Australia—like Canada— has become such a ’ndrangheta colony that an independent Crimine has been established there, divided into six mandamenti, or districts, that coordinate directly with the Polsi Crimine, taking part in their decisions. Even the codes for affiliation and promotion to higher ranks have made their way to Australia. The illegal activities it engages in change over time, but the codes remain the same, regardless of where they are. Its strength, which allows it to take full advantage of globalization, rests on a double tie: on the one hand blood and homeland, on the other disciplined by immaterial bonds of rules and rites.
The ’ndrine began arriving in Australia, along with honest immigrants, in the early 1900s, then in earnest after World War II. They set about reinvesting dirty money from Italy in legal activities, and began cultivating cannabis, for which there was an endless amount of space, fertile terrain, and favorable climactic conditions. Then cocaine arrived, and all the families there—originally from Platì, and as well as from Sinopoli and Siderno, which are tied to the powerful Canadian branch—got in on the business.
Nicola Ciconte kept up his close contact with Vincenzo Barbieri, who, according to investigations, sent him another 500 kilos of cocaine, this time from Italy. But mostly he laundered money. For most of his life his official job has been as a broker, a financial broker. So Barbieri turned to him not only to get cocaine into the Southern Hemisphere, but also—and more important—money. Ciconte, who was not always reliable, was another contact who often caused problems for U Ragioniere. But in the end he allegedly bounced the money through Hong Kong and some other offshore channels so as to launder and deposit it clean in Australian, and even New Zealand, banks. The Calabrian tree doesn’t seem to touch the minor Pacific islands. Maybe because there are so few banks there.
Vincenzo Barbieri was killed in March 2011, in a classic mafia ambush. A gray Audi A3 pulled up alongside him late one afternoon, right as he stepped out of a tobacco shop. Two killers, their faces covered, got out of the car and unloaded a 7.65 caliber and a sawed-off shotgun into him. The shotgun wasn’t to kill, but rather to tear the victim’s flesh apart in a sign of contempt. They shot him in the head and got back in the car, the motor still running. Panicked shopkeepers lowered their shutters; passersby ducked into coffee shops as much to avoid the danger of seeing too much as to escape the shooting. A well-oiled response, a primitive instinct, even though there hadn’t been any executions in San Calogero for quite a while. Barbieri hadn’t lived there for years, yet they killed him in the center of his hometown, right in those narrow, twisting alleyways, without worrying about the people on the street or the video cameras trained on them. The burned-out car was found four days later, a few miles away.
Who wanted Barbieri dead? Or who more than anybody else? Why right then? For the ’ndrangheta, U Ragioniere had committed plenty of errors. Cocaine importation, through Fuduli and his companies, had already been marred by fuckups and foul play. But whenever possible, “men of honor” prefer to solve conflicts with money, which is much quieter and more useful than lead. The answer lies in Barbieri’s expansion, with the help of his accomplice Francesco “Fatty” Ventrici, into another wealthy region in northern Italy, the Emilia Romagna.
Business deals are easier to negotiate there, and the lifestyle is much more free and relaxed. Nobody there objects if you build a big rustic villa for your family, hold meetings in your rec room, or enjoy the garish luxury of your living room, watched over and blessed by a huge oil painting of your father. When evening comes you drive the half hour from the new development in the countryside to the old town to satisfy the rules of your house arrest. Which is what Ventrici does. They don’t even scowl at you if you register your fleet of Porsches, Mercedeses, and Maseratis in someone else’s name, or if you prefer to live right in the center of Bologna, in a fancy penthouse on Via Saffi. Which is what Barbieri does. When the place is searched in June 2009 and he’s found with €118,295 in cash, he is arrested for illegal financial transactions. It’s the first stumbling block in many years. It reminds the Bologna magistrates of Barbieri’s first arrest in Emilia. While under judicial supervision he had spent several months in room 115 of the Grand Hotel Baglioni, the only five-star hotel in the capital of Emilia Romagna.
