The Australian - 05 ottobre 2011 - di Stephen Bennetts

It is also a myth that has enjoyed currency at times even in Australia, itself a key link in the huge global business network of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, the only one of the organisation's three branches thought to be active here.

Although the Sicilian mafia is certainly the best known of the three southern Italian branches of the mafia, Naples's Camorra has recently achieved new Italian and international notoriety through young Italian journalist Roberto Saviano's sensational 2006 expose Gomorra. Since the book's publication, Saviano has been forced, like Salman Rushdie, to live in hiding under police protection.

In one account of the origins of the mafia, three Spanish knights named Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso fled to the island of Favignana off the coast of Sicily some time in the 1400s, after avenging in blood the rape of one of their sisters by a Spanish nobleman. During the next 29 years, they dedicated themselves to establishing a new rule of conduct and secret brotherhood based on honour: the honoured society. Osso (Bone) then moved on to Sicily to establish the mafia, Carcagnosso (Heelbone) crossed into Calabria to found the 'Ndrangheta, and Mastrosso (Masterbone) went off to Naples to set up the Camorra.

This for Dickie is the central foundation myth of the mafia, and its medieval trappings are reflected even today in the texts of mafia initiation rituals that are turned up in police raids. Two such texts came to light in Australia in the 1980s, at properties owned by 'Ndrangheta members in the leafy Canberra suburb of Giralang and the Adelaide suburb of Nailsworth. For Calabrian investigators Vincenzo Macri and Enzo Ciconte, these texts provide important proof of the 'Ndrangheta's ability to export and reproduce its traditional organisational structures even in faraway Australia. Yet Italian police have long been frustrated by what they see as a failure by the Australian government and authorities to take the 'Ndrangheta threat in Australia seriously: in 1995, the Australian Police Minister's Council even issued the extraordinary statement that extensive investigations by the National Crime Authority had "found no evidence that the mafia or other Italian organised crime groups exist or operate in this country in the way they do in Italy".

Despite the hokum of the three Spanish knights, Dickie argues the mafia is in reality no older than the 1860 unification of Italy itself, and that organised crime is in fact a congenital illness of the Italian state: the honoured society of Naples and Sicily was born from the prison system in the middle decades of the 19th century. The violence and conspiratorial politics of Italian unification gave the hoodlums their passage out of the dungeons and into history.

Extortion, the long-established taxation system of the mafia shadow state, is a legacy of the group's historical origins in the Bourbon prisons of pre-unification southern Italy, which were entirely run from inside by criminal gangs who taxed their unfortunate fellow prisoners on almost every conceivable aspect of their miserable daily lives. As one colourful cammorista phrase of the time had it: faccimmo caccia' l'oro de piducchie: "We can get gold out of fleas."

But in the run-up to unification in 1860, these cammoristi began to encounter a new breed of gentleman prisoner thrown into jail for their idealistic opposition to the Bourbon regime then ruling southern Italy. Some of these Italian patriots were members of the Carbonari (charcoal burners), a revolutionary secret society whose arcane masonic rituals were later adapted by the mafias for their own nefarious purposes. This masonic imagery is still reflected in mafia initiation rituals such as the two Australian examples published for the first time in 2009 in Australian 'ndrangheta.

For anyone with any familiarity with the role of the mafia in post-war Italian politics and society, there is a sense of deja vu in many of the episodes recounted by Dickie in the three mafias' 150-year history. In 19th-century Naples, where large sections of the city were effectively ungovernable, the newly created Italian state saw the necessity for some kind of informal alliance with the Neapolitan lumpenproletariat. And so after the dissolution of the Bourbon police force after unification in 1860, the new administration effectively handed over control of public order for a time to local Camorra bosses.

This co-management of public order between state and mafia has since become a recurring theme in modern Italian history.

With the gradual extension of voting rights to all adult males at the end of the 19th century, mafia bosses soon became expert at mobilising votes on behalf of their political patrons in Rome. Sicily was later to become a notorious mafia-sponsored fiefdom for the ruling Christian Democrats after World War II, while critics of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have highlighted the fact, for the first time ever, all 60 Sicilian electorates in the 2001 national election returned candidates from one party, Berlusconi's Forza Italia.

A key to mafia success has been its ability to cultivate highly placed protectors in the political, judicial and law enforcement systems. Calabrian anthropologist Luigi Lombardi-Satriani, a former member of the Italian parliament's anti-mafia commission, has described the 'Ndrangheta as a Janus-like being, with one face turned towards engagement with elite political actors and another towards the organisation's historical roots within local peasant society:

the main face of the mafia is turned towards power, and is an organic element within the entire mafia project . . . [But the mafia] has another face which is turned towards the popular level, and tends to present itself as homogeneous with this milieu . . . [This] is a product of the mechanism of manipulation of folkloric values which is activated to encourage, channel and manipulate consensus within the popular milieu at a local level.

Blood Brotherhoods. The Rise of the Italian Mafias, traces the origins and evolution of the three mafias of southern Italy from their emergence during the turmoil of the Risorgimento to the end of World War II. The book provides compelling testimony that historical research is essential for understanding the present. Institutional amnesia has played a notable role in camouflaging the relentless ascent of each of the three mafias: much police and juridical documentation covering their 150-year life span is mysteriously missing from the archives. Although, since as early as the late 19th century, committed investigators had produced important insights into the nature and structure of the three mafias, again and again these insights were lost along the way or undermined by the convenient myth that the mafia doesn't exist.

