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Speaker 2: You are now listening to True Murder the most shocking
Speaker 2: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 2: written about them Gaesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
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Speaker 2: journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 7: The Calabrian mafia, known as the Andrangeda, is one of
Speaker 7: the richest and most ruthless crime syndicates in the world,
Speaker 7: with branches stretching from America to Australia. Controls seventy percent
Speaker 7: of the cocaine and heroin supply in Europe, manages billion
Speaker 7: dollar extortion rackets, brokers illegal arms deals, supplying weapons to
Speaker 7: criminals and terrorists, and plunders the treasures of both Italy
Speaker 7: and the European Union. The Endranguedda's power derives from a
Speaker 7: macho mix of violence and silence or marita, yet it
Speaker 7: endures because of family ties. You were born into the
Speaker 7: syndicate or you marry in. Loyalty is absolute, bloodshed is revered,
Speaker 7: you go to prison or your grave and kill your
Speaker 7: own father, brother, sister, or mother in cold blood before
Speaker 7: you betray the family. Accompanying the Dregada's reverence for tradition
Speaker 7: and history is a violent misogyny among its men. Women
Speaker 7: are viewed as childel bargaining chips for building and maintaining
Speaker 7: clan alliances, and beatings and worse our routine. In two
Speaker 7: thousand and nine, after one abused Andrega ghet A wife
Speaker 7: was murdered for turning state's evidence, prosecutor Alessandra Siretti considered
Speaker 7: a tantalizing possibility that the andrangetas sexism might be its
Speaker 7: greatest flaw in her most effective weapon. Approaching two more
Speaker 7: mafia wives, Alessandrea persuaded them to testify in return for
Speaker 7: a new future for themselves and their children, a feminist
Speaker 7: sag of true crime and justice. Caught in the middle
Speaker 7: are three women fighting for their children and their lives.
Speaker 7: Not all will survive. The book that we're featuring this
Speaker 7: sevening is The Good Mothers, the true story of the
Speaker 7: women who took on the world's most powerful mafia. With
Speaker 7: my special guest, journalist and author Alex Perry. Welcome to
Speaker 7: the program, and thank you very much for Greeness interview.
Speaker 7: Alex Perry, thanks for having me, Thank you very much.
Speaker 7: Incredible book and thank you for joining us to discuss it. Incredible.
Speaker 7: First off, how did you come to be in a
Speaker 7: position to be able to write this book The Good Mothers?
Speaker 7: And want to write this book The Good Mothers?
Speaker 6: I came across the story, as you do any story
Speaker 6: when you're already working on another one. I was on
Speaker 6: working for Newsweek, doing a story down in Sicily on
Speaker 6: the European migration crisis, and in particular on what seemed
Speaker 6: to be a kind of hidden story there, which was
Speaker 6: the mafia's involvement in that crisis. One answer to the
Speaker 6: question of why hundreds of thousands of people crossing the
Speaker 6: Mediterranean to Sicily and flimsy little boats is because the
Speaker 6: Italian Sicilian mafia wants them to. It's running a lot
Speaker 6: of the migration centers there and is profiting from that
Speaker 6: great humanitarian crisis, making twenty eight years per head per
Speaker 6: day of every.
Speaker 3: Migrant that arrives.
Speaker 6: So it was on that story, I guess that story
Speaker 6: introduced me to the idea that the Italian mafia is
Speaker 6: not some sort of historic legend, but very much a
Speaker 6: present day force. There was one boss who was phone
Speaker 6: tapped boasting actually who was involved in that scam, saying
Speaker 6: that they were boasting to a friend saying he was
Speaker 6: making more money from migrants than he ever did from drugs,
Speaker 6: and you know it also, so I guess that also
Speaker 6: introduced me to the idea that this wasn't the kind
Speaker 6: of romantic legend that we sometimes Carrie Willis of the mafia,
Speaker 6: that these were.
Speaker 3: This was venal.
Speaker 6: It was, it was lethal and as I say, profiting
Speaker 6: from humanitarian suffering. On that story, I had a couple
Speaker 6: of interviews in Rome that I asked a local Italian
Speaker 6: jonist to fix up for me, and her price was
Speaker 6: a couple hundred euros plus you have to come and
Speaker 6: see my play. And her play turned out to be
Speaker 6: a one will and show, one actress and a guy
Speaker 6: on a cello in a playing in a very rundown
Speaker 6: area on the outskirts of Rome, a very mafia heavy area,
Speaker 6: actually playing to a bunch of high school students, and
Speaker 6: I didn't understand a word. It was all in Italian.
Speaker 6: It was my first time working in Italy. The one
Speaker 6: thing I understood was the name of the protagonist, Maria
Speaker 6: Concetto Caciola, and I kind of scurried back to my
Speaker 6: guest house to try and work out what all the
Speaker 6: drama had been on.
Speaker 3: Stage and did some research.
Speaker 6: And she that's one of my three main characters, one
Speaker 6: of the three good mothers. She was a woman who'd
Speaker 6: been born into the mafia, the Calabria mafia this time,
Speaker 6: and had turned against it. And once I started looking
Speaker 6: into her, I realized there were three women whose story
Speaker 6: were broadly similar. They'd all been born in they'd all
Speaker 6: betrayed their family and testified against them and gone into
Speaker 6: witness protection. Yeah, the deeper I looked into it, the
Speaker 6: more the more I amazed.
Speaker 3: Amazed.
Speaker 6: I was a by the story and b that I'd
Speaker 6: never heard of it. You know, these three women, the
Speaker 6: arc of their story was, you know, had huge drama
Speaker 6: and tragedy. But on top of that, I'd never heard
Speaker 6: of the Calabrian mafia, the Draguitar. I'd heard of the
Speaker 6: Sicilian mafia, you know, that's Cousinostra and the Godfather. I'd
Speaker 6: heard of the Neapolitan mafia, the Kamora, the Andraguitor, I'd
Speaker 6: never heard of it, and it turned out to be
Speaker 6: way bigger than the other two.
Speaker 3: It was way more.
Speaker 6: Powerful, as you say, you know it's It runs seventy
Speaker 6: percent of the cocaine in Europe. It has an annual
Speaker 6: revenue of fifty two hundred billion dollars a year. It
Speaker 6: has a presence in one hundred and twenty countries around
Speaker 6: the world, and that kind of fascinated me that there
Speaker 6: was this giant organized crime syndicate that nobody knew about.
Speaker 7: Certainly you introduced in the book right away November twenty fourth,
Speaker 7: two thousand and nine. To illustrate, you talk about a
Speaker 7: woman named Leah Garaflo, and she's with her daughter Denise,
Speaker 7: and she's seventeen and Leah's thirty five, and she is
Speaker 7: the daughter of a mafioso's daughter mafioso and she is
Speaker 7: or she was married to Carlo Costco. Maybe you can
Speaker 7: explain this and tell us, as you do in the book,
Speaker 7: introduce what they're doing in November two thousand and nine
Speaker 7: with Carlo Costco, and tell us about the past as
Speaker 7: you do, to tell us what they're doing at that
Speaker 7: present time with Carlo Costco.
