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The World's Most Powerful Cocaine Broker: Inside the 'Ndrangheta with Antonio Talia

2023/4/18
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Antonio Talia: 本期节目主要围绕着'Ndrangheta这一卡拉布里亚黑手党组织展开,讲述了其从最初的自卫民兵组织发展成为全球最强大犯罪组织之一的历程,并重点介绍了Rocco Morabito这一传奇人物的兴衰。他从早年参与绑架勒索活动积累财富,到后来成为连接南美毒品卡特尔与欧洲市场的关键人物,最终被捕入狱。Talia还详细介绍了'Ndrangheta的组织结构、运作模式以及其在全球范围内的活动,并分享了他作为卡拉布里亚记者的亲身经历和感受。 Danny Gold: 作为节目的主持人,Danny Gold主要负责引导话题,提出问题,并与Antonio Talia进行互动。他引导Antonio Talia讲述了Rocco Morabito的生平事迹,'Ndrangheta的组织结构和运作方式,以及该组织在全球范围内的影响力。他还表达了对'Ndrangheta神秘性和其发展历史的兴趣,并对该组织的运作模式和未来发展趋势进行了探讨。

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Rocco Morabito, a major player in the Ndrangheta, is introduced as a high-ranking member and one of the world's most dangerous cocaine brokers, highlighting his international operations and eventual capture.

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Punta del Este, Uruguay, in the summer of 2017. If you've never heard of it, it's a beautiful seaside city where South America's rich and elite go on vacation or keep villas. One of these rich and elite gentlemen, a model citizen who seems to have a soybean business and deal real estate, has popped up on the radar of the Italian police.

He generally keeps a pretty low profile, except for the occasional birthday blowout for his daughter. But he's made the mistake of registering that daughter at a school under her own name. And this has sent alarm bells ringing all over the world. See, that man's been wanted in Italy for nearly 25 years. And not only just wanted, but like top three or four for fugitives for a country with no shortage of global criminal power players.

and he happens to be a major player. Near the top of the food chain, in the feared Andrangheta criminal organization based in Calabria, but operating on damn near every continent all over the world. The Andrangheta started as a secretive defense militia in the mountains of Calabria, Italy, centuries ago. That's the region in Italy right above Sicily, where the Mafia originated.

They fought off pirates and raiders, but in the 20th century, morphed into a criminal organization that made it big on kidnapping and ransom, before in later years, turning to what else? Cocaine.

And this guy the police are hunting, named Iroko Mortabitou, once dubbed the cocaine king of Milan, is one of the guys who helped get them big into the game. A criminal prodigy, he was organizing massive cocaine deals between the world's most powerful organized crime groups before he was 30. Sitting down with the Cali Cartel, the Sicilian Mafia, and representing the Andrangheta.

He was international, and he helped turn the Andrangheta into Europe's biggest cocaine importer, controlling 80% of the market at times. He's been on the run, though, for years, because despite the slick demeanor, charm, double-breasted suits, and ability to cut deals with anyone, he got a little too much attention, then fled for South America. Said Nicola Mora, head of the Italian Parliament's Anti-Mafia Commission, quote,

He was a major architect in the internationalization of the crime gangs and became the king of cocaine brokers. And his rise over the last 30 years coincides with the rise of the Andrangheta, becoming the most powerful criminal organization in Italy, and some would say the world, operating from Melbourne to Switzerland to Toronto to Brazil.

So when the Italian and Uruguayan police finally nab him in early September that year in a hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay, it's a big deal. But the thing is, the guy is just too slick and too well-connected, and he's not going to stay locked up for long. This is The Underworld Podcast. ♪♪

Welcome back to the End of the World podcast, the podcast where every week two journalists who have reported all over, myself, Danny Gold, and usually Sean Williams, take the listener on a journey through international organized crime. As always, you can get bonus episodes and support us at patreon.com slash the end of the world podcast, where for $5, you get even more content and great interviews and all that sort of stuff.

This week, I am actually not joined by Sean. I am joined by a real Italian who's going to pronounce things correctly for the first time ever on this podcast. You will hear Italian words pronounced correctly. That is Antonio Talia, and he is Calabrian. He's going to tell us all about the Andrangheta. If you guys don't know, they're probably...

I mean, I would say the most powerful organized crime organization in the world at this moment, but Antonio is really going to get into the nitty gritty of it all, and especially what it's like growing up in that area. So Antonio, introduce yourself, tell us where everyone can find you and give us a bit of your background.

