Sciascia’s home was the small village of Racalmuto in western Sicily, the traditional mafia stronghold of dry dusty plains and empty mountains. He was, he said, able to write about the criminals because he had grown up observing the pressure put on the villagers by local bosses, and the way that jobs and positions went to those who obeyed mafia orders. He could feel the mafia in his bones, and, in some fundamental sense, felt he was a mafioso himself.

Having decided to base his book on the true story of a local contractor, murdered for refusing to give in to extortion, Sciascia resolved to deliver his message in clear, unmistakable terms. The mafia, he wrote, was not as some suggested a part of colorful Sicilian folklore — but a highly effective secret criminal organization, made up of bosses and middle men, who used kidnapping, kneecapping and execution to extort money and leverage power. It had already moved, Sciascia continued, from its original base in the Sicilian countryside into the cities, where it was feeding on Italy’s postwar building boom. And, unless checked, the mafia would keep going, up through Italy and far beyond. Sciascia then recommended a line of action: the only way to crush this organized criminality before it was too late was to follow the money, check bank accounts and tax returns, and establish why seemingly unemployed grandees were enjoying sumptuous lives.

Few, in 1961, chose to listen. Politicians, churchmen, industrialists and lawyers lined up to say that the mafia was nothing but an invention in the fevered minds of the Communists, traditional opponents of financial malfeasance. As for the author himself, Sciascia was dismissed as a malevolent critic of his beautiful island home, and interested only in the sales of his books. It would take 20 years and the deaths of many brave and principled investigators, some of them his personal friends, before Sicily began to come to grips with its mafia. By then, the mafia had spread just as Sciascia warned it would, digging its tentacles into every corner of Sicilian life, dominating first the fish, meat and citrus markets, then water, then cigarette and drugs. Its bosses were very rich men — with yachts in Palermo harbor and vast estates in the hills beyond — and would soon become wealthier still.

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From boyhood, Sciascia had been fascinated by the idea of justice. As he saw it, Sicily had been overtaken, since soon after the unification of Italy, by corruption at every level. He railed against ministers who took bribes, contractors who made their money through kickbacks, priests who condoned what their parishioners were doing. He kept turning out his gialli, targeting the Church, politicians both in Rome and Palermo, bureaucrats and industrialists too readily seduced by mafia money or  intimated by threats.

Il Contesto — published in English as Equal Danger — was about the venality of the political and legal establishment and its “degraded and impenetrable” power. Todo Modo, One Way or Another, is partly about the Christian Democratic Party. Dominating postwar Italian politics right until the Nineties, Sciascia always hated it for its endless compromises and corruption. Todo Modo is also about clerics, depicted as accomplices in crime. Readers loved him, praising the honesty of this outspoken, melancholic, tenacious man, scourge of Italian immorality. In political and judicial circles he had few friends. He lost even more when he turned his attention, in 1978, to the kidnap and murder of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists. Once again, Sciascia assailed the Christian Democrats, rightly accusing the party, which feared incriminatory revelations by Moro, of wilfully failing to save him. When it was published, The Moro Affair sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.

From the first, Sciascia built his gialli around a single figure, usually a carabiniere detective, sometimes an intrepid magistrate. These were lonely men, staunch, skeptical, obsessive upholders of the law, highly cultured and above all incorruptible. They read the world using their considerable intelligence, deciphering secret, buried things, even when they seemed capricious and every trail led only deeper into the undergrowth. They solved their cases, identified the killers, challenged mafia henchmen and their political backers. But they never won. In no Sciascia novel is a culprit brought to book. This has not stopped a generation of young carabinieri recruits attributing their choice of career to their admiration for Captain Bellodi, the detective in The Day of the Owl.

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As violence in Sicily intensified through the Seventies and early Eighties, bringing bodies to Sicilian streets as clans fought for supremacy, Sciascia went on writing and accusing. Asked why it was that he was never murdered, he would simply say that the mafia did not read fiction. Some of his books dealt with cases of past injustices. These he called inchieste — investigations — where he delved into unsolved stories about disappeared scientists and wrongly accused prelates. Watching the growing number of attacks on prosecutors who grew too close to the truth, Sciascia followed the long corteges of grieving Sicilians bearing their coffins through the streets of Palermo, mourning them all. By now he had become one of Italy’s best-loved writers. One of his last books, translated as Open Doors, was about a “piccolo judice”, a little judge, who refuses to obey the order given him by his superiors to pass a death sentence, though he knows that this will spell the end to his career. The little judge was a “uomo solo”, a man alone, the kind of man that Sciascia loved most, and someone very like himself.

Sciascia died in the autumn of 1989. He lived long enough to see much of what he had written and warned about confirmed. The mafia had indeed moved north, to spread the trade in drugs throughout Europe and cause epidemics of addicts. Three years earlier, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two immensely brave magistrates who spearheaded the battle against the Sicilian mafia, had managed to bring 471 mafiosi to trial, in a “maxi-processo” (mega-trial) that took place in a concrete bunker built specifically inside Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. They had done so largely by pursuing the money, as Sciascia had proposed, through bank accounts and international financial transactions. Sciascia was in court to watch proceedings and noted that, finally, the immunity that had long protected the mafia had been lifted.

Towards the end of his life, questioned repeatedly for his opinions, Sciascia would say that he had grown afraid of his own prescience, and that in any case the old mafia, retaining a code of honor amid the brutality, was gone. As bad as things were in the Sixties, killings back then were controlled, and senior mafiosi obeyed, something which vanished as the violence spread and more and more players arrived.

By the end, Sciascia claimed he no longer understood what had replaced the mafia of his youth. Just as well, perhaps, that he was no longer alive when Falcone and Borsellino were murdered by mafia bosses enraged at the success of the maxi-processo. Yet Sciascia also didn’t live to see the Italian state finally act against the corruption endemic at the heart of national life, when the “Mani Puliti”, the “clean-hands” group of Milanese magistrates, uncovered and prosecuted a vast number of politicians, civil servants, army officers and industrialists on charges of bribery, fraudulent accounting, kickbacks and misuse of government funds. Among them were many Sicilians.

Yet even now, with the Sicilian mafia paralyzed, Sciascia’s grim premonitions proved accurate. Falcone and Borsellino’s killers were jailed — but since the author’s death, Italian organized crime has spread its wings still further, moving seamlessly into money laundering, prostitution and the smuggling and trafficking of people, using cryptocurrency to conceal its transactions. Along the way, the ‘Ndrangheta, operating out of Calabria, in the remote, impoverished toe of Italy, overtook the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in power and wealth. A loose association of some 500 clans, with over 60,000 members in 84 countries, the ‘Ndrangheta is said today to have an annual income of £49 billion. Perhaps 80% of Europe’s drug trade is channeled through Gioia Tauro, on the coast of Calabria and Italy’s largest container port.

And on it goes. Recent prosecutions have uncovered operations involving shell companies, white-collar intermediaries, prepaid untraceable cards and online foreign exchange platforms — all to launder millions of euros acquired through cocaine, extortion, gambling and human trafficking. Indeed, as prophetic as Sciascia was, he certainly never envisaged the complexity and reach of the modern mafia, a phenomenon that embraces not just Sicily and Calabria but Campania, home to the Camorra, as well as many other associations operating both independently and together, in every continent. In 2023 police across Europe, having staked out an ice-cream parlor in Germany, arrested 108 members of the ‘Ndrangheta for traffic in drugs and weapons. Using Chinese money brokers in Italy, the Calabrians were found to have been running weapons to South America, supplying Brazilian criminal gangs in exchange for cocaine. In response to what is now a global phenomenon, an international police alliance, bringing together 13 countries, has been set up, financed by the Italian Ministry of Public Security.

No Sicilian writer has claimed Sciascia’s mantle as scourge of the mafia — though Andrea Camilleri, a fellow island novelist, often said he imbued his hero Montalbano with Sciascia’s deep shyness. Even so, other brave prosecutors have followed Falcone and Borsellino. One is Nicola Gratteri, who has staged his own mega trial of 331 ‘Ndrangheta suspects in Calabria. Like his famous predecessors, he lives in fear. “I often talk to death,” Gratteri told a journalist not long ago, “because you have to rationalize fear in order to move on”. As the gangs spread yet further, moving into new markets, exploiting every new twist and turn in technology, their crimes copied by loosely associated groups, it is as Sciascia feared: unless checked, in law and in culture, the mafia will always be one step ahead of its pursuers.

***

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul is published by Chatto and Windus on 2 February, 2026.

The mawkish affection the Krays inspired, along with fear, has become something of a cliché. Yet their business model — clubs, protection rackets, loan-sharking and the occasional robbery — really did have rules of engagement: avoiding “civilian casualties” chief among them. Like other criminal outfits, meanwhile, the Krays also indulged in performative acts of community engagement, donating to charities and the poor. In 1966, they quietly gave £100 to the Aberfan disaster relief fund, the largest single donation the organization received.

