Gutsy prosecutors crippled the Cosa Nostra decades ago. Now, a new trial aims to strike a blow against the ‘Ndrangheta, Italy’s dominant mafia.
More than three decades ago, a huge trial in Palermo, Italy, began the decline of Sicily’s notorious Cosa Nostra. Now, a new court case aims to deal a heavy blow to the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, the Cosa Nostra’s successor as Italy’s dominant mob.
Most films and books about the Italian mafia, like “The Godfather,” reference Sicily’s dreaded criminal society, which transplanted itself into the United States with waves of immigrants and long dominated crime in New York and elsewhere.
But weakened by the Palermo trial and its far-reaching repercussions — especially after the murder of its judicial architects, national heroes Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino — Cosa Nostra went into decline. While it continues its criminal activities, the unchallenged dominance it once enjoyed was ceded decades ago to the ‘Ndrangheta from Calabria, a region in the toe of Italy’s boot. It has prospered in the shadows.
The ‘Ndrangheta, recognised as one of the world’s richest and most dangerous mob gangs, learned from the fate of Cosa Nostra to avoid a direct challenge to the Italian state and spectacular killings of officials.
It kept its profile low but built a formidable empire based on the cocaine trade and financed by the proceeds from a lucrative era of kidnappings, including the 1973 abduction of the grandson of John Paul Getty, at that time the world’s richest man.
The ‘Ndrangheta are notorious for their brutality.
The ‘Ndrangheta, notorious for their brutality, hid Getty in the wild Calabrian mountains for five months. When his miserly grandfather refused to negotiate, his captors severed the boy’s ear and sent it through the post to a Rome newspaper, eventually pocketing a ransom of $3 million.
The ‘Ndrangheta is believed to control up to 80% of the European cocaine trade, and its tentacles extend not only all over Italy, including the industrialised north, but to more than 30 countries, including Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Switzerland and the United States.
Police and experts say the ‘Ndrangheta has built a global network to bring cocaine from South America to Europe, most of it in container ships, via Brazil, West Africa, South Africa and the Sahel. Its biggest presence outside Italy is in Germany, but the most infiltrated foreign city is Toronto, with seven mafia families.
Its annual turnover has been estimated as more than 50 billion euros ($61 billion), more than McDonald’s and Deutsche Bank combined.
The new trial, the biggest since Palermo’s ”Maxiprocesso,” began last month. Some 350 people are on trial, many of them white collar workers including lawyers, businessmen, a police chief and politicians, including a former senator. More than 900 witnesses have been called.
Palermo trial exposed the Mafia’s organisation.
While the ‘Ndrangheta quietly built their cocaine empire, establishing close links with South American cartels and affiliations with organised crime groups all over the world, Cosa Nostra — ruled by boss of bosses Salvatore “Totò” Riina, nicknamed the “Beast” — became more and more violent in the 1980s and 1990s.
The brilliant Sicilian magistrate Giovanni Falcone and his friend Borsellino proved that Cosa Nostra was a hierarchical single organisation and not a collection of separate clans, which had previously been disputed. This was upheld in the Palermo trial in 1986-87, with historic ramifications for law enforcement. More than 330 gangsters were convicted, including the fugitive Riina.
In revenge, Riina mounted a bloody campaign against state officials and politicians. When Italy’s Supreme Court confirmed the sentences, the Mafia killed Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards in a massive bomb explosion in 1992. Borsellino and five bodyguards died in another blast two months later.
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992
(With permission of Tony Gentile)
The bombings and subsequent attacks on tourist targets in mainland Italy that killed 10 people caused public revulsion and accelerated the decline of Cosa Nostra, widening the opening for the ‘Ndrangheta.
Riina, who had been in hiding for 23 years, probably with the complicity of local officials, was captured in 1993 and jailed. He died in prison in 2017.
New anti-mafia hero in Italy
The new trial, in the Calabrian town of Lamezia Terme, is the work of Italy’s highest profile anti-mafia prosecutor, Nicola Gratteri, himself a Calabrian, who has spent 30 years under close police protection, unable to lead a normal life.
Police wiretaps were recently reported to have picked up suspected mafiosi referring to Gratteri as “a dead man walking.”
Like the Palermo trial, this case is being held in a specially fortified courtroom, which has been equipped with spacing between defendants and audio-visual connections because of COVID-19. The ‘Ndrangheta has profited from the pandemic, allegedly skimming health funds and lending money to stricken businesses.