Hello, I'm very glad to be here at the Underworld podcast. My name is Antonio Italia, I'm an Italian journalist. I was born and raised in Calabria, which unfortunately is also the cradle of the Ndrangheta. I've been working as a foreign correspondent, but of course I've been working also as a crime reporter.

And I've been reporting about the Ndrangheta, especially about its ramifications and its branches across the world. I've written a book, which is called Satale Shentosei. It's the name of a road in Calabria that leads to many villages haunted by the Ndrangheta. And the book has been translated so far in four languages. Yeah, so let's get that in. Is it in English?

It could be translated as Route 106. Okay, well, let's get it done. Let's get an English version out here because the people... These books sell well, man. These books, you could be the next Gamora. We need that. We need that for you right now. But you were telling me about these three snapshots, I think, these three kind of photos and situations that really...

represent the Andrangheta and everything going on, especially about Rocco Morabito, who you're going to tell us all about, one of the most powerful crime lords ever. So can you kind of paint that picture for us? Yes. So imagine, in the archives of various crime agencies scattered across several nations, like three snapshots taken between two continents in a span of more than 40 years.

So we have our first picture taken at the beginning of the 80s and this is the mugshot of a young Caucasian man in his mid-20s. He has curly hair, simple clothes and his dark eyes are staring at the camera. And this picture was taken in a local station of the Carabinieri in Reggio Calabria, Italy.

And then we have a second picture, dates back to December 15th 1994 and shows a group of six elegant men discussing outside a club, somewhere in the center of Milan. None of them seems aware to be under surveillance, four are identified as dangerous members of the Cali Cartel from Colombia.

The 50s Domenico Mollica are well-known affiliates to the Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mob. But the sixth man, a 30-something in a dapper coat, is unknown to the Milanese investigators, at least at the moment. And then the third photo was shot on September 2, 2017, in Montevideo, Uruguay, and shows a man in handcuffs sitting on a bed of a luxury hotel.

He's Aries Grey, he has gained some weight, but a certain swagger in his eyes leaves little doubt about his true identity. It is the same man portrayed in a mugshot in Calabria in the 80s and outside the Café Milan in the 90s. And although his passport bears the name of a one Francisco Capelletto Sousa, Brazilian citizen, the joint team between the police of Uruguay, Argentina and Italy

is fully aware of his true identity, because the man arrested in 2017 is Rocco Morabito, aka Utamunga, a high-ranking member of Dendrangheta and one of the most dangerous cocaine brokers of the world. Now, these three pictures alone encompass the complex, multilayered history of Dendrangheta

an organization that was once considered a second-rate Italian mafia, and now it is one of the most powerful crime syndicates in the world.

Yeah, I think that's the thing about the Andrangheta, right? Like people know about the Sicilian mafia, obviously pop culture for decades, you know, generations have done stories on them. And we had a heavy Sicilian population in America. And then we also know now about the Camorra, right? Because of the book Camorra and the TV shows and the movies. So the Andrangheta kind of slips below that. And if you guys don't know where Calabria is, it's right above Sicily.

And they're extremely powerful. I mean, we see them mentioned now more than in international crime, you know, reportage in police, Interpol, all that. They get mentioned as really being global on a scale that I don't think you see the other Italian mafias in right now. But they're also kind of mysterious, right? We don't know a lot about them, I would say, compared to the other Italian organized crime groups. So can you kind of tell us a bit more about them? Yeah.

Yes, you're right, Danny. They are a bit more mysterious, even if in the last decade, I would say, the investigators have managed to uncover more and more. But the thing is, let's start from the word. The word itself, Drangheta, is mysterious.

We have to keep in mind that we cannot understand the Ndrangheta if we don't understand where the Ndrangheta was born. So we are in Calabria, as you mentioned, which is the southernmost region of continental Italy. It's just in front of Sicily. If Italy looks like a boot, Calabria is the point of the boot.

And Calabria lies between two seas, and the word Drangheta comes from the east coast, which is on the Ionian Sea, so we are facing Greece. And the term itself, Drangheta, might come from Greek, because it's Andros Agathia, which means something like the virtue of the brave man.

Now, there are many speculations and legends about the foundation of the organization Rangita, but one educated guess suggests to consider the shape of these areas of Calabria. You have the sea on one side and the Aspromonte on the other. And Aspromonte is basically the most impenetrable, secluded and wide chain of mountains in Western Europe.

And between the 60th and the 70th century, when pirates from the other side of the sea, from Turkey or other areas of the Ottoman Empire, systematically raided the East Coast, the Calabrians formed a secret militia or self-defense.

