by Alex Perry
If Alessandra and Giovanni were unhappy with the lightness of the sentences, the judge was too. ‘The court had started doubting that Concetta’s death was suicide,’ said prosecutor Giuseppe Creazzo. The judge indicated he had been dissatisfied at being unable to impose the kind of sentence that a conviction for murder would allow. ‘So he sent the case back to the prosecutors for them to investigate further if it was murder.’
Sandro Dolce, who had interviewed Lea Garofalo in 2002 and was now assistant prosecutor in Palmi, was ordered to investigate the Cacciolas’ two lawyers, Gregorio Cacciola and Vittorio Pisani. After seizing their computer terminals, he found proof that Concetta’s statement had been through various drafts on their computers before she even returned to Rosarno – proof of a conspiracy to force her to retract. In February 2014, the two lawyers were arrested. On 8 September, Vittorio Pisani sent word that he wanted to confess. Alessandra and Giovanni had him moved to the pentiti prison at Paliano. They spoke to him a few days later.
Pisani told the two prosecutors that he had started working for the Cacciolas in June 2011, a few months before Concetta died. He said the family had initially approached him because they suspected Concetta was having an affair with a policeman. They wanted him to use his contacts on the force to investigate. ‘It was an abnormal request,’ said Pisani, ‘but I took it because I had money troubles and I didn’t want to lose the chance of working for a family like the Cacciolas.’
Later that month the carabinieri discovered one of the Cacciolas’ bunkers, then a second. The Cacciolas and Belloccos were convinced the information had come from Concetta. The Belloccos insisted that she be made to return to Rosarno and retract. By this time, the Cacciolas, impatient for a result, had begun threatening Pisani. When Concetta returned to Rosarno, Pisani was under no illusion that she too was being coerced. On 12 August, he witnessed Concetta record her retraction. When she died eight days later, he knew the family was responsible. For a year and a half, Pisani had tried to bury his conscience. The Cacciolas and the Belloccos were unimpressed, however, and Pisani became convinced he was in danger. ‘I was scared,’ he told the prosecutors. ‘And I needed to be able to look myself in the mirror again.’
‘Tell us, why was so much attention paid to this one woman?’ asked Giovanni.
‘As a warning,’ replied Pisani. ‘It was to say: “Enough now.”’
The identity of Concetta’s killer remained a mystery. But the case was still open and the prosecutors were inching closer. On 30 July 2015, the Court of Appeal in Reggio Calabria increased Michele’s sentence to eight years and eight months, Giuseppe’s to seven years and four months and Anna Rosalba Lazzaro’s to five years and six months.
XXVI
In October 2014, Alessandra and her husband packed up their tiny apartment in the roof of the carabinieri barracks in Reggio and moved back to Milan. Alessandra had been promoted to deputy public prosecutor in Italy’s financial capital. Most of the rest of the anti-mafia team had already left Calabria. Giuseppe Pignatone, Michele Prestipino, Giovanni Musarò and Renato Cortese, the flying squad chief, were all taking up more senior positions in Rome.
The reassignments made sense. Some of the biggest ’Ndrangheta clans had been smashed, especially on the stronghold of the Gioia Tauro plain. The cost to the prosecutors of their success was an increased threat to their lives. Alessandra, who like Pignatone and Prestipino had lived inside close protection for years, knew she had added new names to the list of those who wanted to kill her. Of those she knew about, there was Giuseppina’s father, Salvatore, who had threatened her in court, and Concetta’s mother, Anna Rosalba Lazzaro, who had been bugged cursing Alessandra as ‘that bitch, that bastard bitch. I want her dead!’
Giovanni Musarò was another prosecutor now forced to make peace with the idea that he was fighting for a nation in which he no longer really lived. In 2010, in an unrelated case, Giovanni had ordered the arrest of the entire Gallico ’ndrina in Palmi, a total of thirty-two ’Ndranghetisti including an eighty-four-year-old grandmother. Subsequently, clan head Domenico Gallico suffered the humiliation of watching his ’ndrina turn their backs to him in court. In October 2012, Gallico asked to meet Giovanni in his cell in Viterbo prison, north of Rome. Giovanni was mystified, but agreed nonetheless. ‘It was a very strange situation,’ he told a parliamentary inquiry later. ‘I was shown to a very small room. When Gallico entered, he was alone without an escort and uncuffed. He came around to my side of the desk and said: “Dottore, what a pleasure that we can finally meet face to face. May I have the honour of shaking your hand?”’
