by Alex Perry
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 could gather, the ’Ndrangheta felt their hand was being forced. The new push against organised crime had resulted in the arrests of hundreds of mafiosi, including twenty-one of Italy’s thirty ‘most wanted’, and the confiscation of assets and businesses worth nine billion euros.8 Though the operations had hurt the Camorra most of all, the ’Ndrangheta knew it was next. Its bosses had decided on an aggressive and unified response.
For Alessandra, one episode captured by the new intelligence was especially significant. Officers watching a mafia wedding in the hill town of Plati on 19 August 2009 between two powerful clans, the Pelles and the Barbaros, were amazed to spot a who’s who of the ’Ndrangheta among the two thousand guests. These included bosses not only from across Calabria, but also from northern Italy, Europe and as far away as Canada and Australia. ‘They came from all over the planet to this tiny little town in the middle of nowhere,’ said Alessandra. The reason for this unprecedented summit was soon clear. Wiretaps and bugs picked up numerous references to the election of a new capo crimine, Rosarno boss Domenico Oppedisano, appointed to spearhead the ’Ndrangheta’s war on the state. That seemed to confirm the importance of a well-attended meeting of bosses held a few days earlier in Oppedisano’s orange orchard. Two weeks after the wedding, Oppedisano’s promotion was formally confirmed at the annual ’Ndrangheta meeting, held at the festival for the Madonna of Polsi at San Luca.
What interested Alessandra was not Oppedisano himself but who he represented. She knew the capo crimine was elected by a kind of criminal meritocracy, based on who inside the organisation was deemed ‘most charismatic, most admirable and most ruthless’. The boss had to be someone the entire ’Ndrangheta could agree outdid them all for criminal excellence, a leader who would ensure they wasted no more time and blood fighting each other.
On the face of it, seventy-eight-year-old Oppedisano, with his farmer’s tan and a family that was outranked by at least two others in Rosarno, was an eccentric choice. But with her burgeoning knowledge of the clans, Alessandra could see its logic. More than advancement for the Oppedisanos, Domenico’s new position confirmed the ascendancy of the west coast clans inside the ’Ndrangheta. Specifically, it attested to the dominance of a particular Rosarno crime family to whom Oppedisano was related by marriage. It was this family’s domination of the cocaine trade with two other Gioia Tauro families that, more than anything, accounted for the ’Ndrangheta’s spectacular growth over the last three decades. Its reputation for ruthless violence ensured that as well as being one of the richest and most powerful crime families in all Italy, it was also one of the most feared. ‘Through Gioia Tauro, they were running all the drugs and all the arms,’ said Alessandra.
So spectacular had been this family’s progress and so naked their ambition to dominate the ’Ndrangheta, however, that they were resented by almost every other ’ndrina. An earlier attempt to force the election of their own family capo had been fiercely resisted on all sides as an unacceptable affront. The other families might be diminished by comparison but honour demanded they save face by pretending otherwise. Nominating Domenico Oppedisano was a shrewd compromise, combining the signature ’Ndrangheta characteristics of strategy and wilful delusion.
Still, Alessandra had no doubt who now held power inside the ’Ndrangheta. She had seen video surveillance of family members toasting Oppedisano with champagne on the night he was elected. In any new war on the ’Ndrangheta, this family would be target number one. They were called the Pesces.
VII
Lea Garofalo wasn’t the first ’Ndranghetista to turn on the organisation, nor even the first woman.1 But she was one of a mere handful of ’Ndrangheta pentiti, and only the second woman, and the story of the Pagliarelle mama and boss’s daughter who had crossed over to the state had reverberated like a cannon blast around the valleys. Seven years later, Lea was most likely dead. The message that sent to places like Pagliarelle and Rosarno was that there was no alternative to the ’Ndrangheta. You leave, you die. It was a disaster for the Italian state’s new war on the mafia. What had gone wrong?
Lea’s long struggle with Carlo and the ’Ndrangheta was well documented. She had made lengthy statements against the ’Ndrangheta and Carlo three times, in 1996, 2002 and 2008. From these, the picture that emerged of the rura
l Calabria where Lea and Carlo had grown up was of a lost world, cut off from the rest of humanity by a wall of violent tyranny. For most ’Ndrangheta children, it was enough just to be born in a place like Pagliarelle to know their destiny.