The strategy was simple and lethal because each village was split in two. There was a group of houses lying by the sea and another group of houses hidden in the mountains. And even today, if you drive across the East Coast, across the Route 106, which is the place where my book is settled, you see that every village has two versions.

Two versions, which is Marina and Superiore. One version of the village lies by the sea, the other one lies in the mountains. So when the pirates approached to raid and loot the villages by the sea, the men from the secret militias looted them in the hills and the mountains, where they had a better knowledge of the terrain and could easily ambush the invaders.

These secret societies, these secret militias, with a code of silence and blood and oaths and a very complicated structure, survived across the centuries to become a rebel force against the aristocracy, then against the central states of Italy, and then eventually, in modern times, they turned into a crime syndicate, which is Andrangheta.

I mean, it's like, you know, learning the history of how these groups, the Italian groups, other groups as well, sort of came about from stuff that happened centuries ago, right? Whether it's the Sicilian Mafia in Orange Groves or the banditry in Naples and then, you know, other groups too, Chinese triads.

I mean, it's kind of fascinating to see how it develops from these sort of, uh, like secret protective societies and, and emerges from that and then gets into crime. Um, but it's interesting too, about the houses you said, I have a, I have a friend whose family is Greek and they, she would always tell me the same thing that they had like, you know, the house down by the water and then the house down up in the mountains for when raiders came. And that was just the way it was, you know, in these sort of like Mediterranean areas where people were constantly shipping and traveling through. Um,

But now because of that, right, we have the emergence of this colossal criminal organization and powerful people like Rocco Morbito. Can you tell us a bit more about who he was?

Yes, well Rocco Morabito is somehow one of the purest examples of an dranghetista, which is a man of the drangheta. He's one of the purest examples I can think of because he was born in Africa Nuovo, which is a village with a complicated history of poverty and rebellion and a high rate of affiliates to the drangheta.

And I know this place very well because although I was born in Reggio Calabria, which is the capital region, the origins of my own family trace back to the same village, to Africo Nuovo. So I understand the dialects and the culture somehow.

Rocco Morabito was born in 1966 in a well-known drangote clan the family is called Morabito Palamara Bruzzaniti Creme family and he started his criminal career at a very young age

His nickname is Utamunga and refers to DKW Munga, which is an old German SUV. He used to drive on the streets of Aspromonte and he knew the streets well.

of Aspromonte, these secluded valleys very well. And he knew even the most hidden parts across these mountains since he was a young boy. And this brings us to a specific kind of crime that enriched the Ndrangheta between the 70s and the 80s, which is the kidnappings.

Yeah, I want to get to that in a minute, but I just have a question about the Andrangheta and how it works. Is it like a hierarchy where there's one person at the top or a group at the top and then everything goes down? Or is it like a collective name, like Kimura, where there's a bunch of different competing clans? I would say that there's something between the two because you don't have a couple of two clans. Okay?

You don't have a one leader of Andrangheta, but you have something that is called the crimine. The crimine is a circle of about 10 or 12 people.

which are elected and they stay in their place for almost a year. They are the highest ranking members of the Andrangheta, but they do not take operational decisions. Okay.

What they have to do is to watch over the interpretations of the rules. They are some sort of... I would say they are something like the Supreme Court of the Andrangheta. So if something doesn't work, if rules are not respected, the crimine...

will act. Otherwise, every family can do their own business within their own area, which is called locale.

And the crimine, the so-called Supreme Court of the Andrangheta, can only apply the rules when somebody doesn't respect the rules. Otherwise, they do not tell to each family how to drive the business. What they do is to collect the money.

for all the people that are in prison because this is very important every affiliate will receive every affiliate and every affiliate's family will receive support from the criminal from the organization

That's fascinating. Yeah, it is fascinating. And unfortunately, it works because then every family has a very hierarchical structure on the inside. But maybe we will get more into deep of that later if you want to. Yeah, but just the idea of the Supreme Court, I guess it's how a lot of families work, but it's the Supreme Court and the only thing they do, they don't tell you how to make your money or do anything else. They just make sure that you abide by the code.

Yeah, exactly. And they collect the money at the end of the year to support the other families. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, you'll hear amazing stories from people that have lived them, from spies to CEOs, even an undercover agent who infiltrated the Gambino crime family. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Jack Garcia, who did just that. My career was 24 out of 26 years was solely dedicated working undercover.

