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Authors: Petra Reski
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follow. The people are crying out for peace,” he added sadly.
We were sitting on a wooden bench next to the church—the same wooden bench on which he had received almost the whole of the world’s press since the massacre, not just the German daily papers but El País and the Italian broadcaster Rai. Even Japanese television crews had come to listen to Don Pino, who tirelessly stressed that the people of San Luca were simple and good, and only afraid to say anything to the journalists because you never know how what you say is going to be used.
“We condemn all kinds of Mafia, with our swords drawn,” said Don Pino. “And then they write that we’re all like that!And years ago someone even wrote: ‘The parish priest cohabits with the Mafia’.”
Don Pino has spent half his life as a parish priest in San Luca. He was born here, he grew up here, he knew them all, he baptized and married them, and carried them to the grave. He was already the parish priest when San Luca grew rich in the 1980s on the money it raised from kidnappings, when Jean Paul Getty’s grandson had his ear cut off in a neighboring village, and when the women caught an industrialist who had managed to escape from his hiding place and held him until he could be returned to his abductors.
Don Pino was already here when San Luca started investing its ransom money in the cocaine trade; before, along with the villages of Platí and Sinópoli, it hosted the elite of the ’Ndrangheta, the wealthiest Mafia organization in Italy—which today, with an annual turnover of 45 billion euros, controls the whole of Europe’s cocaine trade and has diversified its activities like a multinational corporation, so that it now deals just as successfully in arms as it does in people.
Today the ’Ndrangheta is seen as the epitome of a successful criminal organization. It isn’t organized hierarchically like the Sicilian Mafia, but federally: each Calabrian clan chief makes autonomous decisions. He accepts advice, but not orders. In Sicily, on the other hand, it’s the commission that makes the decisions: la reunione dei mandamenti . And therein lies the weakness of Cosa Nostra—because, if someone at the top spills the beans, the whole organization collapses. The ’Ndrangheta is a close-knit family, everyone’s related—unlike the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, which places more emphasis on the criminal weight of a mafioso than it does on blood ties.
After the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, it took Cosa Nostra years to regain its invisibility—the silent acquiescence of Sicilians, the discreet handouts from politicians, and the blind eyes turned by everyone—without which the Mafia cannot flourish. During the years when Cosa Nostra was in the spotlight, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta rose in its shadow.
With the introduction of a law freezing the property of people who had been kidnapped, abduction ceased to be a viable business. So the ’Ndrangheta left the kidnapping industry and entered the cocaine trade. In Calabria it also controls all public commissions and maintains its power by collecting protection money. It has branches throughout the whole world; in Germany alone it has a network of three hundred pizzerias and, like al-Qaeda, connects the middle ages with the globalized future, negotiating by e-mail with cocaine brokers in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Uruguay, buying a bank in St Petersburg and whole stretches of road in Brussels, while at the same time its members will only marry a woman from the same village, because the family is sacred. Blood relations don’t betray one another. The ’Ndrangheta’s only worry lies in being able to launder money before it rots—as it has done in the past, when two bosses buried 25 million euros in the ground and 8 million became damp and had to be thrown away.
But what could Don Pino do about that? Does the shepherd of souls not have to go where evil is? Is he not more responsible for the sick than
We were sitting on a wooden bench next to the church—the same wooden bench on which he had received almost the whole of the world’s press since the massacre, not just the German daily papers but El País and the Italian broadcaster Rai. Even Japanese television crews had come to listen to Don Pino, who tirelessly stressed that the people of San Luca were simple and good, and only afraid to say anything to the journalists because you never know how what you say is going to be used.
“We condemn all kinds of Mafia, with our swords drawn,” said Don Pino. “And then they write that we’re all like that!And years ago someone even wrote: ‘The parish priest cohabits with the Mafia’.”
Don Pino has spent half his life as a parish priest in San Luca. He was born here, he grew up here, he knew them all, he baptized and married them, and carried them to the grave. He was already the parish priest when San Luca grew rich in the 1980s on the money it raised from kidnappings, when Jean Paul Getty’s grandson had his ear cut off in a neighboring village, and when the women caught an industrialist who had managed to escape from his hiding place and held him until he could be returned to his abductors.
Don Pino was already here when San Luca started investing its ransom money in the cocaine trade; before, along with the villages of Platí and Sinópoli, it hosted the elite of the ’Ndrangheta, the wealthiest Mafia organization in Italy—which today, with an annual turnover of 45 billion euros, controls the whole of Europe’s cocaine trade and has diversified its activities like a multinational corporation, so that it now deals just as successfully in arms as it does in people.
Today the ’Ndrangheta is seen as the epitome of a successful criminal organization. It isn’t organized hierarchically like the Sicilian Mafia, but federally: each Calabrian clan chief makes autonomous decisions. He accepts advice, but not orders. In Sicily, on the other hand, it’s the commission that makes the decisions: la reunione dei mandamenti . And therein lies the weakness of Cosa Nostra—because, if someone at the top spills the beans, the whole organization collapses. The ’Ndrangheta is a close-knit family, everyone’s related—unlike the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, which places more emphasis on the criminal weight of a mafioso than it does on blood ties.
After the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, it took Cosa Nostra years to regain its invisibility—the silent acquiescence of Sicilians, the discreet handouts from politicians, and the blind eyes turned by everyone—without which the Mafia cannot flourish. During the years when Cosa Nostra was in the spotlight, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta rose in its shadow.
With the introduction of a law freezing the property of people who had been kidnapped, abduction ceased to be a viable business. So the ’Ndrangheta left the kidnapping industry and entered the cocaine trade. In Calabria it also controls all public commissions and maintains its power by collecting protection money. It has branches throughout the whole world; in Germany alone it has a network of three hundred pizzerias and, like al-Qaeda, connects the middle ages with the globalized future, negotiating by e-mail with cocaine brokers in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Uruguay, buying a bank in St Petersburg and whole stretches of road in Brussels, while at the same time its members will only marry a woman from the same village, because the family is sacred. Blood relations don’t betray one another. The ’Ndrangheta’s only worry lies in being able to launder money before it rots—as it has done in the past, when two bosses buried 25 million euros in the ground and 8 million became damp and had to be thrown away.
But what could Don Pino do about that? Does the shepherd of souls not have to go where evil is? Is he not more responsible for the sick than
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