But Lea had been different. Her father, an ’ndrina boss called Antonio Garofalo, was killed by three brothers from a rival clan on New Year’s Eve 1974, when he was twenty-seven and Lea was just eight months old – and, for Lea, none of it made sense after that. The feud, or faida, that her father’s murder set off between the Garofalos and the Mirabellis, another Pagliarelle family, lasted all through her childhood until Lea was eighteen. When she was seven, in 1981, Lea’s uncle Giulio tried to avenge his brother by opening fire on a Mirabelli funeral. A few months later, Giulio was killed in retaliation. In 1989, when Lea was fifteen, another of her cousins was shot dead, right in front of her and in broad daylight, in the centre of Petilia Policastro. That same year, the Garofalos began taking their revenge, killing one of the three Mirabelli brothers. They shot a second in 1990 and the third in 1991, then in 1992 they murdered Mario Garofalo, a cousin who – illustrating the incestuous nature of the feud – worked for the Mirabellis.
Lea’s older brother, Floriano, directed much of the bloodletting. He involved his nine-year-old sister, asking her to hide a pistol belonging to their uncle when a police raid was imminent.2 But despite Floriano’s instruction in the duties of vendetta, despite Marisa’s warnings about the need at least to pretend, despite all the anger she felt over her father’s death, and barely knowing that any other life even existed, Lea couldn’t remember a day when she hadn’t seen through the lie. ‘Lea was born into a family where violence was the rule,’ said her former lawyer Vincenza Rando, known to everyone as ‘Enza’. ‘It was “Kill one of mine and I’ll kill one of yours.”’ Lea saw the world differently, said Enza. To her, ‘the ’Ndrangheta was a cult of death and Lea was a woman who loved life. The ’Ndrangheta writes your destiny for you. Lea wanted to write her own.’
Lea’s independence might have come from her mother. Though her mother had married an ’Ndranghetista, she had always worked, mostly as a cleaner at a school in Petilia. ‘Our mother had a completely different mindset to people around here,’ said Marisa. ‘She was a decent woman.’ It was Lea’s mother who taught her what Lea always used to tell Denise: that education was freedom; and that providing for her family was what gave a woman dignity.
Still, their mother wasn’t affectionate, said Marisa. She, Floriano and Lea grew up mostly in the care of their grandparents, who might as well have been from another century. Of the three children, Marisa said it was Lea, the youngest, who felt their parents’ absence most keenly. She was always asking for pictures of her father who, since she had never known him, she was free to imagine as perfect: caring and loving and cruelly taken from the daughter he adored. As a teenager, Lea had a small ‘A’ for Antonio tattooed onto her hand. While the violence raged on around them, Lea couldn’t imagine her father wanting her to spend her life carving out brief moments of peace in a dead-end job as her mother had done. ‘You don’t live,’ Lea told the carabinieri in 2002. ‘You just survive in some way. You dream about something – anything – because nothing’s worse than that life.’ As Lea grew up, it dawned on her that the freedom she craved would be impossible unless she left Pagliarelle.
Lea’s tragedy was that, like many ’Ndrangheta women, she thought love was her way out. When she was fifteen she fell for a village boy she had known all her life, a thick-set bruiser with a flattened nose and cropped hair called Carlo Cosco. Carlo, nineteen at the time, was back from his new life in the north and visiting Pagliarelle for the holidays. What Lea especially liked about him was that he seemed to have no ambition other than to work at an honest job and raise a family. And he lived in Milan, ‘a big city where she could start again’, said Enza. Lea and Carlo eloped after a few weeks. When she was sixteen, in 1991, they married and moved to Milan, where Carlo had an apartment in a large, drab building on Viale Montello.
Almost immediately, Lea realised her escape was a mirage. No. 6 Viale Montello was in the possession of the ’Ndrangheta and Carlo turned out to be one of several ’Ndranghetisti using it as a base from which to traffic cocaine and heroin. Lea had rejected the ’Ndrangheta code but it transpired that her new husband’s embrace of it had been so wholehearted, he thought nothing of tricking Lea into marrying him. Worst of all, it emerged that Carlo was working for Lea’s brother, Floriano, whose bloodthirstiness in Pagliarelle had propelled him to the head of the Garofalo ’ndrina. Lea had thought she courted Carlo. Now it occurred to her that Carlo had sought her out – because she was the sister of an ’Ndrangheta boss. Marriage to her had been a promotion for Carlo. For Lea, the love she had imagined would free her had trapped her even deeper.
