The Godmother, page 19
It boggles the mind to look at the volumes written about the various syndicates, the convictions, turncoats, and murders, which seem, at times, like movie plots too bizarre to be believable. But the mafia in Italy is still very real. Thousands of Italians have died in mafia-related crimes that don’t always entail outright murder. Tentacles in the construction industry have led to the collapse of buildings in earthquake zones. During the 2006 earthquake that devastated the town of L’Aquila near Rome, the antiseismic certification for a local school had been forged by a mafia-tied company and the school collapsed. That the earthquake struck in the middle of the night was a stroke of enormous fortune for the hundreds of children who would surely have been killed had it happened during the day.
The mafia infiltration of the toxic-waste disposal business I’ve mentioned has led to poisonous wildfires and soaring cancer rates in certain mafia territories, not least around Mount Vesuvius. They have also killed thousands through the illegal drug trade, both by feeding addictions and flooding the market with often-lethal substances like unfiltered cocaine and heroin.
The COVID-19 pandemic has given Italy’s crime syndicates even more strength. Italy’s strict Draconian lockdown that strangled the economy starting in March 2020 was the first such attempt to mitigate the spread of the virus outside of China. And while it worked temporarily to bring the numbers of cases and deaths down, it led to the shuttering of countless businesses and left others struggling to survive. Almost immediately after the lockdown began, the interior ministry warned that Italy’s organized crime groups were already cashing in, lending money to struggling businesses on terms that would be impossible to pay back.
Things have changed very little from when Pasqualone helped farmers get more money for their crops by strong-arming manufacturers and buyers. What became apparent during the pandemic is that many of the Italian companies that run into dead ends with the state or banks find themselves desperate enough to deal with crime syndicates. As happened after World War II, most of these companies missed out on government help because they either underreported profits or had employees working off the books to avoid paying taxes, which left them invisible when it comes to stimulus checks and other payments meant to reflect the real cost of the pandemic. And in a country like Italy, where cutting corners and shifty accounting has long meant that the official statistics rarely reflect reality, the pandemic increased the gender gap in society, where women tended to be the ones shepherding their children’s virtual learning from home and standing in long, socially distanced lines at stores instead of earning incomes.
In the criminal society, lockdowns had the opposite effect, because traditionally female roles meant women still needed to leave their homes for groceries and other essentials, and so had an easier time moving around than the men, who had no excuse to go outside. There were several incidents during the lockdown of March through May 2020 in which police claim they were able to pinpoint mobsters on the lam because of the women taking them food and clothing. Again, as in the case of Bernardo Provenzano, who police say was outed by freshly ironed shirts delivered by his partner, blaming the women tied to men who were hiding from justice made it easy for the state to maintain secrecy around its surveillance techniques. But in reality, an anti-mafia investigator told me the real reason they were able to find so many mafiosi on the lam was because they were using their cell phones so often. Prior to the pandemic, it was harder to trace them as they moved among service areas. But because anyone who dared leave their home during lockdown risked being stopped by police, the criminals stayed put, and apparently spent a lot of their time online.
The mafia influence during the pandemic didn’t apply only to bailing out businesses. Raffaele Cantone, an anti-mafia magistrate, says crime groups also used the so-called “shopping bag” welfare scheme in which various criminal groups handed out free groceries and paid utility bills for those who lost work during the lockdown. These gifts to people in no position to refuse them gained buy-in from the population for the group’s other activities, Cantone says. “Winning over community consent is achieved not only through intimidation, but also by buying social control over their territory,” the theory goes. In short, if the groups were making life easier in contrast to greater restrictions handed down by the government, the subliminal message would be that the mafia wasn’t that bad after all.
And in many of the cases during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the women in these criminal groups who became the front-line workers for the mobs as a way to build trust—the exploitation of gender stereotypes was at work once again, since it was easier for women to deliver these handouts without rousing suspicion. Italy’s patriarchal values create the perfect circumstances under which the concept of women as caregivers is always acceptable, even if these apparent acts of generosity actually break the law and extend the reach of criminal power.
Down the road, those who received a handout in their time of need will likely be asked to hide weapons or shelter fugitives. In some cases, they might even be asked to provide a safehouse for mafiosi to hold meetings.
Details of how the mafia works behind the headlines are garnered from turncoat confessions like the one anti-mafia prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti got from Giusy Pesce and other bad women who have—at least for a time—turned their backs on the criminality that they grew up with. The ensuing investigation based on Giusy’s testimonies and Cerreti’s dogged persistence led to prison terms totaling six hundred years.
Cerreti grew up in northeastern Sicily, a short ferry ride across the Strait of Messina from Calabria, where she had watched the evolution of the ’Ndrangheta from a small-time criminal group to the international powerhouse it is today.