I walk in. I'm in the bar. Now, there's a barmaid there, good-looking young lady. She's serving me a drink. What would you like? Usually, my drink was give me a kettle, one martini, three olives, a glass of water on the side. I finish the drink. The guys come in. I'm going to go. Go in my pocket, take out the big wad of money. Bam, I give her $100. If you're with the mob, I say, hey, Jordan, you're on record with us. That means we protect you. Nobody can shake you down. We can shake you down.

but you're on record with us. For more on how Jack became so trusted in the highest levels of the Gambino organization, check out episode 392 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

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So you were saying kidnapping, and some investigators have claimed that the wealth of the Andrangetta...

is based upon kidnapping. Can you kind of explain that a little bit more? Yes, because they claim that the wealth of the Ndrangheta is based upon kidnappings because this was like the first phase of the Ndrangheta somehow. The power of the Ndrangheta today lies on cocaine. But the Ndrangheta entered into the cocaine trade with the money they acquired through kidnappings. And

And it all started in the 70s. They would kidnap the son or the daughter of some rich local, or they perceived as rich, which might be, you know, the son of a local lawyer or the doctor. And they held him or her in Aspromonte until a ransom was paid.

So then they realized that Aspromonte was even more secluded from people and investigators from other regions. So in the 80s, they expanded the business by kidnapping real riches, not people from Calabria, but like the chants of important business dynasties from the north of Italy. And they even kidnapped Paul Getty III.

which was the shorn of the Getty family. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a famous story. Yeah, it's a famous story. And if today you go to Bovalino, which is a village on the east coast of Calabria, very close to the villages of St. Luke and Platini, which are somehow the birthplace of Nadragheta, there's a certain neighborhood dubbed

I mean, of course, it's not written on the wall, but everybody calls it like that. This neighborhood is called Paul Getty Avenue because everybody knows that it was entirely built with the money from the Paul Getty ransom. So this season was...

Seriously a nightmare. I was like five years old, between like five years old and ten years old. They called it the season of kidnappings. And it was a nightmare for all the Calabrians and for the rest of Italy. Because in the 80s, Aspromonte was like synonymous with kidnappings and griefs. And members of the victims' families trained themselves to walls and trees to protest and ask for the freedom of their sons and daughters.

Yeah, I mean, Italy was just crazy in the 70s and 80s with, you know, the mafia wars in Sicily and all that. It's just what a wild time. And I honestly did not know much about these kidnappings. So it's really fascinating to hear. Can you kind of give us like a brief rundown for people who might not know, which includes me, about the Getty kidnapping and what that was?

Yeah, basically there were commanders of usually four or five people who started the target for even months. They had somehow some accomplices in banks because of course they...

They knew how well the target was. And then when they started a good plan, they hacked it. They kidnapped the target, which was usually a boy or a girl, we should say around 18 years old, 20 years old or something. This could happen anywhere in Italy.

And then they managed to carry the target in Calabria and in Aspromonte specifically.

And the entire situation was dire because of course these people, like Rocco Morabit himself, they knew very well all the most mysterious and secluded valleys and roads up in the mountains. So they could keep the

the target, the people who they kidnapped for months and months until they had finally a ransom from the family.

It was a real war because, of course, then authorities tried to block the money from the family. They raided Aspromonte up and down with helicopters and jeeps and anything you can imagine. But we should say that, especially in the first phase, the Dragata families managed to get lots and lots of money through this activity.

It was hard cash. It was very difficult to find where this cash was stashed. It was very difficult to free the hostages. And we should imagine that once an hostage was brought to Aspromonte, you had entire villages who were collaborating

to keep the hostage away. Yeah. And in the end, they accumulated enough money to make a good jump. They realized they also had already members of the family who emigrated to Switzerland with all this

great loves to stash your money, hide the money. And they managed to start to reinvest the money in the new cocaine trade. Yeah, and Getty, for those who don't know, he was one of the richest men in the world at the time. I think industrialist or oil baron.

and known for being really cheap and frugal. And, you know, there were some weird negotiations with the kidnappers and all that. So it was a giant, giant news story, those kidnappings. And Rocco Morabito, was he involved? Like, did his family start out with kidnappings? So the Morabito Palamara Bruzzaniti family from Africa Nuovo, Rocco Morabito family, conducted several high-profile kidnappings.

several, but it was never proved that he was directly involved. Although his nickname Utamunga refers to his knowledge of the most hidden parts in Aspromonte, and this may imply that he participated to some of these operations. In fact, his first problems with justice arose in the 80s and were related to extortions and drugs.

