It Took a Handful of Women to Kneecap One of the World’s Most Brutal Crime Networks
There’s been a lot of talk recently about allegiance and betrayal in the face of criminal prosecution. President Donald Trump, whose obsession with loyalty at all costs has earned him comparisons to mob dons of a bygone era, said recently that aiding federal prosecutors in exchange for leniency — “flipping,” as he called it — “almost ought to be illegal.” On Twitter, Trump went full Mafia, likening John Dean, the White House counsel who testified against Richard Nixon and his associates during the Watergate scandal, to a “RAT.”
But in the world of organized crime that Trump so uncannily evokes, breaking bonds of loyalty to collaborate with law enforcement, particularly when the betrayed are blood relations, is a profoundly painful choice — an act of courage with no happy ending. In Italy, the mob’s cradle, entire families have been brought down by the testimonies of pentiti, “repentant” members who chose to work with prosecutors in return for leniency and protection. In his riveting book, “The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on the World’s Most Powerful Mafia,” journalist Alex Perry explores the tragedy that often accompanies those choices, telling the story of four women who turned against their own families and stood up to the ’Ndrangheta.
The book, which reads like a thriller, is a sobering look at one of the most ferocious and least understood organized crime networks in the world. Steeped in legend and superstition, the ’Ndrangheta is also well-versed in the sophisticated schemes of global finance.
Perry makes an urgent case that the group’s meteoric journey to the vortex of global crime — it controls nearly three-quarters of Europe’s cocaine traffic, launders money on behalf of a host of other criminal groups, and sells weapons to multiple actors in the Syrian conflict — transpired before our eyes. He argues that modern organized crime is an often-ignored but ballooning threat, with a role in everything from the arms trade to global migration, rather than the stuff of romanticized mob movies.
“The ’Ndrangheta is one of the most powerful groups in the world and none of us had ever heard of it, and that is stunning,” Perry told The Intercept. “And that is part of a wider story which I think is a rise of organized crime. We are missing a massive phenomenon of our age: We tend to allow ourselves to be distracted by say, terrorism, because it is so spectacular, or by financial crises. Organized crime is much less apparent, but the more you look into it, it is this enormous phenomenon that is able to change the destiny of countries.”
“The Good Mothers,” which was published in the U.S. this summer, is also a feminist tale set in the sexist world of organized crime. In what is perhaps the most satisfying scene in the book, dozens of members of one of the most powerful ’Ndrangheta families file into court for a maxi-trial that dealt a stunning, if hardly fatal, blow to one of the most powerful and secretive organized crime networks in the world.
The trial’s lead prosecutor was a woman, Alessandra Cerreti, and the case hinged on testimony from another woman, Giuseppina Pesce, a pentita member of a prominent ’Ndrangheta family. Pesce’s collaboration with prosecutors led to the arrest, and later conviction, of dozens of her own relatives and associates. As if that weren’t enough of an affront to a clan ruled by honor codes and gender roles so medieval that infidelity, even to a deceased husband, could be punished by death, when the mafiosi were led into court on the trial’s first day, they were dismayed to see that an unusually high number of the lawyers, court staff, and police gathered there were women. When the three judges entered the room, the accused were stunned to learn that they, too, were all women. The men protested vociferously; some asked for a male magistrate.
“When they saw us all in the court, they began screaming and shouting at me and my colleagues,” Cerreti told Perry. “They were humiliated to be in front of so many women — to be judged by women.” The few women among the accused, including Pesce’s mother and sister, remained silent, writes Perry. “There was perhaps no better representation of the injustice in their own lives than watching their men howl at the sight of an assembly of modern, professional women sitting in judgment over them.”
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/09/the-good-mothers-review-italy-mafia-ndrangheta/
Part 1