Calabria’s ‘Ndrangheta vs the Good Mothers with Alex Perry
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For a few short days in November 2009, 17-year-old Denise Cosco allowed herself to dream of a family life. Her mother, Leah Garofalo, was 35 years old, the daughter of a prominent member of the Calabrian mafia, the Undrangheta. Leah had married a rough-necked and pug-nosed local named Carlo Cosco when she was just 16 and had Leah a year after that.

Leah thought Kahlo was a way out of the organization, once steeped in mythology and comprised, if you believe the legend that is, of 141 families, strewn in towns and villages along the rugged Calabrian coast.

But Carlo, an outsider, had seen otherwise. Lea was his ticket into the Andrangheta, and he almost immediately embarked upon a career of violence and cocaine smuggling, setting up shop in a Milan tower block notorious for its links to killers and people smugglers.

Aged 21, Leah had helped cops send Carlo to Milan's San Vittore prison. And from age 25 to 31, she and Denise had lived on the run, hiding themselves away in the nearby alpine foothills, desperate to stay alive despite the death sentence they were sure hung over their heads as mafia turncoats.

But in 2002, somebody had set Leah's scooter on fire and she turned herself in to authorities, promising to lift the lid on her little-known criminal family in return for a spot in Italy's witness protection. Close call followed close call thereafter. Everyone had an insider inside the witness protection. But in spring 2009, fresh from prison, Carlo changed tack.

He wanted Leah back, and he wanted to forget all the bad blood that had gone before. By September that year, Leah and Carlo were incredibly dating again. Two months later, Carlo invited Leah and Denise back to Milan. She was terrified, but Leah had run out of cash, and she seemed struck by romance.

The family walked around Milan, met family and ate gelato. Perhaps, Denise thought, her mother and father could live happily ever after. The last day that Denise saw Lea alive was on November 24, 2009. That evening, Carlo left Denise with his aunt and uncle while he took his estranged wife out for dinner. AC Milan were playing Barcelona and the Italian city was abuzz.

But when Carlo returned alone, Denise realized the awful truth. Her mother was dead. And if she wanted to stay alive, she'd have to pretend now that she knew nothing of it. I understood there was very little I could do for my mother now, she would later say. But I couldn't let him understand me.

It would be years before Italy knew the truth about Leah Garofalo and Carlo Cosco. But Leah's death and Denise's defiance in the face of her deadly relatives would lift the lid on Italy's and the world's most powerful drug smuggling organisation. One that has outlasted its criminal neighbours by manipulating everything. Nation, family and most of all, its women. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Music

Hi guys, and welcome to the show that lists more secrets than a Calabrian prosecutor. I'm your host, Sean Williams. I'm an investigative journalist based in London, UK, and I'm joined today not by Danny Gold in New York City, but Alex Perry, journalist, documentarian, writer, and author of The Good Mothers, a book centered on the death of Leah Garofalo and several other women inside the murky Andrangheta.

The book also gets into the female prosecutor who blew open those cases, and it's really like an amazing read. I was at it all over Christmas. It's just mind-blowingly good. It's also finally, and importantly, a way for us to cover the Andrangheta here without just doing some gigantic Wikipedia-style episode on them, although, well, we might just do that sometime too.

Anyway, housekeeping, we've got merch now and a steady supply of juicy bonuses for you lovely folks who are subscribing. We really do love you all. And speaking of things that cost a lot, I'm moving to New Zealand. So if you're in and around Wellington, come say hi, especially if you're a gangster and you want to tell your story to this show. That would really be great, guys, really. If you are a terrible person, come say hi. Join me for a third-way coffee somewhere in Wellington.

So Alex Perry, writer and everything else in between, welcome to the show. I read this book quite recently. It's amazing. You've really kind of captured several things that I think I've been thinking about with the Ndrangheta for a long time. I mean, the kind of surface level stories that they tell each other and the wider public about their history, these tight knit, very interesting,

insular family units that kind of are the bedrock of this gigantic organization, possibly by many metrics, the most powerful drug organization in the world. And the angle that you use to jump into the book is absolutely fascinating. Would have just heard in the introduction story of Leah Garofalo and her death, which I'm guessing is

spurred your interest in the story? How did you first come across the story that would become The Good Mothers? You know, on another story, you know, typically that's always how you pick up a story, right? I was doing a story on the Sicilian Mafia and

Basically, the answer to why hundreds of thousands or one of the answers to why hundreds of thousands of people were crossing the Mediterranean to Sicily was that the Sicilian mafia wanted them to. It was running all the migration centers. It was doing all the language classes. There was an amazing piece of intercepted recording, a phone call between two bosses where one is advising the other one to get into migration and out of drugs. And he goes, migration, it's bigger than drugs. So I was on that story and had a couple of interviews in Rome.