Speaker 6: So, yeah, Lea was born into kind of mafia aristocracy
Speaker 6: on the east coast of Calabria. Her family was incredibly
Speaker 6: powerful and involved in all the drag's main businesses. She
Speaker 6: and that meant, but Leah was born into violence, actually
Speaker 6: when she was eight months old.
Speaker 3: Her father was killed.
Speaker 6: When she was nine, her uncle was murdered. When she
Speaker 6: was fifteen, her cousin was shot dead right in front
Speaker 6: of her. In a little town or little village actually
Speaker 6: that she comes from, Paliaele and the surrounding area, there's
Speaker 6: been This is a has a population of four hundred.
Speaker 6: There's been thirty five murders in thirty years. You know,
Speaker 6: it's an extraordinary level of bloodshed. And Leah was kind
Speaker 6: of unique in that she rejected the culture that she
Speaker 6: was born into almost from the moment that she achieved consciousness.
Speaker 6: That the great irony was was that she saw her
Speaker 6: escape as marriage to this guy, Carlo Costco, who she'd
Speaker 6: grown up with and who was living in Milan, and
Speaker 6: she assumed had nothing to do with the mafia, so
Speaker 6: she eloped with him, went to Milan, only to discover
Speaker 6: that in fact he was working for her.
Speaker 3: Brother and a fairly sort.
Speaker 6: Of medium level cocaine smuggler.
Speaker 3: And act.
Speaker 6: In fact, she'd been sort of trapped into the mafia,
Speaker 6: closer to the mafia than ever before, and that Carlo
Speaker 6: actually she hadn't married him. He had married her to
Speaker 6: guarantee his promotion inside the organization. So you can imagine
Speaker 6: that sent her into.
Speaker 3: A tail spin.
Speaker 6: She actually tried to commit suicide a couple of times,
Speaker 6: and then she felt pregnant, gave birth to her daughter, Denise,
Speaker 6: and that gave her seemed to give her a kind
Speaker 6: of new sense of purpose. If she couldn't save herself,
Speaker 6: she felt she had to save her daughter. It was
Speaker 6: a few years after that that she witnessed Carlo and
Speaker 6: his brother killer Man just outside their apartment, and she
Speaker 6: became one of the first ever and drag her to members,
Speaker 6: and only the second woman ever to go to the
Speaker 6: police and testify, after.
Speaker 3: Which she went on the run.
Speaker 6: She and her young daughter, Denise, by then sort of
Speaker 6: five years old, hid out in the kind of the
Speaker 6: backstreets of northern Italy, took assumed names and did cast
Speaker 6: She worked with Lea, worked in cash shobs, in bars
Speaker 6: and so on. Eventually, Carlo, I mean Carlo, who was
Speaker 6: by now in jail on the strength of Lea's evidence
Speaker 6: had put his men to tracking her down, and a
Speaker 6: couple of times they caught up with her. Eventually her
Speaker 6: front door was set alight, and she took the sort
Speaker 6: of unprecedented, unthinkable step actually for seemed to be for Carla,
Speaker 6: for going back to the authorities and rather than just
Speaker 6: testifying about that one murder, testifying about everything she knew
Speaker 6: about the and Draga to including all the murders that
Speaker 6: had happened in Pali Relea, and really exposing this organization
Speaker 6: to the authorities almost for the first time. It really
Speaker 6: was almost the first peak that the authorities has ever
Speaker 6: had inside the Endraygona. And for doing that she went
Speaker 6: into she was given witness protection for various reasons that
Speaker 6: you can read about in the book. That didn't really
Speaker 6: work out. The authorities fumbled it somewhat, didn't protect her,
Speaker 6: tried to kick her out of witness protection. By two
Speaker 6: thousand and nine, Lea herself has rejected it and and
Speaker 6: try is trying to forge a kind of reconciliation with Carlo,
Speaker 6: trying to see if they can't make peace, and her
Speaker 6: and Denise spend four days on a kind of mini
Speaker 6: vacation in Milan with Carlo. They think they're on a
Speaker 6: sort of family holiday, actually the kind of holiday that
Speaker 6: they'd never had. All the while that they're there, the
Speaker 6: four days that there, Carlo is trying to kill Lea
Speaker 6: and has his men running all over the city trying.
Speaker 3: To abduct her. They keep missing.
Speaker 6: I'm not giving much away here. As the first chapter
Speaker 6: in the book, on the last night.
Speaker 3: He succeeds.
Speaker 7: In that her disappearance that one night. It's very again,
Speaker 7: very dramatic what they do with Denise. How this father
Speaker 7: tries to pull off the disappearance of the mother and
Speaker 7: not have Denise be suspicious. So what is Denise doing
Speaker 7: at the same time, where is she when her mother disappears?
Speaker 7: And what is she taught?
Speaker 6: So Carlo sort of engineered a situation where he says
Speaker 6: to Denise, why don't you have supper with your cousins.
Speaker 6: He knows that Leah is not going to want to
Speaker 6: go to that supper.
Speaker 3: You know, she's making.
Speaker 6: Peace or trying to make peace with Carlo. She doesn't
Speaker 6: want anything to do with his family. And so in
Speaker 6: that way, Carlo gets to kind of park Denise and
Speaker 6: and to be with Leah alone with her daughter not there.
Speaker 6: He does this so that he can he can take
Speaker 6: her somewhere and kill her. Basically, Denise and Leah, you
Speaker 6: can imagine, after so many years on the run together,
Speaker 6: have an unusually close relationship. Leah is probably the only
Speaker 6: person that really knows Denise. You know, Denise's hidden away,
Speaker 6: she doesn't have any other friends, and so they're in
Speaker 6: almost constant contact even when they're apart, and Denise is
Speaker 6: having supper with her cousins, but she finds she can't
Speaker 6: get hold of her mother on the phone. That makes
Speaker 6: her very nervous. Even if Leah's phone was going to
Speaker 6: run out of charge, she would have told Denise and
Speaker 6: she would.
Speaker 3: Get it recharged.
Speaker 6: And then after about sort of three hours of separated
Speaker 6: from her mother, Carlo turns up without Leah, and Denise knows,
Speaker 6: she knows immediately what's happened, and she also knows that
Speaker 6: she can't she can't let on, She can't let Carlo
Speaker 6: know that she's aware that her mother is dead, and
Speaker 6: she has to live this kind of as a seventeen
Speaker 6: year old, as a miner. She goes to live with
Speaker 6: her father and she has to live this kind of
Speaker 6: nightmare of pretense, pretending that actually her mother has run
Speaker 6: away to Australia, as her father is saying, pretending that
Speaker 6: her father didn't murder her mother, as she knows going
Speaker 6: on holiday with this family, that she's run away from
Speaker 6: working in their pizza rear. Until eventually, after about a year,
Speaker 6: she can't handle it anymore and she decides to take
Speaker 6: up her mother's spine actually and goes to the authorities herself.
Speaker 7: You demonstrate where you illustrate in this book too, that
Speaker 7: when she goes initially to the as you call him Karabinari,
Speaker 7: hopefully it's a pronunciation for the police, that her father
Speaker 7: and the family are very paranoid about the even the
Speaker 7: amount of time that she spent there, and they asked
Speaker 7: her what she had said to authorities. So it's occurs
Speaker 7: throughout the book where the family doesn't like to be
Speaker 7: wrestled control over their family member by certainly the authorities.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean the Matthia, and particularly the Calabria Matthia.
