The Calabrian mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, were once something of a side-show compared with the more famous Sicilian mafia. Now they are the largest criminal organisation in Europe. Last month, European police arrested more than 130 ’Ndrangheta members in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Spain in a coordinated swoop codenamed ‘Eureka’. Almost all have been charged with drug-dealing, money-laundering or crimes of violence.
The mafia wife never asks about her husband’s work any more than he would dare criticise her cooking
The ’Ndrangheta traditionally specialised in kidnapping, operating in the inaccessible region of Aspromonte, the toe of Italy, for centuries out of reach of the forces of law and order. In the 1990s, the Italian government decided to build a steel plant and a port in Calabria. The steel plant never opened and the port, at Gioia Tauro, looked like another white elephant. But it was able to receive the largest container ships in the world, and the ’Ndrangheta saw their opportunity. Two million containers a year now pass through Gioia Tauro – and it is estimated that 80 per cent of Europe’s cocaine does too.
Like other mafia organisations, the ’Ndrangheta is intensely conservative; it hates the state and loves private enterprise, it reveres the family unit and the extended clan structure. While a man gets rich and gains a reputation for himself, his wife stays at home, looks after the children, spends his money and goes to church. Often the only confidant beyond the women of the family is the village priest.
Women are the silent but essential collaborators of the mafia. The men are united by the ties of kinship. In a profession where it is hard to trust anyone, one trusts one’s sister’s son and one’s wife’s brother; nephews and brothers-in-law abound in mafia history. The connection between the men is provided by the women. It is the grandmothers, the mothers and the aunts who hold the clan together and establish if a youngster is un bravo ragazzo, a good boy, someone to be trusted. In the recent operation, the police drew up a family tree of the various factions of the ’Ndrangheta, showing who was related and connected to whom – an essential way of understanding how the organisation works.
A bravo ragazzo might be a messenger boy by the age of ten, perhaps charged with delivering drugs in his early teens; within a few years he will aim to establish a name for himself. Consider Don Salvatore Cappello, who, aged 14, won renown for stealing the Bishop of Trapani’s pectoral cross, snatching it from around the episcopal neck. By the age of 16, young criminals like Cappello are on the way to getting married, almost always to a girl from a dependable family, recommended and introduced by a mother, grandmother or aunt. Cappello, thought responsible for 200 murders, went down at the age of 31; he was sentenced to life but left behind him a wife and four children. One understands the trajectory of his career, but what was in it for her?
In the first place, money is a major inducement. In the south of Italy, a land of grinding poverty for hundreds of years, where the last famine was in the late 1940s, where unemployment is endemic and where families are haunted by the memory of living in a single room and children going barefoot, knowing you have plenty of money is deeply reassuring.
Marrying a mafioso also means having an uxorious husband who wants children. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, but the alpha males of the mafia are very keen on having babies; they know that they may well be dead or in jail before long. The idea that there will be children to inherit and carry on the family name is important. Women are the guarantee that the family reputation will continue into the next generation.
It would obviously be hard to live with a man who is responsible for 200 murders or the tide of cocaine flooding Europe, but the mafia wife never asks about her husband’s work any more than he would dare criticise her cooking. Of course she knows, but she has chosen not to know. This is the most powerful omertà of all, the silence one practises with oneself.
If you have killed 200 men, it might be hard to live with the memory, and here the mafia wife performs her greatest task of all. With her, you are an attentive husband, a doting father to the children, someone who compliments her pasta sauce in the most extravagant terms; you put up with her demands and her little temper tantrums because you are a normal loving guy. You are not a monster; you are the man she loves. She, the mafia wife, makes it possible for you to delude yourself.
She and the children go to church every Sunday; they go on pilgrimages; they all fervently pray for you. Things may turn out badly – you might end up in jail or dead, most do – but in the long run everything will be fine, because your family will ensure your eternal salvation. You may not believe, but they do, and that is enough for God, the one who hears the prayers of women and children. As for her, kneeling in church with her Gucci bag and her children next to her, praying for her husband, that is what Italian women have done for centuries.
It doesn’t always work that way, though. Santa Puglisi, daughter of a mafia boss, was married to a mafia man a year her senior, widowed at the age of 22, and shot dead in 1996 while praying at her murdered husband’s tomb. With her at the cemetery in Catania was a cousin, Salvatore Botta, aged 14, killed at her side, and another cousin, aged 12, who escaped. That was unusual; most mafia wives live peaceful lives, unaffected by the violence which is their husbands’ stock in trade.
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