My fixer, a couple of prosecutors, her price was 250 euros plus you have to come and see my play.

And her play was a very sort of, well, either arty or underfunded one woman show in a really, in a rundown area of Rome. Quite dodgy, actually, with one woman standing in front of a microphone and a cellist and one red light. And it was a sort of monologue in Italian, which I didn't understand at the time at all. And at the end of it, I was wheeled on stage to give my impressions.

Oh, wow. And also about the play and just Italy in general. So I kind of got through that with some platitudes. But the play had been quite dramatic. I could tell that. And I'd got the name of...

the lead character, which was Maria Concetta Cacciolo. So I went back to my hotel and just sort of Googled it. And the story of the Good Mothers, these three women who were born into the mafia, who rebelled at huge personal cost, it was sort of reasonably well known in Italy, although it had been done kind of piecemeal, that, you know, it's been intermittent coverage of their

trials of, well, two of them were killed. So there'd been sort of busy coverage of that. But although there had been out of what had happened to them, this great big anti-Mafia movement was born in which their sort of photos were held up on banners and stuff like that. Weirdly, no one had written the story. No one had put these women together, which was

Really strange, particularly because two of them were actually best friends. So I just felt like there was an amazing story here that was sort of part documented, but hadn't been sort of told properly. And then once I started digging into it, I didn't know this, but the Italian justice system is a goldmine for journalists. Like the transparency...

is extraordinary. A court case will go through four different stages of different levels of courts. And at each stage, the prosecutor presents an enormous pile of documents, like 2,000 pages of A4, which includes all the evidence to do with the case, including the wiretaps, including everything that you would possibly need as a journalist to recreate a story.

And as it goes through the court case, they add to it. They put in more evidence. So by the time you get to the end of it, I mean, your research is done. I'd like to be able to tell you that it took years of painstaking sort of working through contacts and collaborators, stuff like that. Actually, it took taking a small group of prosecutors out to lunch and giving them a memory stick. The main work in this book was...

was translation and just working through about, I don't know, 50,000 pages of court documents and drawing the story out of that. The book was a writing process. That's what it was about. It was about distilling the story, structure, narrative, and you tell me whether I pulled it off. But what I loved about it was when I was in the middle of this, weirdly, I met a very famous actor

And he asked me what I was working on. And I said, Oh, this story about women who rebel against mafia. And he went, women, very fashionable. Amazing. Oh,

I'm like, oh, you know, where do you start? But what I loved about it, yes, there was a lot, there is a lot of, you know, when I was writing it, it was kind of the Me Too thing was coming up. Whatever you thought about that, this was feminism being used as a weapon to undo a criminal organization. That, I thought, was really exciting. You know, there was, this wasn't talk. This was, this had concrete results and, and,

And the men that they were bringing down are truly terrible human beings. I mean, I guess that's the other...

thing that kind of gave me some conviction about it was, was there is no glamour in these mafiosos. They are sexist, violent pigs. You know, they, they feed people to pigs. Yeah. You know, they are the worst of the worst. They all beat their wives. They all beat their daughters. Um, and they'll kill them if they're unfaithful. Um, so yeah, that gives you a bit of,

conviction and vin when you're working on something like that. This is a story it feels like that has to be told. It reminded me the way that you described the kind of this, like you just said, this medieval family unit that sort of drives the Andrangheta Mafia. It reminded me of the way that the Taliban operates in Afghanistan with women. I mean, very much as chattel, as possession and used as bartering tools and a kind of

the sort of almost the boundary lines of conflict between various families and warring factions and it seems exactly the same in this organization it actually struck me just how similar those two things were yeah there are a lot of the prosecutors i spoke to drew that comparison as well you know it's an organization but it's a it's a culture it's an ideology it's

medieval and it's isolated and rejects the world in the same way. In improper and drang to family they speak a different language. When the

When the prosecutors intercept notes, sometimes they can't read them because it's written in a different script. It's a sort of willfully, it's a really strange culture. And the other weird thing about it is if you go down to Calabria, it's incredibly poor, you know, and there are pretty towns there, but the Andrangheta towns are fantastically ugly, sort of unfinished concrete buildings. I mean, the whole thing is, you know, and it's striking how ugly they are when you have such natural beauty sort of next door.

