http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2150731,00.html
Escalating rivalry blamed for six killings in Germany amid fears of all-out bloodbath
John Hooper in San Luca
Friday August 17, 2007
The Guardian
Carabinieri man a roadblock in the southern Italian town of San Luca on Wednesday after six people were killed in Duisberg. Photograph: Francesco Saya/AP
The cemetery of San Luca is made up of row after row of little, house-like structures in which the tombs of the dead are stacked one on the next amid sprays of plastic flowers, statues of the Virgin, electric votive candles and portraits of themselves when alive.
Maria Strangio's tomb bears the photograph of a young woman with lush, dark hair wearing pendant earrings. It also has an inscription: "Your beautiful youth was shattered when everyone was smiling at you. Death carried you far away. It separated you from your loved ones who every hour repeat your name in the silent, empty house where everyone remembers you."
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The 33-year-old Ms Strangio was murdered in an ambush on Christmas Day last year. Her loved ones' angry refusal to forget will be uppermost in the minds of investigators as they probe the multiple slaying on Wednesday of six people in the Ruhr valley town of Duisburg. For Maria Strangio came from one of two mafia clans enmeshed in a faida, a lethal tit-for-tat feud. Several of Wednesday's victims were from the other.
There had been earlier victims in the 15 years before she was killed. One was her father, Antonio, whose handsome face smiles from a photo on the tomb beneath hers.
But the killing of Maria has given the feud an unprecedented lethal vigour. Even before the Duisburg murders, five people had died since Christmas in presumed vendetta killings in and around this picturesquely sited hill town in southern Italy. The fear now is of an explosion of reciprocal violence that spreads beyond San Luca to encompass other towns and other clans.
"God help us," said the sexton, who declined to give his name, as he closed the cemetery gates. "We hope for peace. But this is a land forgotten by God and man alike."
Framed by the foothills of the Aspromonte massif in Calabria, the "toe" of Italy, San Luca, with a population of just over 4,000, looks even more like the mafia town of the original Godfather film than the town the movie intended to represent - Corleone on Sicily. It has the same winding alleyways, and yesterday almost the only people to be seen in them were widows in black.
Elsewhere, the sole activity was at a roadblock at the entrance to the town manned by Carabinieri cradling sub-machine pistols and among mourners turning up to pay their respects at the house of the parents of 16-year-old Francesco Giorgi, the youngest victim of Wednesday's massacre. None wished to speak.
Earlier in the day an Italian television crew was asked to leave town. Not even the parish priest, Father Pino Strangio, was to be found in his church. But then, as the curate explained, young Francesco was Pino's cousin's son.
The curate, Father Stephen Fernando, from Tamil Nadu in India, said he had been in San Luca for nine years. It was, he conceded, "a difficult village".
And a very special one too. The Calabrian mafia, known as the 'Ndrangheta, is now widely regarded by police and prosecutors as Italy's wealthiest and deadliest crime syndicate - more so even than its better-known Sicilian equivalent, Cosa Nostra. To a greater extent, moreover, the 'Ndrangheta has managed to spread its tentacles across the world - to Australia, Canada and, as Wednesday's shootings showed, to Germany.
San Luca, in the words of a study published in 2005 by Italy's domestic intelligence service, is "the cradle of [the 'Ndrangheta] and its epicentre".
Above the town is the shrine of Our Lady of Polsi, the spiritual focus of an organisation that leans heavily on religious symbolism - among the ranks to which its mobsters can aspire are those of "saint" and "evangelist". For many years, some claim still, 'Ndrangheta bosses from all over the world came to the shrine to pay their respects every September.
Enzo Ciconte, the author of several books on the 'Ndrangheta and a former consultant to the Italian parliament's anti-mafia commission, believes that the importance of the San Luca feud has, until now, been underestimated.
"It is the 'families' of San Luca who have always decided if other families are, or are not, part of the 'Ndrangheta. If, say, in Britain, or Holland, or Germany you wish to set up a new locale (clan), and you don't get the approval of the 'Ndrangheta of San Luca, then your gang is not part of the 'Ndrangheta."
In the past, he said, the town's clans had been sufficiently good terms to be able to reach common decisions. But by dividing them bitterly, the feud had cast doubt on who properly represented the San Luca 'Ndrangheta, thereby creating an issue of legitimacy at the very heart of the syndicate. Such was the pressure to resolve the feud, said Mr Ciconte, that barring a combination of internal mediation and concerted intervention by the state, "there could now be a bloodbath". Small wonder there are so few young men on the streets of San Luca.
As for the mayor, Giuseppe Mammoliti of the Left Democrats, he was on holiday yesterday. But he did have his mobile with him. Did he have a comment on the events in Duisburg?
"What sort of comment?" came the guarded reply from who-knows-where. Whatever reaction he felt was appropriate to the death of so many people from, or linked to, his town.
"I am truly sorry about what has happened," said Mr Mammoliti at length. "That is all. Nothing else."
Did he plan to return? "No," he said. "I'll be away for some days yet."
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