Terrifying reign of the Mafia’s Don on the Don
To Aberdonians, he was the genial owner of a popular trattoria – until he was jailed for racketeering. Now his secret double life as kingpin of a feared Italian crime syndicate has taken a new – and shocking – twist
TO a generation of Aberdeen foodies, he was just Antonio the restaurateur. Immaculately dressed in jacket and tie and with a great half-tamed mane of thick hair, Antonio La Torre cut an exotic dash against the city’s grey stone backdrop.
As the personable padrone of Pavarotti’s trattoria on Union Terrace, his reputation for daring appeared to extend no further than bringing an authentic taste of his native Italy to Europe’s oil capital. In the 1980s and 90s his renowned seafood risotto was, diners would exclaim to their uninitiated friends, to die for.
If his customers knew then just how much more than fine food and wine Antonio La Torre had exported with him from his homeland, they may have chosen their words rather more carefully.
While satisfied regulars might have sung his praises to the rafters, the name of La Torre has always been spoken with fear in the back streets of Mondragone, the coastal town near Naples where he grew up.
There, people knew to respect the La Torres for their links to the Camorra, the Neapolitan version of the Mafia, and a brutal, blood-soaked reign of terror that has spanned decades.
What nobody could quite believe was that a kingpin of this feared crime syndicate was not to be found in a lavish, heavily guarded Italian villa, but living in complete obscurity 1,300 miles away in a modest flat above a butcher’s shop in a quiet suburb of Aberdeen.
And yet, for two decades, La Torre used this anonymous base to mastermind a moneylaundering empire which included restaurants, catering firms, pubs, fitness clubs, and betting shops across Scotland.
His audacious double life collapsed in spectacular fashion when the Italian authorities convicted the man dubbed ‘The Don on the Don’, in his absence, of a litany of offences including extortion, robbery, racketeering and fraud, and he was sent back to Italy to serve a 13-year sentence.
Now, however, his story has taken yet another sinister turn which casts his life in the Granite City in an even more disturbing light.
Last week, a series of raids led to his re-arrest in Italy on fresh allegations involving guns and threats to kill two anti-Mafia prosecutors.
Italian police allege wiretaps have uncovered evidence that the father of three hatched the plan with his younger brother, Augusto, who is serving 22 years for murder and extortion after being jailed in 2003.
AUGUSTO La Torre, now 55, was always regarded as the violent brother – as his unspeakable crimes bear vivid testimony. He claims to be a reformed character these days, although prosecutors remain doubtful. They also believe that Antonio, 62, has returned to a life of crime since he was released early from his sentence in 2014.
He is – and always has been, they argue – a very dangerous man. Which raises a deeply disturbing thought – while he was serving up fritto misto to his well-heeled clientele, could Antonio La Torre also have been arranging the murders of rivals and law enforcement officials from Aberdeen?
Secret wiretaps, say prosecutors, are key to proving the La Torres’ guilt and will show Augusto has continued to issue orders from behind bars.
In one taped conversation released to the Italian media, Augusto is heard telling Antonio that he ‘kills people’ and orders him to ‘call’ one of the targeted prosecutors, Alessandro D’Alessio. Authorities argue that was a veiled threat.
Such an apparent escalation in violence will be met with incredulity in the Granite City, where friends and former neighbours recall Antonio with fondness and former customers remember his effortlessly calm and efficient manner.
No less a figure than Stewart Spence, owner of the Marcliffe, Aberdeen’s only five-star hotel, described Antonio as ‘a really nice person and a very good restaurateur’, while one former regular said: ‘I always enjoyed eating there because they did things the proper Italian way, with big pepper mills and parmesan. It always had a very authentic atmosphere.’
This hardly seems like the conduct of a brutal Mafia ‘Godfather’ – but in the sleepy, rundown town of Mondragone it is a different story. Lying in the heart of the Campania region, this is the ‘home turf’ of the La Torre clan.
Here, the Camorra is said to have been responsible for more than 40 murders.
Antonio is the eldest of four children born to Francesco Tiberio La Torre and his wife Paolina.
Police sources say Francesco was a typical, old-school ‘capo’ in the mould of Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone character in the movie classic The Godfather.
He would sit in Piazza Umberto, the main square of Mondragone, and locals would doff their caps to him, asking for advice on troublesome children, a straying partner or a land dispute with a neighbour. But as he entered old age, Francesco handed over the family’s business to his sons Antonio and Augusto with just one piece of advice – don’t get involved with drugs.
One police source said: ‘He was into the usual rackets of protection, bribery, contracts and extortion but he didn’t touch drugs or guns. That part of the business changed when the power was handed over to his sons – Augusto was the strong arm and the killer while Antonio was the financial brains behind the clan.
‘They ran the family like a military operation and were one of the most ruthless in the area.’
Here, no business was conducted without the consent of the La Torre clan. No buildings were constructed, no contracts awarded and no business was safe unless a sum was paid to the La Torre family. Those who refused to pay were first targeted by a bomb, then shot in the legs.
People who ignored these warnings were killed.
For the La Torres, it was all strictly business – but it could also get personal.
One victim, local councillor Antonio Nugnes, took a stand against the La Torre clan after they demanded a payoff when a health clinic was built in Mondragone in the summer of 1990.
He refused to pay and was never seen again – until Augusto, now serving multiple life sentences, turned informer and revealed the location of his remains. Augusto told police that Nugnes was shot and his body tossed down a well, followed by a bomb which had caused the well to cave in.
The same year, the La Torre clan was also responsible for one of the bloodiest slaughters in Camorra history when gunmen from the family burst into a bar in the nearby town of Pescopagano and sprayed it with bullets, leaving five people dead and a 16-year-old boy confined to a wheelchair for life. The La Torres later called a local newspaper to claim responsibility.
