The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia. Alex Perry
even as it robbed and murdered them. Myth was how those inside the organisation were persuaded they were following a higher code and those outside it found themselves stumped by even the simplest questions, such as who was who. It was all an enormous lie. But it was a lie that explained how, almost without anyone noticing, a small group of families from the wild hills of Italy’s south had become the twenty-first century’s most formidable mafia.
Alessandra became fascinated by the intricacies of the deception. The ’Ndrangheta was an extraordinary puzzle, a multi-level mosaic. From transcripts of tapped phone calls and bugged conversations, she discovered ’Ndranghetisti had their own language, baccagghju, a slang based on Grecanico whose meaning was obscure to almost everyone but initiates. Even when they spoke Italian, ’Ndranghetisti used a code of metaphors to disguise their meaning. An ’Ndrangheta family in criminal partnership with another would describe itself as ‘walking with’ that other family. Rather than demand protection money outright, ’Ndranghetisti would request a ‘donation for the cousins’, an allusion to those men in jail whose families needed support. For a boss to describe a man as ‘disturbing’ or ‘troubling’ was for him to pass an oblique but unequivocal death sentence on him. The euphemisms could be highly contorted. Pizzo, the word for an extortion payment, was a term whose origin was the ‘piece’ of ground on which a nineteenth-century prisoner had slept in jail, which were ranked according to their proximity to the boss. Outside jail in the twentieth century, it had come to denote the tribute that a boss expected from real estate inside his territory.
Deciphering the true meaning of ’Ndrangheta speak was a constant struggle. ‘You have to become more perceptive, more capable of decrypting,’ Alessandra would tell her husband over dinner in their apartment. ‘Mafiosi very rarely make a direct threat. Instead, they send messages with a dual meaning.’ Even the smallest gesture could carry the utmost importance. ‘They can order a murder just by looking at someone from the prisoner cage in court,’ she said.
One of the ’Ndrangheta’s most audacious lies was its relationship with the church. The ’Ndrangheta was plainly an unChristian organisation. But since it came from the most Roman Catholic of lands, it simply insisted the opposite was true. It invoked the saints, especially the Madonna and Saint Michael, the Archangel. It mimicked prayer and church services in its rituals. And it co-opted and bred priests. At mass, some priests in ’Ndrangheta areas would exhort their congregants to resist outsiders. On saints’ days, they directed celebrants to bow to statues of the Madonna before the capo’s house while at Easter, the honour of bearing statues of Jesus, Saint John and the Virgin was reserved for picciotti. The most stunning example of the ’Ndrangheta subverting Christianity happened on 2 September every year when crowds of thousands gathered at the small town of San Luca in the Aspromonte mountains for the festival of the Madonna di Polsi. Among the pilgrims were hundreds of ’Ndranghetisti, including the heads of all the clans, who since at least 1901 had used the event as a cover for the ’Ndrangheta’s AGM, the gran crimine. In plain sight, the bosses would sit at a table laden with pasta and goat sauce, present their annual accounts – what they had earned, who they had killed – and elect a new capo crimine for the coming year. ‘The church is very responsible in all of this,’ Alessandra would say. ‘It’s guilty of some terrible, terrible, terrible things.’
Though the organisation found Christianity useful, Alessandra concluded that at its core the ’Ndrangheta was more of a blood cult. Blood was the bond between families that was the ’Ndrangheta’s strength. The act of spilling blood was also revered as a source of fearsome power. That had led to some unforgiving ’Ndrangheta feuds. The Duisberg massacre of 2007 – which police identified as an attack on an ’Ndrangheta initiation celebration when a burned picture of Saint Michael was found in the pocket of the dead eighteen-year-old – was the latest atrocity in a quarrel between two clans from San Luca. The feud had begun in 1991 when a group of boys from one family threw rotten eggs at the window of a bar owned by another. Including Duisberg, nine people had since died. Many more had been injured. To avoid being shot, ’Ndranghetisti in San Luca would hide themselves in the boot of a car just to travel 100 yards. Killings were timed for maximum horror. The year before Duisberg, a boss from one clan was paralysed by a bullet that passed through his spine as he stood on a balcony cradling his new-born son. In revenge, a rival boss’s wife was shot dead in her family home on Christmas Day.
