plays the role of service agent to the other mafias,’ said Lombardo. ‘They make this network of financial professionals working for them available to other mafias. And after that, when it comes to finances, all the mafias move together as one big mafia.’

That meant the ’Ndrangheta had hundreds of billions of euros at its command. Such a tsunami of money had elevated it to a ‘fundamental and indispensable position in the global market’, said Lombardo, one that was ‘more or less essential for the smooth functioning of the global economic system’. This new centrality afforded the ’Ndrangheta the level of protection it sought. It also offered it an opportunity to indulge in typical mafia behaviour – bullying, intimidating, extorting and blackmailing – on a whole new scale. Lombardo had indications that the ’Ndrangheta regularly manipulated stock prices or markets to its advantage and had even caused mini financial crashes to create buying opportunities for itself.

Most remarkable was what the prosecutor had discovered about the mafia’s taste for government debt. ‘I found a huge amount of capital deployed by the mafia to buy government bonds and Treasury debt,’ he said. At first, this revelation confused Lombardo. There was no sound financial imperative to buy bonds: yields were typically low and far better opportunities were available in other financial instruments. But then he realised the ’Ndrangheta’s motivations were more than merely financial. ‘They don’t need to become any richer,’ he said. ‘They’re rich enough. But alongside the goal of making money is the goal of limiting national sovereignty.’ The ’Ndrangheta had always sought to undermine Italian state power and authority. Now it was doing the same across the world. It did this by buying up large tranches of foreign countries’ debt, then threatening those countries with dumping their debt and prompting a financial default. A debtor nation’s only option was to allow the ’Ndrangheta to use its territory as a base and a money-laundering location. So far, the prosecutors had collected evidence that the ’Ndrangheta had blackmailed Thailand and Indonesia in this way. Lombardo expected China and India to be next. ‘This is about conditioning the global economic system, conditioning the global citizenry and conditioning the political choices of nations,’ he said. ‘This is how the ’Ndrangheta become the rulers not just of territory in Italy but whole other countries.’

Lombardo’s investigations revealed the ’Ndrangheta not merely as a menace to southern Italy but a global monster. Though other mafias were better known, the ’Ndrangheta was the most powerful. In the name of profit and power, it was sowing the seeds of war, chaos and corruption from Rio to Rotterdam to Reykjavík. It was the dark underside of globalisation made real in flesh and blood. Of paramount importance to Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutors, however, Calabria remained the key to the entire enterprise. Any big business decision – to expand territory, to enter a new business, to eliminate a rival – was referred back to the old country. In their bunkers buried beneath Reggio Calabria and Rosarno and the orange groves of Gioia Tauro plain, the bosses were deciding the fate of nations. As she read through the latest case files, it dawned on Alessandra that with their new crackdown on the ’Ndrangheta, the prosecutors held the destiny of hundreds of millions of people, pehaps even billions, in their hands.

The stimuli to the Italian state’s new campaign against the mafia were various: the outcry at the Duisberg massacre of 2007, the 2008 election of a new government publicly committed to ending the threat from organised crime and, the same year, the arrival in Calabria of Giuseppe Pignatone and Michele Prestipino, the destroyers of Cosa Nostra. The fight against the mafia was quickly reinvigorated with fresh energy and resources. Over 2008 and 2009 the carabinieri bugged millions of conversations. ’Ndranghetisti still habitually spoke in riddles and metaphors, and in isolation the meaning of any one conversation was obscure. But taken together and over time, the mass of recordings added up to a true revelation: the authorities’ first ever complete picture of the internal structure and dynamics of the ’Ndrangheta.

There were several surprises. Hitherto, the prosecutors had understood the ’Ndrangheta as a loose alliance of family firms, each with its own territory. Surveillance of Reggio Calabria and the surrounding towns and villages revealed that the horizontal structure of hundreds of ’ndrine, each run autonomously by a family boss, was still the ’Ndrangheta’s foundation. But it emerged that above it was a new vertical, unifying hierarchy of eleven ranks. Several ’ndrine together made a grouping called a locale or società, managed by a paramount chief, assisted by an accountant and a ‘head of crime’ who oversaw all illegal activities. Above the locali were three regional authorities called mandamenti, one each for the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts and another for Reggio Calabria. Together these three groups made up a council variously called la provincial or il crimine or – something that made Alessandra do a double-take – La Mama. Overseeing all of it was a capo crimine, or boss of bosses, who could convene a court, or tribunale, of senior bosses to judge a peer accused of transgressing the code.[6] ‘We’d always thought of the ’Ndrangheta as a lot of local, smaller organisations,’ said Alessandra. ‘Suddenly we realised it had a federal structure and was being run almost like a military organisation.’

In the 1990s, carabinieri had picked up word of an attempt by the ’Ndrangheta to unite the clans. That had ultimately failed. From what the carabinieri were hearing now, this time the reorganisation had succeeded. Why? The old arguments in favour of better coordination to improve efficiency and discipline still stood. But in 2009 the carabinieri were detecting a more ominous motivation: to coordinate a concerted assault on the authorities through a series of assassinations and bombings. On 31 October 2009, the carabinieri filmed an especially brazen ’Ndrangheta summit outside Milan at which twenty-two bosses raised their glasses to toast the new city boss inside a memorial dedicated to Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.[7] The ’Ndrangheta was abandoning its decades-old policy of discreet infiltration in favour of direct confrontation. Why the change? From what the carabinieri