Such philanthropy might explain why, when Reggie Kray died of cancer in October 2000, his send-off was a schmaltzy Cockney pageant, featuring a cast of C-list celebrities and aging villains. Reggie was laid to rest near Ronnie, ending an era of antiquated villainy. It feels apt that one of London’s last old-school heists, the ill-fated Millennium Dome robbery, took place just a month after Reggie passed.

As a London policeman, I witnessed the death throes of old-school London gangsterism. This was the era when the Adams family was finally taken out by MI5. One of the infamous Hunt brothers ended up in court too — after The Sunday Times accused his organization of murder and drug trafficking. Hunt lost his libel fight, and certainly by this point, English organized crime was increasingly centered on narcotics and money-laundering. Yet it soon found itself playing second fiddle to bloodthirsty foreign competition. I’m thinking, here, of the Eastern European gangs unleashed by the Soviet Union’s collapse, to say nothing of the dirty capital, cheap labor and drugs waved in by globalization.

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In this, the decline of English gangsterism has parallels with the wider white working-class, and indeed with the British economy more broadly. It’s tempting, too, to cast analogue villains like the Adams as dinosaurs, vaporized by a meteor storm of foreign narcotics. There’s something to this analysis — but detail is where the devil lurks, and chasing devils is what detectives used to do.

Consider, for starters, the role played by the authorities. By the time Reggie Kray died in 2000, the Metropolitan Police was disrupting English organized crime on several fronts. The first involved aggressively attacking corruption via the fabled “Ghost Squad”. The second encompassed an overhaul of informant-handling, restricting covert relationships between criminals and cops to specialist, heavily supervised units. These were shadowed by a third and accidental shift. By encouraging graduates to join the force, CID offices were less often staffed by detectives who’d attended the same schools as the criminals they investigated.

And if all this helped stymie native organized crime, so too did foreign competition. An uncomfortable truth is that working-class English gangsterism was replaced by foreign competitors. Crime is Hobbesian, and it turned out that foreign criminals were simply more vicious. Notice how London’s gangsters, for instance, have yet to develop the minerals to set up shop in Tirana or Mogadishu. Meanwhile, the Albanian mafia makes softly-softly England its playground. At the same time, English laws and police forces remain configured for the relatively genteel crime lords of yore, not the ruthless bandits of war-torn Africa or the Balkans.

At this point, sociologists and criminologists might point to the structural similarities, say, between the Krays and their Albanian successors. Both involve, do they not, notions of class, family, honor? And, as my Adler family legend implies, English mobsters clearly had a capacity for violence; Reggie himself notoriously stabbed a man to death at a Clapton house party. Yet as a former detective, all this is a bit like saying all food consists of protein, fat and carbohydrate. It’s fundamentally true, but hardly insightful. It’s difficult to imagine the Krays selling heroin to schoolkids, or sanctioning hits in crowded family restaurants.

As for the drugs themselves? They’re clearly important: Albanian gangs have carved out an estimated £6 billion niche in Britain’s cocaine market. In the end, though, it’s again more subtle than that, with the type of drugs also explaining the decline of white English gangsterism. Crack, especially, has become an accelerant of “acquisitive” crime, its addictiveness prompting waves of hit-and-run burglaries. For their part, protection rackets and bank robberies have become niche pastimes. A friend serving on the Met’s Flying Squad bemoans the demise of the old-school blagger. “When I joined we looked at proper people, second generation Eastenders, tooled-up with shotguns.” These days? He’s more likely to be chasing moped-riding kids. Another old colleague, serving on the Met’s Project Team, rolls his eyes when I ask about his work. “Same old shit,” he shrugs. “Drugs and guns, mate. Nothing but drugs and guns.”

In other words, then, the dynamics of the modern drug trade leave less space for the kind of organized heists the Krays became famous for. And there’s something else here too. As the English know full well, it’s easy to be cruel when you’re not on home turf. Our working-classes have cheerfully exported violence abroad, from the Black and Tans to Heysel. But back in England, Gen Z’s white, working-class organized criminals have given up on becoming crime lords. Nor is that especially surprising. The hard Victorian slums their grandparents knew are a distant memory, particularly from the vantage point of a three-bedroom semi in Swanley.

If they’re criminals at all, they’re more likely to operate underworld service industries, oiling the wheels of international narcotics cartels. From county lines drug dealing to City money laundering, English criminals are, increasingly, vassals. Either that, or second-tier dealers, big fish in small ponds — what I call the “Etsyfication” of boutique crime. For the sort who binge “Essex Boys” murder stories and stream TV gangster slop, the height of their ambition is shifting parcels of overcut, third-rate gak.

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As for the old ways? Extortion and blackmail? It’s moved online, replacing shaven-headed men demanding money with menace. Now, teenage nerds bring multinationals to their knees from their bedrooms. Occasionally, they don’t even demand money, merely indulging in cheery digital nihilism. For their part, British police forces struggle with online fraud and hacking. It’s a transnational and highly specialized field, far beyond the ken of the average copper. Hacking is also being co-opted by parastatal organizations, deployed as a hybrid warfare tactic by China and Russia.

To Ronnie and Reggie and their ilk, all this would have felt like mind-blowing science fiction. But though white, working-class Londoners have largely given up on gangsterism, their social superiors haven’t got the message. Film and television show no hint of mercy for the dead horse of Kray-inspired crime — and, as usual, the floggings are delivered by posh boys. I recently enjoyed Mobland, directed by gangster film supremo Guy Ritchie and starring Tom Hardy, who turned in a barnstorming performance as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in the 2015 flick Legend.

Hardy and Ritchie both attended private schools. Hardy grew up not in Tower Hamlets, but the gilded Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. Again, that’s unsurprising: the middle classes have always lionized working-class crime. I suspect it’s partly “noble savage” syndrome, partly an enduring English fondness for Robin Hood defiance. Either way, and whatever their entertainment value, shows like Mobland retool an extinct age of English villainy for the 21st century, even as the Krays’ legacy remains a lodestone, an origin myth, for the kind of person who’s never even seen a hatchet, much less wielded it in anger.

There’s one more irony here too. The fact is, it’s never been easier to make drug money, launder it, then scurry off to the Gulf. Just ask Scotland, where indigenous thuggery has endured in a way it hasn’t down south, and where Dubai has become a sunnier alternative to Glasgow. So if you can almost hear the old Eastenders in their Essex bungalows, lamenting Reggie’s passing and shaking their heads at his brutal successors, such nostalgia misses the point. Were the Krays alive today, they’d happily be filling their boots with coke and dirty money too, then sharing the spoils on TikTok.

In the early hours of 15 August 2007, six young Italian men got into their cars after celebrating an 18th birthday at Da Bruno, a pizza restaurant in the city of Duisburg in western Germany. 

Out of the dark, masked gunmen sprayed their vehicles with 70 bullets, then shot each victim in the head, including the youngest, Fracensco Giorgi, aged 16. In the pocket of the dead birthday boy, Tommaso Venturi, police found a half-burnt image of Saint Michael.

Italian investigators brought in by the German authorities knew what the scorched picture indicated. An image of the saint is partially burnt during initiation rituals into the ‘Ndrangheta, a powerful, 10,000 strong, mafia network founded in the southwest Italian region of Calabria 160 years ago. During this gangster baptism, which marks a rebirth and a lifelong pledge of loyalty, initiates are told:  

“Before the family, parents, sisters, brothers, comes the interest and honor of the society.
 From now on, the society will be your family.” 

The shooting, it transpired, was the result of a simmering 16-year feud between two powerful clans from San Luca, a hilltop commune in Calabria and birthplace of the ‘Ndrangheta. What perplexed the public and the authorities was why this ultra-violent gangland scene had played out, of all places, in Germany. 

Amid the public outrage and a flurry of police anti-mafia activity, what the authorities failed to realize was the extent to which the ‘Ndrangheta had been able to embed itself in the country. Germany wasn’t just a place of refuge for mafia misfits — it was a hub of activity, and Duisburg was a bloody red flag. 

Today, almost two decades after the Duisburg shooting, the ‘Ndrangheta has grown to become one of the largest criminal conglomerates on the planet, with a presence in more than 80 countries across Europe, North America, West Africa and Australia. Described by Interpol as “one of the most extensive and powerful criminal organizations in the world,” the ‘Ndrangheta are involved in a range of criminal activities, including drug trafficking, money laundering, extortion and corruption. But it is Germany which hosts the world’s largest outpost of the Calabrian mob, after their homeland in Italy. 

But it’s the way the mafia has done this that is such a pisstake. The ‘Ndrangheta’s expansion into Germany has largely come on the back of a large portion of parmesan cheese and charm. A network of mafia-run Italian restaurants, from pizzerias and trattorias to gelato shops and cafés, has become the backbone not just for labor rackets and extortion, but in helping to flood Europe with cocaine, even as mobsters use the profits to infiltrate society and establish power in the business world. 

