by Alex Perry
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 othe
r 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.’
