‘Very comfortable,’ they replied. ‘With what?’
‘With the rules,’ said the boss.
‘Very comfortable,’ came the reply once more.
The boss then ‘baptised’ the meeting in the name of the Honoured Society ‘as our ancestors Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso baptised it … with irons and chains’. He ceremoniously confiscated any weapons. The congregation confirmed their loyalty to the society on pain of ‘five or six dagger thrusts to the chest’. The boss then likened their common endeavour to ‘a ball that goes wandering around the world as cold as ice, as hot as fire and as fine as silk’. After the members of the circle affirmed three times that they were ready to accept a new member, they opened their ranks to admit the newcomer. The boss then cut a cross on Zagari’s finger so that it bled over a burning image of Saint Michael while he intoned: ‘As the fire burns this image, so shall you burn if you stain yourself with infamy.’
That was the cue for Zagari to take his oath: ‘I swear before the organised and faithful society, represented by our honoured and wise boss and by all the members, to carry out all the duties for which I am responsible and all those which are imposed on me – if necessary even with my blood.’
Finally, the boss kissed Zagari on both cheeks, recited the rules of the society and delivered a homily to humility, the island of Favignana and blood – which, in case anyone was lost, was the essence of the icy, fiery, silky and world-wandering ball he had mentioned earlier.
It was a wonder anyone kept a straight face, thought Alessandra. Certainly, the cod-medievalism of the ’Ndrangheta’s performances made serious historians choke. Dickie likened the ‘solemn ravings’ of its initiation ritual to a scout ceremony that crossed The Lord of the Flies with Monty Python. One of Italy’s most eminent mafia historians, Enzo Ciconte, was just as dismissive of the ’Ndrangheta’s ‘Red Riding Hood fantasies’.7 But Ciconte cautioned that ridiculous did not mean meaningless. ‘No group of people can last long just by using violence, just by killing, stealing and rustling – they need some sort of faith or ideology,’ he said. ‘The ’Ndrangheta had no tradition. They had to invent one.’
It was a good point, thought Alessandra. What mattered with faith was not plausibility but belief. Most of the main religions clung to unlikely myths and holy stories, which they called miracles or acts of God. Few of them were ever hurt by others laughing at them – quite the opposite. More to the point, a lie was just that: a fib, a fiction, a deceit. No one was claiming the ’Ndrangheta’s bosses believed it. After all, they were the ones telling it.
A better question was why the ’Ndrangheta chiefs found such decorous fantasies expedient. The answer was to be found in their spectacular rise. However contrived and derivative the cult of the ’Ndrangheta might appear to academic examination, it had gained the organisation the loyalty and secrecy of its members, the fear and respect of ordinary Calabrians and, as a result, a thick cloak of opacity under which it hid from the world. The ’Ndrangheta’s stories might have appealed to Calabrians because of their own distrust of the state or their sense of theatre, or simply because they were handed down from father to son with the solemn conviction of a sacred truth. The point was they worked. Myth was how the ’Ndrangheta assumed a moral purpose when it was self-evidently immoral, how it coloured itself romantic and divine when it was base and profane and how it convinced others it was their righteous champion even as it robbed and murdered them. Myth was how those inside the organisation were persuaded they were following a higher code and those outside it found themselves stumped by even the simplest questions, such as who was who. It was all an enormous lie. But it was a lie that explained how, almost without anyone noticing, a small group of families from the wild hills of Italy’s south had become the twenty-first century’s most formidable mafia.
Alessandra became fascinated by the intricacies of the deception. The ’Ndrangheta was an extraordinary puzzle, a multi-level mosaic. From transcripts of tapped phone calls and bugged conversations, she discovered ’Ndranghetisti had their own language, baccagghju, a slang based on Grecanico whose meaning was obscure to almost everyone but initiates. Even when they spoke Italian, ’Ndranghetisti used a code of metaphors to disguise their meaning. An ’Ndrangheta family in criminal partnership with another would describe itself as ‘walking with’ that other family. Rather than demand protection money outright, ’Ndranghetisti would request a ‘donation for the cousins’, an allusion to those men in jail whose families needed support. For a boss to describe a man as ‘disturbing’ or ‘troubling’ was for him to pass an oblique but unequivocal death sentence on him. The euphemisms could be highly contorted. Pizzo, the word for an extortion payment, was a term whose origins were the subject of academic dispute but, according to one explanation, was the ‘piece’ of ground on which a nineteenth-century prisoner had slept in jail, which were ranked according to their proximity to the boss. Outside jail in the twentieth century, it had come to denote the tribute that a boss expected from real estate inside his territory.
Deciphering the true meaning of ’Ndrangheta speak was a constant struggle. ‘You have to become more perceptive, more capable of decrypting,’ Alessandra would tell her husband over dinner in their apartment. ‘Mafiosi very rarely make a direct threat. Instead, they send messages with a dual meaning.’ Even the smallest gesture could carry the utmost importance. ‘They can order a murder just by looking at someone from the prisoner cage in court,’ she said.
One of the ’Ndrangheta’s most audacious lies was its relationship with the church. The ’Ndrangheta was plainly an unChristian organisation. But since it came from the most Roman Catholic of lands, it simply insisted the opposite was true. It invoked the saints, especially the Madonna and Saint Michael, the Archangel. It mimicked prayer and church services in its rituals. And it co-opted and bred priests. At mass, some priests in ’Ndrangheta areas would exhort their congregants to resist outsiders. On saints’ days, they directed celebrants to bow statues of the Madonna before the capo’s house while at Easter, the honour of bearing statues of Jesus, Saint John and the Virgin was reserved for picciotti. The most stunning example of the ’Ndrangheta subverting Christianity happened on 2 September every year when crowds of thousands gathered at the small town of San Luca in the Aspromonte mountains for the festival of the Madonna di Polsi. Among the pilgrims were hundreds of ’Ndranghetisti, including the heads of all the clans, who since at least 1901 had used the event as a cover for the ’Ndrangheta’s AGM, the gran crimine. In plain sight, the bosses would sit at a table laden with pasta and goat sauce, present their annual accounts – what they had earned, who they had killed – and elect a new capo crimine for the coming year. ‘The church is very responsible in all of this,’ Alessandra would say. ‘It’s guilty of some terrible, terrible, terrible things.’
Though the organisation found Christianity useful, Alessandra concluded that at its core the ’Ndrangheta was more of a blood cult. Blood was the bond between families that was the ’Ndrangheta’s strength. The act of spilling blood was also revered as a source of fearsome power. That had led to some unforgiving ’Ndrangheta feuds. The Duisberg massacre of 2007 – which police identified as an attack on an ’Ndrangheta initiation celebration when a burned picture of Saint Michael was found in the pocket of the dead eighteen-year-old – was the latest atrocity in a quarrel between two clans from San Luca. The feud had begun in 1991 when a group of boys from one family threw rotten eggs at the window of a bar owned by another. Including Duisberg, nine people had since died. Many more had been injured. To avoid being shot, ’Ndranghetisti in San Luca would hide themselves in the boot of a car just to travel 100 yards. Killings were timed for maximum horror. The year before Duisberg, a boss from one clan was paralysed by a bullet that passed through his spine as he stood on a balcony cradling his new-born son. In revenge, a rival boss’s wife was shot dead in her family home on Christmas Day.
Why the ruthlessness? For the ’Ndrangheta, the answer