How this has been allowed to happen in one of the world’s most stable and efficient democracies is the subject of a book by Zora Hauser, a criminologist specializing in the mafia from the University of Cambridge. Hauser says this mafia creep has been “made easy” by the German authorities, whose failure to root out the Calabrian mafia in their midst has created a ticking time bomb for law, order, and even democracy, in Germany. 

But why did the authorities fail so blatantly to understand what was happening? Why has the presence of the mafia in the country been overlooked and downplayed for such a long time? These are questions worth asking, because Germany is not alone in facing the rising threat of gangland infiltration. Across Europe’s biggest democracies, after all, organized crime groups are slowly gathering power. 

***

When the first Italian guest workers started arriving in Germany in the Fifties, like many immigrants they were initially distrusted. By the Seventies and Eighties, though, this animosity had dwindled, with an influx of Turks a new diversion. Meanwhile, Germans discovered Italy as a holiday destination with tasty food and good weather, and the number of Italian restaurants and gelato stores in Germany boomed. The Italians went, says Hauser, “from being ‘knifers’ and ‘mafiosi’ to representing good and well-integrated foreigners”.

But as more Italians moved to join family and seek careers in Germany, along came members of the Italian mafia, most notably the Calabrians, who built up businesses and became involved in street drug dealing, theft and extortion. The ‘Ndrangheta’s franchise-like structure — whereby clans set up outposts abroad after gaining approval from a central committee of senior mafiosi in Calabria — made it easy for its mafiosi to venture out of their homeland. Crucially, by the Nineties, compared with the more notorious Cosa Nostra from Sicily and the Camorra from Naples, the Calabrian mafia was far better placed to quickly and efficiently expand their criminal networks abroad. At this time, both in Sicily and the US, the Cosa Nostra was busy fighting an all-out war with the Italian state and the FBI, from which it would not recover; the Camorra was too chaotic and feud-prone to expand so prolifically.   

As luck would have it, the ‘Ndrangheta’s expansion abroad dovetailed with the rise of the international cocaine trade. 

In 2017, after the end of Colombia’s civil war, South American cocaine traffickers decided they needed a fresh market for their product. Mexican cartels had monopolized and saturated the US market, so they turned their full attention to pumping the drug into Europe, where organized crime groups were only too pleased to help out. In a typically bold move, one of the first things the ‘Ndrangheta did to boost imports of the drug from South America was to help build a new port, at Gioia Tauro in Calabria. Plus, their growing presence in countries in northern Europe, near the continent’s busiest shipping ports in Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg, left them perfectly placed to take advantage when the steady stream of cocaine coming across the Atlantic turned into a deluge. 

Since then, Europe has overtaken the US as the world’s largest cocaine market, boosting the coffers — and the power — of crime networks including the ‘Ndrangheta, Albanians, Serbs, Moroccan-Dutch, and Irish. Milking the profits from smuggling a drug that costs $2,000 a kilo in Colombia and at least $40,000 a kilo as soon as it lands in Europe, these gangs deal in multiple tons of the stuff. Annual seizures of the drug at Europe’s borders grew from 60 tons in 2014 to 320 tons in 2022. The profits are mind-boggling. 

Europe’s cocaine blizzard has created a rise in addiction, gangland violence and corruption. In Germany, where estimates put the number of ‘Ndrangheta clan members at between 1,000 and 3,000, the country’s excellent strategic position has enabled the mafia to turn it into a logistical drug smuggling hub, using the profits to infiltrate the country by stealth, infecting it from the inside out. 

***

Diners at the Leonardo Da Vinci restaurant in Wesseling, a small city outside Cologne, could never have known, but behind its unassuming facade of red awnings, pot plants and and terrace dining, lurked a money laundering and cocaine smuggling hub run by the ‘Ndrangheta. As customers ate their carbonaras, cocaine-loaded cars were being driven into Da Vinci’s car park, stored upstairs before an onward travel to Milan. 

These mob-run Italian restaurants, gelato stores and cafés have always been a crucial part of the ‘Ndrangheta’s strategy in Europe. And it is in Germany where this tactic looms largest. This is not the odd restaurant. In some parts of Germany, it’s tricky to buy a pizza without accidentally helping to fund the next shipment of cocaine. A clan based in Erfurt, a city in the central state of Thuringia, has established a near-monopoly of the city’s Italian eateries. Police linked the mafia there to 23 Italian restaurants, cafés, and gelato stores — in a city the size of Luton. 

Behind the pizza ovens and spaghetti bolognese in scores of eateries in Germany, the charm of Italian hospitality is being cynically used by the mafia as a cover to launder money, smuggle cocaine, engage in racketeering and get close to those in power. 

“It’s hard to believe the mafia infiltrates democratic life through the corner pizzeria — but that’s exactly the point: hiding in plain sight,” Hauser tells UnHerd. “The goal is full integration. Winning over the community, reaching into politics.”  

Often, it’s presumed that businesses run by criminal gangs are shells with few customers. But in Germany, they can be the most popular joints in town. A restaurant in the central state of Hesse, whose owner had been involved in drug trafficking, extortion and murder, was the center of public life. It hosted evenings run by the local newspaper, small concerts and events for the elderly. Luigi, the long-standing clan boss behind the restaurant, applied jointly with the local mayor for EU subsidies to restore an old building in the town center. 

The underworld seamlessly mixes with the upperworld. “While the [criminal] business still relies on intimidation, coercion, or, more generally, the constant flow of illicit gains,” says Hauser, “to the outside, it presents a friendly façade, exemplified by good food for honest prices, a warm welcome, and a taste of the Italian ‘dolce vita’ that so fascinates German society.” 

Behind the smiles, though, comes the threat. Hauser spoke to a German businessman who ditched plans to open an ice cream shop in his local town after a ‘Ndrangheta messenger told him there was no space for two gelato stores in the neighborhood, adding that they knew where his children went to school.  

When Hauser traveled to neighborhoods infiltrated by the mafia, and talked to locals about the gangsters arrested in their midst, many thought that she and the police must be mistaken. The mafia had gained so much trust that neighbors and customers refused to believe what they read in the news. Why? Because they had a romantic, nostalgic, movie-inspired view of the mafia. A neighbor of one clan boss, who ran a local pizzeria and was arrested by police special forces, told Hauser that if he really had anything to do with the mafia, then why had the police not intervened earlier? 

Perhaps because the local authorities had also been sucked in.  

‘Ndrangheta mobsters in Germany have been quick to befriend people in positions of power. Politicians and civil servants are deliberately wooed to increase gangster’s social capital, their influence and to help — wittingly or not — shield them from the law. Right from the start, people in positions of authority have had their heads turned by some of these relationships. When police in the late Nineties intercepted the phone of a ‘Ndrangheta member, who owned a restaurant in Stuttgart, they were surprised to find that he was in direct contact with a man he called “my minister”. This turned out to be Günther Oettinger, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union in Baden-Württemberg. Instead of investigating further, the authorities warned Oettinger about the phone surveillance. A public inquiry into the scandal found the politician had not committed any crime, but concluded he might have been “unwillingly and unknowingly used by organized criminals” to further their business. 

A former mayor of Erfurt told Hauser that though he had heard that Luca, a local restaurant owner, had links with the Duisburg massacre and was a member of the mafia, they became friends. He held his re-election party in Luca’s restaurant. “We decided to do Bella Italia,” he told Hauser. “Italian music, federal ministers came and spoke, I was there. We did this as our election rally celebration, and they could profit as well, there were so many people, they were queuing!” 

When a special commando unit entered one of the Erfurt clan’s restaurants as part of a murder-related investigation, the police bumped into their direct superior, the State Minister for Home Affairs, having a meeting over pizza with the Governor of Thuringia. The search was halted. An investigation by journalists found there was no mention of the incident in official records. 

In another restaurant round the corner, phone surveillance caught a district judge telling a mafioso restaurant owner suspected of drug trafficking that his restaurant was under surveillance — before giving him the name of a good lawyer. “This is what differentiates mafias from other criminal networks and explains their unique resilience over centuries,” Hauser tells UnHerd. “It is hard to overstate the importance of the link between the mafia and people in power, because it ultimately guarantees them protection.”

***

It’s a mistake to measure the threat of gangsterism just by the amount of blood spilled. While the Calabrian mafia used to operate with a gun behind its back, after the heat from Duisburg the clan in Germany decided to keep their pistols in their pockets. 

When in 2013 a ‘Ndrangheta boss heard that two of his men had got into an argument and pulled out their guns in Melsungen, a spa town in central Germany, he was furious. A police phone intercept recorded his reaction: ‘What is this circus? Getting out a weapon on the street?!.. I am telling you now and I will not tell you again! Melsungen must be like a church!’

A deliberate policy to put profits before murder, to make it easier to blend in with the legitimate world, was adopted. Avoiding the kind of brazen violence that has necessitated state crackdowns on organized crime networks across Europe, has been crucial to the Calabrians’ expansion abroad and their success in the cocaine trade.