After the savage 1920s fascist repression of the Sicilian mafia by Mussolini's "Iron Prefect", Cesare Mori, and of the Camorra in Campania, Mussolini publicly announced the complete annihilation of southern Italian organised crime in 1927. Yet Dickie's research gives the lie to this claim, showing how these organisations were able to adapt to these difficult circumstances, and indeed re-emerge even stronger in the chaos following the World War II, often with the naive complicity of the Allied occupation forces.

Important similarities and contrasts emerge from Dickie's unique comparative analysis of the three organisations. By avoiding involvement in prostitution from the very beginning, the Sicilian mafia has been able to establish more stable dynastic structures, while the 'Ndrangheta has learned the same lesson during the course of its own history. The Camorra is more inherently unstable than its two cousins, partly because of its continuing involvement in prostitution, but also because of greater indiscipline within its ranks: Saviano describes young camorristi carrying out hits while affected by ecstasy and cocaine. Not surprisingly, the Camorra has a greater reputation for accidentally shooting innocent bystanders than their more professional brethren.

The history of the 'Ndrangheta in Australia begins in Queensland in the early 20th century, when, between 1928 and 1940, 10 murders and 30 attempted murders were attributed by authorities to the Calabrian Black Hand organisation. The disappearance in 1977 of Griffith Liberal politician Donald Mackay is well known, while fans of Underbelly are familiar with the exploits of Australian 'Ndrangheta boss Robert Trimbole.

In 1994, an 'Ndrangheta parcel bomb delivered to the Adelaide office of the National Crime Authority killed NCA investigator Geoffrey Bowen, who was due to give evidence about an 'Ndrangheta cannabis operation the following day. Before being blown up with members of his police escort by a massive mafia bomb in 1992, Sicilian judge Giovanni Falcone had followed the 'Ndrangheta money trail to Australia, while Nicola Calipari (the Italian secret service agent who died tragically in a hail of American bullets in Iraq in 2005 while rescuing Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena) also came to Australia on a secret 'Ndrangheta-related mission in 1988.

His report, along with the Adelaide and Canberra mafia initiation texts, has been published for the first time in Australian 'ndrangheta. Earlier this year, Italian police sought the extradition of Calabrian former mayor of the city of Stirling in Perth, Tony Vallelonga, in connection with suspicious conversations secretly recorded between him and 'Ndrangheta boss Giuseppe Commisso while the ex-mayor was visiting his home town in Calabria.

Italian community leaders have a legitimate concern that the vast majority of Italians and Calabrians in Australia who have no connections to the 'Ndrangheta may be unfairly tarnished with the mafia stigma. I know a number of Calabrians in Australia and Calabria, for instance, who have the misfortune of sharing the same surname as some of the most notorious 'Ndrangheta families, yet have absolutely nothing to do with their criminal activities; this is true even of both authors of Australian 'ndrangheta.

Yet, for veteran investigative journalist Bob Bottom, some Australian politicians have sought to deny the continuing existence of the mafia in Australia for base political motives, out of respect for "political correctness" and as a sop to ethnic sensitivities. This too has a familiar ring from Dickie's accounts of 19th-century investigators in Palermo and Naples who were sometimes targeted by public campaigns alleging they were besmirching the honour of Sicily and Naples through their anti-mafia investigations.

Politicians in Australia, not only Italy, have sometimes been accused of providing political cover for the 'Ndrangheta, most notoriously in the case of former Whitlam government minister for immigration and federal MP for the Griffith area Al Grassby. In 2009, the Australian Federal Police began investigations into allegations that the Liberal Party had accepted up to $100,000 in donations from mafia-linked businessmen to influence then minister for immigration Amanda Vanstone to issue a visa in 2005 allowing alleged 'Ndrangheta figure Francesco Madafferi to stay in Australia. One pillar of Melbourne's Italian community, Nino Randazzo, editor of Il Globo, the city's most widely read Italian language daily (later elected Italian senator for Oceania in 2006), even published a full-page public appeal to then attorney-general Philip Ruddock in Il Globo on Madafferi's behalf. In 2008, Madafferi was arrested in connection with the world's largest ecstasy importation through the Port of Melbourne. Last year, three Australian citizens of Calabrian origin were tried on 'Ndrangheta-related charges in Calabria in absentia, following a failure since 2004 to secure their extradition from Australian authorities.

Dickie's book begins with a quotation from the great Calabrian writer Corrado Alvaro, who once wrote that "the blackest despair that can take hold of any society is the fear that living honestly is futile". Despite this pessimistic message, many who live in southern Italian mafia territory have been inspired by the heroic examples of assassinated Sicilian judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and courageous journalists such as Roberto Saviano to challenge local mafia power, instead of giving in to that blackest despair of which Alvaro writes.

By shining a light so powerfully into the darkest recesses of mafia mythology and history, Dickie's new book will certainly provide a concrete tool in the anti-mafia struggle to which many Italians and Calabrians in Australia and Italy are passionately committed.

Blood Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias
By John Dickie
Sceptre, 448pp, $32.99

Australian 'ndrangheta, i codici di affiliazione e la missione di Nicola Calipari
By Enzo Ciconte and Vincenzo Macri
Rubbettino Editore, Soveria Mannelli, 158pp, E12