And so the question is, why? You know, why is this organized? Why are these men doing this if they don't seem to enjoy the money? You know, they're living terrible lives. They don't seem to get to spend it. Everybody's miserable. Everybody's violent. A lot of them die young. You know, there's no joy in any of this. And the answer seemed to be a very sort of local type of thing. Like, you're the biggest guy in the street.

That's it. Yeah. You know, and nobody sees beyond that world. You know, they don't really watch TV that much. They don't, you know, the music, they're not listening to Taylor Swift. They're listening to the Tarantella, you know, some sort of song or something like that. And the culture is so intense that it's, you know, it blinds everybody in it that it's a prison.

If only they did listen to more Taylor Swift, you know, maybe they wouldn't be in this predicament. So how is this ostensibly backward, insular, incredibly strange and parochial organisation

become arguably the largest drug trafficking network in the world. They don't seem to go hand in hand, those two titles. I think it's an issue of culture and character. The Andrangheta doesn't respect anything else. So I think a normal, everyday garden variety criminal

there are some taboos, right? And there is probably some fear or some trepidation about the idea of flying to South America, meeting a cocaine cartel boss and striking a deal. That just doesn't seem to affect the Indrainter. There's so much. I think they despise the world. And it just sort of allows them to walk into any door. But time and again, when you look at their astonishing rise from this

from this group that was essentially a bunch of shepherds running a protection racket and shaking down the local tavern or whatever.

And then in a generation or two, they become the biggest cocaine empire on the planet. It's this sort of self-confidence that carries them through. You know, it's a kind of like, well, how hard can it be? They just dare to do stuff that other people would second guess and say, no, that would be quite hard. They're like, no, it's not. You know, we'll just go there, pay the money and we'll, you know, make, you know. Yeah, yeah. The speed of their rise is...

There's that character, but also, I mean, their story is also this story of the decline of the Sicilian mafia. You know, the Sicilians took on the Italian state in the late 80s and early 90s, and it was a disaster. You know, essentially, lots of people were killed, lots of mafiosi, lots of prosecutors, lots of judges, and so on. But in the end, it really destroyed Cosa Nostra, and it's never really recovered. And the Calabrians just took over.

They saw that opportunity. They'd always been the junior one. They saw that their nominal bosses were down and they just stepped into that role. And they happened to do it just at a time when the appetite for cocaine in Europe exploded. That moment when Falcone and Borsellino are killed in Palermo and that really rallies the Italian state, which I guess a lot of people outside of Europe might not know is incredibly...

juvenile country. It's not a very old concept as a united Italy at all. No, it's only 150 odd years. Yeah. And that really was the beginning of the end for the Sicilian mob. That really brought everyone around as a unit against them. And it seems like the Indrangheta realised then that they couldn't fight a war, per se, against the Italian state, but that their war would be contained within that

family unit almost to sort of turn the violence inwards and make sure that the word doesn't get out. But also never to make noise. The Cosa Nostra took on the state. The Camorra in Naples is incredibly flashy. Their weddings are in sort of the equivalent of Hello magazine and stuff like that and they drive around town in Lamborghinis.

The Indrangita, just outside appearances, didn't change at all. They still live in these remote little hill villages and do up their trousers with baling twine. To look at them, you'd think there's a bunch of orange and lemon farmers. But that sort of

decision not to show their hand, not to appear, was really successful. I mean, the Italian state didn't really catch on to what was going on for about 15 years and had dismissed the Indrangita as a bunch of goat herders. And actually, it was these cases, the women's cases, which really sort of opened up the Indrangita to the prosecutors for the first time.