This trial differs from Palermo because it concerns only one group, the powerful Mancuso ndrina, or clan, rather than many as indicted by Falcone.
Prosecutor hopes trial will loosen tongues.
Previous, less publicised trials established that the ‘Ndrangheta also had a hierarchical structure and confirmed links with Milan that had been denied by city officials. It exposed the quasi-religious rituals and terminology of the ‘Ndrangheta, which like Cosa Nostra dates back to Italian unification in the mid-19th century. Its name comes from a Greek word loosely translated as “men of honour.”
Unlike Cosa Nostra or even more so the U.S. mafia, the rural-based ‘Ndrangheta has remained until now largely below the public radar, with its bosses living in remote villages and building complex tunnels and underground hideouts.
Based on blood ties, it has been less prone to informants than Cosa Nostra, whose code of omertà, or silence, was undermined by a bloody war between Riina’s Corleonesi and other clans. This made the Calabrian mob more attractive to South American drug cartels.
Gratteri and his team have begun to break this silence, with around 50 informants testifying at the trial, including a nephew of clan boss Luigi Mancuso, 66. This is one of the key aspects of the case.
The nexus between Calabrian gangsters and politics was underlined last month when the leader of a small national party, who was briefly involved in negotiations to end a government crisis, was put under investigation by Gratteri.
Italy’s weapons against mafia
Italy has powerful weapons against mafias unavailable in many countries, including laws that enable it to try an entire organisation in mass trials rather than individual criminals, and to confiscate the assets of gangsters and their relatives. It also has sweeping wire tap powers.
Criminologists say that the ‘Ndrangheta “pollutes” the countries where it spreads by corrupting everyone from politicians to police and judges, laundering its vast funds into legal enterprises.
Fighting the mafia internationally means a broad societal response, not just arresting violent criminals, and combating the poverty and under-development that enables the mafia to thrive in southern Italy and elsewhere.
“To fight this form of complex organised crime, one needs to follow the money and identify where the proceeds of crime go,” said Anna Sergi, a criminologist at the University of Essex in England. “Targeting the power-mafia nexus is key.”
Professor Antonio Nicaso, an organised crime expert at Queen’s University in Canada, said the ‘Ndrangheta wants to avoid publicity and only uses violence when there is no alternative. “It does not want to create social alarm. You must not focus only on the ‘military’ aspect,” he told News Decoder.
“It is a power system and network, like a multilateral corporation, with the ability to merge tradition and innovation. Its ultimate goal is power. The drug economy is not parallel to the legal economy but is integrated with it. There is corruption without the mafia but no mafia without corruption.”
Gratteri accuses the ‘Ndrangheta of “suffocating” his home region, one of Italy’s poorest, but he acknowledges that this trial will not destroy the syndicate, which has proved itself extremely adaptable.
However, he believes the trial — codenamed “Rebirth” — will encourage more people to break their silence, opening the way for other trials and bringing the “liberation” of Calabria
More than three decades ago, a huge trial in Palermo, Italy, began the decline of Sicily’s notorious Cosa Nostra. Now, a new court case aims to deal a heavy blow to the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, the Cosa Nostra’s successor as Italy’s dominant mob.
Most films and books about the Italian mafia, like “The Godfather,” reference Sicily’s dreaded criminal society, which transplanted itself into the United States with waves of immigrants and long dominated crime in New York and elsewhere.
But weakened by the Palermo trial and its far-reaching repercussions — especially after the murder of its judicial architects, national heroes Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino — Cosa Nostra went into decline. While it continues its criminal activities, the unchallenged dominance it once enjoyed was ceded decades ago to the ‘Ndrangheta from Calabria, a region in the toe of Italy’s boot. It has prospered in the shadows.
The ‘Ndrangheta, recognised as one of the world’s richest and most dangerous mob gangs, learned from the fate of Cosa Nostra to avoid a direct challenge to the Italian state and spectacular killings of officials.
It kept its profile low but built a formidable empire based on the cocaine trade and financed by the proceeds from a lucrative era of kidnappings, including the 1973 abduction of the grandson of John Paul Getty, at that time the world’s richest man.
The ‘Ndrangheta are notorious for their brutality.
The ‘Ndrangheta, notorious for their brutality, hid Getty in the wild Calabrian mountains for five months. When his miserly grandfather refused to negotiate, his captors severed the boy’s ear and sent it through the post to a Rome newspaper, eventually pocketing a ransom of $3 million.
