The Good Mothers

by Alex Perry

  The threats against them only reconfirmed prosecutors’ determination to bring down the ’Ndrangheta. The pace was relentless. Alessandra and Giovanni Musarò had thirty separate investigations under way against the west coast ’Ndrangheta. ‘We weren’t going to let them breathe,’ said Giovanni. ‘They were used to enduring one operation, then having a rest. But we just kept on. Someone would be arrested, they would be replaced and then we arrested that person too.’

  On 13 July, in a follow-on from Operation All Inside, the carabinieri staged more raids across the country. This time they were more ambitious. Operation Infinity involved more than 3,000 officers and resulted in 300 arrests from across the ’Ndrangheta hierarchy. The standout success was the capture of capo crimine Domenico Oppedisano, now eighty, arrested in Rosarno.

  Oppedisano, his grey hair swept back across his head, arrested in the kind of dark-grey, open-necked striped shirt you might expect to see on a market trader, conformed to the traditional image of a southern mafioso. But other arrests reflected the organisation’s more recent sophistication. Around half of the raids took place in and around Milan. Those detained included businessmen, lawyers, bankers, accountants, politicians, policemen and public healthcare managers. Pignatone marvelled at the range of figures now behind bars and what it revealed about the ’Ndrangheta’s ability to ‘infiltrate such a wide variety of environments’. A new cosmopolitan generation of ’Ndranghetisti was emerging, he said, who understood how globalisation had opened up the world to illicit businesses as much as it had to legitimate ones. ‘They are graduates,’ he said. ‘They can count on a network of professionals, bureaucrats and politicians. They can penetrate any part of Italy and anywhere overseas.’

  Pignatone’s junior prosecutors were jubilant. Many had prepared for this moment for years. Alessandra had been waiting all her life. Now the ’Ndrangheta was being hit hard, its bosses arrested and its precious secrets exposed. ‘That was the moment we revealed that we knew not only that the ’Ndrangheta existed as a hierarchy and a structure but that it could be proved,’ said Alessandra. The interior minister, Roberto Maroni, described the raids as a ‘blow to the heart of the ’Ndrangheta’s organisational and financial structure’. Oppedisano’s arrest was greeted with a standing ovation in the Italian Senate.4 It was going to be a long war. But the prosecutors had finally shown that they could make the world’s mightiest mafia bleed.

  The ’Ndrangheta was a secret criminal organisation which oppressed people with inhuman violence. If the Italian state was to win its war with it, if the government was to lift the yoke the mafia had imposed on the people, it had to offer them transparency, legality and humanity. But in the heat of battle and with the first flush of victory, the last of those, humanity, was being forgotten.

  Giuseppina was useful to Alessandra. She represented further evidence to support her theory about women’s influence in the ’Ndrangheta. But when Alessandra heard about Giuseppina’s suicide attempts, she felt little compassion for a woman whose predicament was entirely her own fault. ‘I didn’t believe Giuseppina was sincere,’ she said. ‘And in fact, she quickly admitted that she wasn’t really trying to kill herself but merely trying to persuade us to help her reunite with her children.’5

  The same cold-bloodedness was on display in the state’s indictment of Carlo Cosco and Massimo Sabatino for the murder of Lea Garofalo on 27 May 2010. The charge sheet, confidential at this stage in the Italian legal process, included a detailed reconstruction of Carlo’s movements on the night Lea died. But there was also an extensive account of Lea’s relationship with the witness protection programme. To many inside the small group of lawyers and officials allowed to read it, it made for damning reading. Lea had put her faith in the state, and the state had abandoned her. It seemed minded to do the same to Denise. How could Italy expect to beat the mafia if it couldn’t even protect those who tried to help it? The state’s lack of sympathy had killed Lea almost as surely as Carlo had. Enza Rando, Lea’s lawyer, was especially critical. ‘Lea had to make her own way,’ she said. ‘The state just didn’t understand how to make witness protection work, especially for a woman. Lea had the strength and weakness of a mother. Brave but at the same time afraid. She never received the help she needed.’6