Nicola Gratteri, a mafia prosecutor,  said in 2023 that the ‘Ndrangheta in Germany is now “more interested in cash than blood… the mafia is here to buy cocaine and reinvest the money to buy hotels, restaurants, and pizzerias.” 

This is far from saying Europe’s major cocaine traffickers have become impotent. Quite the contrary. According to Europol’s latest organized crime threat assessment, published in May this year, drug trafficking “has a high potential to destabilize EU society, given its association with… corruption, and infiltration in the legal economy.”  The report found that 80% of organized crime networks in Europe also ran companies in the legal economy. 

Slowly, then, organized crime is infecting Germany’s institutions and economy. Police officers and officials are increasingly being investigated for corruption and having links to organized crime. In an ongoing trial which started in May this year, a court has heard how the chief public prosecutor involved in one of Europe’s biggest ever cocaine seizures at Hamburg’s port is alleged to have been on the payroll of the same network of traffickers he was supposed to be investigating. 

***

Why have the German authorities been so blindsided by the Italian mafia — who, after all, have something of a reputation? 

For a long time, Germany’s authorities seemed to consider gangsterism to be something that affects poorer, less stable nations around the world, like Albania or Colombia. The ‘Ndrangheta was allowed to operate “virtually undisturbed,” says Hauser, owing to a mix of incompetence and complacency. She suggests this lack of know-how has resulted in weak organized crime laws; an anti-money laundering framework so bad it has failed to reach EU standards; and a perversely high bar for prosecutors to prove a suspect is a member of a criminal organization. 

“The rise of the ‘Ndrangheta is symptomatic of how vulnerable Germany is to organized crime more generally,” Hauser explains. “Calabrian mafiosi are by no means the only crime groups active in Germany, nor is this presence a new phenomenon. The notable aspect is how long it is taking for Germany to wake up to reality.”

Law enforcement across Europe has been stepping up operations against the ‘Ndrangheta. In 2023, for instance, Operation Eureka revealed how clans in Germany teamed up with Albanian and Latin America crime groups to smuggle 25 tonnes of cocaine in under three years. But German authorities themselves have so far failed to convict any ‘Ndrangheta members in Thuringia, a state in which the ‘Ndrangheta has thrived. 

In fact, they have been suspiciously bad at this. 

During Operation FIDO in the 2000s, the German federal police successfully planted an undercover detective within the Erfurt mafia organization to target eight key clan members. But in 2002 the investigation was suddenly halted without arrests or explanation — a decision that is now the subject of an inquiry by the state parliament. 

Then, in 2019, at a secret meeting in Rome, Italian mafia investigators gave Thuringian state police a list of 70 suspected members and associates of the Erfurt organization, including a list of restaurants and companies they were linked to. Yet bizarrely, no further action was taken. “German authorities… have never acted upon the evidence that they have collected over the years, to the point that a parliamentary inquiry is now investigating a possible case of negligence,” writes Hauser.

This nefarious mix of collusion and negligence fuels mafias the world over. If the money is flowing and the authorities are doing nothing, it’s in no one’s interest to kick up a fuss. And the more mafias integrate, the less suspicious they appear. 

***

Organized crime conglomerates such as the ‘Ndrangheta loom large over the future. At a time when the drug trade continues unabated, and nations are becoming less collaborative and institutions are hemorrhaging trust, crime groups are stepping in to further expand their networks and use the cover of legitimacy to gain more power. How powerful they actually are is a mystery, because the less you look the less you find.

When police from Europe, the US and Australia accessed hundreds of thousands of messages sent between 2019 and 2022 – sent on encrypted mobile phone systems used by gangsters to arrange everything from cocaine deals to executions – what surprised them most was how much they had underestimated the capabilities of organized crime. 

Amid a sea of mundane gangster chat, a treasure trove of intelligence revealed that the scale of the cocaine business, from the UK and the Netherlands to Switzerland and Sweden, was far bigger than they had estimated. But, crucially, the hacks revealed how international crime networks were far more interconnected and collaborative than law enforcement officials had ever imagined. In Europe’s biggest democracies, in countries seen as being “too civilised” for organized crime to become a big threat, gangs are laundering billions in cash, corrupting senior officials, becoming major youth employers, and are shooting witnesses during trials. 

In Spain, the country’s chief economic crimes investigator was arrested after he was linked to a secret stash of €20 million and a gang that smuggled 13 tons of cocaine into the country. In Antwerp, there is so much cocaine being seized the authorities cannot incinerate it fast enough, so it’s being stolen back by the traffickers. Across the border in the Netherlands, which some of its police have called a “narco-state”, the impact of organized crime is being highlighted by frequent incidents of violence, including the execution of a journalist and a lawyer during a gang trial.

In France, a report last year by senators warned the country was becoming “submerged” by drug trafficking and the corollary of exacerbated violence. In Switzerland, drug money is having a growing influence on the legitimate economy, from money laundering to protecting mafias such as the ‘Ndrangheta. In Sweden, where wars over cocaine profits have sparked record gun murders and bombings, crime networks have resorted to recruiting and radicalizing hundreds of teenagers to carry out a spate of gangland killings.

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Closer to home, meanwhile, the UK has become a continental hub for Europe’s cocaine industry and a target for investment by the ‘Ndrangheta and other crime groups. Cocaine money has empowered a new generation of British gangsters, enabling them to disguise themselves as entrepreneurs. Amid this blizzard of profit, every hour inner-city children are being recruited to swap school lessons for a career selling crack and heroin in trap houses in rural and seaside towns and cities across the country. Meanwhile, an endless series of Albanian gang-run cannabis farms staffed by slave labor in suburban homes and abandoned churches, police stations and banks pump out cheap cannabis so the profits can be used to import cocaine.    

Like several other organized crime networks, the Calabrians are on the up, according to those charged with fighting them. “Ndrangheta operations are now extensive across Europe,” Samuel Heath, communications director at Interpol, tells UnHerd. “Over the past few years, we have seen a significant increase in the scope and reach of ‘Ndrangheta: they’re operating in more than 40 countries and continuing to grow.”

If you want to see what the future of gangsterism looks like in a Europe which chooses to face the other way, look at Italy. There, even though mafia-related homicide is very low, the mafia is reaping the rewards of decades of entrenchment, and its grip on society is tightening. Every month, a city council is disbanded, which is the state’s measure of last-resort when there is evidence that the mafia has such a high level of influence over institutions that the whole municipality is deemed to be under its control. Between 1991 and 2020 there have been 351 such dissolutions in Italy, together affecting more than five million people. Calabria saw the most of any region in Italy, with 123 dissolutions. This is control without the need for gunfire or garrotting.

“Virtually no big infrastructure project, political campaign, natural emergency, from earthquakes to Covid subsidies, international event, sporting occasion, including the whole management of the San Siro football stadium in Milan, moves forward in Italy without the mafia trying to get a cut,” says Hauser. ”If no action is taken, this is where we end up.” 

How the Italian mafia, fueled by the cocaine trade, has used pizza restaurants as a way to expand its influence in one of the world’s most robust democracies is just part of a wider story about the relentless spread of worldwide organized crime. It’s also a warning. 

The intermittent noise of gangsterism — a bloody street execution or an innocent caught in crossfire — naturally hits the headlines. Yet all the while, its more clandestine activities continue to rot societies from the inside, degrading the public’s right to hold power to account. 

In hard times, their illegal wealth acts as a vortex of temptation to recruit the young to work on the criminal shopfloor, and to flip business owners, police and politicians. Furthermore, falling trust in mainstream political parties and institutions, complacency and rising extremism has opened the back door to criminal groups who want to get closer to power. Gangsters are useful to corrupt insiders because they can carry out deniable crimes at arms length on behalf of politicians or businesses. In return, they get impunity and favors. Together, the billions of dollars generated by organized crime and corruption each year acts as a vampiric-like leech on societies, widening inequality, making it harder for democracies to help citizens and make life better. Looking the other way is not an option.    

Short Tony’s death was just the latest in a long line of ultra murders. An “ultra” is an extremist football fan, sort of a cross between a hooligan and a Hell’s Angel. Any murder in that netherworld is newsworthy, but this one more than ever: as his dialect nickname implies, Bellocco was a Calabrian mobster, sent north to offer muscle to Inter’s Curva Nord ultras: in return for a slice of the gang’s lucrative businesses.

Bellocco had been one of the key mercenaries in an ongoing battle with a rival Inter crew, the Irriducibili. When that battle was won, Bellocco had become one of the top bosses of Inter’s terraces. Many of us had thought the ultras had already touched rock bottom in August 2019, when Lazio’s top boss, a drug-slinging stoner called Fabrizio Piscitelli, was shot dead as he sat on a park bench in Rome. But what’s happening in Milan takes the ultra story to a darker place: they are now essentially narco-crews, ready to greenlight mergers with organized crime to dominate Milan’s suburbs.

