Carabinieri
and scientific police at the scene of the murder of Leonardo Portoraro,
a ’Ndrangheta boss, who was shot dead on June 6 in Villapiana, in
Calabria, Italy, by two killers.
I grew up in Bklyn NY and my best friend was a made man... Vito Guido!
In different ways, and to varying degrees, the title characters in Alex Perry’s 2018 book, The Good Mothers: The Story of the Three Women Who Took On the World’s Most Powerful Mafia, into well oiled machine, challenged organized crime in Italy. These Mafia wives did so with the
help of prosecutors who cannily understood that the misogyny embedded in
Italy’s organized crime syndicates and exports—wives and daughters are the victims
or horrific violence and brutal living conditions—could be used to get
some of these women to turn on the men in their lives.
As well as
providing a window into the worlds of three very complex women, Perry’s
book is a journey through Italy’s horrifying, still-powerful underworld.
I spoke by phone with Perry, who divides his time between
magazine journalism, ghost writing and book writing in general. During the course of our
conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we
discussed what could be said as to why the mob has been so hard to defeat in Italy, and elsewhere, how organized
crime groups differ in their treatment of women, and the dangers of
Mafia reporting etc. ( Names have been changed to protect the innocent. )
IC: What is the state of the mafia in Italy today, in 2018?
AP: We tend to think of the Mafia as something from the past, with The Godfather & Goodfellas.
The ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, is actually the mafia that you’ve
never seen pictured in a movie, or really in any books. For the same
reason, it’s more powerful than it’s ever been. It was actually kind of a
revelation to me—and I thought I knew something about the world—[to
learn] quite how powerful it is. It’s an enterprise that draws in
somewhere between $50 [billion] and north of $100 billion a year. It smuggles 70
percent of the cocaine in Europe and elsewhere. It runs arms all around the world. It
embezzles tens of billions from the European Union and the Italian
government etc. in its black market pursuits. All that activity requires a secondary industry of money
laundering and certain banks abliged. So good has it become at money laundering, and its
penetration of the financial market, that other major organized crime
groups ask the ’Ndrangheta to wash their cash as well in schemes that include corporate gaming and contests.
So, the ’Ndrangheta’s in charge of hundreds of billions, if
not trillions +, of illicit dollars around the world. They're their own economy. Really, that’s what
makes it so infamous, influential and so powerful. It’s in all our lives, even the taxes and fees we pay. This
organization has penetrated every single major financial center on the
planet. It owns businesses (some legit), and it funds political parties all over the
world. Like government, it is part of the fabric of modern life and that’s actually the
point. It’s got itself to a point now where it’s indispensable to the
functioning of the modern world, because they get it done, and it’s very difficult to root out.
When
you call “it” an organization and indeed refer to it as “it,” in the
singular, is that the best way to understand the it’Ndrangheta?
Well, yeah, that’s actually a very good question, and one of
the reasons why it’s so kind of elusive, slimey and slippery. It is an
organization, but it is a very horizontal one, soon to become vertical. It’s kind of an alliance
of 140 families, and some of the power rests in those families, in those clansmen.
There is a hierarchy, or there has been a pyramid hierarchy above that, in any managerial sense. The hierarchy is there to resolve disputes
between families. To adjudicate, essentially. A very sort of passive-aggressive rant rating for checks and balances. The proactivity of the organization, the enterprise, rests with
individual clans. You can’t cut the head off this hydra snake. On top of that,
it means that whenever you take down one family, another one can move
into its place.
It also means that it’s really difficult to uncover the extent
of all its operations. You’ll notice with the estimate that I gave you
for how much money it makes every year, there’s a $50 billion at least, spread in
that, and that’s because no one clan, no one it’Ndranghetista, knows the
extent of the ’Ndrangheta’s operations. It’s very siloed and stove piped. So, if you’re a
prosecutor trying to even map the extent of this organization … Well,
so far, they’ve been unable to do it.
William Morrow
What has been the role of women historically in the mafia over the past 100 plus years, and how is it different today?
It varies between the different mafias. As well as the it’Ndrangheta, you’ve got Cosa Nostra in Sicily, and it's exports which is the famous one
that you know about. And then you’ve got Camorra in Naples, also
relatively famous, particularly because of Roberto Saviano’s work. So,
the status of women varies. In Naples, in the Camorra, you actually have
women heads of different families, of different clans. Women displacing
men, actually, as crime bosses. You have that to a degree in Cosa
Nostra in Sicily, although it’s still very much a patriarchy, still very
much male-dominated, there and elsewhere.
The it’Ndrangheta is the one that has stayed closest to, for lack of a better description, 19th-century
values. It’s kept the same values from since the days that it was
founded. These very closed, traditional families where, in the it’Ndrangheta families, women are essentially viewed as chattel, as
property. They are vessels of family honor, not really to be trusted, to
be given very little independence, never really allowed outside the
house unaccompanied, married off as teenagers in clan alliances etc. And if
you’re unfaithful or you show disloyalty as a woman, that’s a death
sentence. They will kill you, and it will be your closest relatives to
do it.