Speaker 3: Its whole sort of essence is about.
Speaker 6: Denying shutting out any other type of authority in their area.
Speaker 6: In Calabria, there is nothing but the mafia. You know,
Speaker 6: the state is not allowed in the police, are not
Speaker 6: allowed in other businesses, are not allowed to exist. Even
Speaker 6: religion is funneled through mafia priests. You know that it's
Speaker 6: it's a totalitarian system and and a cult. So yes,
Speaker 6: when Denise is called into the police because they've heard
Speaker 6: that her mother is missing and they want some kind
Speaker 6: of exclamation or account from her, she is taken away
Speaker 6: from Carlo and his immediate family, you know, and her
Speaker 6: immediate family and interviewed alone by the policeman for five hours.
Speaker 6: And this drives Carlo crazy. He he has no idea
Speaker 6: what she's saying. When she comes out, he demands to
Speaker 6: know immediately.
Speaker 3: You know, what she's told the police.
Speaker 6: And he doesn't really believe her when she says, oh,
Speaker 6: I just, I just I just told them that we
Speaker 6: came up and we went with you and then my
Speaker 6: mother's gone missing. You know, how can how can that
Speaker 6: take five hours? So he suspects from the word go
Speaker 6: that she has.
Speaker 3: Told them about.
Speaker 6: About about his family, about the Draguitor, about his attempts
Speaker 6: to kill Leah over the years, and and for Carlo,
Speaker 6: as much as he loves Denise, actually that is a
Speaker 6: sin against the family. With the capital f the endraguitor,
Speaker 6: and and the code of the draguitor is that he'll
Speaker 6: probably have to kill his daughter. There can be no
Speaker 6: exception to breaking a matter that you know, if if if,
Speaker 6: if Carlo makes an exception for anybody disgraced inside the organization,
Speaker 6: and he loses all the status and position that he's
Speaker 6: worked for for decades. So that's the moment that the
Speaker 6: sort of seeds of doubt begin to grow in Carlo's mind.
Speaker 6: And and perhaps Denise realized is that all her pretense
Speaker 6: is never going to work.
Speaker 3: And probably what persuaded her to go to the authorities.
Speaker 6: Well, at the same time persuade Carlo that at some
Speaker 6: point he's gonna he's gonna have to get rid of
Speaker 6: his own daughter.
Speaker 7: Yeah, incredible. You introduced a character, Alessandria Siretti, and she
Speaker 7: becomes involved in two thousand and nine. She's a prosecutor.
Speaker 7: Tell us about Alessandra Siretti and what was unique about
Speaker 7: her and her idea about attacking or fighting the mafia?
Speaker 7: What was her idea that was unique?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, Alexander is A is a is a
Speaker 6: fairly extraordinary person to meet. She there aren't many female
Speaker 6: prosecutors in Italy let alone anti mafia prosecutors.
Speaker 3: She was. She's a Sicilian.
Speaker 6: She was born in Messina during a time that the
Speaker 6: Sicilian mafia was at the height of its power and
Speaker 6: in fact had launched a war on the island of
Speaker 6: Sicily against the Italian state through the eighties and the
Speaker 6: early nineties. You know, one thousand, five hundred or so,
Speaker 6: so many people died in that conflict. And that was
Speaker 6: Alessandra's childhood. She grew up, you know, in the middle
Speaker 6: of a conflict, and I mean, I guess like lear
Speaker 6: had the presence of mind to be able to see
Speaker 6: outside the mafia. Alessandra also never bought into this idea
Speaker 6: that the mafia was somehow glamorous, was a legend.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of Sicilians.
Speaker 6: That will tell you that it's a kind of guardian
Speaker 6: or a bastion of traditional Southern Italian values against a
Speaker 6: predatory northern state. Alixandra didn't buy into any of that.
Speaker 6: In fact, when she was eight years old, when she
Speaker 6: was asked in school, you know that essay question, what
Speaker 6: do you want to be when you grow up? You know,
Speaker 6: her classmates wrote, they want to be princesses or astronauts
Speaker 6: or whatever.
Speaker 3: She wrote, I want to be an.
Speaker 6: Anti mafia prosecutor. I want to put gangsters behind bars.
Speaker 6: And she pursued.
Speaker 3: That ambition.
Speaker 6: Without once veering from you know, all her all her life.
Speaker 6: She left school, she went to law school, then to
Speaker 6: magistrates training, then graduate quite quickly to pretty heavy cases
Speaker 6: in northern Italy, terrorism cases, mafia cases and so on.
Speaker 6: Age thirty nine, said to her bosses that she'd like
Speaker 6: to return to the South, having worked all that time
Speaker 6: in the North, and that she was kind of ready
Speaker 6: to take on the mafia, which in which by that
Speaker 6: time the big mafia was was the Calabria mafia rather
Speaker 6: than Sicilians and her, as you were sort of hinting
Speaker 6: out there, I mean, Alessandra's great insight was that the
Speaker 6: women might be the key to unlock the mathio. It
Speaker 6: makes some kind of intuitive sense, right, if you've got
Speaker 6: a whole organization that's based on family, it's the mothers
Speaker 6: who are who might be at the center of that.
Speaker 3: But Alessandra was dealing.
Speaker 6: With a judiciary mostly full of men, who would tell
Speaker 6: her that the women were victims, that they had terrible lives,
Speaker 6: and they did you know, the women are married off
Speaker 6: at thirteen or fourteen. They typically have several kids by
Speaker 6: the time they're twenty, by which time their husband will
Speaker 6: be in jail, which means that they are then kind
Speaker 6: of confined to the house and not allowed to go unaccompanied,
Speaker 6: very in a very similar way to kind of conservative
Speaker 6: Islam beating his routine. If they're unfaithful, they're dead and
Speaker 6: it will be their son or their brother or their
Speaker 6: father that kills them. So with all of that, the
Speaker 6: prosecutors would say, yes, you know, that's that's all terrible,
Speaker 6: that's tragic, but the women are no use to us
Speaker 6: in our find against the mafia. They are just victims.
Speaker 6: And Alessandra, almost alone fought differently and said, no, you know,
Speaker 6: these women are sentient beings.
Speaker 3: They are in the.
Speaker 6: Room when everything is being discussed, their knowledge will be extensive,
Speaker 6: and because they are treated so badly, they have a
Speaker 6: fairly pure motivation for speaking out. This isn't this isn't
Speaker 6: about someone trying to get a sentence reduction, trying to
Speaker 6: do some sort of bargain with the state. These are
Speaker 6: likely to be women who actually just want to escape
Speaker 6: that entire life. And that was her great insight and
Speaker 6: that is sort of the intellectual kernel at the center
Speaker 6: of the book, this woman who was able to overcome
Speaker 6: not only the misogyny in her own judiciary, but persuade
Speaker 6: her colleagues that the the misogyny that the mafia had
Speaker 6: perpetrated for one hundred and fifty years and used actually
Speaker 6: a way to sort of discipline the family and to
Speaker 6: keep everybody in line, was in the new millennium actually
Speaker 6: a great flaw. That these women were not going to
Speaker 6: want to live like that anymore, that they were going
Speaker 6: to want to speak out, want to change their lives,
Speaker 6: and that perhaps the prosecutors should be focusing on the
Speaker 6: women as a way to bring down this organization.