The thing is that Rocco Morabito somehow, he starts to embody the big changes that Drangheta is experiencing between the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s. Because in one of his first arrests, for example, he was threatening a university professor for some public procurement business. And he was arrested in a rather...

peculiar company because it was with a certain Hassan and Walid Kamaees. These are not his names. In fact, these two people are two militants of the Palestinian Liberation Front, were also well-known heroin traffickers.

So he was 20-something, but he was really very ambitious and he was cultivating acquaintances that eventually brought him at the top of the transnational dark trade. And it was exactly the same period and his clan, the Morabito Palamara Bruzzaniti crime family, shifted from kidnappings to the drug trade. They realized that the kidnapping era was over.

because the state, the Italian state and the Italian police and the Carabinieri, they finally realized how the kidnappings were done. They had to switch to something else, to reinvest the hundreds of millions they robbed to the families of the people they kidnapped. And they, according, imagine this, they,

According to some estimates by Italian law enforcement agencies, the Drangheta gained approximately

800 billion lira with the kidnappings, which is something like $600 million today, which is a good capital. Planted into the drug market. Yeah. Yeah. And they did it collectively. This is another interesting aspect of the drug data. It is true that every family does drugs.

its own business on its own territory. But they tend to collaborate when they see that there's much profit to do. So they evolved from street kidnappers to drug barons. And Rocco Morabito had a specific role in this strategy.

Yeah, what sort of role? Was he kind of the guy who negotiated it? What can you tell us about the role that he played in the strategy? Well, he has a certain... Okay, he's charismatic. He's very well known to be... He's a good talker. He might also be a charmer. And he's very good at negotiations.

Even if we know that he can be very, very violent when he wants to. To understand his role, we also have to keep in mind the history. We have to keep in mind that at the beginning of the 90s, La Cosa Nostra, so the Sicilians, waged a war against Italy, against the state, by killing prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

our heroes, and they threatened the whole country with mass bombings. And the answer of Italian institutions was very harsh and eventually led Cosa Nostra to become somehow a shadow of its former power. And this is the historical moment at the beginning of the 90s when the Calabrians made the move and they took over

And Drangheta becomes Italy's number one crime organization, taking over Cosa Nostra. Because while the Sicilians were busy waging this war against institutions, the Calabrians silently somehow expanded their business and directly approached cocaine producers in Colombia and other Latin America countries.

The thing is that we Calabrians, we have a very long history of immigration across the world. In Canada, in Australia, in the US, and also Argentina and Brazil. So we're hidden among honest immigrants that were always trying to...

improve their lives by migrating in Argentina or Brazil or Australia or whenever, there were always some affiliates to the Ndrangheta that always kept the context with the motherland in Calabria through cousins and relatives and so forth. And Rocco Morabito, according to the investigators,

activated several channels through some cousins to contact the Colombians and eventually his family, the Molabito Palamara Bruzzaniti, started to import the Cali cartel cocaine in Italy and in the rest of Europe. Rocco moved to Milan at the beginning of the 90s and he somehow started to become more sophisticated.

He has always been a charmer, but he started to become more sophisticated. He abandoned all the old simple clothes from Aspromonte. He starts to wear stylish jackets and coats. And some investigators say that his only regret is the accent.

Because even if now in Milan he looks hip, when he opens his mouth you can spot him as a Calabrian in one instant. But you have to imagine Milan in the 90s. It was the era of Armani and Versace, the supermodels, the football stars of AC Milan and Inter Milan.

And the thing is that the whole city was packed with cocaine users. And what Rocco Morabito did and his family, the Morabito Palamara Bruzzanetti did, was

to take over a very strategic hub, which is the Orto Mercato. The Orto Mercato is one of the biggest agricultural markets in Europe. Somehow you have to imagine a town within a town, miles and miles of containers and shops where every night tons and tons of goods

delivered and then distributed between the north of Italy and Switzerland, Austria, the south of Germany and so forth. So the Morabitos, they infiltrated the Orto Mercato, they posed as businessmen involved in the agro-trade, they set up legit companies and turned the Orto Mercato into a cocaine hub.

And Rocco Morabito is at the forefront of this strategy. He negotiated with the affiliates to the Cosa Nostra and the Camorra. He threatened those who didn't want to cooperate with the Ndrangheta and cultivated stable connections with the Latin American narcos. And at 28, he was able to speak face to face with members of the Cali Cartel as some sort of the Ndrangheta ambassador.

He's solid, he delivers, he solves problems. And every party involved in the business gets a big return for their investment. He's also very prudent, he's smart, he uses violence only when it is really needed. But when he recurs to violence, he's always merciless and he's very, very, very intimidating. So he's basically not even 30 years old and he's negotiating with...

