The killers from Calarai

Gianluigi Nuzzi makes the same dire claims over and over in his book about the ’Ndrangheta, the least known of the Italian organised-crime syndicates – that it has spread like a cancer in his country (it does in fact have global reach) and is murdering society little by little.
The broad remedies he suggests offer little solace, and at any rate it’s hard for the reader to get worked up about such a well-structured mob in such a corrupt country. Pessimism prevails. This is the world today.
“Blood Ties” amounts to an interesting but ultimately dissatisfying glimpse inside this most family-oriented of mafias, based in Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot that kicks at the Sicilian ball. The Cosa Nostra rules Sicily, the Camorra “owns” Naples and the Sacra Corona Unita more or less sticks to Apulia. All are rooted in the south.
But the ’Ndrangheta, as Nuzzi reports in great distress, is now also amok in northern Italy, including Venice. Such innovation, oiled by political cronies, helped it become Italy’s most powerful crime syndicate in the late 1990s and early 2000s, generating 3 per cent of the country’s GDP on the back of drug trafficking, extortion and money-laundering. Branches are also massively at work in Canada and Australia.
Thanks to its policy of recruiting only family (sons are groomed from an early age), the ’Ndrangheta enjoys a comparative shortage of informers within its ranks. There have been a few of these pentiti, though (“penitent” has a better ring to it than “stool pigeon”). One of them is Giuseppe “Pippo” di Bella, who in 2009 phoned Nuzzi’s newspaper out of the blue and said he had more to say than he’d told the cops.
In fact he’d given prosecutors plenty of evidence in the preceding half decade, but then his lawyer warned him it was enough. He was deep in peril as it was. Di Bella, however, who’d just lost his wife to cancer, leaving him alone to take care of their adolescent son, needed to get everything off his chest.
He has much to tell Nuzzi and Antonelli as they hold a series of clandestine meetings with the morose son loitering nearby. Di Bella worked for Franco Coco Trovato, the godfather in Calabria, and was in on various operations elsewhere, including the trade in war weapons.
But, despite Nuzzi’s repeated assurances of something big about to be revealed, it all sounds like second-rate Mario Puzo.
Di Bella comes across as a knowledgeable but violence-shy Joe Pesci type, a goodfella actually gone good. Only near the book’s end does he seem to stumble onto something big – the Sicilian mob having a friendly chat with former premier Giulio Andreotti. Maybe it had something to do with one of the anti-mafia prosecutors getting knocked off, maybe not.
Otherwise, does it come as that much of a surprise that the ’Ndrangheta made a pact with immigrant Chinese gangsters in Milan in 1992, even if “they were carving up the whole of Italy”? The Italians “outsourced” its drug deals to Africans and various other grim tasks, including murder, to Eastern Europeans. Seems “routine” enough.
The authors mention in passing that the ’Ndrangheta is believed to be the mob that kidnapped John Paul Getty III in 1971. It was too long ago for their purposes, but a far more interesting yarn.
The mobsters couldn’t have been pleased that John’s oil-tycoon grandfather famously haggled over the ransom demand, wishing to pay only as much as was tax-deductible. They ended up sending the youth home, minus an ear, for $2.9 million, a third of a million less than they wanted.
Perhaps Nuzzi and Antonelli can dig something juicier out of more recent events. Nuclear waste might be more of a worry in Europe than it is if the ’Ndrangheta weren’t surreptitiously sinking ships full of it in the Mediterranean, paid handsomely by industrialists. The glowing cargo that doesn’t end up sleeping fitfully with the fishes is transported to Somalia, Kenya and Zaire for improper burial.
Instead of this, and instead of offering more about the submarine that the ’Ndrangheta was having built in Colombia circa 2006 for smuggling cocaine, we get numerous descriptions of honest paisan businesses that launder mafia cash, and town councils selling out to Gangland.
It’s all probably more interesting to people in Italy.

Blood Ties: The ’Ndrangheta – Italy’s Newest Mafia
By Gianluigi Nuzzi and Claudio Antonelli
Published by Pan Books, 2012
Available at Amazon.com.uk, 13 pounds Reviewed by Paul Dorsey