Mafia traitor faces wrath of the Mob in ‘maxi-trial’
WHEN former gangster Luigi Bonaventura agreed to be a star witness in a mega-trial against hundreds of members of the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s richest and most powerful mafia, he knew he would have to go into hiding.
He had spent years working as an assassin, cocaine smuggler and gunrunner under his father before his wife encouraged him to quit the secretive group that controls the bulk of cocaine flowing into Europe.
It would involve betraying his family, and he expected his father to be furious. Salvatore Bonaventura had spent years training his son to be the equivalent of a child soldier in the ’Ndrangheta’s base, the rugged mountain villages of Calabria, southern Italy.
“My father was violent and cruel to teach me the ’Ndranghetista ways. I grew up learning to kill or be killed. You don’t have a childhood,” Mr Bonaventura said. “To be born into a mafia family is to be destined to become a mafioso.”
Salvatore’s reaction was typical of the Godfather- style group, in which loyalty is preserved at any cost: he tried to have his son murdered.
“The family that manages to kill one of their own to protect the ’Ndrangheta is seen as upholding the highest values,” said Mr Bonaventura, who shot his would-be killer in the ensuing public gun fight. “It is as if you say: ‘I love the ’Ndrangheta more than my own family.’”
It is these values that public prosecutors in Calabria are attempting to break during the biggest court case against a mafia group in Italy since the Maxi Trial against Sicily’s Cosa Nostra in the 1980s.
After years of investigations, a twoyear trial will see some 355 people with alleged ties to organised crime – including Freemasons, police captains and a former senator from Silvio Berlusconi’s party – in the dock for everything from attempted murder to extortion.
Although numbers are hard to come by, the ’Ndrangheta is thought to be responsible for hundreds of deaths in Italy and beyond over the decades.
Some of the more colourful accusations include leaving dead dolphins on doorsteps as an intimidation tactic and burying victims in tarmac.
Around 70 people who opted for fasttrack trials in return for more lenient sentences were convicted in November, but the biggest fish are yet to come.
They include Luigi “the Uncle” Mancuso, 67, considered the head of the most powerful ’Ndrangheta clan at the heart of the trial. To accommodate the 600 or so lawyers involved, it is being held in a bunker specially built at a cost of €4.7million (£3.9million).
For Mr Bonaventura, becoming a pentito (mob turncoat) was his only way out of his life of violence. After admitting to crimes including murder and serving 10 years in prison, he was released in 2018.
He has testified against hundreds of powerful mafiosi, including members of the Mancuso clan, in numerous court cases, of which the so-called RinascitaScott trial is the latest.
He says his collaboration with the government is partly to seek justice for a childhood friend, Franco. After winning an ’Ndrangheta “duel to first blood”, a violent fight with sticks and knives, he drank some of Franco’s blood and they swore to protect one another.
When Franco was later killed in a mafia feud, Mr Bonaventura sought revenge on the system that had let his “blood brother” down: “I have to respect the pact I made, to avenge him from the one who killed him.”
But it was also a way to protect his family, particularly his son, from being sucked into a mafia way of life that goes back to his grandfather, infamous crime boss Luigi Vrenna, who was imprisoned over an ambush that killed a 10-year-old boy and his older brother in 1973.
These days, the ’Ndrangheta prefer to operate in the shadows, relying on corruption rather than murder to run one of the biggest drug-smuggling operations in Europe, with tentacles reaching as far as Australia and Canada.
The trial has not stopped them yet – on New Year’s Eve, more than three tons of cocaine was found hidden in a shipment of bananas in the port of Gioia Tauro, an ’Ndrangheta stronghold.
But lead prosecutor Nicola Gratteri hopes that just as the Cosa Nostra faded away after the 1980s Maxi Trial, this will mark the beginning of the end for the ’Ndrangheta.
“I have known the mafia since I was a child because I was hitchhiking to school and I often saw dead bodies on the road,” he said. “I thought: when I grow up, I want to do something so that this won’t happen again.”
Others are less sure, however. “Hope is one thing, history and legacy is another,” said Anna Sergi, professor of criminology at the University of Essex.
“The trial will send some people to jail … but it won’t fix the social roots of the mafia phenomenon,” she added.
“Every trial is a drop in the ocean, and in order to see the effects we need a lot of drops.”
‘The family that kills one of their own to protect the ’Ndrangheta is seen as upholding the highest values’