The most powerful organized crime groups in the world, like organizing them together, you know, people who don't usually work together, whether it's the Costa Nostra, the Camorra, the Colombian cartels. I mean, would you say at this point that in Milan, he's basically become this sort of like this boss, this boss of bosses? Yeah.

This is a complicated question, but it can help us to define a bit better the structure of the drug.

You have to remember this is the structure of some strange secret militia born centuries ago that then evolved into a crime syndicate. So he is not a top boss, but he has a very important role. Why we say so? Okay, so the basic unit of the Ndrangheta is called the Ndrina. And the Ndrina is formed by at least five or six people who are very often relatives.

If you take several drenas together, they form a locale. And the locale is a territorial unity with the control of a certain area or a certain town.

To form a real locale, you need the authorization from the top level, from the criminal. You can not go to Toronto or Melbourne, and I'm mentioning, I'm talking about Toronto or Melbourne because these two cities, they do have a locale on the trangheta, but you can't go to Toronto or Melbourne and create a locale because nobody will recognize you.

And if you apply the Drangheta rules without consent, you are punished with death. So, orthodoxy is one of the pillars of the organization. Now, every man, every made man within the Drangheta has a certain rank and a certain role. And the rank and the role must not be confused because roles are often rotating on a regular basis.

Because, for example, you can be for a while what they call a maestro di giornata, which is basically a messenger that connects every member, distributing communications and orders. And then after some months, you can take the role of the crimine, who is the guy who keeps the weapons in order. And then you're back to maestro di giornata or contabile, meaning you keep the...

the sheets in order and so forth. But the ranks are based on a growing order. So there's a very strict hierarchy and each rank allows you to do certain things that are forbidden to lesser levels.

Within the Ndrangheta you start as a picciotto, which is basically a soldier. And you have to follow all this strictly. And then you become a camorrista and sgarrista. Now, I know it's very complicated. Picciotto, camorrista and sgarrista are the rankings within the società minore. The società minore means it's the lesser part of the Ndrangheta.

which is you do only very street-level crime and very dangerous stuff. You do racketeering, you deal with drunks on a street level, and so forth. After these three rankings, picciotto, camorista, scarvista, you can be admitted to the società maggiore,

Let's remember there are people who will never be in their lives admitted to Società Maggiore, but you always have the promise to grow within the society. And in Società Maggiore there are several older roles which are Santista, Vangelo, Trequartino, Quartino and finally Padrino. While you are in the Società Minore,

You cannot talk at all with people outside the drangheta with public roles. You cannot talk, for example, with state employees or attorneys and so forth. Once you are in a società maggiore, as a member of the drangheta, you have the license to infiltrate all the environments of society. You can talk with cops, you can join a freemasonry lodge, you can join politicians,

But you always have to remember that your loyalty goes only to the Ndrangheta. And that all the people you meet outside the Ndrangheta, you always have to use them as tools for the benefit of the Ndrangheta. So, to answer to your question, it is sure that Rocco Morabito reached the Società Maggiore. And probably his rank is somewhere between Vangelo and Trequartino, which is very high.

But he never managed to become the leader of a family because the leader of his family is one of his uncles, Giuseppe Morabito, aka Tiradritto, means straight shooter. And Tiradritto, his uncle, was also a very legendary boss.

Can you tell us a little bit about him? Cause straight shooter is just, that's a great mafia nickname right there. Yeah. And John get that nickname. I would say. Yeah. Okay. Um, straight shooter. Uh, I'll give you another great legendary nickname, which is, uh, his brother, uh,

which is also another hunk of Rocco Morabito. And he's Leo Morabito, nicknamed Scassaporte, which means door crusher.

because... Okay. So, you know, you can understand the type. But anyway, Giuseppe Morabito, Tila Ditto, he's a legendary boss because he's basically the one who managed to conquer the Orto Mercato in Milan and to, of course, with the help of his nephew Rocco, to get in touch with the Cali cartel and the other...

the other Latin American's cartels. He was very feared. When he was finally arrested, he was sentenced to a life sentence on the

He was basically also sentenced to a very harsh jail regime. He could not talk to the outside and so forth because the Italian authorities knew that he was able to continue to hold murders and other activities even from jail.