And they're like, you know, these guys are all over the world. Look at the amount of money. Look at the amount of cocaine coming in. I mean, it's sort of genius in a way because the evidence was all there. You know, Joyotaro port in Calabria, the biggest single entry point of cocaine into Europe. The Andrangheta built it in plain sight using European funded money, you know, billions of it, this enormous container port.

And, you know, they built it absolutely to import cocaine. And it just sort of happened. Everyone went, oh, that's nice that they're getting some development in Calabria. And, you know, it's like, no, no, no. It's being built in an area that is 100 percent in Drangata. You know, there are four families that run that tiny little town.

And they are all massive cocaine smugglers. What the hell do you think is going on here? It was a long time before the penny kind of dropped, even amongst the sort of judiciary in Italy. But these women, when they spoke out, blew it wide open, particularly Giuseppina Pesce. She came from a very powerful family that came from the town, from Rosano, right next door to Gioia Taro and

She talked about everything, about tons and tons of cocaine coming in. And out of that, they confiscated hundreds of millions of dollars. They began to realize how big it was. But in a sense, I mean, the state is still catching up now that the Indrangita has gone through

several transformations, you know, once becoming this huge drug smuggler, then it became a sort of money launderer, then it became a money launderer for all sorts of other criminal organizations, because it was so good at money laundering. Now, it's actually, while it's still drug smuggling, and it's still doing a bit of arms smuggling, and it's still doing a bit of protection, you know, it kind of keeps its hand in to keep its rep up. It's actually more of an investment fund.

And it's so ingrained in the legitimate economy that there's really no extracting it. In a sense, it's a legitimate business power. And every prosecutor that I spoke to, there was this sense that they're too late.

You know, there was a time to catch these people when they were moving tons of cocaine and driving the trucks and all this sort of stuff. Well, now they're bankers. Now they're accountants. Now they're management consultants. Yeah, I think we've seen this a lot when we've done research on the Mexican cartels as well, the amount that they've been able to

insinuate themselves now into legitimate businesses, I mean, seafood imports or construction or whatever, it's now almost impossible to extricate them from the economy at large. And it seems like that's

the case here as well i mean one of the the key players in this story carlos costco he is not an investment banker i think it's fair to say not not a management level sort of wonk can you tell me about his kind of rise through the mafia ranks and how he kind of collided with your story then carlo kind of represents the indrangita as it became a kind of cocaine power in the

He's not from one of the 141 Andrangita families, but he is from a village, Petilia Policastro, population like 400, way up in the hills, that is entirely Andrangita and had a powerful Andrangita family, the Garofalos or Garofalos. And he married into them.

And for him, that was a serious elevation in sort of social status and professional status. And he used that platform to bring his brothers in and to become useful to the Indrangita as well.

As they expanded out of Calabria, and in Carlo's case into northern Italy, Carlo was one of the guys that expanded that cocaine network. He was in Milan. A lot of Calabrian families did the same, and Milan was typically where they went. And Carlo ran. He had sort of power over a small area of central Milan.

But from there, he's running large shipments of cocaine across Europe and also taking money to Switzerland and laundering it. But always, yeah, he's a middle manager. So there's always layers above him. But he's an ambitious guy and he's hoping to sort of hack his way up. So when his wife...

from, you know, Andrangata royalty, leaves him, testifies, then testifies again. It's a major embarrassment and it's messing with all his plans. And he kills her as a way to restore his status and sort of elevate himself. And the coldness of the way that he calculates her death over a matter of years is quite unbelievable. I've never really come across a case like that.

Yeah, I mean, for those who are not familiar with it, so they separated. They separated when she, I think he'd misunderstood, right? Leah was a 16-year-old who wanted to get out of Portilia Polycastra and wanted to get out of the Indrangita. She marries this guy. She moves with him to Milan. He turns out to be an Indrangitisti, you know. Whoops. So that's sort of why she leaves it. I think she'd seen him kill somebody, you know, and that was sort of the final straw.

She walks into a police station, starts testifying against him. The police, I mean, as I say, the justice system has its great advantages, particularly for journalists. Their witness protection is terrible. And it's a major, major flaw in terms of fighting the mafia. They often don't take care of people. The whole system seems to be entirely penetrated by the mafia anyway. They've always got someone on the inside they can pay to tell them where someone is hiding out.