She proves an important point: that many Italians who grow up in the heart of mafia-ridden regions are either directly caught up in the criminality or actively fighting against it, because they have a much keener understanding of the true damage these syndicates inflict on their communities.
Cerreti was not born into a criminal family, like so many of the women she has convinced to do the right thing. “That the criminality is ingrained from such a young age is what makes it so hard to break through,” she said.
As the ’Ndrangheta moved north, so did she, focusing the earlier part of her anti-mafia career on the infiltration of the ’Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra into Italy’s wealthier northern reaches from her base in Milan. She saw overlap with jihadis—in style if not ideology—in the way these groups prey on the disenfranchised and offer them meaning at times when it is otherwise hard to find.
In 2009, Cerreti filled in for an anti-mafia investigating magistrate at the court of Reggio Calabria, and in January 2010 she requested a transfer south to Calabria so she could embed with other investigators and learn more about the group she had set her sights on disbanding. She determined almost immediately that the key to chipping away at the criminal group was to turn the women into collaborators by convincing them that it would be the only way to save their children—but she had no idea how difficult and deadly that effort would eventually be.
Coercing a confession out of someone whose life and identity are so intertwined with the criminal underworld is daunting. Mafia women have been brainwashed since birth, and convincing them that there is an alternative way to live takes a special kind of persuasion. Cerreti told me that growing up in the area helped her tremendously when trying to make breakthroughs with these women because she understood the mentality and the lack of alternatives. Crippling poverty leads to idle hands, she says, which become ready soldiers for the mob.
Even though the ’Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra, and even Camorra have spread their tentacles north, their power still lies fundamentally in the impoverished southern regions of Italy. These areas produce the greatest despair and, though rarely, stories of immense courage and hope. Piera Aiello’s is the latter. As a fourteen-year-old growing up in rural Sicily in the 1980s, she met a local teen Nicolò Atria, who she did not know at the time was the son of top Cosa Nostra boss Vito Atria. The don loved Piera and decided that she should marry Nicolò, even though they were young. While Piera didn’t quite understand her young boyfriend’s status in the local community, she knew that he was not like other boys because of the respect he garnered from people much older than he was.
As Piera recounted the story to me in 2018, after she had won a parliamentary seat, she and Nicolò had a spat and she broke up with him, only to be visited at home by Vito, who told her, in no uncertain terms, that she would marry Nicolò or her parents would be killed. Piera had no choice so, at eighteen, the two wed.
Their marriage started badly, with bouts of Nicolò’s temper leading to daily beatings. He forced Piera to wait tables in the pizzeria owned by his family—a family that changed greatly only eight days after they wed. Vito was killed by a hit man, leaving Nicolò more power and, with it, the drive to avenge his father’s death. “He swore he would kill the men who killed his father,” Piera remembered.
Nicolò soon wanted a son, but Piera was not in love, and she secretly took birth control pills to avoid pregnancy. When he found out, he beat her even more and made her go off the pill and repeatedly raped her until she became pregnant. Their daughter, Vita, which means life in Italian, was born shortly after Piera had failed the Italian state exam to become a police officer—a betrayal that angered Nicolò even more. How could she dare join what was then seen as the enemy while carrying his child? “If I found drugs, I threw them away and was often beaten for this,” she said. “I was kicked in the belly and risked losing the baby when I was eight months pregnant. I was forced to learn to shoot, I was forced to keep weapons at home.”
Then, on June 24, 1991, armed men stormed the pizzeria while Nicolò was there and pumped more than three pounds of ammunition into him, killing him immediately. “My face was covered with my husband’s blood,” she said. “I despised Nicolò, but I felt pity for him. He was just a boy, twenty-seven years old, and they killed him like an animal.”
Piera went to the police the next day and turned herself in with Nicolò’s sister Rita, and the two went on to work with anti-mafia judge Paolo Borsellino as state’s witnesses until he was killed by a car bomb in 1992. Rita committed suicide a week later, and Piera and her then four-year-old went into hiding under Italy’s witness-protection program until 2018, when she surfaced to run for parliament for the Five Star Movement. She handily won, even though she did not show her face until she was elected. Once in office, she had full police protection and changed her name officially back to Piera Aiello.
While living under witness protection for twenty-eight years with her daughter Vita, she married and had three more daughters.
She eventually left the Five Star Movement, but remains an influential lawmaker with a different party. She has worked on anti-mafia legislation and works to improve the quality of life for many who live under witness protection, sometimes forgotten after they testify. “For years I have lived in a world of lies,” she said. “Yes, because the mafia is a world based on deception and lies. I continued to live in the lie because I was forced into a double identity and a life in a secret location. Today even the smallest lie weighs on me.”
Today she is president of the anti-mafia association named after Rita, which works to help women find the courage to leave crime families, risky as it is. For her courage, in 2019 Piera was named one of the top one hundred most influential women around the world by the BBC.
