The drug trade earns the ‘c an estimated €50 billion ($78.5 billion) a year. The network is also renowned for its brutality – last week it was claimed that a businesswoman was murdered and fed to pigs in 2016 after refusing to sell her land to a man with ‘Ndrangheta connections.
The alleged Mafiosi face charges ranging from murder and attempted murder to drug trafficking, money laundering and extortion. Also on trial will be accountants, lawyers, public servants and politicians who allegedly collaborated with mob bosses. More than 900 prosecution witnesses will be called in a trial that will involve 400 lawyers.
It is the biggest mass trial since the 1980s, when a similar judicial marathon held in Palermo delivered a decisive blow against Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia.
Luciano Leggio (left), the reputed “boss of bosses” of Italian Cosa Nostra, smiles from behind the bars during he big mafia trials in Sicily in 1986. Credit:AP
The proceedings, expected to last at least two years, will take place in a fortified courthouse in an industrial area outside the city of Lamezia Terme in Calabria.
The alleged mafia members on trial come from clans in the town of Vibo Valentia, and exclude the powerful godfathers who are based in the city of Reggio Calabria to the south.
One of the most prominent figures on trial is Luigi Mancuso, who has allegedly continued to run drug trafficking operations despite spending much of his adult life behind bars.
“I think the impact of the trial will be limited because it doesn’t target the most important people, apart from Mancuso,” said Anna Sergi, an expert on the Italian mafia at Essex University.
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“He’s the youngest of 11 brothers, a very charismatic figure. He is seen as a sort of cult leader,” she said. “He’s a major player in drug trafficking and created connections across Europe, especially in Germany.”
Many of the alleged mafiosi have nicknames reminiscent of The Sopranos or a Martin Scorsese film, from Blondie and Fatty to The Wolf, The Wringer and Little Goat.
Gratteri, the prosecutor, has an intimate knowledge of the ‘Ndrangheta – as a boy he went to school with the children of mafia bosses. “I understand their criminal philosophy, their reasoning,” he said. Having seen the mob’s corrupting influence on his home region, he said he had vowed to do something about it when he became an adult. Many of the defendants were arrested during a series of coordinated predawn raids in Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Bulgaria in December 2019.
The London Telegraph
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