I mean, a lot of the judiciary despise the sort of turncoats that they're meant to be protecting. They don't take care of them. And that's what happened to Leah. She gave her evidence. Nothing much really happened with it. She was risking her life doing this. No one seemed to bother to take care of her. In the end, somebody managed to track her down, a guy employed by Carlo to come and kill her.

managed to do that while she was in hiding in witness protection, she walked out of protection. And she sent messages to Carlo basically saying, you know, I'm not going to testify against you anymore. And I just want to sort of reconcile. As you say, the way he played it,

was this incredibly long game of pretend romance, of I've always kind of loved you and maybe we could get back together. And their daughter, Leia, that was something that she desperately wanted. And so Carlo played this kind of big man, generous, taking the family out for dinner, taking them on a tour of Milan, buying things here, paying for...

a pedicure and stuff like that and he was just waiting for this moment and when he could get Leia alone and when he did he killed her it's also very typical of the Indrangita that the the cynicism the manipulation and this sort of gnawing uncertainty that someone is not genuine and and playing you the Indrangita loves that they love to create this sort of

the kind of terror of uncertainty. You don't know who to trust, you don't know... And it's in that space that they operate because you kind of find yourself withered and going to them as the people who are certain and can kind of restore certainty and are the solid power, really. But for Denise, Carlo and Leia's daughter,

She had to go through this process while she's sitting next to her father of like, oh, my parents aren't falling back in love. In fact, he just murdered her a few minutes ago. She's trying to process this while talking to her father, who's pretending to look for her missing mother.

I mean, it's excruciating. And amazingly, as I say, with the openness of the justice system, it's all there in transcripts, you know. And you mentioned, I mean, there are two other women whose stories in and out of the Andrangheta play a key role in the book. And I don't want to sort of, you know, sort of give those away for anyone. I want people to read the book, but

Giuseppe Nepeschi and Maria Concetta Catiola, I apologise to any Italians listening for the pronunciation, but who was the kind of instigator or who masterminded the idea that these women's tales in particular, the role of women inside this organisation could be the key to unlocking it?

Well, so that was kind of, so a particular prosecutor, funnily enough, a woman, Alessandra Chiaretti, it was her idea that the women, she was assigned to Calabria. She's actually a Sicilian. But when she got to Calabria, she just, she wasn't immediately on the front line. She had about six months and she used it just to read everything she could about the Indrangita. And after a while, she just started focusing in on the fact that this

organization, which was built around family. No one had ever looked at the women, which was weird because the women were the center of the families. And yet they were having these horrible lives.

And I think she came across more than one incident where a woman had tried to sort of testify against her own family and been ignored. So there was a sort of sexism inside the judiciary. The women don't count. They don't take any part in this organization. It's all about the men. Well, no, you know, the women are in the room listening to everything. They're actually often involved in terms of passing messages, say,

to a husband that might be in jail or laundering the money. They're not doing the violent stuff. They're not doing the drugs, but they may be doing the financing. A lot of the property is in their name. And on top of that, they have a motivation to speak because they're having these terrible lives. You know, they are routinely murdered for looking at another guy. There are all sorts of, you know, honor killings going on in Calabria.

And until Alexandra came along, no one had really seen that as an opportunity to get inside this organization. You know, obviously these women are going to be unhappy. I mean, what's amazing is that some of them are and some of them aren't. Some of them are the enforcers of this code. You know, that's also kind of a slightly excruciating thing when one of the women you mentioned, Maria Cacciola, her mother,

is instrumental in drawing her back to the family and finishing her off because she believes in the code and she believes in the honor of the code, which is this thing that's repressed her all her life. So, yeah, but it was Chiaretti who had that insight and then crucially got the backing of her bosses, who were a couple of guys who'd done

very significant work against Cosa Nostra in Sicily in the years previous, sort of at the tail end of the fight against Cosa Nostra. But they were known to be kind of proactive and innovative. And when she said, I think it's the women, I think it's the women, they went, you know, go for it. So, yeah, she focused very much on Giuseppina Pesce. Giuseppina was arrested routinely. There was a crackdown on the Pesce's

But Alessandro kind of let her stew. I mean, to the point of real cruelty, to be honest. Giuseppina tried to commit suicide and Chiaretti said, well, I didn't really think it was sincere. But, you know, I mean, really, she's trying to hang herself. You know, when she reckoned she was sort of broken and she was broken because she was separated from her kids. She sort of presented collaboration as a way of, you can see your kids again if you talk to us. But after that, very...

transactional start to that relationship, they actually became very good friends. It was Giuseppina's example that allowed a second woman, well, a second woman sort of followed that example, her best friend, Maria Caciola. So then there were two talking about their families from the same little town. But yeah, I mean, even when I was reporting this story, I mean, Alessandra...