Speaker 7: Alessandria looked at all of the statements, the three statements
Speaker 7: that lead made to the police. But there was also
Speaker 7: in the book you talk in this incredible visual scene
Speaker 7: where the Nieces at home with Leah and somebody comes again.
Speaker 7: They have to depend on their father for rent for
Speaker 7: the apartment and to fix their washing machines. So these
Speaker 7: the father sends somebody to fix the washing machine. Tell
Speaker 7: us this, describe this scene, whereas the repairman.
Speaker 3: It's by this.
Speaker 6: Stage Lea and Denis are living by their wits again.
Speaker 6: They're outside witness protection because Lea has decided she can't
Speaker 6: trust the States as much as she doesn't trust the mafia,
Speaker 6: and that and because Lear is unable really to get
Speaker 6: a job, partly because if she puts her name on
Speaker 6: any official payroll, you know, anyone in the endraygons who
Speaker 6: will be able to track her. So they're dependent on
Speaker 6: Carlo for money. And he rents them a little apartment
Speaker 6: in a place called Campobasso, where he forces them to
Speaker 6: live with members of his own family. And I mean,
Speaker 6: so abhorrent is this idea to Lear that she actually
Speaker 6: sort of sleeps out in the car outside the apartment
Speaker 6: rather than share with share the space of her family.
Speaker 6: And in fact, this is the first time that Lear
Speaker 6: and Carlos see each other's face to face for thirteen years,
Speaker 6: thirteen years during which Carlo has mostly spent trying to
Speaker 6: kill her. So you can imagine it's a fairly tense environment.
Speaker 6: Lea's got no money. The washing machine in the in
Speaker 6: the apartment goes wrong. Carlo says he's going to send
Speaker 6: around a man to fix it. The guy turns up
Speaker 6: and basically immediately tries to kill Lear. He's not being
Speaker 6: sent down to repair the washing machine. He is one
Speaker 6: of Carlo's crew, and outside the apartment is a is
Speaker 6: a van containing fifty liters in acids in which he
Speaker 6: plans to dissolve her body. You know, it's the most
Speaker 6: sort of extraordinary scene. There's a horrible tussle in the apartment. Denise,
Speaker 6: who is asleep upstairs, comes down and interrupts the fight.
Speaker 6: The attacker, who's not expecting to see Denise there, is
Speaker 6: shocked by that and flees. And that's when, I mean,
Speaker 6: that's when the world really begins to sort of fall
Speaker 6: apart for Lea. She she feels as though she can't
Speaker 6: trust anybody. She becomes incredibly paranoid, as you would. She
Speaker 6: doesn't even want to stay in a building, you know.
Speaker 6: She for the next couple of nights, she and Denise
Speaker 6: actually pitch a tent outside the town hall in Camp
Speaker 6: of Bassa because they, you know, the idea that there'll
Speaker 6: be in plain sight where nobody can do anything to them.
Speaker 6: But the tragedy is that she Leah has no options,
Speaker 6: and quite quickly she realizes that she has to to
Speaker 6: once again try and make peace with Carlo, try and
Speaker 6: convince him that she's never, never going to be safe
Speaker 6: from this guy. So she has to kind of almost
Speaker 6: well not confront him, but try and try and reassure
Speaker 6: him that she's not going to testify him against him anymore,
Speaker 6: that she's no threat to him, and that they can
Speaker 6: leave each other in peace, and that they have a
Speaker 6: common interest in bringing out their doors.
Speaker 3: So, I mean, you have this idea of.
Speaker 6: The whole Lea's whole sort of story at this point
Speaker 6: really begins to have the feel of a of a tragedy.
Speaker 6: She's in a downward spiral, you know, things, things are
Speaker 6: falling apart, and really there's.
Speaker 3: Only ever going to be one ending.
Speaker 7: You talk about. Just before she goes back to Carlo,
Speaker 7: she had been speaking with a lawyer named Enza, and
Speaker 7: it's it's tragic what that conversation was just before she left.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's dreadful. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So, so lear is Uh has got a court case
Speaker 6: in Florence, which.
Speaker 3: Is a case that goes back to a.
Speaker 6: Small incident happened years before. She had slapped a girl
Speaker 6: in the street who had abused the niece. And so
Speaker 6: she's up on a charge of assault and and yes
Speaker 6: she's represented thereby Enson Rando, who is a lawyer actually
Speaker 6: a Sicilian as well, who's moved to the north of
Speaker 6: Italy and has and has taken on kind of gratis
Speaker 6: and number of anti mafia cases and then has been
Speaker 6: advising Leah on her options and how she might sort
Speaker 6: of stay safe. After I, Ensa manages to get Lea
Speaker 6: off the charge with just a sort of minimum penalty,
Speaker 6: and afterwards, Lia says, I'm going to Milan to see
Speaker 6: Carlo and we're going on a sort of short break,
Speaker 6: and you know, Ensa says, you know, this is a
Speaker 6: really bad idea. This guy has been trying to kill
Speaker 6: you for years.
Speaker 3: Why do you think he's suddenly going to change his mind.
Speaker 6: You know, you are in You're walking into the into
Speaker 6: the into a trap. And Leah, who is pretty headstrong,
Speaker 6: but as I say, it also feels as though she's
Speaker 6: she's almost got no choice, tries to argue back and
Speaker 6: sort of say it's a big city. He's not going
Speaker 6: to try anything there. He's not going to try anything
Speaker 6: when I'm.
Speaker 3: With de Nise.
Speaker 6: The truth actually, which came out long after Leah disappeared,
Speaker 6: was that she also.
Speaker 3: Still had feelings for him.
Speaker 6: She'd kept a diary, and in that it becomes pretty
Speaker 6: clear that in some ways she'd always she'd always loved him,
Speaker 6: you know. And so there's again there's this feeling of
Speaker 6: sort of doom and tragedy.
Speaker 3: She's she's she's.
Speaker 6: Drawn back to the man who is reeling her in
Speaker 6: and is reading.
Speaker 3: Her in because he he wants to kill her.
Speaker 6: Enza and Leah have a last exchange by text message
Speaker 6: when she's on the train going to Milan and what
Speaker 6: will ultimately be her death, and endsa tries to say,
Speaker 6: you can get off, you can get off halfway. You know,
Speaker 6: I've arranged a safe house for you to go. Just
Speaker 6: just step off the train and you know, we'll fix it.
Speaker 6: And Leah sort have replied, you know, thank you, thank you, Malo.
Speaker 3: But you know, we've got to make our own life here.
Speaker 3: We've we've got to do it our own way. A
Speaker 3: master laughter and there ever ever hears.
Speaker 7: From there, absolutely, let's use this as opportunity, Alex to
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Speaker 7: Stream loans and same day funding. Now we talked about Alessandria. Now,
Speaker 7: with Leah missing, it seemed that she needed two other
Speaker 7: then Dragetta women to come forward, and with that you
Speaker 7: introduce two women, Gysipoena a Pesche and Concetta Caciola. So
Speaker 7: tell us about first about dysipoena and also the difference
Speaker 7: between the two women, between Conserta and Jusepina.
