Nicola Gratteri: The hometown hero trying to take down the world’s largest mafia

Italian magistrate Nicola Gratteri is not a man it would be easy to claim is living la dolce vita. He has not been to the cinema for 30 years, or a restaurant in his native Calabria in the southernmost reach of the country’s mainland for two decades. When he leaves his house, a walled-off compound surrounded by CCTV, he never travels further than 10 metres without taking his armoured car.

But while he has described himself as a “man in a cage”, it is preferable to how his enemies describe him – a dead man walking.

As the prosecutor of the Republic of Catanzaro, the Calabrian state capital, Gratteri’s life has been singularly focused on taking on the mafia that has dug its roots into his home region. Now he returns to the court this week in the largest trial of its kind in decades as he attempts to strike at what could be the world’s richest criminal organisation.

The ’Ndrangheta (pronounced en-drang-jetta) may not have seeped into the cultural mainstream as virulently as Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, as depicted in The Godfather – or the Camorra of Naples, as in Gomorra – but what they lack in publicity they make up for in prevalence. Of Italy’s five acknowledged major crime syndicates, they are by far its largest, most lucrative and most powerful. Surrounded by the Omertà code of silence, their ranks have proven particularly hard for prosecutors to crack – built on a bond stronger than fear of retribution or the promise of future riches: the ties of family. For decades of young men in Calabria, the choice as to whether or not you would spend your life engaged in criminality came not from your circumstances but from your surname.

Gratteri has seen that relationship all his life. As a child at school he was fully aware of the future mafiosi in his classes – a fact he takes into his present work in tackling the mob. “I know the ’Ndrangheta well from inside, because when I was a child, I was at school with the children of mafia bosses,” he said ahead of his latest trial. “The kids I played with then became mobsters and then became drug traffickers. So that’s why I’m familiar with the criminal philosophy, the way of thinking of the ’Ndrangheta members, and this helps in my work.”

His drive to take on the ’Ndrangheta came at the same time of his life. “I have known the mafia since I was a child because I was hitchhiking to school and I often saw dead bodies on the road,” he said. “I thought: when I grow up, I want to do something so that this won’t happen again.”

His trajectory has been irrevocably committed to that goal. The third of five children, he finished school in Calabria and went on to study law in Catania, Sicily, before returning home to serve in the judiciary. Beyond a brief moment in 2014 in which the chance to step into politics and serve in the cabinet of former prime minister Matteo Renzi was offered and quickly rescinded – rumoured to be because of his desire for revolutionary change to the Italian justice system – it is a path he has remained on ever since.

Despite their notable prevalence and brutality in Gratteri’s 1960s youth, ’Ndrangheta’s growth into one of the world’s most powerful crime syndicates came some two decades later. With a name that translates as “man of honour” in a mixture of Italian and Greek used by some in Italy’s southernmost region, the ’Ndrangheta date back to the origins of the unification of Italy itself. For much of its history, it has existed as separate but linked cells, each one made up of a family with its own criminal expertise. Growing up with an ’Ndrangheta surname means taking on the family business – be that extortion, drug running or any other lucrative criminal activity. Unified by a central history and code – of the Italian mafias, Calabria’s is perhaps the most devoutly traditional, with a focus on Christian iconography and its own origin legend – the mob continued for decades as disparate families that left each other alone to their business lest a dispute needed settling.

In the 1970s, however, some groups hit the jackpot: kidnapping. Groups began to hold rich businessmen in the north of the country – Italy’s financial powerhouse – to ransom, a method of extortion that proved reliably successful. From there, with plenty of cash from their activities in the north, families began to turn to cocaine trafficking in the south, taking on a booming market while leaving the heroin trade to Cosa Nostra in Sicily. As the ’Ndrangheta’s drug of choice grew in popularity across the 1990s, the supremacy of the Sicilians waned as the Maxi trial and the all-out war on the state that followed it sapped their influence. The ’Ndrangheta, turning their back on infighting and declaring “pax mafiosa” between their families, were left with access to one of Europe’s largest ports in Calabria’s Gioia Tauro, an impenetrable infrastructure, and black-market turnover that some have estimated to be equivalent to the GDP of Cyprus.

They have also spent the last half century building a truly international regime – the only Italian mafia to have done so. Offshoots of ’Ndrangheta have been found in Australia and Canada, with signs of the group’s influence appearing on every inhabited continent except Asia. Pacts with South American cartels have made the group a major trafficker of drugs into Europe, while more recently the group has taken advantage of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to do the work of selling and spreading their products in Italy. The group was feared to have established outposts in the UK as recently as 2012.