All this is particularly poignant because Milan is the city that claims to be the cradle of ultra ideology. AC Milan’s famous Fossa dei Leoni (“Lions’ Den”) and Commandos Tigre (“Tiger Commandoes”) both claim to have been founded around 1968, before any other ultra group in Italy. Back then, the ultras were not considered criminals so much as teenage scallywags. The real Milanese outlaws came from the Ligéra. Meaning “The Light” in the local dialect, it encompassed an assortment of petty crooks: pickpockets, pimps, bookies and fences that graduated onto kidnappings and bank jobs.

These days, though, the city is bossed by the ultras. Milan and Inter share the San Siro stadium, its helix staircases looking like springs whatever the angle. The teams’ respective ultras take it in turns to skim off the top of the tens of thousands of punters who come to the stadium every week.

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It all started when the ultras turned their collective back on a sacred tenet of ultradom. Until the early Eighties, it had been a foundational principle that being an ultra meant fighting your enemies — above all enemies from the same city. But when, in 1981, an Inter fan was stabbed to death by a Milan fan, the Milan and Inter ultras negotiated a non-aggression pact.

The major ultra groups from both sides — Nord Kaos and Viking for Inter, the Brigate Rossonero and Commandos Tigre for Milan — began using their sheer force of numbers to make money. Organized hierarchically, these crews started taking over the curtilage of the San Siro, selling fake merch, hiring out parking spaces, levering beers and bapping burgers. A few of them also began offering à la carte highs: coke, speed, weed or E.

Though the Milanese ultras didn’t fight each other, they did fight almost everyone else. Nazzareno Filippini was an Ascoli fan killed by Inter ultras in 1988. Vincenzo Spagnolo, a Genoa supporter, was stabbed to death by a hot-headed Milan fan in January 1995. After those killings, there were more peace conferences.

Some talked of returning to the old days when, they claimed, being an ultra was just a way for waifs to get off their faces and stage-manage the Sunday afternoon spectacle of confetti and pranks. I interviewed hundreds of “purist” ultras for my book on the subject, and most of them lovingly recalled tipped-over cars with number plates from rival cities.

They would speak late into the night about their most memorable striscioni — the long, often witty, banners they unfurled on the terraces. “It truly, truly hurts me to see what happens on the terrace now,” one retired head ultras told me back in 2018. “It makes me suffer greatly… we’ve gone from fist-fights to knives, from knives to… ambushes, to Molotov cocktails, to bombs and to pistols. It keeps getting worse.”

This is partly a symptom of politics. In the Sixties, the ultra movement had used names echoing far-Left liberation movements across the globe (“Fedayeen”), or else evoked Italian partisan bands from the Second World War.

During the Eighties and Nineties, however, many crews turned to the far-Right. The full name, for instance, of Inter’s “Boys” gang was “Boys-SAN”, a reference to Mussolini’s paramilitary Squadre d’Azione.

Giorgio Triani is a sports sociologist who wrote two great books about Italian fans in the Nineties, just as the ultra movement was becoming a crucible for the far-Right. “The Left became disinterested in the terraces,” he says, “and very quickly they became perfectly aligned with the far-Right. They had a need to dominate the vulnerable, the opposition, the losers, the blacks…”

Soon enough, it became commonplace for thousands of supporters to grunt at black players, to interrupt silences for drowned migrants in the Mediterranean, to taunt enemies with allegations they were Jewish and would share the fate of Anne Frank. Lazio, Inter and Verona ultras were at the forefront of this political radicalization, often doing straight-arm salutes and waving swastikas. It even infected the players, with Paolo di Canio unable to resist raising a fascist salute to the Lazio faithful in 2005.

All the while, each passing year made the violence of yesterday seem quaint by comparison. It was money that fed the bloodshed: a police wiretap heard Vittorio Boiocchi — an Inter ultra murdered in 2022 — boast that he made €80,000 a month.

Cash sums that size always attract professional mobsters. And so, long before Bellocco arrived in Milan, there were attempted mergers between Calabrian families and northern ultras. About a decade ago, Juventus’s main crew, the Drughi, allowed a Calabrian family to become part of its racket. Ciccio Bucci, one of these Drughi, was also a fan-liaison officer, and was suspected of having snitched on the group. He was promptly beaten up and ostracized. When he returned to Turin, after a year away in Puglia, he jumped from a famous viaduct outside the city.

It’s not entirely clear who approved Bellocco’s entry to the terraces. But he was fortunate that his ascension occurred just as Inter was bossing Italian football, with the team winning seven trophies so far this decade. The deeper a team goes in a tournament, the more tickets get sold, not just for the stadium but for the planes and buses. Ultras bulk-buy accommodation and food, becoming informal travel agents.

When Inter and Milan met in the semi-final of the 2023 Champions’ League, they agreed to share ticket revenues from the final whoever won. Inter went through, but Milan ultras still made money. Rather than going all in — as ultra philosophy insists you always should — they had essentially “shorted” their own team.

It’s anyway unsurprising that the ultras now cover Milan like a spider’s web: if you want to trade, borrow or buy on the streets of the city, the chances are you’ll cross paths with an ultra. Luca Lucci, an AC Milan hooligan who has done time for drugs-trafficking and GBH, has provided “event-management” services — everything from body-guarding to ticket sales — to rappers like Fedez and Emis Killa. Lucci has also opened a chain of tattoo parlours called Italian Ink. It’s a world no more controlled by teenage tearaways but by old men with names like “Il Barone” (The Baron). When he was shot dead, Boiocchi was 69.

There are advantages to both sides of the mafia-ultra merger. When an ultra finds himself needing to overcome rival groups on the terrace, it’s tempting to call in those pros. And for the mercenaries, there’s the lure of a cash turnover in the low millions for which the punishments are negligible. Ticket-touting, for instance, is only given a custodial sentence if accompanied by more serious crimes.

But Andrea Beretta had apparently grown resentful of his thrusting Calabrian colleague, always in his space and living just around the corner. Bellocco had sought to assert his dominance over Beretta, showing him what he called his family album. “My mother has done 25 years in prison,” he was heard on a wire-tap. “She’s still in prison and she’s 74!”

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It’s a story that isn’t over yet. Bellocco was a made man, and his murder will not be without consequences for his alleged killer. Beretta will either enter witness protection and turn on his mates, or else risk a revenge killing. “It was unthinkable 30 years ago that it would have reached these levels,” says Triani. “Back then the terraces were unhealthy, sure, but now [the ultra world] has become a parasitic cancer completely decontextualized from football and sport.” No wonder it’s a movement now more studied by criminologists than sociologists.

Nineteen ultras from both sides were arrested in the aftermath of Bellocco’s killing last autumn. Most are charged with assault, extortion and being part of a “criminal association” (essentially a gang). The Inter ultras are also accused of having “abetted” the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia of whom Bellocco was part.

This incremental professionalization of ultra gangs goes against another shibboleth of the faith: that no individual makes money from the group. Lucci’s revealing defense is that he’s “only ever made money from drug-dealing, never from being an ultra”. He would rather plead guilty to something the state considers a crime than to betraying the gang, namely by dipping his fingers into his own crew’s till.

Not for the first time, in other words, money and power have flipped a counterculture. And now, commanding voters and consumers by the thousands, they’ve even entered mainstream politics. Again, there’s an overlap of interests: politicians gain street cred from association with organized fan groups, and organized groups can shift electoral results.

Lucci, now arrested, has enjoyed deliberately public handshakes and hugs with Matteo Salvini, the former interior minister (now deputy prime minister), and himself a die-hard Milanista. The former mayor of Catania, Salvo Pogliese, and Daniele Belotti, a former League parliamentarian, have also played on their terrace notoriety to rally fans to the ballot box.

It all feels a long way from those early Sixties days. Back then, the first commandment of ultra faith was fidelity to the borgo, about fighting for your hometown, even if it was just a crappy suburb without hope. But the movement is now as globalized as any multinational, and the striscioni feel like an afterthought.

Nor is Franzese — who went to prison, found God, and is now a motivational speaker — alone. Over the past few years, YouTube has become a kind of Sing Sing for retired crooks. With names such as Joey Merlino and Jimmy Calandra and Dominick Cicale, they explain the mafia code and review classic movies. All the while, with their high-res cameras and sparkling production values, they hawk. Shamelessly. Quite aside from his book, which compares his country’s rulers to erstwhile mobsters like him, Franzese also sells Armenian wine and autographed posters. Buyers, for their part, are encouraged to “join the family”. 

To put it differently, then, that hidden world of Cosa Nostra, of omertà and hits, is gone, replaced by the kind of tawdry consumerism you could get from MrBeast. Given the influence the American mob enjoyed for much of the last century — at its peak, it boasted some 5,000 made men and held billions in assets — that’s remarkable enough. And just as the gangsters are shrugging off their pasts and strolling amiably into the republic’s mainstream, millions of ordinary Italian-Americans are losing their cultural uniqueness too. Together with the grandkids of other European migrants, rather, they’re shedding their hyphenated identities and becoming mere Americans, a process with immense consequences from food to music to politics. 