She was playing down the feminist angle when I spoke to her, because I think she'd come in for a lot of flack from her colleagues. There is still latent sexism inside the Italian judiciary. And a lot of the other

prosecutors were saying, oh, the women are unimportant. No, I'm so sick and tired of hearing about this. You know, it was really, it's really weird. The prosecutors are not at all united in Italy. In fact, they're mostly at each other's throats. They're very sort of mercurial, independent. And that's great for going after, for the freedom to go after anybody. But it means they spend half their time trying to stab each other in the eyeballs. And because they're incredibly ambitious. Yeah, I find that kind of weird, but it was plain, plain.

from the documents that I had, but these were the dynamics of play. And there's a kind of grim parallel between the lives of the women inside the mafia and Alessandra, right? Because she essentially...

because of the work that she does, has to live under lock and key. I mean, her life is incredibly regimented and locked down. How does she live? I mean, have you spoken to her much since the book came out as well? No, I mean, I did three interviews with her and then she stopped cooperating for commercial reasons, essentially. She wanted to...

I think she'd sold the rights to her story to a company in London. She's now actually claiming that she co-wrote the book with me in a court case in Italy, which is pretty extraordinary because it's written in English. She doesn't speak it. But...

Okay. Yeah. That's distracting because it's on my mind at the moment. What was the question? Yeah, no, I mean, her life in itself as well is so... Oh, yeah, no, the lockdown life. Yeah, no, it's a real irony, right? These people are fighting ultimately for their country and they don't really get to live in that country. You know, they don't get to go to restaurants. They don't get to sort of do the passeggiata, walk around town. They don't, you know, all the things that you might associate with a full and wonderful life in Italy. Yeah.

They don't even get to see their family that much. Alessandra told me that she takes a holiday once a year, two weeks, where she goes abroad. She doesn't tell anyone where she's going and she doesn't take her bodyguards. But that's really the only time. Everything else is behind bulletproof glass with a flashing blue light police escort and the whole works. It produces, you know, some of them are, I mean, there are hundreds of prosecutors living like this.

Some of them, it makes them... You can see they're... I mean, it does weird things to your characters. So Alessandra, it seemed to make her...

She's probably the most determined person I've ever met in my life. I mean, she is undeflected by anything. She is a straight arrow. Terrifying, actually. There are others that I met that were very sort of professorial sort of chess player types. You know, they spent their whole lives sort of reading books and quiet pleasures, and they never really interacted with human beings. And so that, you know, their whole life was sort of reading. There are others who...

were very definitely trying to move out of the mafia circle and just do normal sort of magistrate jobs for that reason. They wanted to have a normal life again. Yeah, I mean, it's... But it's a real irony that the people doing this, you know, conducting this fight don't get to enjoy the life that they're trying to preserve for everybody else. And I guess...

it's quite sort of timely at the moment as well right because there are these maxi trials going on against the Indra and Geta a kind of mirroring of what happened with the Cosa Nosa years ago one family that's just one family yeah but it's one area you've got another 140 to go you know okay good luck

Wow. So give me an idea of kind of there's this massive outpouring of public grief and anger in the wake of Leah's death in particular. Why was that and why did it grip the nation so much and kind of what did it do?

to kind of educate or change the public perception of the Andrangheta? I think Leah was a very clear-cut victim. Giuseppina had been an Andranghete and then sort of changed. Leah had rebelled very sort of honorably. She was quite striking looking. You know, that always helps. She had a daughter who was incredibly brave and stood up in court and testified. There was a lot of human drama to this.

