INVESTIGATION: revenge of the Mafia wives

They’ve slept beside the most dangerous men on Earth. They’ve been abused and threatened, and now they’ve had enough. William Langley meets the women bringing the Calabrian Mafia to account.

Amid the warm, fragrant hills of Calabria, deep in southern Italy, some of the most dangerous men on Earth are sitting in steel cages, their tough, sun-bronzed faces betraying little beyond a leisurely contempt for the proceedings around them.

This heavily-guarded courthouse in the old spa town of Lamezia Terme is the setting for the biggest Mafia trial in Italian history, and if the defendants don’t look too worried it is because the past record of such prosecutions suggests a high chance of getting off. The ancient codes of omertà (silence) and clan loyalty have long protected the capi (bosses) of organised crime, feeding their sense of invincibility and frustrating efforts to bring them to justice.

This time, though, the authorities believe they have a secret weapon – a group of women who have turned their backs on the Mafia, and come forward to tell the grisly truth about its activities. There are ex-wives, girlfriends and mothers, most of them raised in the same shadowy world as the Mafiosi, and their emergence may signal the biggest threat the Mob has ever faced.

“These women have lost their fear,” says Nicola Gratteri, head of the investigation which led to the trial. “They are coming out of the darkness. It is a turning point.”

Simple, brutal lives

Behind the beguiling veneer of a simple life among vineyards and olive groves, Calabria’s Mafia has become perhaps the richest, most ruthless and powerful crime syndicate on Earth. Interpol, the cross-border police agency, estimates that it controls almost three-quarters of the European cocaine trade, runs arms to rogue regimes around the world, is heavily involved in rackets from modern slavery to cybercrime, has swindled billions from big businesses and governments, often using bogus development projects, and has a presence in more than 50 countries, including Australia.

While other Mafia clans – notably the Sicilian – bask in a high-profile notoriety, embellished by books and Hollywood movies, the ’Ndrangheta (‘Men of Honour’ in Calabrian dialect) tend to melt into their landscape, living in close family clusters in one of Italy’s poorest but most beautiful regions.

“You could go to one of these hill villages,” says Alessanda Dino, a professor of sociology, specialising in organised crime, at the University of Palermo, “and see a man in simple work clothes wheeling a cart of lemons to the market square, and you would never imagine that this man is at the centre of a global crime network. In a way, their lives are their alibis. People ask: ‘How could these folk, sitting under the trees drinking their aperitivos, be running something so big and sophisticated?’ But that is their brilliance.”

The role of women in the Mafia has long been one of enforced acquiescence. Raised in a centuries-old culture of insularity and resistance to change, few have questioned the ’Ndrangheta’s activities or its sacred codes of loyalty. But in recent years, things have begun to change. The authorities have been using specially trained female investigators in the hope of winning the confidence of women who may be wavering in their

allegiance to the clan. Protection measures and immunity deals have been offered, but the biggest factor appears to be a belated realisation among the ’Ndrangheta women that there might be a better life outside.

“Women are crucial to the Mafia because they ensure its continuity,” says Felia Allum, an Italian documentary maker, who specialises in organised crime, “firstly by having sons who follow in the tradition, but also by keeping things going when their men are in jail or on the run. And they help to feed the illusion of families living ordinary lives. Without the women, the Mafias would not exist, and that’s something the authorities have been working on.”

Yet the old ties do not break easily. Especially when they are reinforced by the threat of brutal retribution. There are stories of ’Ndrangheta women being forced to drink hydrochloric acid – dying in agony – merely on the suspicion of being pentiti (informers). Their place is in the background, modestly dressed and dutiful. Infidelity, even to a deceased husband, is punishable by severe beating.

The female gang buster

One of the first investigators to penetrate this cult-like world was Alessandra Cerreti, one of a new breed of Italian female gang busters. Born in Sicily and well aware of the

Mob’s fearsome power, Alessandra,

51, realised that a key vulnerability of the ’Ndrangheta was likely to be its women.