The American mob has been failing for years. In 1970, Congress passed the RICO Act, which for the first time allowed prosecutors to target anyone belonging to an “enterprise” involved in racketeering — even if the robbery or fraud was done by someone else. That meant bosses became vulnerable: in the mid-Eighties, several New York dons were indicted under RICO and condemned to 100-year jail terms. The prospect of such awesome sentences soon encouraged mobsters to snitch. One example is Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, now a YouTube regular but who became infamous for testifying against his colleagues in 1992. 

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Beyond the rise in guilty verdicts, the mob’s decline can be traced through American culture. When it appeared in 1972, The Godfather mirrored a phenomenon that broadly still existed. Weeks after the movie premiered, “Crazy Joe” Gallo, like Franzese a member of New York’s Colombo family, was gunned down while celebrating his birthday at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. A few decades later, this bloody way of life was already sliding into caricature. In the second episode of The Sopranos, broadcast in 1999, Tony and his friends sit about quoting The Godfather, drowning in nostalgia from their South Jersey strip joint. 

Visit Little Italy now, and Gallo’s killing feels like it could have happened in the Bronze Age. In truth, little but the name remains: the pastries are stodgy, the delis are closed, and the souvenir shops sell t-shirts emblazoned with “Faghedda Bout It”. Across the East River, my old Queens neighbourhood tells the same story. In 1982, two gangsters were executed at Licata’s, a bar the brothers ran in Ridgewood. In some ways, the area hasn’t changed: the yellow brick rowhouses, with their bay windows and Victorian plaster details, look as smart as ever in the sun. These days, though, the mafiosi have disappeared, replaced by $19 cocktail bars. Tellingly, the bar at Licata’s old address remained an underworld stalwart — it’s just that Albanian toughs hung out there instead. 

This hints at a broader trend: while RICO surely ravaged the mafia, the social foundations that gave it strength have crumbled too. That’s obvious enough demographically. Around 1900, that warren of tenements where Gallo was killed hosted some 10,000 paisans, even as substantial Italian-American enclaves arose from Providence to St Louis. Yet you’re now more likely to hear Cantonese than Calabrian on the streets of New York, with only 5% of Little Italy’s population boasting heritage from Il Bel Paese. And if that makes organised crime harder — thugs no longer have a captive audience to extort — the flight to the suburbs is revealing in other ways. 

When it first emerged, at the dawn of the last century, the mafia could recruit from pools of poor young men, just arrived from Neapolitan slums or Sicilian hilltop towns. Illiterate in Italian and ignorant of English, membership helped migrants navigate the treacherous paths of American capitalism, especially when discrimination from Anglo society remained a pervasive (if exaggerated) threat. Through the 1890s, more than 20 Italians were lynched for real or alleged crimes, including 11 on a single day in New Orleans. As late as 1969, sophisticates at Yale could chortle that if “Italians aren’t actually an inferior race, they do the best imitation of one I’ve seen”. Cynically or not, mobsters justified their actions on ethnic grounds too. “Friendship, connections, family ties, trust, loyalty, obedience,” said Joseph Bonanno, one of America’s youngest ever dons. “This was the glue that held us together.”

Nowadays, Italian-Americans face little worse than lazy jokes. More to the point, they’ve brushed off their outsider status and are fully at home in the American mainstream, earning comfortably more than the national average. There are Italian-American congressmen, and Italian-American asset managers, and an Italian-American judge on the Supreme Court. There’s even an Italian-American first lady: though she was born a Jacobs, Jill Biden’s grandfather was a Giacoppo. The need for Bonanno’s glue, in short, has gone, whacked by Michael Franzese and his $15 dog tags. And if even the remnants of the Cosa Nostra now succumb to America’s contemporary manias — the biggest mob hit in years only happened because the killer was made mad by QAnon — millions of honest Italian-Americans are shedding their identities too. 

The US Census makes this plain. In Philadelphia, for instance, the number of self-identifying “Italians” slumped by a quarter in a decade. And though some 16 million Americans still consider themselves Italian, either in full or in part, that’s down 7% too. The linguistic data is also telling. Between 2001 and 2017, the number of people who spoke Italian at home fell by 38%, a decline that’s particularly marked among youngsters. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-dying tongues in America. Religion, that other bulwark of Italian-American identity, is moving the same way. In 1972, 89% affiliated with the Catholic Church. Four decades on, that figure had dropped to just 56%. All that’s marinated by marriage: as early as 1985, more than two-thirds of Italian-Americans under 30 were tying the knot outside the community. 

Beyond the raw figures, you sense the passing of a world elsewhere. For the first time in years, Italian is no longer America’s favourite cuisine, with cannoli and ziti replaced by Mexican tacos. And then there’s the music. Between 1947 and 1954, some 25 Italian-Americans topped the nation’s pop charts. From Frankie Valli to Perry Como, they seduced audiences with their light tunes and dark looks, playfully embracing their italianità. In a 1959 duet with Dean Martin, appropriately called We’re Glad that We’re Italian, Frank Sinatra crooned for Chianti, and explained that linguini “sends me reeling”. It goes without saying that, in an age when Latino artists make all the running, any attempt to sing about puntarelle and anchovies today would be mocked to a shallow grave. 

There’s an irony here. By wearing their heritage on their sleeves, icons like Sinatra first made it sexy, then acceptable, then routine — then nothing much at all. Not, of course, that Italian-American society will vanish overnight. For one thing, identity is about more than language or God. For another, we shouldn’t overgeneralise. This Christmas, and for many more to come, families will celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes, a distinctly Italian-American take on the festive meal. No less important, there remain places where the old customs retain some power. Dodge the rats, and take the D Train uptown from Little Italy, and you’ll soon reach another ethnic enclave. This time, though, the Italian community in the Bronx preserves more that makes it special, from mozzarella makers and fresh pasta stores to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a neo-Romanesque doorstop that still offers mass in Italian. 

Yet the broad trends, I think, are indisputable — just consider that Americans loved cricket until the Civil War. What I mean is that where the English have been, Italians are going; that sooner or later, every immigrant community is destined to be conquered by that mangled mongrel army called the United States. Certainly, this is happening far beyond people whose surnames end in vowels. In 2010, around 35 million Americans claimed Irish ancestry, down from 40 million in 1980. Two years ago, self-declared German-Americans accounted for about 12% of the population, a 4% drop in a decade. Other groups, from Belgians to Czechs, are assimilating too. And though the results are sometimes muddled, with Irish-American identity enjoying a late resurgence, this decline is again visible on the streets and in the suburbs. In Upper Michigan, viewers can no longer watch Finland Calling, a bilingual television show that ran for 53 years to 2015. Across the Great Lakes, the Ohio town of Lorain lately witnessed the demolition of the United Polish Club. It had first welcomed patrons back in 1913.

Quite apart from the flattening power of the American Dream, these identities are doubly vulnerable now. In 1960, when the US was almost 90% white, the countless fissures of Old World ethnicity unsurprisingly mattered more. There’s a reason “Polack” jokes were once so common, and why Martin and Sinatra started their song with “apologies to the Irish and the Jews”. But in 2024, when it’s race not ethnicity that counts, how can Welsh- or Dutch- or Swedish-Americans retain their idiosyncrasies in a culture, in politics and in media, that sees them merely as white? When even prime-time comedy decries Tim Walz for “white nonsense” — the answer must be that they can’t. Nor are things likely to change, especially when “majority-minority” status arrives in a few decades, and when Trump and his discontents have prodded two-in-five white Americans towards racial identitarianism. 

But integration is an old American pastime. And where the English have gone, and the Italians are going, more recent arrivals will someday travel too. In time, Cantonese will fade from the tenement courtyards. There’ll come a day when those Albanians bury their shotguns and shuffle off to Westchester, the proud dads of asset managers and congressmen. 

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This isn’t, however, simply an elegiac tale of loss. Rather, the passing of the clubs, and the cooking, and the identities that underpin them, has birthed a political storm. As late as the Vietnam War, so-called “white ethnics” were habitually assumed to vote Democratic, showing collective loyalty to the traditional party of migrants, Catholics and blue-collar workers. And so it proved: 78% of Polish-Americans voted for Kennedy in 1960, with the same percentage of Irish-Americans backing Johnson four years later. Even Italian-Americans, somewhat faster to go Right than their hyphenated peers, overwhelmingly championed LBJ. After half a century of wealth and assimilation — leavened by demographic shifts and the racially tinged mantras of people like Richard Nixon — the DNC surely would leap at such numbers today. In 2020, barely half of Polish-Americans gave Joe Biden the nod. In New Jersey, 57% of Italian-American men now say they’re Republican, comfortably more than other white males in the state. 

