by Alex Perry
The same duty of care applied to ’Ndrangheta mothers schooling their children in mafia life, the very life force of the ’Ndrangheta. The convention recognised a parent’s right to educate their child. But that was subordinate to the child’s right to be protected from prejudice and abuse, physical or psychological; and to its right to a responsible education aimed at preparing the child for a tolerant, peaceful, legal life. ’Ndrangheta children didn’t have any of that. They didn’t have much of a childhood full stop. ‘You take a seventeen-year-old ’Ndrangheta boy and ask him what music he listens to and he’ll reply “the Tarantella”,’ said di Bella. ‘He doesn’t know Lady Gaga or Madonna. It’s such a strict, narrow upbringing. They can’t see further than their own family and their own little town.’
Di Bella began to believe that the greatest problem with an ’Ndrangheta upbringing was the way it stunted a child emotionally. At an early age, children learned to hide and control their feelings, lest they betray themselves or others. They internalised the code, which forbade almost any individual expression or identity. And while they formed almost no relationships outside the ’Ndrangheta, inside it, as their friends and relatives were steadily murdered or put in prison or went on the run, they became ever more lonely. ‘There is no one to tell the child the right road to take and no individual will to choose a different road,’ said di Bella. ‘The young man doesn’t even contemplate it because he doesn’t know a different reality exists. For children growing up in these little mafia towns, the cult of the ’Ndrangheta oppresses everything and everyone.’ No surprise, said di Bella, that court reports on ’Ndrangheta children showed psychological devastation. ‘Their symptoms are similar to Vietnam veterans,’ he said. ‘They are inhibited. They all have this strong sense of anguish and anxiety. Their dreams are full of nightmares. And they are alone.’
Taken together, di Bella concluded, the ‘mafia family system’ was itself ‘prejudiced against the welfare of children’. ‘A mafia education, mafia indoctrination by the parents, the perpetration of crimes by the child, the physical danger to children,’ said di Bella, ‘all these are detrimental to the mental and physical integrity of the children and contravene the fundamental rights, liberties and principles of the UN charter. The primary victims of the ’Ndrangheta are their own children.’
The Family had always been an immoral perversion of blood relations. Now it seemed it was illegal, too.
Di Bella was proposing deprogramming ’Ndrangheta children, a matter in which the judiciary had no expertise. When he raised the subject with social workers and psychologists, they recommended not just taking the children away from their parents but trying to offer them a normal adolescence. Growing up was, at heart, about discovering freedom. Freedom was what the ’Ndrangheta denied its children and that was why they turned out the way they did. If the state wanted to change them, said the psychologists, it should place younger children with families far outside Calabria who would let them attend school and hang out with friends and make the conventional choices of any child growing up. Once they were old enough, the children could stay in a hostel where they would be required to attend school. They should be allowed contact with their parents but, crucially, the power to direct their lives should rest with the children themselves. The advice made sense to di Bella. ‘These children come from small worlds where everything is ’Ndrangheta,’ he said. ‘Their inexorable destiny is to be killed or end up in jail. A desire to choose a different path is never contemplated because they don’t know the alternatives. You can’t desire another world if you don’t know it exists.’
The hope, said di Bella, was that if children were allowed to experience a conventional upbringing, a new idea would take hold in their minds: self-determination. ‘Our idea was to let them know there is a better world out there with different rules,’ he said. This was ‘a place where you can be free. Where there is love and affection. Where there is no need for violence or killing in order to let other people understand what you’re thinking. Where there are equal rights for men and women. Where prison is not a medal you get on your chest. And where you can try out your personality free from the surname you have.’ What the authorities would be attempting, said di Bella, was a kind of ‘cultural infiltration’. They would insert the children into everyday Italian life and let it gently subvert them. ‘The ’Ndrangheta infiltrated us,’ he said. ‘Now we were going to infiltrate them right back.’
In court, instead of custodial sentences, di Bella began ordering ’Ndrangheta children to be separated from their families in another fashion. He sent many of the older teenagers across the Straits, to a hostel attached to a church high up in the hills above Messina. The programme was run by a young Sicilian psychologist, Enrico Interdonato, who had made a speciality of the mafia. Interdonato would take his charges out for pizza and to night clubs. When he took one boy to a bookshop, he was astonished to learn it was the first time the boy had ever visited one.
Initial results were mixed. One boy, Francesco, arrived with a propensity for violence and a set of rock-hard prejudices against women, immigrants, the police and the state, which were only slightly softened by the time he left. But another boy, Riccardo Cordì, from the ’Ndrangheta stronghold of Locri, was transformed. Riccardo’s father, an ’Ndranghetista, had been killed when he was a boy. His brothers were all in jail. Riccardo himself had been headed the same way, appearing in di Bella’s court after being arrested for stealing a police car, and then again for fighting.
After a year at the hostel in Messina, that destiny no longer appeared certain. After he turned eighteen and left the hostel, Riccardo wrote a letter which was published in several newspapers.