“I reasoned that, deep down, every mother wants the best life for her children,” she says. “Most of these women were living captive lives. Suppose we could show them something better. A woman who could see a way out would be hard to stop. Rather than trying to break into their world, the idea was to encourage them into ours.”

Alessandra, an energetic brunette with a taste for stylish dressing, has made painful personal sacrifices to wage her fight against the Mafia.

She and her husband, a senior carabinieri (police officer), have lived for years under protection, and she says they decided against having children because “anything could happen to us”.

The first cases Alessandra brought to court provoked outrage and disbelief from the hardened mafiosi. “They were shouting things like: ‘We’re not answering questions from a woman’, and demanding a male prosecutor,” Allesandra recalls. “And then they found that the judge was a woman too, and they were shocked, and I thought that it was very revealing of the attitudes to women in their circles.”

Alessandra’s plan to break open the Mafia faced other obstacles. From its 18th century origins as a kind of bandit militia, the ’Ndrangheta has never operated as a single organisation, but as a loose federation of roughly140 families scattered across the ‘toe’ of Italy, with each claiming rights to its local area. These families – known as ndrine – provide members with a complete support system, but only in exchange for absolute loyalty.

“This co-opting of family demonstrates a kind of genius,” writes Alex Perry, the London-based author of The Good Mothers, a book about Mafia women. “The ’Ndrangheta understood that a family itself could be a source of corruption. The love of a mother for a son, or of a daughter for a father, could persuade the most law-abiding to abandon their principles. And, since the ’Ndrangheta made itself indistinguishable from Calabria’s traditional, family-centred culture, any woman thinking of leaving had to fear abandoning everything she had ever known.”

Where would a pentite go? Police protection counts for little when local law enforcement is riddled with agents on the Mafia payroll. Alessandra saw that a national witness protection program was needed – similar to the American FBI’s. If she could offer both

safety and the prospect of a new life, there just might be takers.

There are stories of Mafia women being forced to drink hydrochloric acid – dying in agony – merely on the suspicion of being informers.

I see, I hear, I speak

The ’Ndrangheta had already made its attitude to informers clear with the ghastly murder of 35-year-old Lea Garofalo, a local capo’s girlfriend, who went to the police hoping to extricate her young daughter, Denise, from the clan. The Mobsters tracked her down, kidnapped her off a street in Milan, and tortured her for several days before killing her and dissolving her body in acid. Although her disappearance had gone largely unreported, the discovery of Lea’s dreadful fate, two years later, triggered a national outcry and anti-mafia demonstrations under the slogan “Vedo, Sento, Parlo” (I see, I hear, I speak).

Still, Alessandra and her mostly female team persevered. They worked behind the steel doors and bulletproof windows of an office in Reggio Calabria, the regional capital, and travelled when necessary with police guards. She remembers being dismayed by the widespread acceptance of the Mob’s role in local life, and the belief that nothing would ever change. Even in police and judicial circles, there was a sense that little could be done.

“So we worked hard on the women,” she remembers. “We won their trust, these wives, sisters, daughters, because as women ourselves we speak the same language. For these women, collaboration with justice was an act of love towards their children, so that the boys do not become soldiers of the clan and that the girls do not marry a mafioso.”

An early breakthrough came in 2010 with the arrest, on relatively minor charges, of Giuseppina Pesce, wife of the local Mob boss in Rosarno, a port town that handles many of the ’Ndrangheta’s cocaine shipments. Like many Mafia women, Guiseppina had been born into one clan and married off in her late teens to another. Choice and compatibility had little to do with this procedure, which was designed solely to strengthen alliances.

When she was picked up, aged 31, she was in a lot more trouble than the police knew. While her husband, Salvatore, was serving a prison sentence, she had begun an affair with another man. “The first time I had truly loved someone,” she would say later. The story had leaked out, and in keeping with Mafia tradition, Guiseppina was looking at a ritual death sentence. Offered the chance of a new life and identity, she decided to co-operate.

Her testimony provided a rare firsthand account of life as a Mob wife: “I never had any freedom,” she said. “I didn’t have a voice or an opinion. I wasn’t even given a real say in who I married. After the birth of our first child, my husband began to treat me and our daughter badly. He neither respected my role as mother nor a wife. I tried to leave him several times, but my family prevented me.”

