Calabrian mob now biggest

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Reported by

Beth
July 18, 2008

Move over, Sicilians – there’s another Italian crime group that makes more money, has closer family ties, and unlike Don Corleone, doesn’t have a problem with drugs trafficking.

The Calabrian mafia, known as the ‘Ndrangheta, is making up to $70 billion annually out of its base in southern Italy, mostly from drug trafficking.

The ‘Ndrangheta is big enough that a Rome think tank reckoned earlier this year that the group’s 2007 revenues amount to nearly 3 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, and were up 16 percent from $58 billion in 2006. The think tank, Eurispes, said some 62 percent of that were generated from drugs, mostly from direct ties with Colombian cocaine cartels.

Other ‘Ndrangheta business includes smuggling illegal immigrants, arms trafficking from the former Yugoslavia, and public works and construction rackets.

The group, also known as the “Honored Society,” began as a way for peasants around Calabria to band together against aristocratic landlords. In the 20th century the group branched out into illegal ways to make money, and by the 1990s, they were cutting out the Sicilian Cosa Nostra middleman when buying cocaine from the Colombians. The clan’s reach extends to the US, Canada, Western Europe and Australia.

Besides being richer and, experts say, more deadly, than the Sicilian mob, the ‘Ndrangheta is also bypassing the Cosa Nostra’s godfather-top-down pyramid structures in favor of families based on blood relationships or intermarriages. Groups are named after their village, or after the family leader. The family-based cells, say prosecutors, are harder to monitor, and turncoats are nonexistent. The ‘Ndrangheta also rarely kills public officials, which kept the group off the radar for many years.

It wasn’t until last summer’s massacre of six young Italians outside a pizzeria in Duisburg, Germany, that the group gained international notoriety. In May 2008, the US government put the ‘Ndrangheta on its narcotics kingpin list. The following month Italian police arrested nine people and seized $8 million worth of property after alleging that the Calabrian mafia was investing drug money in resorts in Sardinia, and issued arrest warrants for 32 people from a single clan in the Calabrian town of Cosenza for allegedly loan-sharking in Italy and running drugs and laundering money from Spain.