Dear Editor,
I am a boy of Calabria, I come from Locri and my name is Riccardo Cordì. On 7 March 2011, I was arrested by the police in Locri for the theft and damage to a car owned by the railway police. In July 2011, I was charged with another instance of assault. But the court in Reggio decided to send me away from Locri to see if I could leave behind these experiences. It was the start of my journey.
When I arrived in Sicily, at first it was not easy to be alone and away from home. But everything changed when I began to see a psychologist in Messina who guided me towards the discovery of a new life. I did things, met people and visited Rome, Milan and other places that I had never seen. One morning, I went to see the sea with the psychologist. We could see Calabria, my land. But for the first time, I could see it from another perspective.
I decided then and there that my life would be different. I want to return to Locri but I do not want any more problems with the law. Not because I can’t handle it but because I want to live in peace. I want to be clean. Before this experience, I believed the state did not care about the people. The state was just this thing that took you away from home, without you ever knowing when or if you would return. But in recent months, I have met a different state. This state didn’t seem to want me to change. Rather, it tried to understand who I was.
And who am I, really? A boy of eighteen. A boy like any other. I was very small when my father was killed and I saw my brothers go to jail. I want a different future for myself. That doesn’t mean that I renounce my family. My brothers will always be my brothers and Calabria will always be my land. But now a new road lies before me and I choose it for myself with my own free will. The state has given me this chance. I can choose what I do when I grow up. I can choose what job I do to get by in the city. I can stand tall. I have no idea if I’ll succeed but I’m going to try – because something has changed for me. I changed. And I can change further. Others too. There are so many guys like me who need the state to support them as it supported me. Right now, they don’t believe this state exists. But I know, and I write this letter so that others can know, too. The road is still steep. But a happy ending, I now know, is not just a dream. It can be real life.2
Interdonato, Riccardo’s psychologist, said even Riccardo’s family, who were ’Ndrangheta through
and through, seemed to accept that the state wasn’t harming their boy and might even be opening up some new horizons to him. Interdonato and Riccardo still talked every day months after Riccardo had left the hostel. One morning, Interdonato turned on his phone to find Riccardo had sent a picture of himself with a small baby. ‘He married his girlfriend this year and they had a son,’ said Enrico. ‘Family is at the centre of Italy’s history. The mafia took those values and extremised them until it became a kind of psychological abuse. But Riccardo is beginning a new family. He’s writing a new history.’
XXII
Alessandra and Giovanni were still haunted by their inability to prove that Maria Concetta Cacciola’s death was murder.
They had plenty of circumstantial evidence. For one, Concetta had never seemed suicidal. On the contrary, said Giovanni, ‘Concetta was organising to leave her family again. She had her love affair. The wiretaps showed she and her lover were planning their future together.’
There was also the physical impossibility of drinking a litre of hydrochloric acid by choice. Though initial forensics suggested Concetta had killed herself, a pathologist later found bruises on her neck and other marks on her arms consistent with someone holding her down while a second person held her mouth open, possibly with a funnel, and poured acid down her throat. In addition, the autopsy revealed Concetta had taken no sedatives to dull the pain. She’d felt everything. Presumably, surmised the prosecutors, because she was meant to.
Alessandra and Giovanni were also sure Concetta’s family was behind her killing. That was the ’Ndrangheta code. Every family cleaned up its own mess. Alessandra still thought Concetta’s indecision, and her belief that it would be months before the family acted, had given the Cacciolas the opportunity they needed. ‘This lack of determination, taking too much time,’ she said. ‘Maybe this was fatal to her.’
There was a further possibility, however. Maybe the Cacciolas had planned to wait but had stepped up their plans after Concetta told her mother she was returning to the protection programme. In that scenario, Concetta’s mother, Anna Rosalba Lazzaro, would have been key. ‘Maria Concetta Cacciola still felt love for her mother,’ said Giovanni. ‘That’s why she told her she was going back into witness protection. But Lazzaro was a classic mafia woman, tasked with preserving the clan. She was the one who said: “You’re either with us, or with them”.’
Precisely who killed Concetta, however, remained a mystery. ‘We can say she was murdered,’ said Giovanni. ‘The question remains: by who? Her mother and father left the house that afternoon. It wasn’t them. Something else happened but we still don’t know what.’
If the two prosecutors couldn’t say who killed Concetta, they couldn’t charge anyone with her murder. They decided that even as they would continue trying to prove a case of homicide, they would prosecute the Cacciolas on a lesser charge. Article 110 of the Italian criminal code specified that ‘when more than one person participates in the same offence, each shall be subject to the penalty prescribed for such offence’.1 Article 580 made it illegal to help or instigate suicide, an offence punishable by between five and twelve years in prison.
Charging the family with pressuring Concetta into suicide would still show that in twenty-first-century Italy no one could expect to assist their daughter’s death, to conspire in it, and get away with it. And it was a case Alessandra and Giovanni could readily prove. Concetta had told them how the family had beaten and threatened her. From wiretaps, they had the Cacciola family on tape discussing how to force Concetta to retract. They also had them using her children to blackmail her into returning to Rosarno. In the recording of her retraction, a second woman’s voice could be heard coaching her. Two months after Concetta’s murder, they had her sixteen-year-old son, Alfonso, blaming Concetta’s parents for his mother’s death. Finally, the Cacciolas themselves were saying that their daughter had died of shame. There was some poetic justice here, thought Alessandra. The Cacciolas were so blinded by the cult of the ’Ndrangheta and their loyalty to the code that they hadn’t realised they were effectively admitting an offence. Concetta had felt no shame on her own. Whether she had killed herself or been murdered, it was the shame poured on her by the family that had made her death inevitable.
