“We arrive at their homes as punctually as registered letters.” A mafioso said that into a wiretap, and Italian prosecutors later quoted it to describe how the ‘Ndrangheta leans on local businessmen. The line says a lot about an organisation that began in the mountains of Calabria and now reaches across continents.
The FBI dates the group to the 1860s. It grew up in Calabria, in the toe of Italy, and its defining feature has never changed: it is built on blood. The basic unit is the ‘ndrina, a family clan, and there are hundreds of them. OCCRP, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, has described Italy’s largest mafia as made up of around 150 families. Typically one ‘ndrina holds a town or territory and answers to its own boss. There is no single head to cut off.
Why family makes it hard to crack
Writing in the Guardian, Clare Longrigg noted that family ties made the group “almost impenetrable to investigators,” since it is extremely difficult to persuade anyone to betray his own brothers. She pointed to the numbers from the mid-1990s: 27 “penitent” mafiosi in Calabria against more than 400 in Sicily. Italy’s Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate has said, as quoted by Reuters, that the same family bonds give the clans “maximum flexibility” to pursue business.
That flexibility explains how the group climbed past its rivals. When Cosa Nostra and the Camorra were feeding off the transatlantic heroin trade, the ‘Ndrangheta was still known for kidnapping in the Calabrian highlands. It abducted an estimated 200 people between the 1970s and the 1990s. The best known victim was John Paul Getty III, grandson of the oil tycoon, seized in Rome in 1973 and held in the mountains for five months. His kidnappers mailed his severed ear to a newspaper, and his grandfather reportedly paid $2.2 million.
Cocaine, and the places it goes
Today cocaine is the core business. Italy’s antidrug directorate described the group in its 2022 annual report as the biggest influence on cocaine shipments arriving from South America. The port of Gioia Tauro, in Calabria, has long been central; the Guardian, as cited by OCCRP, reported an FBI finding that 80% of Europe’s cocaine flowed through it.
The clans spread through emigration. Family links reached Australia, Canada and Germany, and cities in northern Italy, where drug money could be laundered. In Greater Toronto, police know a group of ‘ndrine as the “Siderno Group.” In Australia, an outfit called the “Honoured Society” has operated for around 100 years. The group is also reported in Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The money is enormous, though its exact size is unknown. The Guardian reported in 2014 that the ‘Ndrangheta earned an estimated €53 billion in 2013, about 3.5 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, more than Deutsche Bank and McDonald’s combined. Forbes put its worth at around $72 billion in 2021. Some of that cash goes into infiltrating local government and steering building contracts.
The state pushes back
Police have scored real hits. In 2010, Operation Crime produced about 305 arrests, according to the Department of Justice. In November 2021, raids on the Molè clan of Gioia Tauro netted over 100 suspects, including a town councillor and several business leaders, and turned up more than a ton of cocaine. The same month brought the first convictions in a maxi trial of more than 300 alleged members, held in a specially built courtroom in Lamezia Terme. In 2023 a court convicted 207 members on charges from drug trafficking to extortion. INTERPOL’s I-CAN project, launched in 2020, had led to 158 arrests worldwide by January 2025.
Prosecutor Riccardo Targetti, after the Molè raids, called collusion with the clans “playing with fire.”
Sources
- Where Is the ’Ndrangheta Family Now? What to Know About the Mob at the Center of “Mafia: Most Wanted” – AOL
- Wer sind die ‘Ndrangheta – Italiens mächtigste Mafia-Organisation?
- Italy Arrests 100 Suspected Ndrangheta Members – OCCRP
- Close family ties and bitter blood feuds – The Guardian
