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