Lea sank into depression. According to Enza, she made several attempts at suicide. When she fell pregnant in the spring of 1991, Lea tried to abort. ‘She did not want to give her son or daughter the same future,’ said Enza. In December, heavily pregnant, she left Viale Montello and took a bus to a hospital deep in the country. She gave birth alone, to a baby girl. Lea had imagined she might give her baby up for adoption, somewhere Carlo would never find the child. ‘But when Denise was born,’ said Enza, ‘Lea fell in love all over again. Denise gave Lea a reason to live.’
Like everyone who had worked mafia cases in Milan, Alessandra knew all about No. 6 Viale Montello. A vast and historic building in the middle of the Italian business capital, il fortino delle cosche (the fort of the clans) wasn’t just a mafia base but a six-storey challenge to Italy’s claim to be a modern, unified, lawful state. The ’Ndranghetisti paid no rent on its 129 apartments, nor any tax, nor any bills for municipal services like water or electricity. They treated the Renaissance mansion with disdain. A spaghetti of wires hung from its walls and collapsing balconies. Its courtyards and central garden were filled with refuse and rusted, broken appliances. The stairwells and corners stank of urine. Not only was the building a hub of the European drug trade, it was the source of supply for hundreds of Milan’s street dealers, especially those in the notorious Piazza Baiamonti, and a focal point for other criminals of every type: enforcers, smugglers and killers; political corrupters and state contract fixers; wayward policemen, judges and politicians. And all of it in flagrant plain sight. Viale Montello was an arterial thoroughfare just a kilometre from the city centre and yards from a city police station. Unsurprisingly, No. 6 Viale Montello was something of a preoccupation for Milan’s anti-mafia prosecutors, who had it under near-permanent surveillance.
For the prosecutors, the relationships inside No. 6 Viale Montello in the 1990s – between brothers, in-laws and even husband and wife, and the way those dynamics eventually played out – became an important early case study of this newly ascendant mafia. It was from watching events there that the prosecutors would be able to assemble a picture of what Alessandra described as a ‘modern, efficient, present-day organised crime syndicate’ whose strength lay in ‘enforcing a respect for medieval rules’. In the end, the prosecutors would conclude that they were fighting a culture, and that in No. 6 Viale Montello they had a peculiarly instructive Petri dish. Among the most informative events they watched there was the rise of an ambitious young ’Ndranghetista called Carlo Cosco, and his eventual undoing by his wife.
Carlo’s first big step up the ladder had been to marry the boss’s sister. On his return to Milan in 1991, the surveillance teams watched as Floriano’s lieutenants in Milan, Silvano Toscano and Thomas Ceraudo, duly catapulted Carlo and his brothers, Vito and Giuseppe, to prominence, granting them control of the lucrative dope and protection rackets in Piazza Baiamonti and nearby Cuarto Oggiaro. As a medium-level drug smuggler, dealer and extortionist, Carlo wasn’t above manual tasks. Sometimes he would ask his new wife, Lea, to help cut and package heroin, cocaine and hashish. He asked her for other favours too, like spying on Antonio Comberiati, a rival ’Ndranghetista who liv
ed in the building with his wife, Gina.
Comberiati was a hothead and troublemaker. His nickname was il lupo, ‘the wolf’. He resented most of the families in Viale Montello, seemingly aggrieved by his and Gina’s inability to conceive. But he was especially incensed by Carlo’s promotion.
One day in February 1994, Lea was dressing Denise, then two, for her first Milan city carnival, when Carlo interrupted to say he had seen Comberiati talking to the Chinese shop owner who ‘employed’ Carlo as a security guard. This arrangement was standard for the men at Viale Montello. Whenever carabinieri asked for proof of occupation, they would be shown contracts of employment claiming a job providing security for the Chinese traders on the ground floor. Carlo was concerned by what might be transpiring between his sponsor and his rival and asked Lea to listen in from the street. Lea soon overheard Comberiati insisting that the store close because it was being watched by the carabinieri. If Carlo lost his ‘job’, said Comberiati, that was too bad.
This was too much for Lea. ‘I couldn’t help myself,’ she said in testimony years later. ‘I interrupted and tried to defend Carlo, saying we had a daughter and Carlo had the right to remain there to work.’ Comberiati, outraged at being confronted by a woman, and his rival’s wife to boot, shouted back that he outranked Carlo. Then he threatened to kill Lea for daring to face him. ‘I’m the boss around here!’ he shouted. ‘I’m in charge! It’s my right!’
