High-security 1,000-capacity courtroom has been built
in Calabria, with cages to hold the defendants
"The law is equal for all" reads the title
in Lamenzia where Italy's biggest mafia trial in
decades will start tomorrow, with more than 300 defendants linked to the
powerful crime group, the 'Ndrangheta, to appear amid high security.
But there is an odd aspect to this, Freemasonry. For
example, the investigation conducted by prosecutor Nicola Gratteri
revealed a mixture of 'Ndrangheta, politics, and
Freemasonry.
The National Anti-Mafia and Counter-Terrorism
Directorate (DNAA) affirmed the enormous interest of Cosa Nostra and
'Ndrangheta linked to Freemasonry,
indicating 193 subjects with double membership of which 122
from the Grand Orient of Italy; 58 to the GLRI, 9 to the GLI and 4 to the
Serenissima.
Calabria, the region in the ‘toe’ of the Italian
‘boot’, is home to the Ndrangheta. Of all
the world’s gangster fraternities, the Ndrangheta has
the best claim to being global: it has colonies in northern Italy, northern
Europe, North America, and Australia. Regional and local government has been
beset for decades by organized criminal influence, and the dilapidated rural
communities of Calabria are home to some of Europe’s biggest drug traffickers.
The Ndrangheta is no mediocre mafia.
In October 2011, in a farm building in one of those
rural communities, police listening devices recorded the local ’ndrangheta boss, Pantaleone ‘Uncle Luni’ Mancuso: ‘The ’ndrangheta doesn’t
exist anymore! … The ’ndrangheta is part of
Freemasonry … let’s say, it’s under Freemasonry. But they’ve got the same rules
and stuff … Once upon a time the ’ndrangheta belonged
to the rich folk! After, they left it to Giuliano Di Bernardo, the university
professor who, between 1990 and 1993, was the Grand Master of Italy’s biggest
and most prestigious Masonic order, the Grand Orient. In June 2019, speaking
through the beard that makes him resemble an Armani-suited Karl Marx, Di
Bernardo testified before a Calabrian court. He recalled his shock when, as
Grand Master, he looked into the state of Masonry in Calabria: ‘I discovered
that twenty-eight of thirty-two Lodges were governed by the ’ndrangheta.
So at that moment, I decided to leave the Grand Orient.’
Calabria has provided plenty of fuel for conspiracist
newspaper headlines that are as confusing as they are inflammatory – along the
following lines: ‘Mafia boss says, “Freemasons run the ’ndrangheta!’”
‘Former Grand Master confesses, “The ’ndrangheta runs
the Freemasons!”’ On 1 March 2017, on the orders of the permanent Parliamentary
Commission of Inquiry into the Mafia, police mounted dawn raids on the offices
of the four biggest Masonic orders, and confiscated membership lists. Their
search concentrated on Freemasonry in Calabria and Sicily, Italy’s most
notorious mafia hotbeds.
The raids by the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry
brought back Masons’ memories of similar raids twenty-five years earlier. At
that time, a sprawling criminal investigation had sought to map hundreds of
criminal and wheeler-dealer networks over the impossible tangle of different
Masonic orders, Lodges, and rites – both regular and irregular, open and
covert. In 1993, the confiscated membership lists were leaked, and Italy’s
Freemasons were named in many newspapers. Some Brothers reported receiving
anonymous threats in the aftermath; others said they were cold-shouldered by
friends. (Strangely, the lists in the press excluded all but a tiny number of
the women Masons from mixed orders.) Eventually, in 2000, a court in Rome
halted the investigation, declaring that it owed more to the ‘collective
imaginary’ about Freemasonry than it did to any evidence that Freemasons were
infiltrating the public institutions for illicit ends. Many dismissed this
ruling as a cover-up. Masons were left bitter.
Given this history, in 2017 there was a complete
breakdown in trust between the members of the Parliamentary Commission of
Inquiry and the Masonic leadership. The Commission’s report accused the chief
Masons of being in denial about mafia infiltration, and of being ‘far from
transparent and cooperative’: all four Grand Masters had refused to hand over
their membership lists. Soon afterward, the Grand Master of the Grand Orient
published a pamphlet that compared the Parliamentary Commission to the
Inquisition. (As coincidence would have it, the Commission’s hearings are held
in the same Roman palazzo where Galileo was forced to recant his scientific
findings.)
Yet there is a strong sense that the Freemasonry’s
dispute with the Commission of Inquiry was fueled by political grandstanding
from both sides. It is worth remembering that the most senior Masons are
elected: they are the Prime Ministers and Presidents of their little
democracies. Denouncing anti-Masonic prejudice and evoking the memory of
Masonic martyrs have always been rallying cries among the Brethren, and thus a
useful electoral gambit. On the other side, it would have taken a strong-willed
parliamentarian on the Commission of Inquiry to face up to the public animosity
towards the Craft. In February 2017, for example, Italy’s leading current
affairs magazine carried the front-page headline, ‘Let’s abolish Freemasonry’.