Carlo is a cardboard cutout villain. I mean, he's built like a gorilla in court.

so obviously lying and unsympathetic and on top of that actually in court signaling you i've seen the tapes he's making hand signals to other indrangita members in the gallery of wow at one point he does this and then he does this and then uh and then he does this which is he's doing the monkey signs of like hear no evil speak no evil he's basically saying it looks like i'm talking to these people but i'm keeping my vows you know

I'm just spinning them lies. You know, he's a, you know, calculating, cynical, violent murderer. And I think the starkness of the injustice really got people going. And, and,

It became a kind of cause to love. There are a couple of anti-mafia organizations in Italy that have really got going in the last sort of 15 years. In Sicily in particular, Libra, you'll come across in Palermo, shops, you know, selling all this anti, you know, this product is certified not to be made by the mafia kind of stuff. And they really adopted Leah's story and Denise's story and took sort of Denise under their wing and...

Yeah, and created this sort of consciousness about it. It didn't happen so much with Giuseppina Pesce or Maria Concerta Caciola, which is, you know, it always felt kind of cruel to me. In many ways, Giuseppina was the most effective at exposing the mafia. And Maria Caciola, her death was in some ways the most tragic. It was this awful, as I say, sort of emotional blackmail by her mother and the manner of her death. I mean, I went,

go into it, but it's just horrendous. Yeah, it's all part of this. I think you describe it in the book, the Lupada Bianca, right? The white shotgun, this sort of ultimate rubbing out of a human being, the existence of it. Erasing. Yeah. Erasing of somebody and their name is never spoken of again. One day they're just not there anymore and no one ever talks about it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's horrendous. And so you say that a lot of this book was going through the court documents, translating things and piecing together a narrative from that. I mean, did you ever come into contact with any members of this organization or did you ever feel the kind of pressure of them at all while you were reporting this? Because it's very, this is not the sort of thing they want out.

I had one kind of brush with them, which was really sort of telling. So I went to Petilia Policastro, Carlo's old village, where the Garofalo's had come. I wanted to see this little house where Leia had lived. And I knew this is a, this is a, in Drang it's a stronghold, the whole town. So there was a bigger town just before it. I went there, met the mayor, met the police chief, spent half a day being taken on a

tour of the museums and the olive groves and stuff like that, kind of slightly pretending to be interested in the history of this area. And what I really wanted was one thing. I wanted the police guy to let the one policeman in Petilia Policastro know that I was coming

And for me to, for that guy to escort me to this house. And I just, I just wanted to, I didn't want to talk to him. I'd been to a few in Dragon's Towns before. And I, you know, even before I parked my car, people had rapped on the window and going, what the fuck are you doing here? Who the fuck are you? Really? Wow. In your face, you know. So I didn't really want that again. So I thought, oh, I just wanted to be able to describe it, you know, in words.

So the police chief said, yes, no problem. I'll phone the guy. I drive 10 minutes to this village with my translator. I get there. This car, as I parked,

parks behind me cuts me off so i can't move it's the policeman not in police clothes who says you should come now they're they're waiting for you i'm like fuck we walk up to the main square you know there is one in this tiny little place there is one cafe there's a group of like

very nasty looking bloke standing outside having a coffee and a fag. And then this other car draws up and it's Leah's sister, Marisa, who walks this kind of tightrope between being part of the Andrangenta and not being part of the Andrangenta. She's become an anti-mafia campaigner, but it's

almost like a reassurance to the Indrangita that I'm doing the campaigning so you don't have to worry about it because I won't be that effective. It's a weird thing that she's doing. And she's quite glamorous and shades and whatever. And she says, right, she announces she's ready for her interview. I'm like, okay. So we have a very stilted conversation for 20 minutes with all these guys staring at us.

where I sort of say, I ask her stuff like, were you close to your sister? And she goes, yep. It's like a footballer interview. Eventually I sort of run out of questions and, uh, and she goes, great, let's go. And, you know, back in your car and she escorts us to the main freeway motorway back to Rome out of, you know, and then waves us off. And it's sort of, we're thinking, okay, that's such a weird experience. The next week,

In both local papers, there are two, there is a double page spread 2000 word article on me. This is the British journalist, Alex Perry, who is currently touring the region. Exactly where I'd been, like to the minute where we'd stop for lunch, who we'd met everywhere, you know, and it was just sort of like, we are fucking onto you. Wow. It's pretty intense. Yeah.