A police source said: ‘They said it was because four of those who were killed were drug dealers and they didn’t want them selling drugs to kids in the area. That was a joke, because the real reason was they didn’t want them on their patch and they wanted to corner the market themselves.’
In another case, rival boss Alberto Beneduce and his driver Armando Miraglia were shot and their bodies found in a burned-out car after a falling-out over drugs.
There is little suggestion that such mob violence of the kind seen in TV series such as The Sopranos arrived in Aberdeen with La Torre.
It’s rather that the city, known internationally for its status as the oil capital of Europe, was used as a ‘safe haven’ to clean dirty money.
According to Dr Felia Allum of Bath University, who has written a book about the Camorra in Europe, the bloodletting stays in the ‘old country’ as the clan crosses foreign borders. ‘When
camorristi move abroad, they adopt a different strategy, which is predominantly a financial one,’ she said. ‘In Aberdeen it appears to have been money-laundering.’
She added: ‘We have these perceptions of Italian organised crime, with the big mama and blood all over the streets.
‘That is what we expect to find and, if we don’t find it, we think it means it is not there.’
What Antonio La Torre undoubtedly found in Aberdeen when he arrived there in 1984 was a place where his Mafia connections were not known. He was, after all, wanted in Italy on a string of charges including Mafia association and firearms offences.
There was a more prosaic reason for basing himself in the Granite City – his wife, Gillian Fraser, was from there. With their flat in Rosemount Place, the La Torres were an outwardly normal, respectable couple with a young family.
He opened two restaurants in the city – Sorrento and Pavarotti’s – but behind the scenes he set to work on a series of financial scams that netted his family a fortune in Italy. Anti-Mafia prosecutor Raffaele Cantone, who helped to bring the clan to justice, described Aberdeen – cash rich, yet peaceful and geographically removed not only from mainland Europe but from much of the UK – as the ‘perfect HQ’ for a crime syndicate to base operations.
La Torre’s idea was simple. Setting up phantom companies in Scotland and in Italy, he obtained bank loans to buy goods from the Campania region to export to the UK. As soon as the cash arrived in the phantom firms’ coffers, La Torre bankrupted them and diverted the money elsewhere.
That way, he received both the cash and the goods, which he then sold on.
Mr Cantone said: ‘It was a lucrative activity – goods had not been paid for and could be sold off in Scotland at prices well below those of the competition.
‘The clan’s activities in Scotland were extremely varied, from the exporting of frozen fish to the running of restaurants and to services connected to the world of oil refineries.
‘The clan was also involved in the illegal, but very lucrative, trading of high-powered cars.’
He also used the money to buy land for a car park in Aberdeen city centre and converted a building into flats, making a sixfigure profit.
La Torre’s carefree sojourn in Aberdeen was interrupted in 1996 when he was arrested in Amsterdam and returned to Italy, where he was jailed for four years on outstanding charges.
But he was free after 15 months and a legal order forcing him to remain in Italy was overturned by a tribunal, which ruled that he no longer presented any threat. So he returned to Aberdeen and carried on where he left off. While there were occasional visits to Italy to do business in person, most of it was conducted on the telephone using a series of code words.
Money was referred to as ‘sausages’ while banking deals were simply called ‘movements’.
Italian police turned up the heat on the La Torres in 2004 after Augusto – thought to be the head of the family – cooperated with detectives and admitted the Camorra’s involvement in more than 20 murders. He was jailed, leaving Aberdeen-based Antonio as the new ‘Godfather’ and the subject of intense scrutiny.
IT was a trip home to southern Italy which sealed his fate. After being caught issuing threats to shopkeepers, he fled back to Scotland as an Italian court sentenced him to 13 years for extortion, robbery, racketeering and fraud in his absence.
An international arrest warrant was granted in 2005 and La Torre went into hiding, moving between safe houses provided by friends in Dundee, Inverness and Stirling.
In his quest to avoid capture, he sold his businesses in Aberdeen but, ultimately, there was no escaping the net fast tightening around him.
Helped by Scottish police officers, Italian detectives arrested him in March 2005 and returned him to his native land to serve the sentence imposed in his absence.
His cousin and Pavarotti’s coowner, Michele Siciliano, gave himself up to anti-Mafia prosecutors a year later.
Confronted by allegations that he was responsible for ‘violent and threatening activities’ in Mondragone, La Torre would tell a court: ‘When that happened, I was in Aberdeen, in Scotland.’
After his arrest, his wife insisted he had led a crime-free life in Aberdeen, saying: ‘I believe he is innocent. He went to jail because of his association with his brother. He is paying for someone else’s bits and pieces.’
But she added: ‘I do not see him now. I do not write to him and I do not want to get involved. I am a hard-working woman from a decent family. I have not had so much as a parking ticket.’
The couple divorced in 2008 and Miss Fraser still lives and works in Aberdeen – and still declines to discuss her ex-husband’s business. The restaurants are long gone, but the whiff of scandal is harder to shift.
Four years ago, the preliminary results of an EU-funded study made waves when it suggested that the Camorra were still commercially active in Aberdeen even after Antonio’s arrest.
Dr Allum, whose book The Invisible Camorra: Neapolitan Crime Families Across Europe, was published last year, doubted the Camorra had much presence left in Scotland but said it was difficult to say how deeply La Torre had infiltrated the UK’s legitimate economy as his activities have never been fully investigated.
She added: ‘But since his extradition, it is unclear if this Camorra clan still has a presence in Aberdeen and what this may look like because there is not enough available intelligence.’
Only one thing is clear. Even as Antonio La Torre languishes in a remand cell in Parma awaiting his day in court, the Camorra’s numerous tentacles continue to stretch far and wide.
It would take a brave person to say the Don on the Don is done.