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For the ‘Ndrangheta, a war or a pandemic are new business opportunities. The conflict in Ukraine, for example, is a dinner table where there is no shortage of weapons, construction, human trafficking, black markets and European funds. A tempting opportunity that follows the Covid-19 season, during which organized crime has done its utmost to support families and businesses in difficulty.
Nicola Gratteri and Antonio Nicaso
I am Nicola Gratteri, a magistrate who has always been involved in the fight against the ‘Ndrangheta, and Antonio Nicaso, a journalist and historian of criminal organisations, who tell us how mafia organizations manage to expand “outside the borders” and how their “help” to people in difficulties are able to trigger dependency mechanisms to be exploited in due time.
The authors tell of threats, intercepted by investigators, addressed by an ‘Ndrangheta member to a small businessman who had been supported: “I’ll cut you in two and make you disappear with two bags of lime” and again, knowing that he represents a powerful organization , “there is a ship behind me”. This is precisely the logic why “if you ask you must be able to give back what has been given to you”. And then the recommendations made to his grandchildren by an elderly gentleman resonate: “you shouldn’t ask the ‘Ndrangheta for anything, not even the time”.
Calabria
The writers explain how the ‘Ndrangheta, while retaining its roots in Calabria, has ramifications in all Italian regions and in different parts of the world, is no longer a rural mafia, but an evolved organization capable of using telematic resources, to cryptocurrencies and trafficking on the dark web, dedicated to the trafficking of toxic waste, online gambling, money laundering, without renouncing drug and weapons trafficking, the exploitation of prostitution, extortion and counterfeiting. The reporters address the problem of the mutation of the mafias which, like viruses, “adapt to the changes in the social organism that hosts them”, make themselves less visible by limiting violence with the aim of not missing any opportunity in any country in the world, that is forced to redesign their structures to adapt to contemporaneity.
We must therefore ask ourselves whether our country is capable of changing as rapidly in order to counter mafia organisations, or whether, on the contrary, it acts as a driving force for them while remaining rooted in that system of power characterized by mutual co-optation between people and restricted groups, the country of magic circles and amoral familism that has characterized our history.