When Giovanni extended his right hand, Gallico pretended to do the same, then with his left hit Giovanni across the face, breaking his nose. ‘I fell from the chair,’ said Giovanni. ‘As I lay there up against the wall, he kicked and punched me maybe fifty or sixty times.’ During the attack, Giovanni remembered thinking: ‘If I don’t block his punches, he’s going to break my neck. He’s going to kill me.’ After thirty seconds, several guards pulled Gallico off, kicking and screaming. ‘Are you crazy?’ asked one, pinning him to the floor. Gallico pointed at Giovanni. ‘Ask him what he did to me and my family!’ he howled. ‘Ask him what he did to me!’
Bodyguards were posted outside Giovanni’s door in hospital that night. They had not left his side since. Not long afterwards Marcello Fondacaro, an ’Ndrangheta informer, told Giovanni that the same Bellocco boss who had ordered Concetta be made to retract had also made a plan to kill Giovanni and his boss, Prestipino. ‘The Belloccos thought Maria Concetta Cacciola’s retraction would have ended the story,’ said Giovanni. ‘They were very angry when that didn’t happen. Giuseppe Bellocco, in particular, was known as a very dangerous human being who held grudges and harboured great resentment.’ According to Fondacaro, Bellocco planned to ambush Giovanni and Prestipino with gunmen and explosives as the two prosecutors drove to court. ‘He knew I drove to Palmi twice a week during a trial I was dealing with,’ said Giovanni. ‘He knew the route, the colour of my armoured car and my escort car, and that Prestipino would have been following in his armoured car, with another escort car with him. He’d even asked permission from the Gallicos to carry out the attack.’ The double assassination failed only because the trial in Palmi was unexpectedly adjourned. And while, to some, gunmen and explosives might have seemed like overkill, to the prosecutors it underlined how serious the ’Ndrangheta were about revenge. ‘In Calabria they do it well or not at all,’ said Giovanni.
It was time to get out. None of the anti-mafia prosecutors or their families could expect to live a normal life again. It was, in a way, their own life sentence. But Alessandra, for one, was finding inspiration from an unexpected source. ‘Giuseppina knows what she did is another death sentence,’ she said. ‘Her betrayal has to be punished with death and it has to be her brother, the same blood, who kills her to restore the family honour. And one day, he will get out.’ But Alessandra said it had been years since she had seen Giuseppina doubt herself. ‘For Giuseppina,’ she said, ‘what she did was an act of love towards her children.’ In the end, the contest between The Family and her own family had been no contest at all. ‘She’s fine,’ said Alessandra. ‘Actually, I think she’s happy.’
From the moment 150 years earlier when a group of southern criminals met a band of revolutionary freemasons in jail and decided to veneer their thuggish criminality with myth and legend, the ’Ndrangheta had shown itself to be nothing if not adaptable. Calabria would always be the ’Ndrangheta’s homeland. There were still plenty of ’ndrine to pursue there and the trafficking, extortion, corruption and murder would continue. But as the prosecutors’ Calabrian campaign against the ’Ndrangheta began to wind down, new surveillance evidence made clear that the centre of gravity for Italian organised crime was moving to the north of the country and even further afield. The change made sense. Italy was the only country in the world that even had a law of mafia association. Few other countries allowed such intrusive surveillan
ce. Plenty of them made it far easier to legitimise criminal wealth by buying assets like bonds, shares, property and businesses.
And if the ’Ndrangheta was moving, it was also changing shape. The Calabria prosecutors had made a point of mapping and destroying the ’Ndrangheta’s command structure. For the organisation, the intelligent response was to dismantle it. Prosecutors began reporting the emergence of a more informal, decentralised, diffuse group, a loose association, an ad-hoc gathering, even something as ephemeral as a state of mind. They likened its penetration of Italy’s legitimate economy and, beyond it, Frankfurt, London and New York to liquid poured on a sponge.