These trends are affecting practical politics. Boasting a large Italian-American population, Staten Island, alone in New York’s boroughs, went red in 2020. That’s dovetailed by GOP gains in other suburbs, in the Bronx and Long Island, where two recent Republican winners were suggestively called Anthony D’Esposito and Kristy Marmorato. Clearly, the Empire State has some way to go before it becomes competitive at the national level, but Donald Trump could nonetheless win more votes here than any Republican since 1988. It’s the same in the battlegrounds. For Poles in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), or Hungarians in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), razor-thin electoral margins mean the conservative turn matters. And recall once more that where they’re going, newer migrants will finally follow. Small wonder some Asians and Latinos are now moving Rightward themselves.

While the numbers are doubtless useful, the most interesting shift is cultural. And here, again, we return to the mob, with Italian-Americans using the last dregs of gangsterism to proclaim their politics. Trawl community Facebook pages, and many posts favourably compare Donald Trump to a mafia boss, praising his thuggish charm and disdain for social convention. It presumably helps that even his name is Don. He may be a born-again Christian, but Michael Franzese is much the same. Between waxing sentimental for the Cosa Nostra, he also shares more polemical videos, for instance reminding viewers that Trump “lowered your taxes” and that “we had no wars” during his time in office. Sometimes, he’s even more explicit. In a February interview with Piers Morgan, the presenter suggested the former president acted like a mob boss. “What’s wrong with that?” Franzese retorted. “You know how many people tell me, ‘I wish the mob was running the country right now’?” As a policy prescription, it sounds dubious. But as a mark of integration, I can think of nothing better. 

Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies pondered the idea of a bridge as long ago as 1840. More recently, Silvio Berlusconi emerged as its greatest champion. His building plans were twice thwarted by political rivals who deemed it an absurd vanity project — but his vision still inspires devotion in Italian politics today. The Strait of Messina Bridge has come to symbolise a powerful and modern Italy. In a country fretting that its days of breath-taking building are over, the bridge is seen as sign that contemporary leaders can match not just the grandeur of ancient Roman viaducts and Renaissance churches, but also Mussolini’s creation of entirely new suburbs (a project later adopted by Berlusconi).

The politics of the bridge are intriguing: Giorgia Meloni’s government has recently augmented fiscal autonomy for the regions, which will almost certainly benefit the north more than the south. The bridge promises the opposite: it’s a nationalist symbol uniting the country and showing the south that Rome cares. The EU likes the idea because it would complete its Scandinavian-Mediterranean corridor. The transport minister and leader of the Right-wing Lega party, Matteo Salvini, has also gone all-in. In five years, as Meloni’s star has risen, Salvini’s popularity has crashed. And so despite opposing the bridge until 2016, he has now bet the entirety of his dwindling political capital on its completion.

“This project is very elevated in the public imagination,” says Guido Signorino of the Invece del Ponte group. “It’s like the pyramids, and Salvini wants to enter the history books as the visionary who made it happen.” The man who has journeyed from communist to neo-fascist, from secessionist to nationalist, now appears to see himself as Italy’s Pharaoh.

Architects envision a bridge 3.6 kilometres long, bookended by two main towers higher than the Eiffel Tower. With three vehicle lanes in each direction plus train tracks down the middle, 6,000 vehicles could pass over per hour and 200 trains per day. This won’t, of course, come cheap. According to the Italian Treasury, €1.2 billion has been spent on feasibility studies since 1965. The estimated cost of building the bridge has increased exponentially: in 2006 it was calculated to cost €3.9 billion; by 2011 that figure had rocketed to €8.5 billion. Now it stands at €13.5 billion.

Will it be worth it? Salvini has claimed that the project will create 120,000 jobs, but this figure has come under scrutiny. The company responsible for the project suggests that the real figure is more likely to be between 4,300 and 7,000, while one association opposing the bridge thinks that only 2,230 jobs will be created.

The main objection isn’t the vast cost or the blurry figures, but the inevitability that portions of the budget will be syphoned off by the Sicilian and Calabrian mafias (Cosa Nostra and the ‘Ndrangheta respectively). The anti-Mafia campaigner, Don Luigi Ciotti, has warned that the bridge “won’t only link two coasts but also two mafias”. That criminal infiltration takes hundreds of forms: financial investment, courier services, supply of raw materials, security, earth-moving, waste-removal. Every aspect of a major project is vulnerable to the mafias: they can make it all go smoothly or cause complications for decades. They might only gather breadcrumbs, but it’s a near-certainty that they’ll end up with a little of the loaf.

“The bridge won’t link just two mafias, but 20 different gangs,” Daniele Ialacqua, of the No Ponte Capo Peloro organisation, told me. “I worry we’re going to find ourselves in a situation like Chicago in the Thirties: there are too many interests, too many contracts.” The opposite is perhaps more likely, that rival gangs will cooperate and pool strengths: “in order to carry out major [building] projects in Calabria,” crime expert Anna Sergi recently wrote in Il Post, “the ‘Ndrangheta clans have always teamed up to strengthen their entrepreneurial capabilities. They will do it again.” Police wiretaps have already picked up on mob bosses negotiating how to share out the future juicy contracts.

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But objections to the bridge go much further. The Strait of Messina has always been troubled: Homer’s mythical sea monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, lurked on either side, symbols of the jeopardy of sailing between them. Hence the idiom “between Scylla and Charybdis”, the original version of “between a rock and a hard place”. The passage was risky not just because of snares and high winds but because of devastating earthquakes. The Straits are in Italy’s Zone 1, the most dangerous area for seismic risk. In December 1908, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake killed around 80,000 people and caused tsunamis that devastated the nearby coastal areas.

Even those in favour of the bridge have expressed concerns about the wisdom of building on that faultline. On 3 May, the Order of Engineers of Messina wrote an open letter stating that, although the bridge should go ahead, there was “deep concern” about the superficiality of the project’s earthquake-protection measures. They insisted that the research behind this would “require months of commitment, not days or weeks!”

Part of the problem is that the design of the bridge is very old: a consortium called Eurolink won the tender in 2005 with a design by the late British bridge designer, William Brown, dating from 1993. Brown remains an admired architect — he was responsible for the Severn, Humber, and Forth Road bridges in the UK, and plenty of others around the world. But the central span of his Italian bridge is due to be more than one kilometre longer than any other bridge span in the world. “That’s a huge jump in scale,” says Signorino, “but there’s been no jump in technological know-how. Our current knowledge doesn’t allow us to state that this is wise.”

There have been enough infrastructure disasters in Italy over the years to justify Signorino’s concerns. In August 2018, the Morandi Bridge in Genoa collapsed, causing 43 deaths. In 2014, just nine days after it was inaugurated, the Scorciavacche viaduct in Sicily also caved in. The company responsible for building that viaduct, Bolognetta, is a member of the Muratori Cementisti cooperative that has a 13% share of the Eurolink consortium. The other construction giants involved in the project aren’t renowned for their probity either. In 2022, the Spanish construction firm Sacyr, which has a 18.7% share of the Eurolink project, was fined — along with other firms — more than €200 million by Spain’s anti-trust regulator for rigging public tenders between 1992 and 2017.

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The bridge risks creating other problems, too. It may well obstruct the tallest container ships on their way to the vital Port of Gioia Tauro, forcing them to make a 500-kilometre detour around Sicily. And then there’s the displacement of locals: in Torre Faro in Sicily and Villa San Giovanni in Calabria, around 400 homes will be demolished in total. Environmental organisations — from the World Wildlife Fund to Legambiente — have also opposed the destruction of uniquely biodiverse lagoons and migration routes. “Living in these protected areas,” one weary resident told me, “we’re not even allowed to change the colour of our houses, but now they want to move millions of cubic metres of earth and build two Eiffel Towers!”

There’s also a sense that the bridge is futile unless the rickety public transport on either side is improved. The effective rail speed in Sicily is an astonishingly low 26-28 km/h, so placing a multi-billion-euro bridge at one end of the island seems superfluous to most Sicilians: “You can’t reduce a bottle-neck when there’s no bottle,” says one Sicilian I spoke to.

It’s anyone’s guess whether this mythical bridge really will be built. Work had been due to start this month, but in April the Environment Ministry requested an additional 239 documents to clarify a variety of critical issues. It turned out that the 318-page environmental impact document submitted by the Stretto di Messina firm overseeing the bridge in April had drawn on out-of-date statistics and many of its tables were gobbledygook. Even if the bridge does get started, one gets the impression it might be a very slow build.

But then came the sting in the tail familiar to all Italians: there were no taxis for the final three miles of the journey. The buses were done for the day, so I just stood with them in a state of astonishment, waiting in line behind dozens of frazzled commuters and bewildered tourists for white cabs that arrived once every 10 minutes. It was more than an hour before we got a lift.

In Italy, passengers queue for taxis rather than vice versa. In the whole of Abruzzo, a region with almost 1.3 million residents, there are only 97 licensed taxis. Rome has only 28.5 taxis for every 10,000 citizens. And Palermo has a mere five licensed taxis per 10,000 residents. The comparable figure for London, with a far more extensive public transport network, is 106.

The reason for this dearth is the refusal to issue new licences. In Genova, no new taxi licences have been issued by the city council since 1980. In Livorno, none have been granted since 1977, and in Napoli, despite its explosion in tourism, taxi licences haven’t increased since 1997. Rome hasn’t increased its taxi numbers for nearly 20 years.