The ‘Ndrangheta is believed to control up to 80% of the European cocaine trade, and its tentacles extend not only all over Italy, including the industrialised north, but to more than 30 countries, including Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Switzerland and the United States.
Police and experts say the ‘Ndrangheta has built a global network to bring cocaine from South America to Europe, most of it in container ships, via Brazil, West Africa, South Africa and the Sahel. Its biggest presence outside Italy is in Germany, but the most infiltrated foreign city is Toronto, with seven mafia families.
Its annual turnover has been estimated as more than 50 billion euros ($61 billion), more than McDonald’s and Deutsche Bank combined.
The new trial, the biggest since Palermo’s ”Maxiprocesso,” began last month. Some 350 people are on trial, many of them white collar workers including lawyers, businessmen, a police chief and politicians, including a former senator. More than 900 witnesses have been called.
Palermo trial exposed the Mafia’s organisation.
While the ‘Ndrangheta quietly built their cocaine empire, establishing close links with South American cartels and affiliations with organised crime groups all over the world, Cosa Nostra — ruled by boss of bosses Salvatore “Totò” Riina, nicknamed the “Beast” — became more and more violent in the 1980s and 1990s.
The brilliant Sicilian magistrate Giovanni Falcone and his friend Borsellino proved that Cosa Nostra was a hierarchical single organisation and not a collection of separate clans, which had previously been disputed. This was upheld in the Palermo trial in 1986-87, with historic ramifications for law enforcement. More than 330 gangsters were convicted, including the fugitive Riina.
In revenge, Riina mounted a bloody campaign against state officials and politicians. When Italy’s Supreme Court confirmed the sentences, the Mafia killed Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards in a massive bomb explosion in 1992. Borsellino and five bodyguards died in another blast two months later.
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Sprawling and populous, India presents unique healthcare challenges. Its vast COVID-19 vaccination program offers an example to even rich nations.
A hospital staff member receives a COVID-19 vaccine in Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir, 16 January 2021. (AP Photo/ Dar Yasin)
India has begun a massive vaccination program aimed at immunizing 300 million people from COVID-19 by August.
The world’s second most populous nation after China, India is calling upon a million doctors and millions of planners and medical staff to target children and adults most in need of protection.
But India no longer needs help from the elephants that hauled vaccines to remote villages in the 1980s when India began to fight polio, measles and other childhood illnesses.
“We now have plenty of roads, even to remote areas,” said a government official at the Indian Embassy in Washington. “We don’t need the elephants for that any more. Trucks have already begun moving to 13 cities.”
Nor does India need donations from foreign aid agencies to deliver more than 300 million doses of vaccine. India boasts the world’s largest vaccine producer, Serum Institute, and the country often provides vaccines and other medicine to developing countries in Asia and Africa, as well as to some developed countries.
In an example of vaccine diplomacy, India will donate 150,000 doses to Bhutan, 100,000 doses to the Maldives and send more to Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Seychelles, India’s Foreign Ministry said last week.
India’s COVID-19 vaccination program is a huge undertaking.
In trips I made across India in the 1970s, I often saw handicapped children on spindly legs, victims of polio, which struck 200,000 children a year.
Starting in 1985, mammoth, well-organized efforts to eliminate polio got underway in India. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared India officially polio-free in 2014 after some 2.3 million medical staff and 155,000 supervisors treated 172 million children.
For decades, millions of Indian health workers, doctors and scientists fighting polio, hepatitis B, measles and now the coronavirus have been working, sometimes using elephants, to reach remote villages and provide vaccine injections to its 1.3 billion people.
One Indian program targets 55 million new mothers and their babies, delivering immunizations for free each year.
India’s healthcare delivery program is instructive to American and European virus-fighters, struggling to organize swiftly and broadly enough to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic.
India’s sprawling health program uses a series of more than 25,000 “cold chain” sites where medicine can be kept cool in a tropical country, for both storage and transport. And India is reportedly producing one billion syringes that cannot be reused by drug addicts.
India takes the campaign to inoculate 300 million people very seriously, with newspapers and public reminders that 10 years ago, the country experienced its last case of wild polio virus.
Other countries are taking lessons from India.
India’s system has such vast reach because it piggy-backs on the nation’s electoral system, according to Dr. K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.
India is the world’s biggest democracy. More than 900 million citizens were eligible to vote in the nation’s 2019 general election, and a record two thirds of them, or more than 600 million, cast ballots. An immense electoral system is in place that connects far-flung constituencies and permits the casting and counting of votes.