And sort of in my own language, in newspaper journalism, you know. I mean, I just sort of thought, Jesus Christ, you know. And that's nothing compared to what, you know, normal threats. But it felt it was just a demonstration of power and control. It's funny that you mentioned the press there because there is a thing running through the book as well, that there are certain elements of the local press that,

in Calabria who are clearly either in the pockets or in the debt of the mafia there. I mean, it seems bizarre, some of the sort of op-eds that come out during the process of these deaths that are being investigated, right? Yeah, oh yeah. You know, it goes on. I mean,

A lot of it, this is a family organization, right? So a lot of the editorials, I mean, the sort of tortuous logic that you've got to create to sort of defend the mafia, right? But they zeroed in on, oh, you're breaking families apart, you know? And you're like, well, yeah, when the family is a criminal organization, maybe. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, weirdly, that turned out to be a bit of a dead end in terms of a campaign because...

There's another court in Calabria, which is a youth court, which focuses on the kids. And

He, the magistrate who runs that is very definitely breaking families apart. And he's using the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to do it. As in, he's saying these families are institutionalized child abuse, you know, and we have international law justification to pull these kids out of these families and offer them a different life. So, yeah, but for a long time that the angle that was taken in the press was

they're ripping our children from us you know how terrible is that how unitalian you know yeah you read these editorials and you're i mean we've all met bad journalists right but you sort of either you you i don't know about you but i tend to believe that there is a sort of common code or something like that and you're like yeah god the

The creatures who are writing this stuff. Yeah, but it's so representational of how that organisation misuses the idea of a, you know, inverted commas, traditional family to keep flying under the radar, right? It's kind of a perfect encapsulation of that. With the Indrangita, I mean, you always come back to everything is a lie. Everything is a lie. You know, the whole honour code, it's a fucking lie.

You know, the whole, you know, this is a murderous criminal organization only interested in itself. The idea that they are southerners fighting rapacious northerners is a lie. They prey on southern, you know, they keep the South poor, you know.

All the sort of ludicrous kind of rituals, standing in a horseshoe and murmuring and pricking the finger and dripping blood on a picture of Michael St. Angelo. It's a lie. It's a made-up Monty Python mumbo-jumbo. And the whole thing is a myth. But it's an incredibly powerful one.

It works. People worship at this fake altar. It runs tramlines through people's minds to the point where they are doing themselves harm. You know, as I say, mothers are murdering their own children because they have absorbed this code.

So yeah, it's reprehensible and yet incredibly effective. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's a good note to end it, Alex. Thanks so much for joining us. What are you currently working on? How can people see your work? So I did a story in the summer about Mozambique and a big ISIS rebel attack on a bunch of construction contractors building a gas pump for Total. Yeah, it's a fantastic story. For Outside Magazine, which I'm now expanding into a book looking at

Looking at the entire oil and gas industry and why it is that oil and gas seems to be such an incredibly violent industry.

business did you know that 23 000 people have been killed in oil and gas in the last sort of 30 years i mean it's it's i can tell you with the american army it's three times as high and the american army wow yeah it's um but beyond that it's just this it's this industry that seems to well i think as i'm discovering it not only attracts conflict it actually sort of

profits yeah yeah you're a sucker for for a punishment firstly talking to mafiosi and then uh and then switching over to oil and gas executives that must be great fun yeah i mean like yeah i have this conversation with my wife it's like why do you do all these dark subjects i mean it is very sort of instinctual but i guess i just like to feel as though i'm doing something that matters

No, I mean, and the book is fantastic. Uh, I was going to say like, get it wherever you get books, but I mean, if you can download a podcast, then you can definitely find a book online. So the good mothers is wonderful. Uh, you've really sort of found the humanity in these stories. It's such a, it's such a personal story as well as one that has repercussions all over the world. Uh, as this huge organization. And if you hate books, which would be unlikely someone listened to this podcast, but it's going to be on TV as well. And, um,

Okay. That's exciting. Well, Alex Perry, thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, I'd like to catch up soon about some of your other work. Sounds like there's a lot of crossover with our show as well. Yeah. We'll always have a beer before you go. If that's possible. Yeah. But I would love one. Yeah. All right. Cheers. Thanks for joining. All right.