Barbieri played the wealthy southern Italian gentleman, taking advantage of the trust he inspired, while Ventrici played the complementary figure of the nouveau riche who is still a hard worker, a simple man at heart. Neither one fit the stereotype of the mafioso. Besides, it’s not all that remarkable, even in Emilia, that all sorts of people turn out to be loaded. So the two of them went on buying, buying, buying, hatching ever more ambitious expansion projects. Ventrici controled the Futur Program, a real estate agency in San Lazzaro di Savena affiliated with Gabetti (a major real estate chain). Barbieri, without even talking price, invested in the King Rose Hotel in Granarolo, a three-star hotel with fifty-five rooms conveniently located near the Bologna convention center. Then shares in the clothing company Cherri Fashion, the Montecarlo café in Via Ugo Bassi, real estate, land.
Even though they were much better off far from Calabria and its rules, above all that unspoken rule that—as in Colombia—envy is more deadly than cancer, they always maintained their ties to the homeland. It wasn’t a question of nostalgia but of business. Francesco Ventrici controlled M5, a construction company he employed in Emilia as well, the Union Frigo Transport Logistic, and the VM Trans (which had replaced Ventrans after it was confiscated thanks to Operation Decollo). All registered in Calabria, even though the road haulage company had a branch in Castel San Pietro, in the province of Bologna. His trucks meant he was still a force to contend with. Ventrans had an exclusive deal with Lidl, a multinational deep-discount supermarket company in Calabria. The confiscation of the company did not prevent VM Trans from taking over that contract. But in 2009 a problem arose. Lidl decided to use other carriers as well—a question of costs. “It’s either us or them,” Ventrici screamed, and halted pickups and deliveries. Police reports started piling up, fast and furious. Drivers beaten up, verbal abuse that went from broken legs to death threats. “You’re not unloading this truck, your boss has to come do it, that way we’ll burn him alive . . . your coworkers have already been warned . . .”
The first company turned down the job. Lidl tried again with an Umbrian company, paying armed guards to accompany the drivers to Calabria. But the violence didn’t stop. In the end, as Decollo ter revealed, the Lidl managers met with the owner of VM Trans in Massa Lombarda, in the province of Ravenna. Ventrici, playing the part of the big boss, declared, “You want a war, but in Calabria not even the pope would win a war.” And in case his words weren’t enough, that same day the drivers supplying a supermarket in Taurianova were attacked by armed assailants. The two pistol-wielding ambassadors fled as soon as they saw security guards arrive. But Lidl Italia had had enough. Too many complications, too many losses. So they reestablished an exclusive relationship with Ventrici until he was indicted for this story as well. According to the magistrates, the criminal businessman was able to break Lidl, forcing it, through the use of the violent behavior and threats described above, “to reconsider its organizational strategies, and to renounce the assured economic advantages, including those of competitive prices, that would have resulted from using multiple carriers to transport goods to Calabria.”
Fatty enjoyed making sensational, exaggerated statements during more important negotiations as well. He works with a family, he’s not a gypsy, and in twenty years of trafficking cocaine, he’s never once paid €30,000 a kilo. This is the substance of his retort to the Colombians who came to see him in his rustic villa in Emilia Romagna to talk about the differences of opinion blocking 1,500 kilos of cocaine in Ecuador. The German pilot, Michael Kramer, who had already pocketed a €100,000 advance, refused at the last minute to take the load to Lubiana, Slovenia. Ventrici shit his pants again, fearing that his about-face was a sign that
he’d somehow hired a DEA infiltrator. Then Barbieri was killed, and Ventrici decided to interrupt his first big drug deal organized without U Ragioniere. The magistrature took care of the rest: From January to August 2011 it bombarded him with arrest warrants and seizure orders, from Catanzaro to Bologna.