  Alessandra bristled at the criticism. She would have preferred a faultless protection programme which led seamlessly to the prosecution and conviction of mafiosi. But people died in war. Sometimes mafiosi, sometimes carabinieri and prosecutors, and sometimes witnesses. Lea’s death was no reason to show weakness. It was every reason to show resolve. ‘Prosecutors always get blamed,’ she said. ‘But the facts are that Lea applied for witness protection and didn’t have enough information to justify it. Protection costs a lot of money. If your information is not important or deep enough, you don’t get it.’7

  Even if Alessandra was right about the limits on government finances, there was no disputing that the state had failed in one of its primary duties: the protection of its citizens. Lea had crossed the divide to fight on the side of the government, and had lost. As a result, according to the indictment, she had probably been tortured, killed and dissolved in acid. Why? Because the ’Ndrangheta thought she was theirs to keep or discard as they chose – and because, in the end, the state had done the same. Alessandra might be right that this was a war. But if the state was fighting with the same ruthlessness as the ’Ndrangheta, would the people care who won?

  It wasn’t that Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutors had been born peculiarly unfeeling. It was that they were trained to be. From law school through their training to their years on the job, they had been told that emotion had no place in the service. The mafia was heat and blood. Prosecutors were cool focus, discipline and procedure.

  But as long as they withheld their hearts from the fight, it was easy to confuse a prosecutor’s professional detachment with indifference, or even disdain. The mafia’s victims deserved sympathy. Often the best the prosecutors could muster was pity. Cut off from the world, on an endless shuttle between windowless office, bullet-proof car, steel-doored court and secure apartment, it was easy for a prosecutor to forget that war was ultimately played out in flesh and blood, and often won by capturing hearts and minds. Alessandra dismissed Giuseppina’s suffering. She marvelled at the emotional decision-making which led Lea Garofalo to her death. ‘Lea Garofalo went to Milan where she knew her husband was, even after she had been threatened by him, almost like a form of protest,’ she exclaimed. Lea had followed her heart, and that had doomed her. Alessandra’s considered response was heartlessness. ‘I study women in the ’Ndrangheta,’ she said. ‘I go to conferences about it. It’s a subject I’m very passionate about.’ But no one should mistake intellectual interest for personal attachment. ‘I don’t get involved in these women’s lives,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’8

  XII

  The war was heating up. In August, a bundle of industrial dynamite was detonated outside the Reggio home of Calabrian attorney general Salvatore di Landro. In early October, an anti-mafia magistrate in Sicily announced that he had intelligence on a secret summit between the leaders of Cosa Nostra, the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta at which Italy’s three big mafias had drawn up a hit list of assassination targets. On that list was Giuseppe Pignatone. The next week, Pignatone received a phone call at work telling him there was a surprise waiting for him outside. That turned out to be an Eastern European rocket launcher hidden under a mattress. The Italian press began calling 2010 ‘the year of bombs and bazookas’.

  Pignatone professed he was encouraged by what he viewed as the actions of an organisation in distress. While the threats had to be taken seriously, there was no question of easing off when the crackdown was so clearly being felt. There were more indications that the ’Ndrangheta was being shaken. Ordinary Calabrians were stepping forward to assist the state and that, said Pignatone, ‘had never happened before’. When Justice Minister Angelino Alfano prematurely declared the ’Ndrangheta ‘fatally
wounded’, the Calabrian prosecutors winced at his haste. Still, said Pignatone, there was no doubt that ‘positive results are giving us even more positive results’.1 One development was almost unprecedented, he added. Inside jail, an ’Ndranghetista had begun talking.