Why the ruthlessness? For the ’Ndrangheta, the answer was easy: to instil fear and reap power. For individual ’Ndranghetisti, the question was more vexed. Why be an ’Ndranghetista if your fate was to spend lengthy stretches in prison, inflict unspeakable violence on your neighbours and, in all probability, die young? Alessandra decided it came back to the lie. The ’Ndrangheta had used its fantasies about honour, sacrifice, loyalty and courage to build a prison around its young men, trapping them in a claustrophobic sect based on blood and butchery. Pride in the ’Ndrangheta’s rural heritage even encouraged some ’Ndranghetisti to imbue their violence with a rustic aesthetic. Pigs often featured. A family targeted for intimidation might discover the throats of all its male pigs had been slit. On one occasion, the carabinieri recorded an ’Ndranghetista boasting how he beat another man unconscious, then fed his living body to his own pigs. The bloodthirstiness could also be literal. More than once, men loyal to an assassinated boss were observed to rush to the scene of the killing, dip their handkerchiefs in the departed capo’s blood and press the dripping cloth to their lips.
Alessandra realised that the ’Ndrangheta’s phoney cult of blood, family and tradition also accounted for its oppression of its women. That misogynist tyranny was real enough. Driving through small town Calabria, Alessandra rarely saw women out of doors and almost never unaccompanied. Nevertheless, it was with a sinking sense of inevitability that she read that the ’Ndrangheta’s conservative values were yet another affectation.
As long ago as 1892, the ’Ndrangheta had admitted two women highwaymen into its ranks. John Dickie found court records from the 1930s showing that the picciotti once had a pronounced personal and professional attachment to prostitution as both pimps and johns. But it seemed that the ’Ndrangheta later dispensed with prostitution because, though the trade was lucrative, it was built on qualities like infidelity, loose discipline and double standards which were inimical to order and control. The closed, buttoned-up, isolated family culture of traditional Calabria, on the other hand, was perfect for organised crime. Family ties were also how the ’Ndrangheta fashioned a global criminal octopus out of the pattern of Calabrian emigration to the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Latin America in the 1920s.
The more she read, the more Alessandra realised that the ’Ndrangheta’s true genius had been in co-opting the Italian family. The more the ’Ndrangheta made itself indistinguishable from traditional, family-based Calabrian culture, the more anyone thinking of leaving the organisation had to consider that they would be abandoning all they knew and all they were. For most, it would be impossible to see beyond it.
But by basing itself around family, the ’Ndrangheta hadn’t merely been bolstering secrecy and loyalty. It had understood that family itself was a source of corruption. The undeniable love of a mother for a son or a daughter for a father – these were the sorts of bonds that ensured even the most law-abiding broke the law. Fathers would advantage their families however they could. Children would never betray their parents. Mothers, above all, would do anything to protect their children and wreak terrible revenge on those that harmed them. The ’Ndrangheta was the family augmented and accentuated into a perfect criminal entity. It was, of course, a diabolical transformation. The use of children was plainly child abuse, while to pervert the family in a country like Italy was to poison the soul of a nation. But it was also a masterstroke. If family was the basis of its power, and family was the essence of Italy, then family was how the ’Ndrangheta could corrupt the country.
For such a clan endeavour to work, Alessandra was convinced women had to have a role. And from her reading of case files and investigations, she soon discovered they had several. Women acted as messengers between men on the run or in jail, passing along tiny, folded notes – pizzini – written in a code of glyphs and addressed by the use of a code of numbers. If a man was killed or inaccessible in jail, his widow could become his de facto replacement and continue the family