Vincenzo Barbieri, like his accomplice or ex-accomplice, had organized an import circuit with close relatives and personally recruited accomplices. He wanted to do things in style, and even got himself an agent in Colombia, a young man who’d already started a family and had opened a restaurant. In the department of Meta, where many cocaine fields and “kitchens” had moved, the restaurant’s name—La Calabrisella—which evokes not only a popular folk song but also the marijuana grown in Calabria—has a bitter, sarcastic taste. But things didn’t go smoothly for him this time either. In September 2010 a load of 400 kilos was seized in Colombia, and in November the same thing happened to an entire ton that had landed in Gioia Tauro, inside agricultural trailer frames. Barbieri, who was varying the cover-up methods he’d tried out with Fuduli, had another 1,200 kilos of pure cocaine sent from Brazil in cans of palm hearts. The container was seized at the port of Livorno on April 8, 2011, by which date the buyer was already dead.
U Ragioniere managed to set off a scandal of unprecedented proportions even from the grave. It was the first time his name echoed all over the media without disappearing quickly into the burial mound of mafia news. The DDA of Catanzaro opened a new line of inquiry within the mother investigation, Decollo Money. The public learned about it on July 29, 2011. In December 2010, Vincenzo Barbieri allegedly summoned the manager of a San Marino bank to the King Rose Hotel in Granarolo and gave him two suitcases filled with cash: €1.3 million ended up in an account in his name at the Credito Sammarinese bank, and a comparable amount was subsequently deposited in an account in the name of one of Barbieri’s relatives, transferred thanks to the mediation of some notable individuals in the Calabrian town of Nicotera. But that’s not all. Thanks to the economic crisis the bank was facing serious liquidity problems, and so was up for sale for the sum of €15 million. Credito Sammarinese was already negotiating with a Brazilian bank, but U Ragioniere allegedly promised to put up the same amount, thus raising the prospect of a ’ndrangheta takeover. The public prosecutor, assisted in his investigation by San Marino magistrates, asked for the indictment of former manager Valter Vendemini, the president and founder Lucio Amati, as well as the Calabrian middlemen and the holders of the still active accounts. In the end, Credito Sammarinese was forced into receivership.
A suspicious activity report, or SAR, was sent, but too late: on January 31, 2011, five days after the Catanzaro magistrates had Barbieri arrested again in the context of Decollo ter.
Barbieri was ambushed just before he was able to return to Bologna. It’s thought that they feared he would expose the whole tree, in particular the Mancuso ’ndrina, that all the newspapers and TV news dragged in every time there was a story that had to do with him. The sensational seizure in Gioia Tauro in November 2010, which could not fail to trigger inquiries, severely shook the entire organization’s business serenity. Moreover, it is not unlikely that in Calabria they knew about his San Marino bank plot and thought it a huge mistake to open an account in one’s own name in an offshore paradise just sixty miles from home.
The press painted Vincenzo Barbieri and Francesco Ventrici in increasingly superlative terms: superpowerful bosses, top narco-trafficking brokers, incredibly dangerous criminals. Sure, they imported tons of drugs. But from close up they look pretty insignificant. Greedy bunglers with only average intelligence. Duped by their own victim. It was merely the use of violence that gave them strength. That and—much more important—cocaine. Cocaine money. Cocaine money ready to buy up failing banks. Cocaine money transformed into trucks, ready to supply an entire supermarket chain, and thus be turned into millions more in profit. With money laundering you keep on earning. It’s not that complicated.
• • •
What hurts me the most, though, is knowing that their mediocre affairs found more space, filled more pages, than other stories. Extraordinary stories like Bruno Fuduli’s. When Operation Decollo went public there were only a few passing mentions in the Italian press of an unnamed infiltrator. Then, years later, a few more lines when El Mono made news with his disclosures from a United States prison. Nothing more. Invisible. Invisible, like almost everyone who pays with silence for words offered in the name of justice. Who pays for the affront they caused that tree watered by fear and fed by business deals? Them. Not the others. Not men like Ventrici and Barbieri, who move in and out of prison as if playing a real-life game of Snakes and Ladders. And who then serve most of their time in their own homes, in the place where they chose to live, surrounded by their loved ones, integrated into society. With the chance to cultivate their interests, legal and illegal, with oodles of money to invest or spend for whatever they desire or need. Only killers and those bosses condemned to a special regime or forced to reconcile commanding and living in hiding are worse off than those who helped to denounce them.