Speaker 6: So there's a sort of coincidence of timing here. Leah
Speaker 6: goes missing in Milan just well, just a few months
Speaker 6: after Alessandra moves from Miland to Collabria to fight the
Speaker 6: and Durangutar. Lea's case initially doesn't make many headlines, but
Speaker 6: inside the prosecutor Service obviously that they're aware of it
Speaker 6: and everything that that Lea had divulged about the Enduranguitar
Speaker 6: it strikes a chord with Alessandra at the time. This
Speaker 6: is an organization that is is still pretty much a
Speaker 6: kind of mystery to the authorities. You know, they're aware
Speaker 6: of its existence, of course, uh and they're aware of
Speaker 6: the kind of the body count because they're they're they're
Speaker 6: picking them up, but they really have very little insight
Speaker 6: into where the power lies, what the structures are are,
Speaker 6: what kind of money it's making, how many members are.
Speaker 6: You know, there's the whole world that's that's missing from
Speaker 6: their knowledge. And it's right, it's Alessandra's insight as we
Speaker 6: said that that that maybe the women are the way
Speaker 6: to fill in this picture, and her first contact is
Speaker 6: with Giuseppina Peschet, who is picked up in a bust
Speaker 6: that Alessandra organizes against against the Peschet clan, who are
Speaker 6: the most powerful family in a town called Rossano. Powerful
Speaker 6: because Rossano is right next to a port called Joyatara Port,
Speaker 6: which is the sixth biggest in the Mediterranean, a massive
Speaker 6: container port, and which is the funnel through which Dean
Speaker 6: Draguta is moving most of its cocaine into Europe and
Speaker 6: actually conducting its arms smuggling business. They own that port
Speaker 6: and there are tons and tons of cocaine coming in
Speaker 6: through that so Alessandra is one of her first investigations
Speaker 6: picks up around a dozen members of the Pechet clan,
Speaker 6: including just A Pina Pechet. Just Apina Pechet takes her
Speaker 6: detention pretty badly. She separated from her children for the
Speaker 6: first time in her life, although the prosecutors don't realize
Speaker 6: this yet. What really concerns her is not so much
Speaker 6: that she is not with them, although that's pretty painful,
Speaker 6: but it's the idea that her kids are now going
Speaker 6: to be brought up by the Durangon to buy the
Speaker 6: mafia as in their fate as well. For the boys,
Speaker 6: murderers and killers is kind of sealed. And for the women,
Speaker 6: this miserable life of following kind of gangster jailbird husbands
Speaker 6: around and being confined.
Speaker 3: To the house. That's what really disturbs her.
Speaker 6: And after she she actually sort of attempts suicide kind
Speaker 6: of what it certainly looks like she's ten suicide a
Speaker 6: couple of times. And eventually this letter appears at Alessandra's office,
Speaker 6: offering to meet, and offering to meet in particular without
Speaker 6: a lawyer presence, And that is a real signal that
Speaker 6: seems to suggest that this woman is thinking of talking
Speaker 6: freely the lawyers. That the mafia has worked for the mafia,
Speaker 6: not for the client, so to say that she wants
Speaker 6: to meet without one is to suggest that she's thinking
Speaker 6: of betraying the family. Actually, so Alexandra goes to meet her.
Speaker 6: The meeting goes really badly. Jesseepina asks for her children
Speaker 6: and to be moved to a safe house and offers
Speaker 6: in return perhaps a couple of names of people on
Speaker 6: the run and maybe where they're where they're hiding out.
Speaker 6: Alessandra makes a show of kind of storming out. Really
Speaker 6: she packs up her bags, and her laptop and makes
Speaker 6: to leave, and as she gets to the door, Guspoina
Speaker 6: relents and says, actually, everything I do now, everything I say,
Speaker 6: I do it for my.
Speaker 3: Children, and.
Speaker 6: She opens up. And it takes some time because it's
Speaker 6: a very hard thing for Jusipina to do mentally to
Speaker 6: betray everyone and everything she's ever known, but also she
Speaker 6: has an immense amount of knowledge, and it just takes
Speaker 6: hours and hours and days and weeks, and in fact
Speaker 6: runs into several months for her to divulge all her evidence.
Speaker 6: But by the time it's all down, it runs to
Speaker 6: nearly sixteen hundred pages of a four It's just a
Speaker 6: massive amount of knowledge.
Speaker 3: Who owns what you know? Who murdered who? You know?
Speaker 6: How much this business makes and that business where the
Speaker 6: dragons has evolved in public contracts and road building and
Speaker 6: disposal of waste, who's running the cocaine rings, who's running
Speaker 6: the arms smuggling stuff? You know, it's a it's an
Speaker 6: encyclopedic level of knowledge. Completely transforms the state's understanding of
Speaker 6: not just the Peschet clan but the wider and Draguita.
Speaker 6: And suddenly you know they're kind.
Speaker 3: Of they're on their way.
Speaker 6: And what's more, alessandra theory about about how the women
Speaker 6: might be the way to undo the mafias has proven
Speaker 6: to be resoundingly correct. Just a been a, as I say,
Speaker 6: has has allowed the Italian state to plot the Endraguitor
Speaker 6: for the first time and to expose it to the world,
Speaker 6: to Italy and to the world, to tell the world
Speaker 6: we are hosting this enormous international crime syndicate that that
Speaker 6: you know for death.
Speaker 3: Now we've had no idea, but you know of quite
Speaker 3: how big it is.
Speaker 6: But you need to know about this Germany because it
Speaker 6: has this huge presence in Germany. You need to know
Speaker 6: about this. The US because it's all over the cocaine
Speaker 6: shipments on the Eastern seaboard. You need to know about it.
Speaker 6: Canada because these are the guys that are shooting themselves
Speaker 6: in supermarket car parks around Ontario and Toronto. This massive,
Speaker 6: massive organization that's in one hundred and twenty countries around
Speaker 6: the world and is the world's premiere money launderer. You know,
Speaker 6: this is this is everything they get from Justepoena. That's
Speaker 6: and that's her importance. Her other sort of legacy and
Speaker 6: importance is that her example encourages her friend, the third
Speaker 6: Good Mother, Maria Concettacachiola, also to go to the authorities
Speaker 6: about a year after guepoena. She has much less evidence
Speaker 6: to hand over, but her importance is perhaps in the
Speaker 6: way that it seems to confirm a trend that the
Speaker 6: women are not going to stand for the way that
Speaker 6: they're being treated, that they have the power of turning
Speaker 6: on their families. And this is you know, when when
Speaker 6: when a second woman walks in though a police shop
Speaker 6: and begins to testify the the endragons invincibility, its power
Speaker 6: begins to crumble. It's it's it's really an existential crisis
Speaker 6: for for for an organization that demands to dominate the
Speaker 6: women of all people, you know, to the men are
Speaker 6: the ones rebelling and shaking it to its foundation. So
Speaker 6: you know, at this point, the dragons to it's feeling
Speaker 6: incredibly paranoid and insecure.
