If you think of violent, influential organized crime in Italy as a thing of the past, think again.
Carabinieri and scientific police at the scene of the murder of Leonardo Portoraro, a 'Ndrangheta boss, who was shot dead on June 6 in Villapiana, in Calabria, Italy, by two killers. Photo by Alfonso Di Vincenzo/Kontrolab/LightRocket via Getty Images.
In different ways, and to varying degrees, the title characters in Alex Perry's 2018 book, The Good Mothers: The Story of the Three Women Who Took On the World's Most Powerful Mafia, challenged organized crime in Italy. These Mafia wives did so with the help of prosecutors who cannily understood that the misogyny embedded in Italy's organized crime syndicates—wives and daughters are the victims or horrific violence and brutal living conditions—could be used to get some of these women to turn on the men in their lives. As well as providing a window into the worlds of three very complex women, Perry's book is a journey through Italy's horrifying, still-powerful underworld.
I spoke by phone with Perry, who divides his time between magazine journalism and book writing. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed why the mob has been so hard to defeat in Italy, how organized crime groups differ in their treatment of women, and the dangers of Mafia reporting.
Isaac Chotiner: What is the state of the mafia in Italy today, in 2018?
Alex Perry: We tend to think of the Mafia as something from the past, with The Godfather. The 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, is actually the mafia that you've never seen pictured in a movie, or really in any books. For the same reason, it's more powerful than it's ever been. It was actually kind of a revelation to me—and I thought I knew something about the world—[to learn] quite how powerful it is. It's an enterprise that draws in somewhere between $50 [billion] and $100 billion a year. It smuggles 70 percent of the cocaine in Europe. It runs arms all around the world. It embezzles tens of billions from the European Union and the Italian government. All that activity requires a secondary industry of money laundering. So good has it become at money laundering, and its penetration of the financial market, that other major organized crime groups ask the 'Ndrangheta to wash their cash as well.
So, the 'Ndrangheta's in charge of hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of illicit dollars around the world. Really, that's what makes it so influential and so powerful. It's in all our lives. This organization has penetrated every single major financial center on the planet. It owns businesses, and it funds political parties all over the world. It is part of the fabric of modern life and that's actually the point. It's got itself to a point now where it's indispensable to the functioning of the modern world and it's very difficult to root out.
When you call "it" an organization and indeed refer to it as "it," in the singular, is that the best way to understand the 'Ndrangheta?
Well, yeah, that's actually a very good question, and one of the reasons why it's so kind of elusive and slippery. It is an organization, but it is a very horizontal one. It's kind of an alliance of 140 families, and the power rests in those families, in those clans. There is a hierarchy, or there has been a hierarchy above that, but not in any managerial sense. The hierarchy is there to resolve disputes between families. To adjudicate, essentially. A very sort of passive role. The proactivity of the organization, the enterprise, rests with individual clans. You can't cut the head off this snake. On top of that, it means that whenever you take down one family, another one can move into its place.
It also means that it's really difficult to uncover the extent of all its operations. You'll notice with the estimate that I gave you for how much money it makes every year, there's a $50 billion spread in that, and that's because no one clan, no one 'Ndranghetista, knows the extent of the 'Ndrangheta's operations. It's very siloed. So, if you're a prosecutor trying to even map the extent of this organization ... Well, so far, they've been unable to do it.