And you couldn’t squeeze the world. In their new positions, many of the prosecutors found their time in Calabria quickly began to feel like the golden years. Like the swordfish hunters of the Straits of Messina, the Calabrian prosecutors had harpooned a monster and forced it to the surface. But now the creature was disappearing back into the deep, vanishing into the folds of an international financial system that not only tolerated secrecy but, in the case of the $20 trillion offshore banking industry, actively depended on it. The prosecutors often felt like they were in a losing race against time. Hundreds of billions of ’Ndrangheta euros and dollars had been already successfully laundered beyond reach or reproach. And to the prosecutors’ frustration, in the world of frictionless global money movements, their fastidious objections were often viewed as pedantry. Franco Roberti, head of Italy’s anti-mafia and anti-terrorism office, lamented the lack of cooperation his investigators received in London or New York or Hong Kong, let alone the centres of secret banking on paradise islands around the world. Foreign governments ‘don’t want to believe that the problem of the ’Ndrangheta is their problem too’, he said. ‘They want to believe that their money doesn’t stink.’ Roberti was pessimistic about the chances of beating a global mafia in a world where politics was subordinate to business. ‘Business dictates and politicians follow, and this has facilitated the absorption of mafia money and influence around the world,’ he said. A world in which any idea of the common good had been replaced with greed and yawning inequality was one, said Roberti, whose gates were wide open to mafiosi. He called it the ‘Snow White syndrome’. ‘Nobody wants to look in the mirror,’ he said.
That kind of thinking could lead a prosecutor down a dark path, as Alessandra knew. A world where financial and political scandal had become depressingly routine was one in which it was all too easy to conclude that what the prosecutors were really fighting was the night in human nature. The ’Ndrangheta wouldn’t be able to corrupt business and politics unless businessmen and politicians already had the potential for it. Hadn’t the serpent admirers of Milan understood centuries ago that enlightenment and darkness walked hand in hand? And if family itself was a form of corruption, as the mafia posited, then what chance did legality have in any country, let alone Italy? ‘We can’t fight the ’Ndrangheta just by putting people in jail,’ said Alessandra. ‘We need a cultural change. We need a change in people’s minds.’ The prosecutors had no way to assist that effort. Barricaded behind their steel doors and bullet-proof windows, all they could do was watch.
None of that would diminish what had been accomplished in Calabria. The ’Ndrangheta was reeling. However nimble they were, the clans could not adjust to betrayal. ‘That’s an unacceptable issue for them,’ said Prestipino. ‘It’s unbearable. It threatens their entire existence.’ The effect of the Calabrian campaign would be felt for generations. Prestipino’s experience in Sicily had taught him that once a mafia’s invincibility cracked, the floodgates opened. In Sicily, hundreds of mafiosi had come forward to testify. ‘They never recovered,’ he said.
In the hill villages and small towns of Calabria, the ’Ndrangheta was still ruthlessly punishing disloyalty. In February 2012, a thirty-year-old man called Fabrizio Pioli who was having an extramarital affair with a mafioso’s daughter was beaten to death with sticks outside Rosarno. In August 2013, Francesca Bellocco and Domenico Cacciola, whose affair had scandalised two of Rosarno’s biggest crime families, disappeared. Such violent reprisals discouraged the flow of pentiti. But a steady stream was under way. By the end of 2015, the judiciary could count 164 pentiti and 29 witnesses who had testified against the ’Ndrangheta. That was hardly a cascade. But given that five years earlier even a single ’Ndrangheta pentito was almost unheard of, it felt significant.
Perhaps most remarkable was the number of ’Ndrangheta wives following the three women’s example: fifteen, more than had ever testified in four decades of Cosa Nostra trials. Di Bella’s youth court, in particular, had become a magnet for dissident ’Ndrangheta women. As sons – more than thirty by the end of 2016 – turned against their fathers, mothers chose their children over their husbands. ‘It’s a phenomenon we didn’t predict,’ said di Bella. ‘Many women realise these measures are not punishing their children but protecting them. They come secretly and ask us to send their children far away.’ One woman who wrote to di Bella in confidence in November 2015 was typical. Her husband had been convicted of murder. Her father, cousin and eleven-year-old nephew had all been killed. Her two teenage boys, she wrote, ‘are rebellious and violent, hanging around with bad guys, and fascinated by the ’Ndrangheta and guns. My son Rosario thinks jail is an honour that will win him respect. Please send my children away. The thought tears me apart but it is the only solution. In my family, there is no one – no one – I can trust.’