Their code of secrecy and deep roots in Italian society have made them a much trickier group to prosecute than the likes of Cosa Nostra, who themselves have proven no easy target. While ’Ndrangheta in Australia may, in extreme circumstances, turn to Calabria for mediation, most families appear to be left to their business. The lack of a strict top-down hierarchy and dependence on blood ties at their core means that to take down a branch of the mafia is often to ask sons to turn in their fathers, and wives their husbands.

However, it is an approach that Gratteri says is proving easier. His time in the profession has seen him serve as Calabria’s antimafia figurehead, fighting cases that took down operations in his region and across the globe. Perhaps his most important, dubbed Operation Crimine-Infinito, brought to light a great deal about the inner workings of the group while also uncovering the links between operations in Milan and the south. Involving the arrest of more than 300 people in the north and in Calabria, the case proved that – far from being a network of totally isolated families acting on their own interests – the mafia was governed by a web of committees and subcommittees that allowed local groups to function with autonomy while protecting the identities of senior crime bosses.

Now he goes into the nation’s second largest mafia trial with a number of informants – some said to be family members looking to break the cycle of crime. The Omertà has begun to break. “Over the last years we have gained a lot of credibility, a lot of trust,” he said. “People have started to cooperate. The people are standing by us, are starting to believe in us,” he said.

Gratteri told reporters as he arrived at court on Wednesday that the trial was a turning point, with the ’Ndrangheta now being called out for its crimes and brought to face justice.

“Decades ago, people would tremble when talking about Cosa Nostra or when using the word ’Ndrangheta, something they would say only in a hidden room, around the fireplace, whispering,” he said. “Today we are beginning to speak out in the open sunlight. In the last two years, we can say we have been seeing a spike in complaints by businessmen, bullied citizens, victims of usury, people who for years have been subject to the pall of the ’Ndrangheta.”

This perhaps points to the success of Gratteri and those like him in building a culture that can challenge mafia dominance. Away from the courts, the second prong of the magistrate’s approach to ’Ndrangheta has been to attack its roots by targeting the next generation of mafiosi. He regularly gives talks at school and universities, and his book La mafia fa schifo – meaning “the Mafia sucks” – collects letters from young men on their thoughts on criminal organisations in a bid to de-radicalise those at risk of following in the family business. “You have to tell the raw truth without sugarcoating it … to ensure students can start to equip themselves to understand the world of adults,” he said at one school in 2016.

The risk to Gratteri and threats to his life continue, however. His wife and two young children, while under constant surveillance, are told nothing of his work for their own protection. He travels everywhere in a bombproof vehicle (he prefers driving to trains and planes). The use of heavy protection was made all the more necessary following the assassinations by bombing in 1992 of the Maxi trial lawyers Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino at the hands of the Sicilian mob.

In 2005, the special ops wing of Italy’s carabinieri police uncovered a cache of weapons in Calabria that they linked to a plot to assassinate Gratteri – including a detonator, a rocket launcher, a Kalashnikov, and hand grenades thought to be necessary to penetrate the armour of his vehicle. Gratteri, the deputy prosecutor for Calabria at the time, shrugged off the threat. “I don’t think there is a link,” he said. “Each ’Ndrangheta club has an arsenal. Once they had rifles, guns, pistols and sticks of dynamite, now explosives and bazookas. Only the type of armament has changed.”

While some question the potential for wholesale change as a result of his court case, a trial that could take well over a year, it is hard to contend with its scale. The largest since the Maxi trial, it grew out of the investigation of 12 clans linked to convicted ’Ndrangheta boss Luigi Mancuso, who served 19 years for his role in leading what investigators allege is one of the mafia’s most powerful crime families, based in the town of Vibo Valentia. In the bunker-style court at Lamezia Terme, 325 defendants will be tried, with space for 600 lawyers to work on the case and more than 900 witnesses expected to be called. While Crimine-Infinito may be a more important case, proving vital in understanding ’Ndrangheta, the results of what has been called Operation Rinascita-Scott could still put a dent in the mob’s hegemony.

Gratteri’s commitment to tackling a criminal enterprise so vast and so brutal that it will likely impinge on his own freedom for the rest of his life – forever risking the threat of violent reprisal – remains a major personal sacrifice. Taking on the mafia requires an acceptance that your life will remain at risk forever, that your family may always remain under police protection, and that you will not be safe until everyone is. While acknowledging he is penned in, he told The Atlantic in October that he does what he needs to do in order to ensure he can keep the promise he made to himself as a child – to do something about the death and destruction wrought by criminal enterprise. “I can say what others can’t allow themselves to say, because they don’t have their affairs in order,” he said. “Because they can be blackmailed. Because they’re afraid. Because they’re cowards.”