Speaker 7: As you do in the book you talk about though
Speaker 7: the grasp of the and drag Edda in terms of
Speaker 7: knowing what this all means. The prosecutors find out about
Speaker 7: the infrastructure of this organization, but also the organization realizes
Speaker 7: what these women's betrayal can mean and does mean so
Speaker 7: they employ every day. Can in using the family again,
Speaker 7: tell us about some of the ploys and efforts they
Speaker 7: do to get jusepoena to change your mind and retract
Speaker 7: what she says.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, I mean as you say, I mean. The
Speaker 6: secret of the Dragons of the Clamoring Matthia is is secrecy,
Speaker 6: and it's in forced that a matter through family, through
Speaker 6: family loyalty. You don't speak out because you're betraying your
Speaker 6: nearest and dearest, your own brother, your own father. That's
Speaker 6: how it's been such a kind.
Speaker 3: Of closed shop. That's how it's been so successful.
Speaker 6: That's why none of us have ever heard of it,
Speaker 6: because it's maintained this secrecy through family loyalty. Going along
Speaker 6: with that has been and that sort of traditional family
Speaker 6: structure has been kind of morals that date back to
Speaker 6: the nineteenth century when it was founded, as in the
Speaker 6: women are treated, you know accordingly. As as we've discussed,
Speaker 6: what begins to happen now is that the dragoniton realizes,
Speaker 6: like the state does, that this is it's perhaps it's
Speaker 6: great flaw, but its response is to fall back on
Speaker 6: the same family structures.
Speaker 3: You know, if it can't.
Speaker 6: Control the women through threats from the men. It will
Speaker 6: kind of go for the juggler by trying to blackmail
Speaker 6: them through their children. And that's what happens with with
Speaker 6: Gisippina and with Maria Concetta Catiola. Dysipina takes her kids
Speaker 6: with her into protection. When the suitcase of clothes arrives
Speaker 6: from the family home for her eldest daughter, it arrives
Speaker 6: with a mobile phone hidden in it, and the family
Speaker 6: starts calling that phone immediately and saying to the daughter
Speaker 6: she's called Angela, Oh, your mother's taken you away from us.
Speaker 6: You know you've had to break with all your family
Speaker 6: and your friends. That's such a tragedy. What a terrible mother.
Speaker 6: She's doing her thing for her own reasons, but she's
Speaker 6: ruining your life. I bet they're giving you terrible food.
Speaker 6: How miserable you must be.
Speaker 3: And and.
Speaker 6: The senior old daughter drinks all this and and starts
Speaker 6: working on her mother, saying, you've ruined our lives. You know,
Speaker 6: I want to go back to my family.
Speaker 3: I'm miserable. Here.
Speaker 6: You promise us a new life, but this is a
Speaker 6: terrible life, and it works. Espina begins to waiver, and
Speaker 6: in fact, at one point completely retracts all her evidence
Speaker 6: and and sort of disavows it. With Maria Concettacatiola. She's
Speaker 6: aware actually that this is what happened to Gieseppina. She goes,
Speaker 6: she goes to the authorities a year later, and she's
Speaker 6: aware of that target.
Speaker 3: So she decided not to take a.
Speaker 6: Children with her, which actually turns out to be an
Speaker 6: even worse mistake.
Speaker 3: Her own mother then.
Speaker 6: Gets in contact and through through again through the children.
Speaker 6: I mean, Maria has broken all contact with her family,
Speaker 6: but finally cracks and sends one email to her eldest daughter.
Speaker 6: The family back in collaborate, sees on that as a
Speaker 6: way to reopen communication, and within days they've got a
Speaker 6: phone to her and they're blackmailing her and they're saying,
Speaker 6: you will never see your children again unless you come home.
Speaker 3: To the family.
Speaker 6: And the police actually have surveillance of Maria talking to
Speaker 6: her best friend and discussing this situation. She's Maria is saying, look,
Speaker 6: you know, if I go back to them, I know
Speaker 6: they're going to kill me. That's who they are, that's
Speaker 6: how they operate. And she's sort of saying, I think
Speaker 6: though that I probably have a year or eighteen months
Speaker 6: to live if I go back, they wouldn't kill me
Speaker 6: straight away, because that would be stupid.
Speaker 3: It would be so obvious that they had done it.
Speaker 3: So she decides.
Speaker 6: Again, you know, there's a prosecutor that I spoke to
Speaker 6: you who compares.
Speaker 3: Her this story to a Greek tragedy.
Speaker 6: She decides to go back to her family, in the
Speaker 6: full knowledge that she's they're going to murder her, but
Speaker 6: thinking that a year to eighteen months with her children
Speaker 6: is worth it. And in fact, it turns out she's miscalculated.
Speaker 6: She only has eleven twelve days to live before she's
Speaker 6: found in the basement of a family home having drunk
Speaker 6: a liter of acid, and her father drives at a hospital,
Speaker 6: but she's dead on arrival.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this is incredible, e And so for Alexandra, she
Speaker 7: realizes the gravity of the situation. And you also, as
Speaker 7: you have a chronicle in the book, the Denise is
Speaker 7: also filling in a lot of the gaps with Alessandra
Speaker 7: to be able to eventually be able to prosecute those killers,
Speaker 7: including her father, six people for the murder of her mother.
Speaker 3: So I was prosecuted from Alessandra. But yes, exactly Denise.
Speaker 6: Denise, what she does is she takes up her mother's fight.
Speaker 6: She testifies twice and certainly fills in the gaps over
Speaker 6: her mother's disappearance, although it is in fact.
Speaker 3: Four years before.
Speaker 6: Or three years before they find Lea's body, but Denise
Speaker 6: certainly fills in all the gaps as to why Carlin
Speaker 6: might be trying to kill her and who else is
Speaker 6: in his gang. The other thing that that Denise does
Speaker 6: really is is by taking up her mother's fight, and
Speaker 6: you know in a certain knowledge now seeing it as
Speaker 6: a mother has been murdered, that she is also also
Speaker 6: basically signing her own death warrant. She becomes a kind
Speaker 6: of an icon of the anti mafia movement, particularly amongst
Speaker 6: sort of young students in northern Italy who begins showing
Speaker 6: up at the case, begin organizing vigils outside. And that's
Speaker 6: that's what really turns the story of these three women
Speaker 6: into a wider social movement in Italy. Initially it's the
Speaker 6: Lea Garifolo and Denise Garifolo case that rapidly spreads to
Speaker 6: includes Giuseppina Peschet and Maria Concerto Caciola. Until these three
Speaker 6: mothers and one daughter become an icon not just of
Speaker 6: the movement that's protesting against the sort of oppression of
Speaker 6: the mafia, but also misogyny, sexism in general in Italy,
Speaker 6: and really, for the first time in history, there is
Speaker 6: a mass protest movement against the mafia. I mean again,
Speaker 6: I mean it seems to sort of speak to the
Speaker 6: power of what these women, you know, have done. Their
Speaker 6: stories seem to energize Italy in a way that's never
Speaker 6: happened before, and suddenly the mafia is really shaken. Here
Speaker 6: is a mass movement that is not pretending anymore that
Speaker 6: the mafia doesn't exist, but it's declaring that it exists,
Speaker 6: but declaring that Italy is oppressed by all the criminality
Speaker 6: and the corruption, and is marching in their thousands through
Speaker 6: the streets.
