love or the thrill of a hot spurt of blood from a stabbed traitor’s heart, the men would compete for hours to see who could dance fastest and longest. ‘The Greece of Italy’, wrote the newspapers, though in reality that was an insult to Greece. Unlike its Ionian neighbour, southern Italy’s legal economy hadn’t grown since the millennium. Unemployment among the young, at more than one in two, was among the worst in Europe.
The south had experienced one kind of development, however. Many southerners saw Garibaldi’s creation of a northern-dominated Italian state as an act of colonisation. Already damned for who they were, they cared little for northern opinions of what they did. Across the Mezzogiorno, from the birth of the Republic, brigands were commonplace. Some organised themselves into family groups. In the century and a half since unification, a few hundred families in Naples, Sicily and Calabria had grown rich. And as criminal rebels who claimed to be secretly subverting an occupying state, they used the intimacy and loyalty of family and a violent code of honour and righteous resistance to draw a veil of omertà over their wealth. Even in 2009, Calabria’s crime bosses still dressed like orange farmers. It was only in the last few years that the Italian government had begun to grasp that these brutish men, with their bird-faced women and tearaway sons, were among the world’s great criminal masterminds.
There was, at least, no mystery to who ran the ’Ndrangheta. The south’s lack of progress was social as much as material. Tradition held that each family was a miniature feudal kingdom in which men and boys reigned supreme. The men granted their women little authority or independence, nor even much of a life beyond an existence as vassals of family property and honour. Like medieval kings, fathers paired their girls off as teenagers to seal clan alliances. Beatings of daughters and wives were routine. To men, women were desirable but feckless, not to be trusted to stay faithful or direct their own lives but to be kept strictly in line for their own good. Women who were untrue, even to the memory of a husband dead for fifteen years, were killed, and it would be their fathers, brothers, sons and husbands who did it. Only blood could wash clean the family honour, the men would say. Often they burned the bodies or dissolved them in acid to be sure of erasing the family shame.
Such a perversion of family would have been extraordinary in any time or place. It was especially so in Italy, where family was close to sacred.4 The severity of the misogyny prompted some prosecutors to compare the ’Ndrangheta with Islamist militants. Like ISIS or Boko Haram, ’Ndranghetisti routinely terrorised their women and slaughtered their enemies in the service of an immutable code of honour and righteousness.
So, yes, Calabria’s prosecutors would say, the life of an ’Ndrangheta woman like Lea Garofalo was tragic. And, yes, the ’Ndrangheta’s inhuman sexism was one more reason to destroy it. But that didn’t mean the women were much use in that fight. Almost from the day in April 2009 that Alessandra arrived from Milan, many of her colleagues told her the women in the mafia were just more of its victims. ‘The women don’t matter,’ they said.5 When they heard of Lea’s disappearance, they conceded the news was heartbreaking, especially for those who had known Lea and Denise in witness protection. But Lea’s death was merely a symptom of the problem, they insisted. It had no bearing on the cause.
Alessandra disagreed. She claimed no special insight into family dynamics. Alessandra was forty-one, married without children, and her appearance – slim, meticulously dressed, with short straight hair in a sharp, boyish parting – emphasised cool professionalism. When it came to The Family, however, Alessandra argued that it was only logical that women would have a substantial role in a criminal organisation structured around kin. Family was the lifeblood of the mafia. Like an unseen, uncut umbilical cord, family was how the mafia delivered nourishing, fortifying power to itself. And at the heart of any family was a mother. Besides, argued Alessandra, if the women really didn’t matter, why would the men risk it all to kill them? The women had to be more than mere victims. As a Sicilian and a woman inside the Italian judiciary, Alessandra also knew something about patriarchies that belittled women even as they relied on them. Most judicial officials missed the importance of ’Ndrangheta women, she said, because most of them were men. ‘And Italian men underestimate all women,’ she said. ‘It’s a real problem.’
At the time Lea Garofalo went missing, evidence to support Alessandra’s views was on display in every Italian newspaper. For two years, the press had filled its pages with the lurid allegations and distinctly conservative attitudes of a state prosecutor in Perugia called Giuliano Mignini. Mignini had accused an American student, Amanda Knox – with the assistance of two men, one of whom was Knox’s boyfriend of five days – of murdering her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher. Mignini alleged the two men were in thrall to Knox’s satanic allure. Taking his lead from Mignini, a lawyer in the case described Knox as a ‘she-devil … Lucifer-like, demonic … given over to lust’. Fifty-nine years old, a devout Catholic and father of four daughters, Mignini later told a documentary maker that though the forensic evidence against Knox was scant, her ‘uninhibited’ character and ‘lack of morals’ had convinced him. ‘She would bring boys home,’ he mused. ‘Pleasure at any cost. This is at the heart of most crime.’6
In the end, Knox and her boyfriend were acquitted on appeal, twice, and the prosecutors castigated by Italy’s Supreme Court for presenting a case with ‘stunning flaws’. But at the time of Lea’s disappearance, Knox was days from being found guilty for the first time and Mignini’s version of events – that an unmarried American woman who had slept with seven men was just the kind of fiendish deviant to have sex slaves murder her roommate – was the accepted truth.
Alessandra didn’t lecture her colleagues on female emancipation. In their own lives they were free to hold whatever views they wished and she wasn’t about to let any of them think she was asking for special treatment. But when it came to cracking the omertà that cloaked Europe’s biggest mafia, Alessandra argued that the state had pragmatic reasons to care about the prejudice of gangsters. The ’Ndrangheta was as near perfect a criminal organisation as any of them would ever encounter. It had been around for a century and a half, employed thousands around the world and made tens of billions a year. It was not only the single biggest obstacle standing in the way of Italy finally becoming a modern, united nation, but also a diabolical perversion of the Italian family, which was the heart and essence of the nation. And yet until a few years earlier, the Italian state had been barely aware of its existence. When she arrived in Reggio Calabria, no one at the Palace of Justice could give Alessandra more than rough estimates of how many men the ’Ndrangheta employed or where it operated or even, to the nearest $50 billion a year, how much money it made. The kind of free will and independence that Lea Garofalo represented, and the murderous chauvinism rained down on her as a result, represented one of the few times the ’Ndrangheta had ever broken cover. At a time when prosecutors where just beginning to understand ‘how big the ’Ndrangheta had become and how much we had underestimated it,’ said Cerreti, Lea’s evidence against Carlo Cosco was also one of the prosecutors’ first ever peeks inside the organisation. The ’Ndrangheta’s violent bigotry wasn’t just a tragedy, said Alessandra. It was a grand flaw. With the right kind of nurturing, it might become an existential crisis. ‘Freeing their women,’ said Alessandra, ‘is the way to bring down the ’Ndrangheta.’
Alessandra Cerreti was born on 29 April 1968 in the eastern Sicilian port of Messina.1 In twenty-two years away, she’d only rarely visited her home town. Now she was living in Reggio Calabria, Messina’s sister city, three miles across the water, and rarely out of sight of it. She realised she’d never noticed how Messina changed through the day. At dawn, a pink light would lift its piazzas, boulevards and palm trees out of a purple gloom. At midday, the sun painted the scene in primary colours: blue sea, red roofs, yellow hills, and the white cone of Mount Etna to the south. Sunset was a languid affair, as the wind slackened and Messina sank back into the dusk under clouds edged with orange filigree. Night ushered in a Mediterranean
