They’re evil, they’re deadly, and they’re here
Antonio Montanaro is fighting a criminal organisation that is like ‘the dark side of the moon’.
Antonio Montanaro is fighting a criminal organisation that is like “the dark side of the moon”.
While other mafia groups were being pursued by authorities for acts of brutal public violence, ‘Ndrangheta clans stayed largely out of view – and prospered.
“This particular organised crime group decided to have more covert behaviour,” Montanaro says. “They took advantage, actually, of the law enforcement action against the other criminal organisations in Italy. They left some gaps, where ‘Ndrangheta infiltrated and took their place.”
Montanaro is a colonel with the Italian National Police who for the past 24 years has specialised in international co-operation.
Now he is at the forefront of the fight against one of the world’s most powerful criminal organisations, as project manager of Interpol’s Co-operation Against ‘Ndrangheta (I-CAN).
Montanaro was in Melbourne in late April for a secretive high-level meeting of international law enforcement agencies to discuss how to work together to combat the ‘Ndrangheta, and spoke exclusively to The Australian.
“We have defined our project as a global attack against a global and globalised threat,” he says.
Back in October 2019, the international general assembly of Interpol in Santiago, Chile, brought together some 900 officials from 162 countries, including more than 70 police chiefs and ministers.
Italy’s delegation was gearing up for an unprecedented assault on the ‘Ndrangheta, laying out plans for a global response, Montanaro says. International counterparts immediately consented to be involved.
Three months later, in January 2020, I-CAN was launched as a three-year project to “combat the increasingly insidious and global threat of mafia-type crime”.
Australia was among the 11 pilot countries, alongside Italy, Canada, Germany, the US, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Brazil, France and Switzerland.
The first meeting of police chiefs was held in June 2020.
It was still the early days of the Covid pandemic, and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw attended via audiovisual link.
The project reflects the fact that the ‘Ndrangheta is now “at the top of the Italian anti-mafia agenda”, Montanaro says.
“The ‘Ndrangheta organisation sometimes is regarded as a rural organisation only living in Italy,” he says.
“It is indeed an aggregate of Italian families having roots in the region of Calabria, but has ramifications stretching all over Italy and all over the world.
“We can say that now ‘Ndrangheta is the real, unique broker for international drug trafficking.”
Key to the ‘Ndrangheta’s success is its discipline in remaining subterranean, something it has managed for decades, Montanaro says. “I remember a sentence of an American magistrate that defined ‘Ndrangheta already in the 1980s as “silent like the dark side of the moon”.
“So it’s an organisation that was already felt to have this kind of behaviour,” he adds.
The other key hallmark of the ‘Ndrangheta is to infiltrate the legal economy with vast sums of money generated from their illicit activities.
“They have an incredible amount of investment money to spend,” Montanaro says. “This penetration in legal markets is sometimes even taken positively by governments – they don’t have enough awareness of the phenomenon. “You see an investment coming into your country, but these have the effect of corrupting, polluting, the economy.”
In Italy, there is strong legislation not only to fight against the phenomenon that is the mafia, but also to act in advance.
That legislation is not always there in other countries.
“What this organised crime group is exploiting is the weaknesses of governments, the lack of awareness,” he says. “They try to go where they know that the legislative and judiciary action is more feeble than, for example, Italy.”
According to Interpol, the ‘Ndrangheta has grown to be one of the most extensive and powerful criminal organisations in the world. The only Italian mafia organisation present on every continent, it is known to have tentacles in at least 47 countries.
I-CAN includes a selection of those countries.
The ‘Ndrangheta’s strong presence abroad came into the public’s view 15 years ago when six Italians were shot dead in front of a family restaurant in Duisburg, western Germany. It was an uncharacteristic outbreak of public violence, the result of a long-running feud between two rival ‘Ndrangheta clans from San Luca, Calabria.
Montanaro says it led to a new era of co-operation between Italy and Germany that has since seen a “lot of operational results”.
At the same time, intelligence gathered about the activities of the ‘Ndrangheta abroad had convinced Italy that wider international co-operation was needed – hence the launch of I-CAN.
“The first pillar of the project is awareness raising,” says Montanaro. To this end, the Italians have been spreading the word about the ‘Ndrangheta’s operations through meetings in countries including Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. They have also met the FBI and DEA in the US.
“For police, international co-operation needs trust. You can meet your colleagues on video, but the real trust you build only by personally meeting,” Montanaro says.
Italy and Australia are exchanging information “daily”.
AFP Commander Raegan Stewart says the Melbourne gathering brought together experts from around the world who were actively working on Italian organised crime.
They were looking for ways to collaborate and to work together operationally.
“The ‘Ndrangheta is the biggest and most dangerous of the Italian organised crime groups in the world,” she says.
“They are in more than 30 countries. The AFP has got an international network, we’ve got people in the right places around the world – they’re the reason why everyone’s here.
“What’s important to us is the collaboration with international partners, and especially with our Italian counterparts.”
AFP Assistant Commissioner Nigel Ryan told The Australian on the sidelines of the Melbourne meeting that “we’ve learned things in the last few days that we did not know before”.
He says there is a saying used by the ‘Ndrangheta: “There are two groups. One is Calabria, and one is what will become Calabria. That’s how they view themselves,” Ryan says.
Investigators are attacking “the key enablers” of Italian organised crime domestically and abroad to counter them, he says.
“We attack their money, we attack their communications, we attack their logistics, and we attack their key insiders.
“What we’re trying to do is make the most hostile environment we can.”