Speaker 3: By the time.
Speaker 6: Lea's body is recovered and she is granted a state
Speaker 6: funeral almost in Milan, thousands and thousands of people turn
Speaker 6: out from all across Italy to pay their respect, including
Speaker 6: a load of people who've come up from Calabria, and
Speaker 6: one woman in particular who goes immediately from the funeral
Speaker 6: to testify to the Carabinieri and also to turn state's evidence.
Speaker 3: So I get.
Speaker 6: You know, Denise in that sense becomes this really pivotal figure.
Speaker 6: After this year of nightmarish pretense with her father and
Speaker 6: real doubt about what way she should go, she decides
Speaker 6: to carry on her mother's fights and becomes this inspiration
Speaker 6: to a nation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you talk, you write about these three women's Gisippina
Speaker 7: and Concetta and Denise's faces or Leah's face, and they
Speaker 7: become the in the media. So these photos of these
Speaker 7: women represent this, all of these anti mafia marches and
Speaker 7: this movement that nobody's ever seen before. We didn't mention
Speaker 7: that because of the information that these women were able
Speaker 7: to provide and all of the people that were brought
Speaker 7: down in all of these operations, you call them Operation
Speaker 7: all Inside, and then they had Operation Infinity. You talk
Speaker 7: about three hundred arrests, three thousand officers, and even the
Speaker 7: arrest of Domenico Alpa Dessando, now he's eighty years old
Speaker 7: in Rosarno he was and you talk about lawyers, bankers, accountants, politicians, policemen,
Speaker 7: public health managers. All of these people were arrested in
Speaker 7: this in this endeavor. So tell us how successful they
Speaker 7: were with those charges in that information and arrests and convictions.
Speaker 3: But as you say, I mean it was.
Speaker 6: I mean there's two ways in which they had kind
Speaker 6: of unprecedented success. One was taking people off the street,
Speaker 6: you know, arresting people. Hundreds, if not thousands of people arrested,
Speaker 6: and in fact those you know, the legacy of that
Speaker 6: goes on today. There's been thousands of people from the
Speaker 6: Andraguita are now in jail, and you know, you're talking
Speaker 6: about an organization that really, even at its upper estimate,
Speaker 6: is perhaps sort of six or seven thousand strong, So
Speaker 6: you know, a major, major body blow. On top of that,
Speaker 6: there was hundreds of millions of euro confiscated from the
Speaker 6: Peschet family alone, for instance, and this is the most
Speaker 6: powerful family in the Dragutor at the time. Before they're arrested,
Speaker 6: sixty four members of Jusseppina's own family go to jail.
Speaker 6: The state confiscates two hundred and sixty million euros, including
Speaker 6: two soccer teams. I mean, it's it's and with the
Speaker 6: arrest of all the lawyers and the.
Speaker 3: Accountants and the other enablers in the in the sort.
Speaker 6: Of financial centers in Milan and so on, the structure of.
Speaker 3: The Endraguitar is also revealed.
Speaker 6: Isn't just about men in Trilby's and dusty pinstripe suits and.
Speaker 3: Calabria in their orange growth.
Speaker 6: This is a sophisticated international asset management business, actually money
Speaker 6: laundering business that seems to have penetrated every.
Speaker 3: Part of the Italian and the European economy.
Speaker 6: So that's the great success. They arrest a lot of people,
Speaker 6: they confiscate a lot of money, and that that goes
Speaker 6: on to this day that these cases are still working
Speaker 6: their way through the court. But what was kind of
Speaker 6: fascinating actually when I was reporting the story was, you know,
Speaker 6: and I must have spoken to twenty twenty five anti
Speaker 6: mafia prosecutors over the two or three years that I
Speaker 6: was doing this, not one of them expressed a kind
Speaker 6: of a sentiment of triumph. If anything, there was a
Speaker 6: real sense of anti climax. And I became very sort
Speaker 6: of curious about that, because, after all, you know, you'd
Speaker 6: think this was a this was a really really triumphant moment,
Speaker 6: And the answer seemed to be that there was a
Speaker 6: sense that they were never going to win. Actually that
Speaker 6: they had exposed this monster to the world. They had
Speaker 6: in the book I like in it to a whale
Speaker 6: they brought, you know, they harpooned the whale and brought
Speaker 6: it to the surface. But now it was disappearing back
Speaker 6: into the depths. The Endraguitor is nothing if not an
Speaker 6: adaptable organization. So if it's treatment of the women were
Speaker 6: one of its great flaws, it was suddenly beginning to
Speaker 6: treat those women much better. In fact, women were being
Speaker 6: promoted up the organization. If what the prosecutors were attacking
Speaker 6: was the vertical structure that kind of adjudicated between the
Speaker 6: one hundred and forty families of the Endraguitor, well, if
Speaker 6: that's what the prosecutors were attacking, it seems that the
Speaker 6: Andraguitor just collapsed that structure.
Speaker 3: It doesn't exist anymore. There's nothing to take aim at.
Speaker 6: What was possibly you know, the real flaw in the
Speaker 6: in the prosecutor's strategy was they're only able to do
Speaker 6: stuff in Italy. Obviously their jurisdiction ends at the border.
Speaker 6: The Dragutor has become a transnational international organization. And one
Speaker 6: after another the prosecutors said to me, Well, in fact,
Speaker 6: what they said to me was, you know, it's very
Speaker 6: nice that you've come down to Italy to look at
Speaker 6: our story down here. But you in London, you know,
Speaker 6: have a major and dragonitar story there. The and dragutor
Speaker 6: runs most of its money through the city of London,
Speaker 6: and as long as that financial engine and facilitation exists,
Speaker 6: there's only so much we can do. In fact, you know,
Speaker 6: the head of the anti mafia service in Italy put
Speaker 6: it to me in sort of more philosophical terms. He says,
Speaker 6: as long as politics is subservient to business, as long
Speaker 6: as we allow our laws and our procedures to essentially
Speaker 6: bend before the power of money, we can't win this fight.
Speaker 6: What he was saying was, I think that this is
Speaker 6: about greed, and as long as we prioritize getting rich,
Speaker 6: we are going to allow bad people to get rich
Speaker 6: along with the good.
Speaker 3: So you know that it was really striking.
Speaker 6: Actually they exposed this organization, they really shook it financially,
Speaker 6: but in the end, I think they were made to
Speaker 6: realize the limits of the damage that.
Speaker 3: They could do to it.
Speaker 6: As long as there workplaces like London or the Cayman Islands,
Speaker 6: or Hong Kong or wherever that were prepared to take
Speaker 6: their money.
Speaker 7: That they would buy the debt from two countries, specifically
Speaker 7: Thailand and Indonesia, and then from there those countries would
Speaker 7: be at least motivated to let them operate in those countries.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know, there were there
Speaker 6: there's a number of moments when I was reporting the
Speaker 6: story where my jaws that have.
Speaker 3: Hit the floor. But but yeah, this.
