Denise wasn’t the only one living a lie in Pagliarelle. Watching Lea’s daughter offered the carabinieri one of their best leads for finding out what had happened to Lea. But any reminder of the state’s relationship with Lea, or any hint that it might continue with her daughter, would be enough to condemn Denise. The carabinieri decided the state’s only visible presence in Pagliarelle should remain the lone village policeman. Unseen and unheard, however, scores of officers would watch Pagliarelle day and night.
Over the years, the challenge posed by the mafia had compelled Italy’s security services to innovate. To pursue violent ’Ndranghetisti through mountain terrain had led the Calabrian carabinieri to form a unique Special Forces-style squad, the cacciatori (‘hunters’), a unit made up of snipers, bomb disposal experts, heavy weapons operators, helicopter pilots and Alpinists. The sight of a cacciatori helicopter gunship flying low over the Aspromonte mountains was a corrective to anyone who doubted the state was fighting a war in southern Italy.
But even the cacciatori’s resources paled next to those commanded by Italy’s covert intelligence units. Around the world, only a few specialised police units are permitted to eavesdrop on suspects’ telephone calls or spy on them electronically. In Italy, a measure of the mafia threat was that all three police forces – the domestic police, the militaristic carabinieri and the Guardian di Finanza, which specialised in economic crime – had surveillance divisions that employed thousands. In 2009, the Italian state was tapping a total of 119,553 phones and listening to 11,119 bugs. Almost no type of reconnaissance was forbidden. To establish targets’ whereabouts, plain-clothes officers followed them, filmed them through hidden mini cameras and larger zoom lenses set up at a distance – several miles across the valley, in the case of Pagliarelle – and tracked their phones’ GPS signal. To find out what the subjects were saying, they hacked their text messages, phone calls, emails and social media chats.
In Reggio, almost an entire floor of the gracious building that served as the city’s carabinieri headquarters had been transformed into a humming indoor field of electronic espionage. At the centre was a control room from which chases and operations were coordinated. Around it were twenty smaller offices, each dedicated to a different surveillance operation. Every room was packed with scores of screens, servers, modems and snaking thick black wires. Working without interruption in six-hour shifts that ran continuously, day and night, officers in Reggio and an identical team in Milan had been following bosses like Carlo for years. Chosen for their facility with dialects and their ability to inhabit the skin of their subjects, the operators knew their subjects so well they could decipher the meaning of their words from a euphemism or even an inflection in their voice. The Calabrian teams also had a particular skill with bugs. They planted devices in cars, homes and gardens. They bugged a basement laundry whose underground, signal-cutting location made it a favourite ’Ndrangheta meeting place. They bugged an orange orchard where a boss liked to hold meetings, and for the same reason bugged a forest. One time they even bugged a road where one boss took walks, ripping up the asphalt and re-laying it with tar embedded with listening devices.
Such entrepreneurialism brought results. In early 2008, the squad hunting ’Ndrangheta supremo Pasquale Condello, by then fifty-seven and on the run for eighteen years, observed that every two weeks, as though he were on a schedule, Condello’s nephew would shake his surveillance in the centre of Reggio, swapping from the back of one motorbike to another in a series of choreographed changes. The carabinieri were convinced the manoeuvres were in preparation for meeting Condello. One day, an officer noticed that the nephew always wore the same crash helmet. A few nights later, a carabinieri officer punctured the silencer on a car, then drove it up and down outside the nephew’s house to cover the sound of a second officer breaking in and switching the helmet with an identical one implanted with a tracer. When it was time for the next rendezvous, the carabinieri followed the nephew through his usual multi-ride acrobatics then, using the tracer, to a small pink house in a back alley on the south side of Reggio Calabria. Surrounded by more than a hundred cacciatori, Condello surrendered without a fight.
This was the front line on which Alessandra had imagined herself working when she transferred to Calabria. But a staffing shortfall meant that on arrival she was assigned to Reggio as a city judge. Her knowledge of Milan and Calabria and her interest in ’Ndrangheta women notwithstanding, she was forced to watch the Lea Garofalo case unfold from afar.
Still, there were advantages to such a gentle start. For one, the undemanding hours allowed plenty of time to learn the lay of the land. Alessandra kept pace with active investigations by chatting to officers at the carabinieri’s headquarters, a short walk from the Palace of Justice. At other moments, she researched the ’Ndrangheta’s history. In her office, she assembled piles of case files, carabinieri surveillance transcripts, pentiti statements, academic papers, history books and even accounts of Calabrian folklore.
To a Sicilian like Alessandra, the origins of the ’Ndrangheta felt familiar. The organisation was at its strongest away from the big cities in the hundreds of small mountain hamlets like Pagliarelle nestling in the valleys that led away from the coast. As in Sicily, many of these settlements had been the cradle of some of Europe’s first civilisations. Alessandra read how paintings of bulls dating from 12,000 BC had been found in Calabrian caves. By 530 BC, Pythagoras was teaching mathematics in Kroton (later Crotone) on the plain below Pagliarelle while the citizens of nearby Sybaris were drinking wine piped to their homes by vinoducts. Like Sicilians, Calabrians had their own archaic language, in this case Grecanico, a Greek dialect left over from the Middle Ages when Calabria had been part of the Byzantine Empire.
Something else that Calabria had in common with Sicily: from the beginning, it was a land apart. Many of the valleys were accessible only from the sea, naturally isolated behind steep mountainsides, thick pine forests and, in winter, snows that could cut off villages for months. For thousands of years, there had been no one to defend the families who lived in these valleys. They tended olive trees, fished the ocean and scanned the horizon as invading armies sailed by from Rome, Germany, Arabia, Spain, France, Italy and America. They were poor, resilient and resolutely autonomous, and as Italy’s north steadily eclipsed the south, their estrangement from the rest of the Italian peninsula only grew. When in 1861 a group of northerners began to send bureaucrats, teachers and carabinieri into the valleys to proclaim the rule of a newly united Italy, it was the families who repudiated, thwarted and occasionally killed the colonisers.
At first, the families had no connection to the mafia. The phenomenon of organised crime first emerged in Italy in the 1820s with the Camorra in Naples and then in the 1840s and 1850s with what became Cosa Nostra in Sicily. In both cases, ordinary criminals found themselves in jail with educated, bourgeois revolutionaries who were fighting foreign domination and feudalism, and who often organised themselves in masonic sects. As patriots, the rebels taught the future mafiosi the importance of a righteous cause. As freemasons, they taught them hierarchy, and the power of legend and ceremony.
When Sicily simultaneously unified with the north of Italy and ended feudalism, the ensuing chaos gave Sicily’s criminals a chance to put these new lessons to work. Though the northern dukes and generals leading unification described it as an act of modernisation, many southerners regarded it as another foreign conquest. Adding to the discontent, the immediate effect of the advent of private property in Sicily was a rash of property disputes. To protect themselves, landowners, towns and villages set up vigilante groups who, for a fee, protected their assets, hunted down thieves and settled disputes. To be effective, these groups required men who could intimidate others. Jail-hardened criminals were a natural choice.
Soon these bands of enforcers were calling themselves mafiosi, a term derived from the Sicilian word mafiusu, meaning swagger or bravado. Their new name was, in effect, a rebranding. Violent