This first act of rebellion by an ’Ndrangheta mother sometimes grew into something more. Di Bella said the youth courts could add another ten ’Ndrangheta women to the fifteen who had testified in the adult courts. As a result of his success, di Bella’s programme was being rolled out across Italy. It helped that, at the same time, such global figures as Malala Yousafzai and Michelle Obama were making women’s emancipation a worldwide issue. Di Bella found himself wondering whether Italy might have finally found its way to a mafia-free future. ‘We’re opening up these disagreements inside families that were previously thought to be impenetrable,’ he said. ‘We’re a crack in the monolith, a light in the dark, a bright threat to the whole mafia family system.’
At times, the momentum was palpable. In June 2014, Pope Francis further splintered the mafia’s consensus when he travelled to Calabria and, before a crowd of a hundred thousand, excommunicated all mafiosi, denouncing the ’Ndrangheta as an example of ‘the adoration of evil and contempt for the common good’. Francis later followed his decree by condemning the Camorra in Naples and visiting pentiti at Paliano. The change felt seismic, grinned di Bella, and to the ’Ndrangheta more than anyone. ‘They can feel the ground moving under their feet,’ he said.
In their new offices in Milan and Rome, asked by their staff how it had been in the south, Alessandra and Giovanni would tell stories about Calabria.
Giovanni’s favourite tale was about hope. He’d been listening to wiretaps of the Cacciolas one day, he said, when he heard them discussing a family called the Secolos, whom the Belloccos were gradually ruining through loan-sharking. It reminded him of a conversation he had had with Concetta. She had told him about the bind the Secolos were in and how the matriarch, Stefania Secolo, had asked Concetta if she could help them. Concetta had asked her father to intervene but he had dismissed her pleas. Giovanni wanted to know more. ‘So I called Stefania Secolo in for a meeting,’ he said. ‘And in the days before she was due to come in, we also began listening to her phone. Her brothers and everyone else were saying to her: “Don’t say anything! Don’t honour the memory of someone who cannot come back to life! Don’t be a hero! Heroes die!” But on 28 February 2012, she came to me and told me exactly what happened and with her evidence, we arrested the Belloccos and put them in jail.’ Giovanni sighed. It was ‘such a beautiful story’, he said. ‘Stefania Secolo spoke out because her friend Concetta had reminded her how a person should behave and how they could be free. Her friend had been killed for it. Yet Stefania still spoke.’ From his five
years in Calabria, ‘that’s the day that stays with me.’ There was all the hope in the world in that one day, he said.
Alessandra was happy to talk about Giuseppina. But when people asked, she would often tell them the story of Giuseppina Multari. Just before Christmas in 2012, a few months after Giuseppina Pesce had resumed her cooperation and was preparing to testify against her family, a letter addressed to her arrived at the Palace of Justice in Reggio. The writer ‘expressed her support for Giuseppina and urged her to believe in the institutions of the state and the people around her’, said Alessandra. ‘The letter read: “Go for it! Be brave!”’ It was signed ‘Giuseppina Multari, protected witness’.
‘I was curious,’ said Alessandra. ‘Who was this woman who had sent this very special letter? She was in the witness programme and I’d never even heard of her.’ Alessandra searched through the Palace of Justice archives, looking for records of a Multari. Eventually she found a letter Multari had written to the carabinieri in 2006 and some statements she had made in 2008. Alessandra read how Giuseppina Multari was Concetta’s cousin by marriage. Her husband, Antonio Cacciola, was notorious in the ’ndrina for dipping into his own drug supplies. He was also having an affair. One night in November 2005, Multari and Antonio had a fight, Antonio stormed out – and Giuseppina never saw him again. ‘Officially it was a suicide but Giuseppina Multari was convinced his family had killed him,’ said Alessandra. ‘And after her husband’s death, she was kept at home by his family like a slave. She could not go out. She could not drop off her children at school. She was only allowed to go to the cemetery.’
One night, the Cacciola men left the house to go to a wedding. Finally alone, Giuseppina fled. She walked to the coast. ‘She was going to drown herself in the sea,’ said Alessandra. ‘But suddenly her phone went and it was her brother Angelo. She told him she was trying to kill herself. He came and found her.’ By the time Angelo arrived, his sister was suffering from hypothermia. He drove her to hospital. When Angelo asked her why she was trying to commit suicide, she told him about the Cacciolas and the beatings and how she was living in a virtual prison. ‘I am going to do something for you,’ Angelo replied. ‘I am going to help you.’