But they have respect.
Respect. A word tainted by the use mafias all around the world make of it. Aped by the most disastrous, ferocious youth gangs. Respecto. The maras in Central America shout it when they beat a new affiliate bloody. Respect. Fat gansta rappers loaded with gold chains and surrounded by girls wiggling their hips utter it. Respect, brother. Yet this desecrated and ridiculed word continues to mean something essential. The certainty of possessing—by right—a place in the world, a place among other people, wherever you are. Even in the void of an underground hole or the vacuum of solitary confinement.
Yet those who choose to side with the law often lose even that certainty. And then what’s left? Can the decision to choose liberty turn into the most radical solitude? Can an act of justice be repaid with unhappiness? Informers become invisible. Like ghosts. Like the shades of Lake Averno, the mythical entrance to the underworld. I think about it a lot when I try to come to terms with those in Italy who accuse me of having received too much public attention. Nothing replaces the friends lost along the way, the cities left behind, the colors, tastes, voices, the use of a body that can move freely, walk, sit on a wall and stare at the sea, feel the wind through its clothes. Public attention can weigh on you like a prison. But it is also related to respect. Attention lets you know that your existence counts for other people. It tells you you exist.
Bruno Fuduli testifies at the trial. He shows his face to his loan sharks and the business partners imposed on him, but also to the Colombian narcos with whom he had become friends. Then he returns to the shadows. He is invited to appear on an investigative TV program on the port of Gioia Tauro. The appointment is at the Salerno train station, chosen at random because they can’t reveal where he lives or film his face. They stop to do the interview along the waterfront. Bruno is wearing pants and a white, raw linen shirt. He looks like a burly giant compared to the reporter and the girl in sneakers who accompanies him. He has a deep voice, like a baritone, and he appears calm the whole time. He doesn’t lose his composure when he reveals he’s afraid and suffers from insomnia. He doesn’t betray the least emotion as he talks about the ten men armed with pistols and machine guns who watched over him when he was held hostage in Colombia. Finally, as if mentioning an inescapable fact, he says that something will happen to him someday. They will look for him, if they aren’t doing so already, and sooner or later, they’ll kill him. The ’ndrangheta may wait fifteen or even twenty years, but it doesn’t forget. Just a few minutes to sum up a life. A body without a face on the screen. And then, once again, nothing. Until two years later.
In early December 2010, the DDA of Catanzaro launched Operation Overloading, which would have brought to an end a drug-trafficking investigation like so many others were it not for the fact that it happened to involve some anomalous figures: a Carabinieri colonel in service in Bolzano
and a young, very wealthy real estate agent in Rome who is called Pupone, or Big Baby, like Totti, in the wiretappings. The first was involved in picking up some suitcases at Fiumicino Airport and then delivering them to their addressees in Rome. The second, of helping to finance loads of cocaine, thanks to his friendship with Antonio Pelle, nephew of the recently deceased boss ’Ntoni Gambazza.
The first customers for that round of imports were two allied ’ndrine on the Tyrrhenian side of the province of Cosenza—minor families, despite how formidable they were. Their initial objective was to supply their own zones and still have enough of a surplus to sell in the north. But they wanted to do things right. So they hired Bruno Pizzata, the best narco in San Luca. Pizzata, a real pro, insisted that for the moment it was too slow, too complicated, and too inefficient to send the lots by ship. So he decided on air delivery from Venezuela and Brazil to Amsterdam, Rome, or Spain, making use of “mules” who swallow drug-filled pellets or carry false-bottomed suitcases. Pizzata was constantly traveling between South America, Spain, Holland, and Germany. He’d spent a good part of his life in Germany, and that was where he took refuge after having escaped arrest during Overloading; until February 2011, when they found him eating in the pizzeria La Cucina in Oberhausen, a city very close to Duisburg, the 2007 site of the ’ndrangheta massacre.
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