Читать книгу The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia - Alex Perry, Alex Perry - Страница 11

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.’