The infrastructure that underpins elections, including polling stations, is being used in India to administer vaccine doses, and electoral rolls help identify priority age groups.
Reddy also credits the Indian administrative service, which can coordinate work among states and vaccination centers. Typical problems, Reddy said, are “last mile” issues in remote villages, such as keeping vaccines cool and arranging second visits to give the second COVID-19 vaccine.
Countries in Southeast Asia are gearing up for ambitious vaccination campaigns, taking lessons from India’s polio program, according to the WHO.
“We are witnessing unprecedented efforts by member countries to protect their vulnerable population against COVID-19 with vaccines,” said Dr. Poonam Khetrapal Singh, WHO Regional Director for Southeast Asia.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the WHO, but his successor, Joe Biden, restored U.S. membership on his first day in office last month.
New roads and increasing population shifts to cities means that, for now, elephants will not be carrying life-saving vaccine doses to far-flung regions of India, which in many ways is setting a standard for richer countries.
A hospital staff member receives a COVID-19 vaccine in Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir, 16 January 2021. (AP Photo/ Dar Yasin)
India has begun a massive vaccination program aimed at immunizing 300 million people from COVID-19 by August.
The world’s second most populous nation after China, India is calling upon a million doctors and millions of planners and medical staff to target children and adults most in need of protection.
But India no longer needs help from the elephants that hauled vaccines to remote villages in the 1980s when India began to fight polio, measles and other childhood illnesses.
“We now have plenty of roads, even to remote areas,” said a government official at the Indian Embassy in Washington. “We don’t need the elephants for that any more. Trucks have already begun moving to 13 cities.”
Nor does India need donations from foreign aid agencies to deliver more than 300 million doses of vaccine. India boasts the world’s largest vaccine producer, Serum Institute, and the country often provides vaccines and other medicine to developing countries in Asia and Africa, as well as to some developed countries.
In an example of vaccine diplomacy, India will donate 150,000 doses to Bhutan, 100,000 doses to the Maldives and send more to Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Seychelles, India’s Foreign Ministry said last week.
India’s COVID-19 vaccination program is a huge undertaking.
In trips I made across India in the 1970s, I often saw handicapped children on spindly legs, victims of polio, which struck 200,000 children a year.
Starting in 1985, mammoth, well-organized efforts to eliminate polio got underway in India. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared India officially polio-free in 2014 after some 2.3 million medical staff and 155,000 supervisors treated 172 million children.
For decades, millions of Indian health workers, doctors and scientists fighting polio, hepatitis B, measles and now the coronavirus have been working, sometimes using elephants, to reach remote villages and provide vaccine injections to its 1.3 billion people.
One Indian program targets 55 million new mothers and their babies, delivering immunizations for free each year.
India’s healthcare delivery program is instructive to American and European virus-fighters, struggling to organize swiftly and broadly enough to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic.
India’s sprawling health program uses a series of more than 25,000 “cold chain” sites where medicine can be kept cool in a tropical country, for both storage and transport. And India is reportedly producing one billion syringes that cannot be reused by drug addicts.
India takes the campaign to inoculate 300 million people very seriously, with newspapers and public reminders that 10 years ago, the country experienced its last case of wild polio virus.
Other countries are taking lessons from India.
India’s system has such vast reach because it piggy-backs on the nation’s electoral system, according to Dr. K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.
India is the world’s biggest democracy. More than 900 million citizens were eligible to vote in the nation’s 2019 general election, and a record two thirds of them, or more than 600 million, cast ballots. An immense electoral system is in place that connects far-flung constituencies and permits the casting and counting of votes.
The infrastructure that underpins elections, including polling stations, is being used in India to administer vaccine doses, and electoral rolls help identify priority age groups.
Reddy also credits the Indian administrative service, which can coordinate work among states and vaccination centers. Typical problems, Reddy said, are “last mile” issues in remote villages, such as keeping vaccines cool and arranging second visits to give the second COVID-19 vaccine.
Countries in Southeast Asia are gearing up for ambitious vaccination campaigns, taking lessons from India’s polio program, according to the WHO.
“We are witnessing unprecedented efforts by member countries to protect their vulnerable population against COVID-19 with vaccines,” said Dr. Poonam Khetrapal Singh, WHO Regional Director for Southeast Asia.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the WHO, but his successor, Joe Biden, restored U.S. membership on his first day in office last month.
New roads and increasing population shifts to cities means that, for now, elephants will not be carrying life-saving vaccine doses to far-flung regions of India, which in many ways is setting a standard for richer countries.
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