Speaker 6: Is perhaps when I you know, it hit hardest, was when, yeah,
Speaker 6: a prosecutor who specializes in the finance of the Mapia,
Speaker 6: Giuseppe Lombardo, said that he had found evidence that the
Speaker 6: Dragitor was in charge of such a wall of money,
Speaker 6: and he was saying, actually, not just its own money,
Speaker 6: not just fifty two one hundred million dollars a year,
Speaker 6: but so good at it had it become at laundering
Speaker 6: money that other organized crime groups from around the world
Speaker 6: were giving their money to the Endurangtor to launder kind
Speaker 6: of on a commercial basis for a feet so you
Speaker 6: can imagine they're in charge of trillions actually, and he
Speaker 6: said that financial might had given them the power to
Speaker 6: behave in exactly the same way that the mafia always behaves,
Speaker 6: which is intimidation and bullying, but on just a almost
Speaker 6: unimaginable scale. It had blackmailed entire countries. And the way
Speaker 6: it had done this, as you say in Indonesia and
Speaker 6: Thailand cases, it had gone to those markets, bought up
Speaker 6: what was available in terms of government debt on the market,
Speaker 6: which turns out to be a fraction of what's been issued,
Speaker 6: but probably about five percent. But then that's enough to
Speaker 6: be able to go to those governments and say, look,
Speaker 6: if we drop your debt, if we dump it, you
Speaker 6: will go bankrupt.
Speaker 3: You know, your interest payments.
Speaker 6: Will sky market and you will default. Or you know,
Speaker 6: here's your guest out. You allow us to operate on
Speaker 6: your territory, run our money through your markets, put our
Speaker 6: people in your cities, use your ports, whatever we want
Speaker 6: to do. We want impunity. So yeah, you know, every
Speaker 6: stage of reporting this story is it was a journey
Speaker 6: of George opping discovery quite how big and you know
Speaker 6: this powerful this organization is. But yes, according to a
Speaker 6: very sober and understated man who's been looking into their
Speaker 6: finances for over a decade, now, they are now blackmailing
Speaker 6: entire countries and I and I sort of looked at
Speaker 6: him and I said, you know what.
Speaker 3: You know, how big does this get?
Speaker 6: And he said, well, you know, our indications now is
Speaker 6: that their next targets are India and China, you know,
Speaker 6: I mean, my god, and you know, and actually this
Speaker 6: is sort of I think the bigger message of the
Speaker 6: book is is, you know, of course, organized crime is hidden.
Speaker 6: I mean, that's why we call it organized. It's it's careful.
Speaker 6: It's it's it doesn't it doesn't appear on the front
Speaker 6: page of the paper all that much. It's it's it's
Speaker 6: a careful business. But I begin to believe actually that
Speaker 6: the Endragta is just one example of what we're missing
Speaker 6: in terms of the influences of our age. You know,
Speaker 6: we tend to be very distracted by things like terrorism,
Speaker 6: for instance, which are obviously a very legitimate concern, but
Speaker 6: which are also very spectacular and very public and you know,
Speaker 6: kind of an easy headline in a way. And I
Speaker 6: think what we're missing is the rise of organized crime
Speaker 6: as a real driver and influencer of our age. If
Speaker 6: this is one group that is able to blackmail entire countries,
Speaker 6: change the destiny of nations, and there are twenty or
Speaker 6: thirty other groups around the world with similar kind of power,
Speaker 6: I mean, it's it's just mind boggling to think about really,
Speaker 6: and I become increasingly convinced that, you know, in the
Speaker 6: years since I finished reporting The Good Mothers, I've been
Speaker 6: looking into other organized crime groups. As I say, I'm
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm ever more convinced that organized crime is
Speaker 6: a real driver.
Speaker 3: Of our age.
Speaker 7: Absolutely. On the more personal note, in this book, before
Speaker 7: I leave you, we talk about Denise, one of the
Speaker 7: heroes in this book, and Leah and then her court
Speaker 7: case where it has revealed the plot to kill her,
Speaker 7: and it's fascinating to realize again the misogyny and the
Speaker 7: family and then this whole thing's driven home with this
Speaker 7: one story that she finds out that the boyfriend that
Speaker 7: she was fooling around with, or the guy that she
Speaker 7: was fooling around with, which was a bodyguard, was also
Speaker 7: ordered to kill her and dispose of her an acid,
Speaker 7: wasn't he.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I mean it's absolutely Shakespeare.
Speaker 6: And I mean, you know, we talked to tell you
Speaker 6: about like just jewel dropping moments in this story. When
Speaker 6: I was when Rando, you know, first told me this story.
Speaker 6: I was working with a translator who this was sort
Speaker 6: of we had a kind of three hour interview and
Speaker 6: when we got to this point he just sort of
Speaker 6: grown and collapsed. He couldn't couldn't take any more twists
Speaker 6: and turns in the story. But yeah, you're right. What
Speaker 6: happened was Carlo deputed one of his crew to be
Speaker 6: Denise's minder after Lea had disappeared, and and and to
Speaker 6: keep his eye on her and escort her around in
Speaker 6: the little village of Paliarelli, where his his base was,
Speaker 6: and they fell in love. He was called Carmeni Venturillo.
Speaker 6: He fell in love with Denise. She fell in love
Speaker 6: with him, and he escorted her for about eight months.
Speaker 6: She had she she she kept asking him, you know
Speaker 6: what happened to my mother? He never said anything. They
Speaker 6: were sitting on the beach close to a year actually,
Speaker 6: I think about ten months after Lea disappeared. When the
Speaker 6: police pulled up and marched Carmene off, and as they're
Speaker 6: putting him into the squad car, one of the officers
Speaker 6: shouts over his shoulder to Denise, this is the guy
Speaker 6: that got rid of your mother's body. This is the
Speaker 6: guy that helped kills your mother. You know, unbelievable. Actually,
Speaker 6: later on the reason that Lear's body is found is
Speaker 6: because Carmene confesses he's still in love with Denise.
Speaker 3: He wants to break from Carlo.
Speaker 6: He wants to give Denise some closure, so he tells
Speaker 6: the police where the body is and you know how
Speaker 6: to find it and on. And that actually is what
Speaker 6: allows the state to put Carlo away because very difficult
Speaker 6: to prove a murder if you don't have a body.
Speaker 6: This is the missing piece of the jigsaw and this
Speaker 6: is what allows yeah, Carlo to be.
Speaker 3: To be knocked up.
Speaker 6: I think he got twenty five five years them.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, it's a fascinating story. I want to thank you
Speaker 7: very much for coming on and talking about the Good Mothers.
Speaker 7: For those that might be interested in following this and
Speaker 7: other work that you've done. A digital website for this book,
Speaker 7: can you tell us much?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, people can read about it on my website, which
Speaker 6: is Alex Dashperry dot com. There's a contact book there
Speaker 6: if anybody wants to get in touch, and I really
Speaker 6: encourage them to do so. I love hearing from people
Speaker 6: and you know, hearing.
Speaker 3: What they think of the book, where what they like,
Speaker 3: what they don't.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it'd be great if people get in touch.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, thank you very much, Alex. I want to thank
Speaker 7: you very much for coming on and talking about The
Speaker 7: Good Mothers, the true story of the women who took
Speaker 7: on the world's most powerful mafia. It's a very powerful book.
Speaker 7: It's fascinating and incredible. Thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 7: You have a great evening, Dan, You're absolutely welcome. Thank you,
Speaker 7: good night.