The populist Five-Star Movement, which came to power in June 2018, has a policy
of expelling Freemasons from its ranks, and Masons are often listed among its
‘establishment’ enemies.
The Ndrangheta is
a curious organization, having more than twice as many members as Sicily’s Cosa
Nostra, and a much more complicated structure: for example, each stage in the
career ladder of an Ndrangheta is marked by
a new rank with its own elaborate initiation ritual. The Calabria mafia is an
underworld mirror of the Craft, which blends local autonomy for the Lodges with
national and international ‘brand’ control. What we could call the Ndrangheta brand or franchise, meaning its rules,
ranks, and rituals, are all centrally controlled by a body called il Crimine (‘the Crime’). Even when they are based
outside Calabria, ’ndranghetisti seek
authorization from the Crime to set up new cells. But the Ndrangheta is also decentralized, in that its
individual clans and cells pursue all kinds of criminal activities at their own
initiative. Nobody is answerable to the Crime when they smuggle in a shipment
of drugs, for example.
Things began to shift in the 1970s when the Ndrangheta grew vastly richer on the profits of
kidnapping, narcotics, and infiltrating public works contracts. As the money
flowed in, the criminal brotherhood’s structure evolved: unbeknownst to the
mass of the membership, ever more upper ranks were invented. By creating them,
most senior bosses were trying to monopolize access to the money derived from
infiltrating public works, and keep the peace among themselves while they did
so. But they could never settle on a definitive formula, just as at various
times in the history of Freemasonry, there was runaway inflation in the number
of Degrees and rituals, and a fight over who got to authorize them. Such
internal wrangles were one of the reasons behind savage Ndrangheta civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s. In the
end, around 2001, an alliance of the most powerful bosses founded an entirely
separate and highly secretive group within the Ndrangheta,
so investigators believe. The group’s members include men with the kind of
white-collar, political skills needed to get on with brokering corrupt deals
with business and the state, while the crime bosses were left free to use their
own less specialized skills to best effect. A few bosses who knew about this
group have been bugged using various names to describe it: ‘the invisible
ones’, for example. And because, like everyone else, Calabrian gangsters love
to think of the Freemasons as the last word in occult power, they also refer to
the new group, according to one supergrass, as
‘something analogous to Freemasonry’.
That is what the Ndrangheta boss Pantaleone ‘Uncle Luni’
Mancuso was doing when he was recorded in 2011 saying that the Freemasons had
taken over the Ndrangheta. He was using a
metaphor, as almost no one pointed out when Uncle Luni’s words
were splashed over the newspapers.
But now is not the time for the Freemasons of Italy to
shout their outrage at the way their reputation has been attacked because of a
mere metaphor. The Gotha Trial may yet hold damning surprises in store. It is
also crucial to understand that when Ndrangheta refers
to Freemasonry they are not just speaking in metaphor. Masonic Lodges, real
Masonic Lodges, are part of the Calabrian mafia’s pervasive networking system.
Here is how the judges think it all works. The Ndrangheta loves to get its hands on state contracts
for collecting and disposing of rubbish, building and maintaining roads and
hospitals, and so on. ’Ndranghetisti use
mediators to wheedle their way into winning these contracts: politicians,
administrators, entrepreneurs, and lawyers. Indeed, mafia organizations are
only as strong as the mediators they can call on; they have a constant hunger
to co-opt new ones, and will use any mix of bribery, blackmail, and
intimidation to do so. This is where Masonic Lodges fit in.
Especially since the P2 scandal, Freemasonry has attracted unscrupulous men from
the same kind of professional background as the honest Masons. Many of the
unscrupulous new arrivals get bored and go elsewhere when they realize what
honest Masons actually do. But within the confused world of Calabrian
Freemasonry, there are plenty of niches where clusters of them can find a base.
Most of the Lodges cited in the judges’ ruling in the Gotha Trial are the kind
of ‘covert’ or ‘irregular’ Lodges not authorized by the main national orders.
They act like dating agencies, matching ’Ndranghetisti to
mediators from among the professional classes, and can offer a route to the
very top of the grey zone where the criminal underworld meets the upper world
of politics and business. But regular Lodges are at risk too: by accepting a
banal favor from a Brother secretly in league with the ’Ndranghetisti ,
even an honest Mason can be drawn into a web of blackmail.
If the ruling of the trial that
starts tomorrow is right, then there is an obvious way that the interests
of Freemasonry could be harmonized with the fight against the mafia. The main
Masonic orders could seek the help of the law in policing the boundary between
regular and irregular forms of Masonry. Alas, no such approach will be adopted
any time soon. There are too few people on either side who have an interest in
collaboration. Masonry and anti-Masonry seem doomed to carry on their
centuries-old slanging match.
Prosecutor Nicola Gratteri
(pictured in the center below) acknowledges that Wednesday’s trial, which
is expected to last a year, will not kill off the crime empire, but he hopes it
will mark an important step towards its demise by encouraging victims to come
forward and denounce the mobsters.
“It will open the path to yet more trials and allow us
to make even deeper inroads into the group. I want people to believe in us and
begin to collaborate and have ever great trust in us,” he said.
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