During the last few months of 2011, Alessandra and Giovanni steadily built their case against the Cacciolas. By 9 February 2012, they were ready. That morning, as the prosecutors released their indictment to the public, the carabinieri arrested Concetta’s parents, Michele Cacciola and Anna Rosalba Lazzaro, in Rosarno and issued a warrant for Concetta’s brother Giuseppe, who was detained two months later in Milan. All three were charged with conspiracy to force Concetta to perjure herself and to commit suicide. The carabinieri called the arrests Operazione Onta, or Operation Shame.
The arrests made the press the next day. ‘Driven to suicide by her own family’ read a front-page headline in Il Quotidiano della Calabria, the province’s main paper.2 What caught Alessandra’s eye, however, was a lengthy accompanying editorial by the paper’s editor, Matteo Cosenza. For the first time in an Italian newspaper, Cosenza linked the cases of Concetta, Lea and Giuseppina as elements of the same essential story. ‘Giuseppina Pesce, Maria Concetta Cacciola and Lea Garofalo had the misfortune to be born into a terrible world,’ he wrote. ‘Despite tremendous suffering, these women decided to break with their families and to choose the path of legality and justice.’ All three women had paid dearly for their courage, wrote Cosenza. All had plunged their lives and the lives of their children into dark turmoil. Two of the women had died. Cosenza continued:
Some say we exaggerate when we talk about the ’Ndrangheta and its penetration of Calabria’s society and institutions. They say it doesn’t exist. These cases remind us of the truth. All honest Calabrians must follow these women’s example in their daily lives and stand up to the ’Ndrangheta. Do it for yourself! Do it for the young, who deserve a different future in this wonderful land! It’s almost impossible to imagine how someone can make a change after being born into an ’Ndrangheta family – someone who sucks arrogance and lawlessness from their mother’s breast and who can’t even conceive of a world of civil coexistence, tolerance, respect and happiness. That’s why we must bow before Giuseppina, Concetta and Lea. Despite everything, they were able to grasp that they were living among evil and find the courage to say: ‘Enough! Stop! We and our children must live in peace, not in perpetual war!’
They paid a high price. They will pay a higher one if we forget them. Calabrians, don’t turn away! Let’s become the beautiful, strong Calabria we all want! We know the evil among us. Step by step, we will rid Calabria of this great malevolence and redeem ourselves in the eyes of our children, and of the world.
Alessandra could scarcely believe what she was reading. Her big idea had always been to crush the ’Ndrangheta by freeing its women. For years, it had been a private obsession. Over the last two years, month by month, man by man, she had slowly persuaded her colleagues. With each successive case – first Lea, then Giuseppina, then Concetta – the strength of her argument had grown. Concetta’s death, in particular, had given Giuseppina renewed determination and spurred Roberto di Bella to rethink everything he was doing at Reggio’s juvenile court.
But Alessandra could never have predicted a newspaper campaign against the ’Ndrangheta, calling on all Calabrians to take the three women as their standard bearers. Two years earlier, crowds had blocked the road in Reggio to cheer ’Ndrangheta boss Giovanni Tegano as he was led away to jail. Only a year earlier, Calabria Ora had launched its campaign against Alessandra. Now, suddenly, here was everything she had been working towards, all her intuition from growing up during la mattanza in Sicily, the summation of her years of study and research, the mountain of evidence she had amassed detailing how ’Ndrangheta women were oppressed and how a tiny few had fought back – all of it, on a newspaper front page, in an article calling for something close to revolution. It felt miraculous. ‘Il Quotidiano
created, for the first time, a public debate about the women in the ’Ndrangheta,’ she said. ‘And suddenly people all around us were talking about how the ’Ndrangheta had been corrupting our lives all these years. It was a real, immediate change.’
It occurred to Alessandra that what she had resisted for so many years – sentiment, empathy, emotion – was precisely what Il Quotidiano was using to stir up its readers. To a prosecutor, the ’Ndrangheta’s women were a technical tool with which to unlock Europe’s biggest criminal conspiracy. To a newspaper editor, the story of the three good mothers was an epic tragedy to rouse a people. And Il Quotidiano’s reporters had been industrious. Across the inside pages, they laid out every element of the story for their fellow Calabrians to read. A report on the arrest of Concetta’s parents was accompanied by articles on the Pesce investigation (‘Pesce clan hit with 11 more arrests’) and the Garofalo case (‘Garofalo trial: one defendant threatened’). The letter Concetta left for her mother when she went into witness protection was reprinted in full, as was her recorded ‘retraction’. There were backgrounders on the clans of Rosarno and eulogies to the two dead women from members of parliament. There were even descriptions of the three bunkers about which Concetta had testified.
