“ARE you going to write that in the newspaper?”
A local of the coastal village of Calabria, enquired of a newcomer, a young Dutch journalist from Amsterdam who had recently taken residence in the idyllic neighbourhood in southern Italy.
The enquirer, a man named Toto had been in a lengthy coma resulting from a car accident and upon regaining consciousness, claimed to anyone who’d listen that he’d seen God – as he was now exhorting the journalist, named Sanne de Boer, to write about his experience. Shortly after the duo’s encounter, a 34-year-old-man from a nearby street was shot dead in front of his house by two masked men in what was reported to had been a mafia hit.
The deceased’s uncle, a newspaper reported, was a leader of a Ndrangheta (the name of the Calabrian mafia) clan in a neighbouring village who had been killed a few weeks earlier by hitmen riding on a scooter.
De Boer had hardly been in her adopted village for long when one September evening, its quiet was shattered by the sight of a burning car belonging to a young woman who worked for the municipality. Ostensibly, the arson attack had been a ‘message’ intended for her cooperation in a matter related to the issuing of building permits. Afterwards, the shaken owner never even bothered to report the incident to the carabinieri (police) for fear of reprisal!
One Christmas Day in 2006, just four days before de Boer’s arrival in Calabria, armed intruders barged into a house in San Luca and proceeded to fire on occupants indulging in the festivities – killing a young mother named Maria Strangio. Her husband, the leader of a Ndrangheta clan in the Calabrian village, had been the intended target but survived!
Then, on the evening of 14–15 August 2007, six young men were found dead at the entrance of an Italian restaurant named Da Bruno managed by the Calabrian mafia clan in Duisburg, Germany – a massacre alleged to had been an outcome of a then sixteen years-long vendetta around San Luca between the Pelle-Vottari and Nirta-Strangio clans! The massacre’s link to the clans’ feud was based on the discovery of a prayer card – depicting the Archangel Michael, one of the Ndrangheta’s patron saints, aiming a sword at a creature – stained with drops of blood, found in a pocket of one of the victims.
Maria Strangio’s murder along with those of the six young men, appeared to lend credence to media speculation linking them to a vendetta among the clans and it was these seemingly unrelated incidents which triggered the newshound to delve into what is recognized as Italy’s most powerful crime organization known as: ‘Ndrangheta. It would be at the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi, a traditional venue of Ndrangheta gatherings in nearby San Luca, that the vendetta between the rival clans was called to a halt – with the Calabrian carabinieri reporting that the occasion was marked by ‘dancing and shaking hands’ by everyone!
Fortuitously – having initially been wooed by the region’s pastoral romanticism of woodstoves, homemade soppressata sausages, tiny beer steins of coffee dashed with anise liqueur, etc. – de Boer had substituted her native country for a region and way of life steeped in: Mafiopoli – meaning, ‘a society governed by the mafia’.
The title of this tome, most of its content isn’t about what the author experienced during the period she resided in the region, rather, a current and hindsight collection of occurrences and history gleaned from interviews she conducted with a spectrum of people, i.e., clan members, victims, prosecutors, collaboratore di giustizia (informants), etc., related in sundry ways to the ‘Ndrangheta – a criminal organization whose existence throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries has come to adversely affect that of Italians, including other nationalities, residing in their homeland as well as across the European Union and at far-off lands such as Canada and Australia.
According to Professor Enzo Ciconte, a Calabrian historian, the region’s organized crime harks back to the 1820s, with the term ‘Ndrangheta gaining currency in the 20th century by way of distinguishing the organization from the Neapolitan Camorra (whose name was already in use by 1735) and the Cosa Nostra (whose term dates back to the 1820s). The word, ‘mafia’ – referring to what the Camorra was called in Sicily – wasn’t in use until 1861.
‘Ndrangheta’s is a way of life which, inter alia, integrates phrases, symbols, rituals, etc., such as omertá (code of silence); sorella d’omertá (silent sister – implying women’s inaccessibility to undergoing Ndrangheta initiations); il Crimine (the Crime – a board of leaders who decide on matters appertaining to the entire organization) and Madonna della Montagna (Madonna of the Mountain – the most valued saint to every member of the organization). Initiated picciottos (young men) pledge to hold the clan’s interests above those of their parents, brothers or sisters thus: “From now on, you are my family,” they swear. “The punishment for making a mistake is death.”
The author interviewed brave Italians who, akin to Peppino Impastato – who in the 70s lead resistance against the mafia through the rallying cry, “La mafia é una montagna di merda!” (“the mafia is a pile of s- -t!”) – resolved to defy the criminals’ hegemony.
Individuals such as Gaetano Saffioti, an entrepreneur who, after being subjected to 22 years of extortion for pizzo (protection money) amounting to 2.8 million euros, surreptitiously gathered damning evidence against the organization which led to the arrest of forty-eight Ndranghetists from Palmi on January 25, 2002.
Another was Maria Concetta Cacciola, a mother of three from Rosarno who broke the omertá by exposing her family’s extortion and loansharking activities to the authorities – leading to her placement onto the witness protection programme, which she later left, resulting in her death, aged 30, allegedly at the hands of her own family, in August 2011!
Other vital participants were two state prosecutors, viz, Alessandra Cerreti – referred to as ‘that puttana’ (that whore) by Michele Cacciola during the saga regarding his daughter’s betrayal – and Nicola Gratteri, who has become the face of the fight against the Calabrian mafia. Both are at the forefront of exposing the culprits’ excesses which have led to lengthy convictions! Per se, a brave undertaking when viewed against the background of the fate which befell their predecessors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino – who were assassinated in bomb attacks, allegedly on the orders of Sicilian mafia boss of bosses, Toto Riina, in 1992!
The first foreign journalist based in Calabria to write about the ‘Ndrangheta, de Boer got to compare notes with Petra Reski, a German investigative journalist who had already written a book, The Honoured Society, about the mafia.
Whilst de Boer was being asked if it was dangerous to write about the mafia, Reski – who in 1989 covered the so-called Palermo Spring (in which she reported on the maxi-trial against Cosa Nostra, instigated by Falcone and Borsellino) in Sicily and where she encountered Letizia Battaglia, the photographer renown for her documentation of mafia-related killings in Palermo – was already embroiled in litigation, censorship and threats instituted by Italian businessmen implicated in her book.
Conversely, organized crime’s tentacles also reached de Boer’s Netherlands with the ordered murder of fellow journalist, Peter R. de Vries, in Amsterdam in July 2021 – for his collaboration in the trial of a mafia leader named Ridouan Taghi.
Such has been the impact of the organization’s increasingly violent ways that in June 2014, subsequent to the death of a 3-year-old child caught in its crossfire, Pope Francis visited Calabria where his homily before a quarter million audience culminated with this no-nonsense remark: “The Ndrangheta is this: the worship of evil and contempt for the common good!”
‘Ndrangheta is a multinational operation active, according to Interpol, in forty countries on five continents, involved in murder, extortion, elections rigging, tax evasion, kidnappings (it abducted the 16-year-old grandson of oil magnate John Paul Getty – for whose release from five months of captivity a ransom of almost $2 million was paid), construction, hospitality, transportation, contraband, narco trafficking, retail, agriculture, wine smuggling, food trade (olive oil, bread, etc.), et cetera.
De Boer’s Mafiopoli is an essential account regarding an organization which sprang from obscurity to an omnipresence lending credence to the assertion that all our lives are affected by its reign!
A Trade Paperback, MAFIOPOLI is published by Octopus and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R435.