  At the beginning of October 2010, the prosecutor’s office in Palmi received a letter from San Vittore jail in the centre of Milan. San Vittore is Italy’s most notorious mafia prison. Thousands of mafiosi have served time there and most pass through at some stage, including Carlo Cosco, Massimo Sabatino and Salvatore Riina, the Cosa Nostra boss who ordered the executions of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Even to write to an anti-mafia prosecutor from inside San Vittore and request a meeting was a risk. But to specify that the meeting must take place without a lawyer – indicating that the inmate was considering talking freely, since mafia lawyers worked for the organisation rather than the individual – was so dangerous as to suggest the prisoner was beyond caring. Giuseppina Pesce was already a dead woman walking. Maybe she was thinking of becoming a dead woman talking, too. ‘If you can make her talk,’ said Pignatone as he handed the letter to Alessandra, ‘we’ll have done in three years in Calabria what took us thirty years in Palermo.’2

  Alessandra was doubtful. Still, she agreed with Pignatone that Giuseppina was more likely to open up to another woman. And to Alessandra, even the smallest chance of a woman prosecutor unlocking the ’Ndrangheta through the evidence of a woman mafiosa was irresistible.

  On 14 October 2010, Alessandra was driven by a security detail through the gates of San Vittore. She was escorted to a meeting room by a prison warden and a marshal. After a few minutes, Giuseppina was led into the room by a prison guard. She walked slowly and hesitantly. Giuseppina had the prison look: wan, with greasy hair, her shoulders hunched like a beaten animal. ‘She looked at me with such loathing,’ said Alessandra. ‘Such pride and resentment and hatred. I represented the state, which was ruining her life.’3

  After this inauspicious beginning, the atmosphere quickly deteriorated. Giuseppina blurted out that she wanted to be moved to a state safe house and to see her children. In return, she would help them catch some ’Ndrangheta bosses on the run. Alessandra dismissed the offer out of hand. ‘She wanted to give us a couple of names in exchange for her freedom,’ she said.4 It was pathetic, thought Alessandra. And it wasn’t how the prosecutors worked. They didn’t negotiate with gangsters. That was how the mafia drew you in. Alessandra closed her laptop and made to leave.

  Giuseppina looked up at Alessandra with alarm. This wasn’t how the meeting was meant to go. Giuseppina’s idea had been to negotiate with Alessandra the ’Ndrangheta way, which was to say, hard: reveal little of what you have, affect nonchalance about any deal offered and eventually extract as much as possible for as little as possible. What’s more, Giuseppina was a Pesce. Her family killed people. Her family was power. She had summoned the state to see her. And yet here was this woman prosecutor – a woman! – turning everything upside down and heading for the door.

  Alessandra would later admit she was bluffing. Of course she wanted to know about ’Ndrangheta fugitives. She wanted anything Giuseppina could give her. But Alessandra was angling for everything Giuseppina could give her. The state had painstakingly built its case against the Pesces and the ’Ndrangheta. The evidence was good enough for trial. But it could always be stronger. It was all but inevitable that several mafiosi, including a few kingpins, would walk. There was so much the prosecutors didn’t know or couldn’t prove. Who ran what? Who, precisely, moved how much cocaine? Who laundered whose money? Who, exactly, pulled the triggers? In Giuseppina Pesce’s head was the evidence that could solve hundreds of crimes stretching back decades. A full confession would split the ’Ndrangheta wide open, devastating an organisation whose power depended on secrecy. It would transform the fight against the mafia. Most crucially to Alessandra, it would also finally prove – to the ’Ndrangheta, the judiciary and all Italy – that chauvinism was toxic, witless, self-destructive folly.

  Alessandra, then, was gambling. But as she reached the door, Giuseppina cleared her throat. ‘Everything I testify to now,’ she said, ‘I do it for my children, I do it to give them a different future.’5

  Giuseppina would eventually tell Alessandra everything she knew. It took time. Alessandra and Giuseppina began talking inside San Vittore prison. Once the carabinieri retrieved Giuseppina’s children from the Palaias, who had been looking after them, and took them to a safe house near Aprilia, south of Rome, where they were reunited with their mother, Giuseppina and Alessandra spoke for several more months. It wasn’t just the size and scale of Giuseppina’s knowledge. At the beginning, in those first few hours and days, she also delivered it slowly. Giuseppina was still torn between love for her own small family and loyalty to The Family. ‘She was desperate to be reunited with her kids,’ said Alessandra. ‘But it was really hard for her to betray her relatives.’6

  But gradually, as Alessandra offered reassurances about her safety and that of her children, the two women established a rapport. ‘She knew she was going to die,’ said Alessandra. ‘She knew it would be her brother who killed her. I had to explain to her over and over that it’s not normal that if you cheat on your husband, then you have to die.’7 Giuseppina started to relax. There was even a moment on that first day in October when Alessandra saw her eyes shift from terror and confusion to courage and trust. As they talked, Giuseppina became calmer and more confident. Alessandra could feel an almost tangible sense of a beginning, like the first glow of a new era of collaboration opening up right in front of her.