And he was called straight shooter because of course, yes, Tiradritto, he was very well known to be a straight shooter. He was very dangerous with fire weapons and everybody knew that he had to shoot you only once actually.

but so rocco at this point becomes like the cocaine king of milan i think they called him what um where does he go from there because he they go after him yeah pretty hard they go after him pretty hard they go after the whole uh the whole family pretty hard um there's a huge investigation uh which is called first uh fortaleza

and then it will have several names. And basically the Italian Carabinieri and Italian Police and Italian Guardia di Finanza, they realized that the Orto Mercato was turning into a hub for cocaine, that they had to look for the Morabito Palamara Bruzzaniti family.

They arrested basically the highest rankings of the family and Ivarol Pichotto Giornata in a huge operation in 1994.

They also arrested Tiradritto, the straight shooter. But Rocco is one of the few who manages to run away. He had a very...

very good apartments in the outskirts of Milan. That morning when the operation is running, the police and the Carabinieri are conducting the operation. They bombed, you have to imagine, at least 50 officials. They crushed the doors of his apartment and they found it empty.

And he disappears. And after a year, in 1995, he has been named one of the 10 fugitives, one of the 10 most dangerous fugitives of Italy.

He was charged with, of course, cocaine trafficking. They already knew that he had some links to Brazil because in 1992 he was spotted with... He was responsible for the... Basically, a very... If I don't remember badly, it was like around 600 kilos of cocaine

the transport from Brazil to Italy, again with Walid Issa Kamais, who is a partner from the Palestinian Liberation Front. And the Italian investigators, somehow they realized that his links to Brazil were very, very tight. Then

he totally disappears. The investigators, they suspect that he has some very good connection in Latin America. And by very good connection, we mean somebody who managed to forge him or also to give him

some political pass, sorry, some diplomatic passport. He disappears. He disappears for more than 25 years. But from time to time, he always have the sensation that he was behind this huge

traffic of cocaine from certain ports of Latin America, especially in Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay and Italy.

and also from these ports to certain ports of Europe, because he had also taken contacts with other Drangheta families, like the Pellevottari from San Luca,

in Mancuso di Limbadi. We are talking about the real aristocracy on Drangheta somehow. So it was like the... You said it was like, for a while, it was the king of cocaine and Milan, true, but by managing to escape from the arrest in 1994...

he managed to became somehow the, uh, king of cocaine between two worlds, between Europe and, uh, Latin America. Um, the interesting thing is that, uh, um, after, um, he was somehow spotted, uh, between Uruguay, between Montevideo, they, and every time, uh,

the Italian authorities tried to reach him, there was always some mistake which somehow led to the suspicion that he was very highly protected from some political authority in one of those countries.

But then he totally disappeared. They never found his whole identity again. They somehow suspect that he had several identities.

at least one identity for each one of these nations, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. We have to remember that this is also an area where, especially Uruguay, where all these Latin American countries border.

And he was able to move across all these borders and to forge new relationships with new clans from Brazil and from Paraguay and so forth. And then finally, after 23 years on the run,

He was arrested on the 4th of September in 2017. Yeah, and then he was in and out, right? Didn't he escape from prison for a minute? Yeah, that was incredible. So it was a very well-designed operation.

You had people from the Uruguayan police, you had people from the Argentinian police and you had people from the Carabinieri who were there on the field in Montevideo. It was a rainy evening. They identified him.

He had a very stylish villa on the outskirts of Montevideo in Punta del Ester, which is basically, I wouldn't say a gated community, but it's a very high class neighborhood outside Montevideo. But it seems because he had some sort of quarrel with his wife.

we will be back to his wife later, he decided to sleep into a hotel in Montevideo. So they followed him, they kicked the door of his hotel room and he tried to show this passport named Francisco Antonio Capeleto Sousa.

which was some Brazilian businessman under the identity of who he was living for years and years. But then they took his DNA and from Italy they confirmed he was Rocamorapido.

He was arrested, he was led to a Norwegian prison, and he spent there like one year. The Italian authorities were asking for extradition.

For some bizarre reason, the Uruguayan authorities didn't want to give the extradition to the Italian authorities. And then on the night of the 24th of June 2019, after more than one year in exile,

in prison, almost two years actually, he managed to escape with three other people. He managed to escape actually from the roof of the El Carcere Central de Montevideo.

He jumped from the rooftop. Of course, then they discovered that they had some help from the inside of the prison. He already had a car outside who was waiting for him and he disappeared again.

That was 2019 and the Italian authorities, as you can imagine, were baffled and enraged because at that time it was the second most dangerous fugitive for Italian justice. Meaning the number one was Matteo Messina Denaro and Rocco Morabito was the number two.

