Free The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia by Petra Reski Page B

the village (the term they used for policemen in those parts), house searches by the carabinieri , wigs and makeup for hiding scars, messages, and ferrying people around in jeeps. About “them” and “us.” And as I stood at the bar drinking my espresso, I wondered whether the man standing next to me eating his cream pastry mightn’t have been shifting a consignment of bazookas the previous day.
    A few days later, Shobha and I decided to take a look at the house that stood over the Pelle-Vottari clan’s bunker—not the only one in San Luca, incidentally. The important families of San Luca had holed up at the edge of the village in fortresses,five-story concrete castles. The Pelle-Vottari family had built one such. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a five-meter-high steel fence. Because the bunker underneath it had been sealed and impounded, we thought the house was empty. A false assumption, as it turned out.
    First we just heard a sound. A hoarse cry, then a dull rumble, and at last the automatic gate opened. Like a herd of wildly snorting bulls, ten men came charging down the drive. Quivering, bobbing, and cursing, they stood in our way, and in the way of our car. They demanded that Shobha hand over her camera and grabbed for my notebook. The youngest of them was twenty years old at most; they wore white Dolce & Gabbana T-shirts and their hair was gelled into spikes. They hissed: “Piss off, you miserable whores.” They were boys who pressed their teeth tightly together until their lower jaws trembled. Only one of them was older, perhaps fifty; with his padded waistcoat, he looked like a shepherd coming back from vespers. The men were being urged on by an old woman in a black pleated skirt. “Break their knees!” she cried. Their faces contorted with fury, the young men rubbed their fists as if they’d already started thumping us. They pressed so close to us that we could smell their breath. “You stupid bitches, we’re going to smash your heads in.”
    As they doubtless would have done if a police patrol hadn’t arrived and stopped them. A plump policeman got out and pushed the men aside. His voice sounded like a woman’s. There was something surreal about standing at the end of this cul-de-sac, between hate-filled mafiosi and a high-pitched policeman trying to calm them down. It was our good fortune that the Duisburg attack had already attracted far too much attention. The Italian secret services had reported on attemptsby ’Ndrangheta families to bring about a cease-fire in San Luca. Because if the Duisburg murders were properly avenged, there was a danger that Europe would become aware of the problem that the ’Ndrangheta represented. And the Calabrian Mafia desperately wanted to prevent that. According to the famous Agenda 2000, the European Union’s sponsorship program, huge amounts of European money is flowing into Calabria, and thus into the hands of the Mafia. “Measures to remove imbalances between the regions,” they call it in Brussels. That’s why they want peace in San Luca. And that was why we were able to get back into our car and drive away.
    After that, Shobha and I thought it might be a good idea to give San Luca a wide berth for the rest of our Calabrian story. We decided to drive to Locri, just a few miles away from San Luca. The name of Locri has a strong resonance in Italy: in Locri the regional politician Francesco Fortugno was killed by ’Ndrangheta assassins in 2005, and it was here, shortly afterward, that the Calabrian anti-Mafia movement Ammazzateci tutti , “Kill all of us!” was founded—an organization that emerged from a student group and called for a revolt against the ’Ndrangheta. However, it was Sunday, and Locri was nothing but a main street with deserted-looking houses. We walked across an empty, rectangular piazza planted with withered jasmine bushes. Along uneven pavements and potholed tarmac. Locri was the essence of nothingness. No cinema,