  Transcribed, Giuseppina’s evidence would eventually run to 1,514 pages. It included diagrams she drew of the ’Ndrangheta hierarchy, descriptions of rituals, evidence of several murders, and detailed accounts of cocaine smuggling rings, extortion rackets, money laundering, credit card fraud and public corruption. ‘No stone was left unturned,’ said Alessandra. ‘She told me so many things.’8 Giuseppina’s evidence not only backed up the existing cases, it prompted a raft of new ones. ‘The whole character of our investigations changed from that moment,’ said Alessandra. ‘It was a real turning point.’ Based on what Giuseppina told her, over the next year Alessandra would confiscate a total of €260 million in property from the Pesces and the ’Ndrangheta, including forty businesses, four villas, forty-four apartments, 164 cars, sixty plots of land and two football teams. The number of arrests sky-rocketed. Eventually, Alessandra would be able to lay charges against a total of sixty-four ’Ndrangheta men and women from the Pesce ’ndrina, including two Palaias and fourteen Pesces. Giuseppina revealed the location of three houses in Rosarno under which the Pesces had built bunkers and pinpointed five other underground hideouts. Even when she didn’t know a bunker’s whereabouts, she offered other help. Her cousin, acting clan head Francesco ‘Ciccio’ Pesce, she said, ‘liked women, a lot of women’. After she gave Alessandra details of one girlfriend, the carabinieri followed the woman until she led them to Ciccio’s hideout, which he had equipped with sixteen infra-red cameras. Another boss was tracked to a bunker by tailing his friends, whose names were also provided by Giuseppina.

  More than the loss of money or personnel, it was the act of Giuseppina’s betrayal that shook the ’Ndrangheta. ‘Pesce was a name that creates terror in Calabria,’ said Alessandra. ‘This – breaking the chain, making it possible for women and children to leave the mafia and be free and safe – it was like a bomb.’9 When news of Giuseppina’s betrayal reached Rosarno, their rivals the Belloccos held a party to celebrate the Pesces’ shame. In Reggio, Prestipino and Pignatone were equally ecstatic. ‘A woman with the name of Pesce, an organic member of this fearsome ’Ndrangheta family, a woman from a place where women don’t have the same rights as men, she betrays them and moves to the side of the state,’ said Prestipino.10 ‘Immediately, they lose prestige. They lose power. It’s devastating. Ordinary people see it’s not true that they will always go unpunished. It’s
not the case that they’re invincible. People say: “They’re no longer capable of silencing even one of their own members.” People start having doubts about them.’

  Just as important, ’Ndrangheta members themselves would start to feel the old certainties erode. ‘Giuseppina showed everybody that there was an alternative to ’Ndrangheta – that the state could save you and save your family,’ said Alessandra. ‘She was living proof that you could leave the ’Ndrangheta. That you could survive it. That you could be free.’11 Prestipino concurred. ‘’Ndrangheta members start realising that the ’Ndrangheta life is not irreversible. They have an alternative. Giuseppina is proof to all ’Ndrangheta members and women that a mafia member cannot just quit but can organise their life in a different way. Anyone can do it. This undermines and jeopardises the consensus the mafia has built. It’s an existential crisis.’12

  Giuseppina’s motivation for her betrayal was rooted in her desire to give her three children a better life. ‘I want to change my ways now and take my children with me and try to create a different future for them,’ she wrote in a testimonial statement.13 But there was something else, too. She and Alessandra had made a connection. In one sense, they were two women united against a world of violent men. When Alessandra felt Giuseppina was holding back on a sensitive matter – her marriage, her affair, how the Pesce men were – she would ask the male carabinieri officers in the room to leave, so Giuseppina would feel less liable to be judged and able to speak more freely.