The Mob reacted with vengeful fury, using her three children, aged five, nine, and 15, as a weapon against her. When the children were finally tracked down and rescued, the police discovered that they had been beaten, starved and forced to write letters denouncing their mother as a “whore and traitor”. Today, she is reunited with them, and living under a new identity in northern Italy.

Despite the risks, other Mafia women began to emerge from what Nicola Gratteri calls “the darkness”. Their stories of hardship and brutality

demolished whatever romantic notions still swirled around the mafiosi, providing vital new information about the Mob’s operations, and laying much of the groundwork for the current trial.

In a disused call centre, converted into a cross between a courtroom and a highsecurity jail, around 350 alleged gang members and associates are facing a rap sheet that took over three hours to read out. COVID restrictions mean most are confined to their cells beneath the building, where they follow the proceedings by video link, but every day a handful are brought up to face questions. They shrug, stretch, smirk and spread their hands in gestures of bewildered innocence as a hair-raising chronicle of criminality unfolds around them.

Previous Mafia trials have had mixed results, with solid evidence hard to come by, witnesses and even court officials subjected to extreme intimidation, and many defendants opting to plead guilty in exchange for short jail sentences, which they serve only to return to the Mob. This time, says Nicola, 62, Italy’s best-known anti-Mafia investigator, the trial must be the basis for an all-out war on the clans. “We have to go after everyone who makes this kind of activity possible,” he says. “It isn’t just the chiefs in their villages; it’s the corrupt politicians and officials and the company bosses who do deals with these people.”

Nicola, a local boy from Gerace, a small town with a heavy mafia presence, sensed from an early age his life would be devoted to fighting the Mob. He remembers walking to school and seeing a corpse lying in a nearby street. “At our school there were ’Ndranghera children, and they were already acting in a ’Ndranghera way,” he says, “and I couldn’t accept that. So I thought: When I grow up, I will try to change things.”

Today he lives in a fortified compound, travels in an armoured car and says he hasn’t eaten out in a restaurant for 20 years. To the Mob he is a condannato – a man under sentence of death – but Calabrians, weary of the ’Ndranghera’s reign of terror, treat him as a hero.

The weariness appears to be spreading. A new breed of anti-mafia politician is emerging in places the Mob once held in its pocket, and radical initiatives are gnawing away at the gangs’ control over this wild, lovely corner of Italy.

Rescuing Mafia children

“It’s tough, but we have to break the cycle,” says Roberto di Bella, a juvenile court judge in charge of a controversial project to remove and relocate children from Mafia families. “Many of these kids face an inescapable destiny – death or prison.

They grow up breathing in a Mafia culture. It is violence for the boys and subjugation for the girls.”

Critics initially accused the project, called Free to Choose, of “ethnic cleansing” and “deporting” Calabrian children, but Roberto believes there’s little choice if the generational drip-feed is to be ended. “We see boys of 10 or 11 who already know how to handle guns, supply drugs, evade the police. We have girls being married off at 13 simply to shore up family alliances. It is child abuse and we have a duty to intervene.” Often, he says, it is the children’s mothers who ask for help.

Many of the women, according to prosecutors, take their first tentative steps to freedom via social media, where they find connections to a world they have been isolated from. “They have a glimpse of the outside,” says Alessandra, “and they can take encouragement from others who have done the same thing.”

Last year around 20 Mafia women and their children were relocated to other parts of Italy. One of them – named only as Lucia, the wife of a powerful Mafia boss – says she fled when her husband’s family began pressuring her to become more involved in the business.

“I was terrified the night we ran away,” she told an Italian magazine. “It felt like leaving your whole life behind. But when you’ve tasted freedom, you can never go back in the cage.”

At the football field-sized courthouse, the grim tales of murder, extortion, blackmail and trafficking will flow for many months. After a lifetime in pursuit of his quarry,

Nicola can afford to be patient. Those scented hills are quieter now, and the mobsters are in the cages. AWW