And they also had new evidence, they had new investigations. They knew that, for example, lots of other Calabrian families like Bellocco della Piana di Giugiatauro were importing cocaine due to Rocco Morabito's great connections.

but it disappeared again until finally in 2021, it was the end of May, the 24th of May, in the capital of the Joao Pessoa state in Paraíba, so we are in Brazil. Finally, I Carabinieri del Rosso, which is the Regroupamento

Operativo Speciale, Reparto Brasil Speciale, which is the elite of the Carabinieri, together with the collaboration of the FBI and the DA and the Policia Brasiliana, they managed to find him. He had already changed identity, of course.

And they realized somehow that his wife might have been linked to some family of very prominent Brazilian diplomats. And they arrested him. And this time, the Brazilians, unlike the Uruguayans, gave the extradition very easily.

So the 25th of May 2022, a year after, less than a year after,

Rocco Morabito was finally returned to the Italian justice and now the king of cocaine of the two worlds is facing a life sentence in a Calabrian jail. I know somebody that a law enforcement official who was on a plane that went from Italy to

to Brazil to catch Rocamorabito. So they spent many, many hours together. And this law enforcement official told me that he was very quiet, very... Apparently, he was very gentle. Um...

He didn't talk that much, but he always had the old attitude of a real drangetta man, which is you... It is not just that you do not talk to the police. You treat them like they are not real human beings. They are something different because you're a drangettista and...

They are something law enforcement officials and people from the state. They somehow are part of a different species of beings. It's really old school right there. Can you tell us a bit about what it's like first, you know,

you grew up like not just in the area, but like in the towns where these guys came from. So when you're growing up there, I mean, are you seeing friends from school or, you know, the fathers of your friends that are involved? And then to go from that where, you know, they probably know you, right? You grew up around them to being a reporter on what they're doing. I mean, that sounds like it's extremely dangerous. So I grew up in, yes, in this sort of environment. I think I can understand what was going on.

My family always took a different decision and decided to lead a different kind of life. And there are many Calabrian families who did this. You asked me if it's not dangerous. You know, the thing is that the Ndrangheta has evolved

They knew that I wrote this book. They knew what I was working on somehow. But I wouldn't say that I fear for my health.

When I say that they evolved, the thing is that they found meaner ways and more dangerous somehow ways to hit you. So you have had lots of cases of people who, for example, have been smeared

They can put you cocaine into your house and then they can call the police for a ride and your reputation is over. They can involve you into some financial scheme, even if you don't know that and your reputation is over and so forth.

So I think that this is the thing that scares me most. So one day, I don't know...

They will find some cocaine in my apartment or they will claim that I stole some money. Listen to this podcast. It's false. It's all false accusations. This is the way that the Drangheta acts now against people who are opposite to the Drangheta. They understand that if they shoot somebody and there's a corpse...

This makes lots of noise. If you smear the reputation of somebody and leave them to face legal problems for years and years, the problem is over. And you didn't have to do much noise about that. Damn.

Yeah, I mean, they've clearly wised up. But yeah, I mean, that was great, man. So wait, I didn't understand at first. Is your book available in English right now? Or is there a translation? No, not for the moment. I hope there will be a translation soon. For the moment, it has been translated into French and German and Hungarian and Polish.

Well, we should get it here, man. I mean, there's enough book publishers that listen to this. And it's all about your experience, A, growing up with the Andrangheta and then reporting on them as well. And it sounds like a history, too. No, not really. But yes, I start with some family history, but then it is about the Andrangheta itself and how it grew up.

in Toronto, in Melbourne, and in how the Drone Data manages to do some only laundering in Hong Kong, for example, how they strike some deals with El Cartel del Golfo in New York City. But then everything in the book leads back to 100 years

and 4 kilometers, which are these 104 kilometers of the Route 106, which is the title of the book, because this is the cradle of the phenomenon. And even if there's some huge drug deal in Melbourne or in Toronto, or there's a war in Toronto or Montreal,

If you go back to the family names, all the family names trace back to this route 106.

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing, man. I hope someone here smartens up, someone listening to us and publishes it in English in the States. Yeah, that was great. Tell people where can they find you, where can they reach out to you or email you? Where are you on social media? Yes, I'm on Twitter, Antonio Talia, A-N-T-O-N-I-O-T-A-L-I-A. Or on Instagram, my Instagram is AntonioTalia77.

Awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you so much. And what's the title of the book again? Roots 106. Awesome. All right. Thanks. And everyone else, you know, tune in next week. Sean will be back. And as always, patreon.com slash underworld podcast. Email us at the underworld podcast at Gmail. You can subscribe on iTunes with one click and, you know, all that other good stuff.