its shutters and drainpipes painted bubblegum pink, was only yards from the main piazza. But the four hundred villagers of Pagliarelle had learned long ago to live with their ghosts. In three decades, thirty-five men and women had been murdered in mafia vendettas in Pagliarelle and the nearby town of Petilia Policastro, including Lea’s father Antonio, her uncle Giulio and her brother Floriano. In such a place, in such a family, Lea’s disappearance could seem inevitable, even a kind of resolution. Years later, her sister Marisa would look up at Lea’s first-floor window from the street below and say: ‘Lea wanted freedom. She never bowed her head. But for people who follow the ’Ndrangheta, this choice is considered very eccentric. Very serious. You want to be free? You pay with your life.’ Really, Marisa was saying, there was nothing anyone could do.1
Alessandra Cerreti knew many of her colleagues shared that view. When she arrived in Calabria from Milan seven months earlier as the province’s newest magistrate, she had been struck by how many Calabrians still accepted the ’Ndrangheta as an immutable fact of life. Outside southern Italy, the mafia was regarded as a movie or a novel, an entertaining, even glamorous legend that might once have held some historic truth but which, in a time of more sophisticated concerns such as financial crises or climate change or terrorism, felt like a fable from a bygone era. Not so in Calabria. Like their more famous cousins in Sicily and Naples, the ’Ndrangheta had been founded in the mid to late nineteenth century. But while the Sicilians, in particular, had seen their power steadily eroded by a state crackdown and popular resistance, the ’Ndrangheta had grown ever stronger. The organisation was still run by its original founders, 141 ancient shepherding and orange-farming families who ruled the isolated valleys and hill towns of Calabria. Its foot soldiers were also still quietly extorting billions of euros a year from Calabria’s shopkeepers, restaurant owners and gelato makers – and murdering the occasional hard-headed carabinieri or judge or politician who stood in their way. What had transformed the ’Ndrangheta, however, was a new internationalism. It now smuggled 70 to 80 per cent of the cocaine and heroin in Europe. It plundered the Italian state and the European Union for tens of billions more. It brokered illegal arms deals to criminals, rebels and terrorists around the world, including several sides in the Syrian civil war. By the prosecutors’ count, by 2009 the ’Ndrangheta’s empire took in fifty countries, a quarter of the planet, from Albania to Togo, linking a mob war in Toronto to a lawyer’s assassination in Melbourne, and the reported ownership of an entire Brussels neighbourhood to a cocaine-delivering pizzeria in Queens, New York, called Cucino a Modo Mio (‘Cooking My Way’). By the dawn of the second decade of the new millennium, the ’Ndrangheta was, by almost any measure, the most powerful criminal syndicate on earth.
If ruthless violence was the fuel of this global empire, astounding wealth was its result. The prosecutors’ best guess was that every year, the organisation amassed revenues of $50–$100 billion,2 equivalent to up to 4.5 per cent of Italian GDP, or twice the annual revenues of Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Ferrari and Maserati combined. So much money was there that cleaning and hiding it required a whole second business. And so good had the Calabrians become at money laundering, pushing billions through restaurants and construction companies, small offshore banks and large financial institutions, even the Dutch flower market and the European chocolate trade, that Alessandra’s fellow prosecutors were picking up indications that other organised crime groups – Eastern Europeans, Russians, Asians, Africans, Latin Americans – were paying the ’Ndrangheta to do the same with their fortunes. That meant the ’Ndrangheta was managing the flow of hundreds of billions or even trillions of illicit dollars around the world.
And it was this, the ’Ndrangheta’s dispersal of global crime’s money across the planet, that ensured the Calabrians were in everyone’s lives. Billions of people lived in their buildings, worked in their companies, shopped in their stores, ate in their pizzerias, traded in their companies’shares, did business with their banks and elected politicians and parties they funded. As rich as the biggest businesses or banks or governments, ’Ndrangheta-managed money moved markets and changed lives from New York to London to Tokyo to São Paolo to Johannesburg. In the first two decades of the new millennium, it was hard to imagine another human enterprise with such influence over so many lives. Most remarkable of all: almost no one had ever heard of it.
The ’Ndrangheta – pronounced un-drung-get-a, a word derived from the Greek andraganthateai, meaning society of men of honour and valour – was a mystery even to many Italians.3 In truth, this ignorance was due as much to perception as deception. Many northern Italians had trouble even imagining wealth or achievement in the south. And the contrast was striking. The north had Florence and Venice, prosciutto and parmigiana, Barolo and balsamic, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, AC Milan and Inter Milan, Lamborghini and Maserati, Gucci and Prada, Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Pavarotti, Puccini, Galileo, da Vinci, Dante, Machiavelli, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus and the Pope. The south had lemons, mozzarella and winter sun.
This was, Alessandra knew, the great lie of a united Italy. Two thousand years earlier, the south had been a fount of European civilisation. But by the time the northern general Giuseppe Garibaldi amalgamated the Italian peninsula into a single nation in 1861, he was attempting to join the literate, the industrial and the cultured with the feudal, the unschooled and the unsewered. The contradiction had proved too great. The north prospered in trade and commerce. The south deteriorated and millions of southerners left, emigrating to northern Europe, the Americas or Australia.
In time, the provinces south of Rome had come to be known as the Mezzogiorno, the land where the midday sun blazed overhead, a dry, torpid expanse of peasant farmers and small-boat fishermen stretching from Abruzzo through Naples to the island of Lampedusa, 110 kilometres from North Africa. For much of the south, such a sweeping description was a clumsy stereotype. But for Calabria, the toe, it was accurate. The Romans had called it Bruttium and for 300 kilometres from north to south, Calabria was little more than thorn-bush scrub and bare rock mountains interspersed with groves of gnarled olives and fields of fine grey dust. It was eerily empty: more than a century of emigration had ensured there were four times as many Calabrians and their descendants outside Italy as in their homeland. When she was driven out of Reggio and into the countryside, Alessandra passed a succession of empty towns, deserted villages and abandoned farms. It felt like the aftermath of a giant disaster – which, if you considered the centuries of grinding destitution, it was.
Still, there was a hard beauty to the place. High up in the mountains, wolves and wild boar roamed forests of beech, cedar and holly oak. Below the peaks, deep cracks in the rock opened up into precipitous ravines through which ice-cold rivers raged towards the sea. As the incline eased, woods gave way to vines and summer pastures, followed by estuary flats filled with lemon and orange orchards. In summer, the sun would scorch the earth, turning the soil to powder and the prickly thorn-grass to roasted gold. In winter, snow would cover the mountains and storms would batter the cliffs on the coast and drag away the beaches.
Alessandra wondered whether it was the violence of their land that bred such ferocity in Calabrians. They lived in ancient towns built on natural rock fortresses. In their fields, they grew burning chilli and intoxicating jasmine and raised big-horned cows and mountain goats which they roasted whole over hearths stoked with knotted vine wood. The men hunted boar with shotguns and swordfish with harpoons. The women spiced sardines with hot peppers and dried trout in the wind for months before turning the meat into a pungent brown stew. For Calabrians, there was also little divide between the holy and the profane. On saints’ days, morning processions would be followed by afternoon street feasts at which the women would serve giant plates of maccheroni with ’nduja, a hot, soft pepper sausage the colour of ground brick, washed down with a black wine that stained the lips and seared the throat. As the sun began to sink, the men would dance the Tarantella, named after the effects of the poisonous bite of the wolf spider. To the tune of a mandolin, the beat of a goatskin tambourine and a song about thwarted love or a mother’s love or the thrill of a hot spurt of blood from
