But in a crucial second stage, the ’Ndrangheta had opened its financial structure to organised crime groups around the world: Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, but also Chinese triads, Nigerians, Russians, Colombians, Mexicans and criminal groups from every part of the planet. ‘The ’Ndrangheta plays the role of service agent to the other mafias,’ said Lombardo. ‘They make this network of financial professionals working for them available to other mafias. And after that, when it comes to finances, all the mafias move together as one big mafia.’
That meant the ’Ndrangheta had hundreds of billions of euros at its command. Such a tsunami of money had elevated it to a ‘fundamental and indispensable position in the global market’, said Lombardo, one that was ‘more or less essential for the smooth functioning of the global economic system’. This new centrality afforded the ’Ndrangheta the level of protection it sought. It also offered it an opportunity to indulge in typical mafia behaviour – bullying, intimidating, extorting and blackmailing – on a whole new scale. Lombardo had indications that the ’Ndrangheta regularly manipulated stock prices or markets to its advantage and had even caused mini financial crashes to create buying opportunities for itself.
Most remarkable was what the prosecutor had discovered about the mafia’s taste for government debt. ‘I found a huge amount of capital deployed by the mafia to buy government bonds and Treasury debt,’ he said. At first, this revelation confused Lombardo. There was no sound financial imperative to buy bonds: yields were typically low and far better opportunities were available in other financial instruments. But then he realised the ’Ndrangheta’s motivations were more than merely financial. ‘They don’t need to become any richer,’ he said. ‘They’re rich enough. But alongside the goal of making money is the goal of limiting national sovereignty.’ The ’Ndrangheta had always sought to undermine Italian state power and authority. Now it was doing the same across the world. It did this by buying up large tranches of foreign countries’ debt, then threatening those countries with dumping their debt and prompting a financial default. A debtor nation’s only option was to allow the ’Ndrangheta to use its territory as a base and a money-laundering location. So far, the prosecutors had collected evidence that the ’Ndrangheta had blackmailed Thailand and Indonesia in this way. Lombardo expected China and India to be next. ‘This is about conditioning the global economic system, conditioning the global citizenry and conditioning the political choices of nations,’ he said. ‘This is how the ’Ndrangheta become the rulers not just of territory in Italy but whole other countries.’
Lombardo’s investigations revealed the ’Ndrangheta not merely as a menace to southern Italy but a global monster. Though other mafias were better known, the ’Ndrangheta was the most powerful. In the name of profit and power, it was sowing the seeds of war, chaos and corruption from Rio to Rotterdam to Reykjavík. It was the dark underside of globalisation made real in flesh and blood. Of paramount importance to Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutors, however, Calabria remained the key to the entire enterprise. Any big business decision – to expand territory, to enter a new business, to eliminate a rival – was referred back to the old country. In their bunkers buried beneath Reggio Calabria and Rosarno and the orange groves of Gioia Tauro plain, the bosses were deciding the fate of nations. As she read through the latest case files, it dawned on Alessandra that with their new crackdown on the ’Ndrangheta, the prosecutors held the destiny of hundreds of millions of people, pehaps even billions, in their hands.
The stimuli to the Italian state’s new campaign against the mafia were various: the outcry at the Duisberg massacre of 2007, the 2008 election of a new government publicly committed to ending the threat from organised crime and, the same year, the arrival in Calabria of Giuseppe Pignatone and Michele Prestipino, the destroyers of Cosa Nostra. The fight against the mafia was quickly reinvigorated with fresh energy and resources. Over 2008 and 2009 the carabinieri bugged millions of conversations. ’Ndranghetisti still habitually spoke in riddles and metaphors, and in isolation the meaning of any one conversation was obscure. But taken together and over time, the mass of recordings added up to a true revelation: the authorities’ first ever complete picture of the internal structure and dynamics of the ’Ndrangheta.
There were several surprises. Hitherto, the prosecutors had understood the ’Ndrangheta as a loose alliance of family firms, each with its own territory. Surveillance of Reggio Calabria and the surrounding towns and villages revealed that the horizontal structure of hundreds of ’ndrine, each run autonomously by a family boss, was still the ’Ndrangheta’s foundation. But it emerged that above it was a new vertical, unifying hierarchy of eleven ranks. Several ’ndrine together made a grouping called a locale or società, managed by a paramount chief, assisted by an accountant and a ‘head of crime’ who oversaw all illegal activities. Above the locali were three regional authorities called mandamenti, one each for the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts and another for Reggio Calabria. Together these three groups made up a council variously called la provincial or il crimine or – something that made Alessandra do a double-take – La Mama. Overseeing all of it was a capo crimine, or boss of bosses, who could convene a court, or tribunale, of senior bosses to judge a peer accused of transgressing the code.6 ‘We’d always thought of the ’Ndrangheta as a lot of local, smaller organisations,’ said Alessandra. ‘Suddenly we realised it had a federal structure and was being run almost like a military organisation.’
In the 1990s, carabinieri had picked up word of an attempt by the ’Ndrangheta to unite the clans. That had ultimately failed. From what the carabinieri were hearing now, this time the reorganisation had succeeded. Why? The old arguments in favour of better coordination to improve efficiency and discipline still stood. But in 2009 the carabinieri were detecting a more ominous motivation: to coordinate a concerted assault on the authorities through a series of assassinations and bombings. On 31 October 2009, the carabinieri filmed an especially brazen ’Ndrangheta summit outside Milan at which twenty-two bosses raised their glasses to toast the new city boss inside a memorial dedicated to Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.7 The ’Ndrangheta was abandoning its decades-old policy of discreet infiltration in favour of direct confrontation. Why the change? From what the carabinieri
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