Not all heroes battling the mafia are on the inside. Letizia Battaglia is a red-haired Sicilian chain-smoking photojournalist in her eighties. She describes her archives of photo negatives documenting the mafia crimes she chased over the years as “full of blood.” Now she dedicates much of her time to curating exhibits and talking about the harm the mafia has done to the country. I have interviewed her and seen her speak about her experiences in Rome and in Palermo, where she commands the same sort of respect that mafia women would. And each time we talk, she pulls back a little more of the curtain about what it was like to be a woman covering the bloodiest crimes in the history of the Sicilian Mafia during the 1970s and ’80s. “The phone would ring, and I’d hop on my Vespa and go,” she told me once. “I had no idea what I was in for, but I knew it would be bad.”
From time to time, she was threatened after her pictures of perpetrators in court made the front page of the local newspapers, but mostly the mafia dons didn’t take her very seriously, she says. “They weren’t afraid of me with my little camera. I didn’t seem threatening until it was too late.”
After her career took off and her name started making the rounds, she would get calls from people whispering threats or be the victim of the occasional curious flat tire that she was sure was meant as a message. But mostly she didn’t care and kept on documenting the criminals, taking their pictures as they arrived in court, or of the coffins and crying widows and mothers of the victims. But her photos also implicated politicians and businesspeople who showed up at crime scenes and mafia funerals. More than once, anti-mafia investigators subpoenaed her photos for their investigations.
“The women were never on the front line in the courtrooms, but they were always there, passing messages and giving secret looks,” she said. She remembers being at one trial during which a number of men were on the dock but the real mafia business was being done in the courtroom gallery, where deals were made and alliances forged. Letizia says the men would look into the audience and give subtle signals, maybe a shrug of the left shoulder while looking down to their shoes. “The women knew exactly how to read the messages, and they would go out and maybe a day or two later, I’d have to shoot another murder.”
Letizia believes the mafia has ruined the country. “We were like a country at war,” she told me. “But it wasn’t even a civil war. It was good against evil, and it was bloody.”
She has little hope that the mafia will ever be eradicated in Italy. “It is such a part of society now,” she says. “It is no longer just about shooting and killing, they have infiltrated the governments, the successful enterprises . . . you can’t even tell the good guys from the bad anymore. At least before [when crimes were more blatant] it was easier.”
Federica Angeli is a journalist covering the mafia for La Repubblica in Rome who has played a major role in breaking open the Casamonica family dealings. As a result, she is under a constant death threat and was given a full-time police escort in the summer of 2013, when police overheard the dangerous Spada crime family of Ostia making plans to kill her.
The plotting against the journalist only emboldened her, and Angeli feels confident that the power of the pen can protect her. She is a frequent commentator on Italian television and her scoops tend to set the pace for the rest of the Italian media on all things Casamonica and Spada. On her Twitter profile, she posts the latest threats she receives in her bio. “If you write, I will shoot you in the head,” she wrote recently. “You will never win against us.” She signed the threat, “the mafia of Ostia.”
Federica’s popular 2013 book, A Mano Disarmata, which translates roughly to An Unarmed Hand, was made into a film that is hauntingly honest. Federica is a married mother of two, which adds a layer of complexity to her challenges since she is adamant that the children live a normal life in safety. The film portrays Federica’s struggle within her family, including tense times with her husband as he tries to talk her out of covering the mafia “for the safety of the children.” She resisted and felt her life’s calling was to dismantle the deadly group, which she testified against for the first time in 2018.
Her story is a compelling one, and as a woman, she has a certain empathy for the mafia women she covers, easily understanding the power struggles within the family dynamic as well as the professional structure.
Journalism in Italy, much like the mafia and the Church, showcases the worst of what patriarchal structures offer. Even Federica’s own bosses at times told her that despite her unparalleled skill at storytelling, she might be better off giving it all up to stay home or risk ruining her marriage or robbing her children of their mother. She has resisted and remains one of the most important journalists covering the mafia, always aware that those who tell these stories are as disposable as the criminals their stories are about.
Other reporters have remained as steadfast as Angeli in refusing to be silenced. Maria Luisa Mastrogiovanni has reported on criminal gangs from Puglia. Her groundbreaking reporting on how the Sacra Corona infiltrated the local government resulted in multiple threats. It was never clear who—the criminal group or the corrupt local government—was trying to shut her up, but they threatened her young children while they were in school. Mastrogiovanni eventually left the region for her own safety and that of her family, though she continues to report on organized crime. “I’ve left my home in Casarano in order to protect my husband and my children, because I couldn’t be sufficiently protected from a possible attack,” she told Reporters Without Borders. “There are not enough police officers to combat the mafia and to defend the journalists who cover this subject.”