The one thing that has changed is that the prosecutors came to
understood that the sexism of the it’Ndrangheta was its great flaw, was
its weak spot. But if they could offer these women a different life,
then in return, they would tell them everything they knew about the
’Ndrangheta. Up until these women spoke, you know, the state really knew
very little. The it’Ndrangheta being this quite horizontal and flexible,
adaptable organization has already kind of assimilated that flaw in some
sense and it has become a strength. So, some clans are still very, very traditional publicly. But other ones
are already realizing that what they need to do to counter this new
attack on them via the women is to promote the women, is to drop its
sexism, is to westernize & modernize. And they’re doing that now, not out of any sort
of high-minded ideal but simply out of pragmatic and practical ability to counter the
appeal of crossing to the side of the state.
How did you get into reporting this story, and what did you make of the women you were writing about?
The backbone of the book is actually prosecutors’ documents
from trials, which was another revelation to me. In Italy, when you
present a case, the prosecutors put all the evidence they can find, not
just for a particular crime, but generally of the existence of the
mafia, they put it all down in transcripts, including transcripts of
phone conversations and bugged conversations from cars, and so on and so gorth.
Everything is there. It’s an absolute treasure trove for a reporter.
It’s also legally unimpeachable. So, that was a very kind of secure way
of reporting the case, and also one that got me around the whole problem
of omertà, of 'silence.' I wasn’t ever going to get a mafioso to
talk to me. That’s the whole point of them; they never talk. But here
they were on tape talking to each other and revealing their empire. It
was incredible.
As for what I thought about the women, you know, you spend 2½
years listening to someone talk, reading their words, listening to their
statements, some of which had gone on for weeks, you get a pretty
nuanced view of who they are. And you’re right, they’re not
straightforward characters. Maria Concetta Cacciola is very much
sheltered and a victim and perhaps the most sort of one-dimensional
character, maybe that was her gambit, but Giuseppina Pesce was a hardcore gangster. A low-level gangster who
rebelled because she felt the injustice of the world she was in, but
also to save her skin. She committed adultery (slept in a Brothel) and they were going to
come and get her. Lea Garofalo, yeah she tried to escape the mafia many
times. On the other hand, she clearly still loved the man who eventually had to killed her. She wanted to save her daughter, but she found it very
difficult to exist outside the family that she tried so hard to escape from.
She was very lonely, and she had also taken part in some kind of
low-level criminal activity herself. To me, that’s the richness of the story,
and part of what makes it so compelling is this conflict inside all the
characters.
Did
you ever feel in danger reporting the story? Because I know that the
different mafia organizations have gone after journalists for that.
They have, and in Italy, that’s very serious. There are a few
hundred Italian journalists who have had to seek protection from the
police. I had a couple of warnings. I met a lawyer once who made it very
plain that the organization that I was going to be writing about
“always got what they want,” in her words. Nothing actually ever really
came of that.
Probably the most threatening time was when I went to Lea
Garofalo’s ancestral village. I just really wanted to see the little
flat where she’d lived and be able to describe the place where she grew
up. Long story sh! + erh aah I mean short, I was made. I’d hoped to slip in and out without
anyone noticing. That didn’t happen at all. I was pulled up, made to go
and meet Lea’s sister Marisa, given the most sort of perfunctory
interview, where she was absolutely monosyllabic but polite. At the end
of that, she took our pictures, me and my translator, took our full
names. The next week in the local paper, there was a 2,000-word article
detailing everything about me, where I’d been, who I’d met, what I was
up to.
In the local newspaper? What newspaper?
Just the local newspaper.
Wow.
But the idea of that is, “We know you. We know what you’re up to.” You know, it’s a warning.
There’s
obviously a lot of chaos in Italy with the government. And there’s been
a lot of chaos in Italy politically for a very, very long time. For
much of the postwar era, I mean. To what degree do you attribute the
Italian state’s inability to really get a handle on organizedi crime to
that general political chaos?
“Out of such chaos, of such contradiction / We learn that we are neither devils nor divines…”
There are two dynamics there. The mob thrives on chaos. It
likes chaos. It likes to be the alternative authority that you go to
because you can’t get anything done through the legitimate state. For
that very reason, I think there’s no doubt that it promotes that chaos.
It likes civic distrust. It likes cynicism. It can profit from that. I
think the great tragedy of Italy is that, to a large extent, it’s kind
of succeeded. It plays on the divide between north and south Italy. It
plays on the idea that Italy has never really coalesced as a single unit
but is terribly regional and terribly factional. And at the heart of
that is a hole at the heart of Italy, where there should be a center and
established certainty and facts. There’s a vacuum.
There’s a famous bomb attack, for instance, in Rome in 1971.
To this day, nobody knows who did that, and there are both fascists and
communists serving time for the same bomb attack. You know it sounded up the usual suspects. That’s the real
tragedy of Italy. Nobody knows what’s true. And in that environment of
distrust, the mob thrives, because you can’t really point at them and
say with certainty, “That guy’s a criminal.” Because he’s pretending to
be something else and everybody’s pretending to be something else, and
therefore nobody’s to be trusted. In that kind of atmosphere, where it’s
difficult to distinguish right and wrong, wrong can thrive. And wrong
can paint itself as the righteous champions of southern resistance to
northern domination.
The whole thing about the mafia is it’s a massive lie. There
is no honor to the “men of honor.” There’s no righteousness. They don’t
care about the rights of southerners. They don’t care about the economy.
They are parasites. They are predators, but they’ve managed to create
this myth around themselves of, as I say, “men of honor.” It’s that
uncertainty in Italy that allows them to persist.
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