Most of us have an idea of what the Italian mafia looks like. We imagine gangs of violent criminals who make their fortunes from drug-dealing, prostitution, racketeering and, increasingly, public contracts. Thanks to hundreds of cinematic portrayals, we can’t avoid certain tropes: food-obsessed fatties, trilbies and trench coats, nightclubs and blood.
The reality, however, is far more subtle. Today, the biggest mafia trial in Italy for 35 years begins in Lamezia Terme, on the Calabrian toe of the Italian boot. More than 900 witnesses will give evidence in a cavernous call centre which has been converted into a court to seat nearly 1,000 lawyers, judges, prosecutors and spectators. But what is noticeable is that the majority of the 355 indicted criminals — who will be locked in cages — are not thick-set, unshaven toughs, but suited professionals. Indeed, the mugshots of lawyers, accountants, managing directors, politicians and even a police chief speak of an organisation that is far more white-collar than we might imagine.
At the end of last year, I spent two hours with Nicola Gratteri, the magistrate who has led the “Rinascita Scott” investigation, which involved raking through 24,000 wiretaps and months of surveillance footage. Inside his office fortress in Catanzaro, he repeatedly told me how far removed Italian mafias are from stereotypes. The proceeds of criminality, he said, are far more likely to be invested in international stock-markets than in seedy clubs. It’s a similar message offered by the National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor, Federico Cafiero de Raho, who last October warned that “the mafia’s strategy at present is focused more than ever on loans to, and acquisitions and infiltrations of, companies”.
The reason for this is simple: Italy’s mafias — Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples and Campania, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia and the biggest, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria — are now so rich that they make money out of money itself. Figures purporting to show their worth are always controversial — it’s not like they file a statement of accounts — but estimates suggest that the ‘Ndrangheta alone enjoys a turnover of between €36-€55 billion per annum, the equivalent of roughly 3% of the country’s entire GDP. In the space of a century, mob bosses have gone from being agricultural gangmasters to sophisticated investors and fund managers. Rather than stalk the streets, today their sons typically graduate in business studies and, often, in chemistry.
But what has changed organised crime more than anything in the last year is, of course, Covid-19. Today, mafias are in effect multinational empires, and, like every international organisation, have been hit by travel restrictions and lockdowns. Drug-routes have been disrupted, people trafficking channels have narrowed, closed stadia have put paid to ticket-touting and their restaurants – those constant, small earners and useful cash laundromats – have no diners.
Yet even so, national crises have always offered opportunities for organised crime. Whenever the Italian state appears flat-footed or absent — earthquake reconstruction is a common example — their “operational flexibility”, to borrow a phrase from a recent UN Office on Drugs and Crime report, allows mafias to fill the void. In particular, the pandemic has provided organised crime with something even more important than money: a chance to cement territorial control. For example, with many Italian families now struggling to make ends meet, a number of mafiosi have taken to showily distributing food packages. Last spring, the brother of a Cosa Nostra boss in Palermo was seen distributing packets of pasta. The Camorra, meanwhile, went one step further and suspended collections of the pizzo (protection money) and started distributing sugar, coffee and pasta instead. It’s an ancient strategy, not dissimilar to Al Capone opening a foodbank in Chicago in 1930, though the Italian Internal Ministry only recently came up with a term for it: “mafia welfare”.
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