The Good Mothers - Alex Perry

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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 criminals had always been able to inspire fear. The mafiosi wanted respect, too. While they didn’t deny a criminal self-interest, the mafiosi insisted theirs was an honourable endeavour: protecting poor southerners from rapacious landowners and an oppressive north. Of course, Sicilians soon learned that the people from whom they needed most protection were the mafiosi themselves. The protection ‘racket’ was born.

      When organised crime reached Calabria a generation or two later, Alessandra read, it had repeated many of the same patterns. Like Cosa Nostra, Calabria’s mafia began in jail. One of Calabria’s main administrative centres was Palmi, a hill town with views out over the east coast that, as the provincial capital of the Gioia Tauro piano, the estuary plain, possessed a police station, a courtroom and a prison. In the spring of 1888, gangs of hoodlums, many of them graduates of the town jail, began staging knife fights in Palmi’s taverns, brothels and piazzas. As the heat rose with the coming summer, it seemed to stoke a violent hooliganism among the ex-cons, who began rampaging through the streets, slashing citizens with knives and razors, extorting money from gamblers, prostitutes and landowners, rustling cattle and goats, and even threatening magistrates, the police and newspaper editors.

      In those early days, the prototype gangsters called themselves camorristi, a straight copy of the Naples mafia, or picciotti, a word that the British historian John Dickie translates as ‘lads with attitude’.1 If they were united, it was chiefly by their dandyish style: tattoos, extravagant quiffs, silk scarves knotted at the neck and trousers that were tight at the thighs and flared at the ankle. In his history of the three big Italian mafias, Mafia Brotherhoods, Dickie describes how picciotto culture spread across Calabria in months.2 Like all young male fashions, it might have died just as rapidly had it not penetrated the hill valleys. There the families had little taste for the picciotti’s dress. But the remote and defensive interior of Calabria was fertile territory for a movement whose methods were mostly physical and whose distrust of the state was pronounced. And just as they ran everything in the valleys, the families were soon running the piccioterria.

      A central goal for all mafias was to create a consensus around power. Whenever the question of power arose – political, economic, social, divine – the answer had to be the mafia. It was the peculiar luck of the Italian mafias that circumstances conspired to graft their enterprise onto the most durable of southern Italian power structures: the family. In Sicily, the mafia came to be known as Cosa Nostra, meaning ‘our thing’, and Our Thing was, really, Our Family Secret, an outsmarting of the northern state built on the intimacy and obedience of kin. Likewise in Calabria, the valley families gave the picciotti a ready-made hierarchy, order, legitimacy and secrecy. It was this – loyalty to blood and homeland – that was the foundation of all the horrors to come.

      By the turn of the twentieth century, Calabria’s street hoodlums had been organised into local cells called ’ndrine, each with their own turf, ranks and boss. At first, picciotti were useful for small matters: appropriating a neighbour’s field for the boss’s cows, resisting rent demands from fussing landlords or extracting protection money from the neighbourhood trattoria. Highway robbery, smuggling, kidnapping and loan-sharking were lucrative earners for more enterprising picciotti. Bosses also took on additional duties like adjudicating property disputes or defending women’s honour.

      But as the picciotti endured successive crackdowns by the authorities, some wondered how they might turn the tables on the state. If the source of the wider world’s power came from money, they reasoned, then maybe the way to attack that outside world was to venture out into it, steal its money and take its power?

      The Calabrian mafia was soon using its money to buy favours from the carabinieri and the judiciary.

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