The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia. Alex Perry
ensured the future of the ’Ndrangheta by producing the next generation of ’Ndranghetisti, raising children with an unbending belief in the code of honour, vendetta and omertà, and a violent loathing of outsiders who, the mothers whispered, were weak and without shame with their loose talk and looser women. ‘Without women performing this role, there would be no ’Ndrangheta,’ said Alessandra. Secrecy and power were the goals. Male misogyny and female subservience, forced or even willing, were the means.
What confirmed women’s influence inside the ’Ndrangheta was that, though they were often the victims of its violence, they also instigated some of it. Alessandra was astonished to hear about one mother from the Bellocco clan who outdid all the men for bloodthirstiness. The carabinieri had managed to bug a family meeting convened to discuss how best to avenge the death of one of their men, killed in a clan feud. The men proposed killing every male member of the rival ’ndrina. Then a woman spoke up. ‘Kill them all,’ she said. ‘Even the women. Even the kids.’ The woman wanted an entire family of thirty wiped from the face of the earth.
There was no way any of it worked without the mothers, thought Alessandra. And to a resourceful and open-minded prosecutor, that held out an enticing possibility. In the twenty-first century, there had to be other Lea Garofalos out there, mafia mothers who were unhappy with their lives and the destiny of their children. The mother, the madonna, was a holy figure in Italy and the ’Ndrangheta had corrupted her and bent her to its criminal will. There had to be women inside the organisation who hated the way they were being used. It had to be possible for Alessandra to offer these knowledgeable figures a different life and persuade them to betray their husbands and fathers. And imagine if she could. ‘It would break the chain,’ she told her fellow prosecutors. ‘It would remove the guardians of the ’Ndrangheta’s traditions. If they took their sons too, then they would be removing future soldiers. It would be very special, very important. It would impoverish the entire mafia family. It would undermine the whole culture and the mindset.’
Alessandra was refining her theory. The way to destroy The Family, she was beginning to realise, was through its mamas.
In January 2010, Pignatone and Prestipino finally gave Alessandra the job she wanted.1 From the New Year, she would be lead anti-mafia prosecutor for Calabria’s west coast, taking in the villages on the Gioia Tauro piano, the town of Rosarno and the port of Gioia Tauro. She would report directly to Pignatone and Prestipino. She would also have a second prosecutor as her junior, Giovanni Musarò, a thirty-seven-year-old on his first big posting.
Like Alessandra, Musarò was attracted by Pignatone’s and Prestipino’s dynamism. ‘I was very young, they had this huge experience from Palermo and they brought with them a completely different way of working,’ he said. Borrowing from Falcone and Borsellino, the old model of prosecutors as ‘lonely heroes’ was out, said Giovanni. The new watchword was collaboration. ‘They put a great effort into creating a team, sharing information with colleagues and behaving like a democracy,’ he said. Each member brought different strengths. ‘Alessandra was driven by ethics and very determined. Pignatone had a great ability to predict events. Prestipino was very clever and very pragmatic. He knew all his investigations and all his investigators. He was able to go to each of us and say: “Maybe go to Alessandra and you’ll find this. Or maybe go here and ask this investigator, and they’ll help you with this.”’
For Alessandra, the prize was her new territory. Palmi, on the southern end of the Gioia Tauro estuary, was where the ’Ndrangheta was born. A century and a half later, the piano remained the heart of the empire. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at the place, thought Alessandra. The ’Ndrangheta was richer than most global corporations and in Rosarno even the most minor ’Ndrangheta family was thought to have three, four or five million euros stashed away. Yet somehow in a country of amber cornfields, olive hills and blue mountains sprinkled with red-roofed villages and magnificent Roman and Renaissance cities, the ’Ndrangheta had contrived to make their towns into verrucae of unkempt, concrete ugliness. Touring Rosarno for the first time, Alessandra felt like she’d arrived after an apocalypse. Everything looked scorched. The trees were blackened and their leaves orange and brittle. The single park was just chalky pebbles and dry spiky weeds. The streets, whose asphalt resembled spilled lava, were strewn with refuse. Everything was covered with crude graffiti. And the town was dead. Shops were shut or deserted. Many of the breezeblock houses were unfinished and empty, their gardens building sites and their glassless windows as vacant as the eyes of a skull. In the main piazza, no one sat on the benches, no one ate in the restaurants. To one side, a children’s playground consisted of a rusted swing, a broken slide and a shattered piece of concrete littered with wrappers, cigarette butts and broken glass. Alessandra could feel it. The fear. The omertà.
Unpicking the paradox of how this desperate place could be home to such a rich criminal empire was key to the story of the ’Ndrangheta’s modern rise. It began at 3 a.m. on 10 July 1973, when a small gang of ’Ndrangheta toughs from the villages around Gioia Tauro kidnapped John Paul Getty III, the sixteen-year-old grandson of the billionaire John Paul Getty, from outside his home in Piazza Farnese in central Rome. The gang held the boy in the Calabrian mountains for five months. His father, who had been in a heroin-induced haze at the time his son was taken, initially thought the kidnapping was a hoax staged by his son to obtain money. The kidnappers called the family patriarch, John Paul Getty Snr, and threatened to cut off his grandson’s fingers unless they received a ransom of $17 million. The elder Getty refused, arguing: ‘If I pay one penny now, I’ll have fourteen kidnapped grandchildren.’ To press their case, the gang cut off John Paul III’s left ear and sent it to a newspaper in Rome. It was accompanied by a note threatening that the second ear would be arriving in ten days unless the ransom was paid. Getty Snr relented and paid $2.2 million, the maximum his accountants advised him was tax-efficient. He loaned the final ransom balance of $700,000 to his son, the boy’s father, at 4 per cent interest.
John Paul Getty III never recovered from his abduction or his grandfather’s indifference. He died at fifty-four, an alcoholic and drug addict in a wheelchair, having been crippled at the age of twenty-five by a near-lethal combination of Valium, methadone and cocktails. But for the west coast ’Ndrangheta, these grubby beginnings were the seeds of an empire. They went on to stage 150 more kidnappings. In Gioia Tauro, they used the ransom money to buy construction trucks. ’Ndrangheta men inside local government ensured these trucks were contracted for the building of a steel plant near Gioia Tauro port. When the government abandoned that project as uneconomic, the trucks went to work on a bigger site: the expansion of the port itself.
State construction contracts – building motorways, high-speed rail links, and even wind and solar farms, while loan-sharking at extortionate rates to force rivals out of business – went on to become a giant, profitable ’Ndrangheta business in its own right. By the time Alessandra was posted to the west coast, a project to widen and repair the arterial highway running from western Calabria up Italy’s coast to Salerno had somehow ended up costing the state $10 billion in three decades for what was still little more than a succession of roadworks.2 The biggest earner, however, was Gioia Tauro port itself. Once its expansion was finished, the port was the largest container facility in Italy and the sixth largest on the Mediterranean, with a capacity to load and unload millions of containers a year on a quay that ran for three and a half kilometres and was backed by an avenue of towering cranes. The ’Ndrangheta, as the only power in the area, had total control. The group ‘taxed’ every container passing through the port at $1.50 a time. It charged the port operators fees amounting to half their profits, an annual income that ran into several billion dollars. It used the port to send weapons around the world. And in the 1980s and 1990s, during la mattanza, it was through Gioia Tauro that the ’Ndrangheta built its cocaine empire.
But aside from a single street of new houses in San Luca nicknamed Via John Paul Getty in a small town to the south, there was no sign of the ’Ndrangheta’s wealth. To the ’Ndrangheta,