It’s hard to ignore the problem. At peak times outside every major railway station, there’s a 50-metre or so queue of people waiting in vain for a lift. According to AGCM, Italy’s Competition Authority, in June last year, 46% of all calls to Roman taxis went unanswered. That same month in Milan, the figure was 42%. In July 2023, 49% of all requests for a taxi in Napoli were ignored. AGCM has since launched an investigation into monopolistic, cartel practices, denouncing “the significant shortfall of supply in relation to demand”.

“The current situation is disastrous in the main cities,” says Carlo Rienzi, President of the consumer-rights organisation, Codacons. “As soon as foreign tourists arrive in Italy, they suffer a malfunction that is unparalleled in the rest of the world.”

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But there’s more at risk than the serenity of tourists and commuters. Night-clubbers here rarely take taxis home. Some risk drink or drug-driving, leading to what has become known as the stragi del sabato sera — the “Saturday night massacres”. Others, including my three teenage kids, just call their parents when the fun is over. Though it’s not only parents who double as cabbies: some cities have experimented with deploying buses as cabs, resulting in the odd spectacle of a 40-seater vehicle driving across a city to pick up one person.

Naturally, this shortfall of supply suits cabbies perfectly. The basic laws of economics — that prices rise as supply dwindles — doesn’t quite apply to Italian taxis because there are set tariffs: a starting day-time price of, for example, €3 in Rome, or €3.40 in Bologna. There are no algorithms that push higher prices according to demand, as is the case with Uber. But the scarcity of taxis does mean that drivers are never idle; there is always money to be made.

Crucially, they are paid mostly in cash. In December last year, a survey by Altroconsumo — a consumers’ rights publication akin to Which? — discovered that 18% of taxi drivers refused card payments. That figure rose to 30% in Naples and 40% in Bari. A female friend of mine who was on a book tour in Naples a few years ago was violently insulted when she insisted on paying with a card. And every month or two, a similar story crops up in the press: in August 2022, for instance, two Australian tourists had their souvenirs smashed by an irate cabbie when they tried to pay by card.

The reason is obvious: tax-avoidance. According to the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), the declared average earnings of licensed taxi drivers in Rome is €12,817 per annum. In Palermo, it’s €9,489; in Napoli, it’s a laughably low €6,275.

Even if no one believed those figures, it was, until recently, hard to disprove them. Then, in May last year, a renegade taxi driver from Bologna, Roberto Mantovani — who uses the moniker “Redsox” — started publishing his daily earnings on social media. He put everything out there: cash payments, card payments and a daily total. On most days he earned between €500 and €600. In the three months of May, June and July of 2023, during which time he worked 47 days and nights, his gross earnings were €25,091.

“Within a week of publishing my earnings, my tyres had been slashed,” Mantovani tells me. “It was an almost Mafia operation to shut me up. I know it was my colleagues; I recognised one of them from the CCTV.” There are, obviously, many variables, but he estimates that his peers earn between €5,000 and €9,000 gross a month.

An affable man with a bald head and trim white beard, Mantovani has been the target of a sustained hate campaign. “I receive excrement in the post,” he says, “I get rubbish left on my car. My colleagues hate me profoundly, they spit on me and my car.” He was even suspended for a week for “damaging the honour of his [taxi-drivers’] cooperative”, called Cotabo, and was excluded from a refresher course about defibrillator use because his colleagues refused to attend if he was present.

Their fury is hardly surprising: Mantovani’s transparency has cost his colleagues tens of thousands of euros in lost earnings. The discrepancy between his earnings and theirs is too vast to be credible, and so they’ve had to increase the amount they declare to the tax authorities. “I’m undermining that block of €4,000 to €5,000 placed in cash on the family table every month,” he says.

Yet the real money isn’t being made from tax evasion, but from selling coveted taxi licences at inflated prices. Recently, undercover reporters from Le Iene, a satirical TV programme, filmed a Bologna driver offering to sell his licence for €285,000. Mantovani tells me that he paid €250,000 to acquire his licence eight years ago (from a cabbie who wanted a change of career). Now, though, he calculates its value has probably fallen to around €200,000, reflecting the recent 10% increase in the size of Bologna’s taxi fleet.

A taxi licence is a lucrative investment, guaranteeing years of tax-free earnings. “The business plan is straightforward,” says Gabriele Grea, a Professor of Economics at Milan’s Bocconi University. “An upfront investment in a licence must pay back in a reasonable number of years of activity in a regulated market, where competition is limited by law. The licence keeps its value in order to guarantee a serene retirement.” That business plan, however, relies on vetoing any new licences. If, as AGCM has urged them to, city councils do increase the number of taxi licences by 20%, the value of the asset will fall. In which case, taxi drivers would find their cushy retirement plans under threat.

As a result, every time a city council attempts to issue more licences, the city risks being grid-locked by thousands of taxis either on strike or a go-slow, which involves driving at 5-mph through the city en bloc. Mantovani calls the taxi-drivers’ lobby “a great economic and military power. We’re an economic power because we bought a part of the public service. We’re a military power because we’re a small army. We can block the roads. Everyone’s scared of taxi-drivers, we’re the last of the untouchables.”

Perhaps this explains why politicians are reluctant to act. “Taxi drivers are greatly feared by the political class,” says Rienzi. “They have an absolute supremacy compared to other workers. With their protests they’re able to hold in check millions of citizens.” While there are only around 35,000 taxi drivers in the country, their relatives — who also benefit financially from protected privileges — swell to around 150,000 the number of people who will fight any political party that attempts to change the status quo.

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Taxi drivers also have a trapped audience upon which they unleash their opinions and prejudices. I’ve frequently been monologued to by taxi-drivers who use their cabs as soapboxes, ranting against a particular mayor. It’s easy to imagine that local politicians live in fear of this loquacious lobby.

As a result, legislation regarding taxi drivers is invariably in their favour. Despite hard lobbying, Uber has been unable to enter the Italian market in any meaningful way. Uber drivers are obliged to have a “luxury car”, making them more costly than the white cabs. And while in the past, taxi drivers shared between themselves 80% of all monies from the issuing of new taxi licences, new legislation from last summer, the “Decreto Asset”, decreed that that proportion will now rise to 100%. It’s been estimated that, if licences were increased by 20%, each extant licensee would receive €35,000.

I’ve found it almost impossible to find anyone willing to defend the taxi drivers. Of all the various taxi unions, only Federtaxi replies to my enquiries. “If you say to me,” says Claudio Gianandrea, a Federtaxi representative, “that there’s a situation of distress, I would agree with you. But I’ve been in service for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like last year.” He believes that the problem lies not in the lack of taxi licences, but in a post-Covid tourist invasion combined with widespread roadworks and municipal upgrades across Rome as it prepares for the 2025 jubilee. He points out that, despite runaway inflation, taxi fares haven’t risen for 12 years.

In many ways, though, this isn’t a niche story about transport blockages, but about Italy’s flat-lining economy. One of the major factors behind Italy’s economic woes is its tendency to protect professional cartels. Although such privileges have been chipped away in recent years, there are still many professions — including notaries, chemists, and notoriously beach-front bagni — that keep prices eye-wateringly high, standards low, and competition at bay. One city councillor I spoke to said that in his southern town, the local chemist was “richer, more respected and more powerful” than the mayor.

The EU has repeatedly attempted to force competition on this sclerotic economy, but the country artfully ignores all such edicts. In some ways, its ability to resist market forces is almost admirable. If Italy often feels enchantingly medieval — with luthiers, leather-workers and book-binders toiling away in city cellars — it’s partly because it has been able to shelter artisans and their medieval guilds from the gale-forces of globalisation. But if you come here for such other-worldly charm, don’t be surprised when you can’t find a taxi to take you to your hotel.

Living on the Jersey Shore, in a vacation spot that emptied out after Labor Day, my partners in petty crime and I would break into summer homes, and go for the fridge, the beer, the hard liquor. But unlike my ruffian peers, who weren’t Italian, I was intrigued by the mobster life of The Godfather. In parts of North Jersey, say Jersey City or Hoboken, it would have been different, but my attraction to what they referred to as “the life” was more or less solitary in my pretty Anglo working-class neighbourhood.

Upwardly mobile and eager to anglicise, my father hated the Mob and the rep it gave to first generation Italians. I had the build and the inclination for boxing, but because of the well-known connection between the sport and the mafia, he would have preferred me to stick to baseball or football — even though my grandfather, born in Italy and raised in Brooklyn, was a boxing instructor and an infantryman in the Marines during the First World War.

But I loved the way the Mob guys carried themselves. To me they were like pirates, “born to hang”, unafraid of death or long prison terms. They didn’t take shit from anyone and made mounds of money, and I admired them for that, for both their balls and their ability to make tons of dough.

There’s a famous section in The Phenomenology of Spirit about a master and a slave, in which Hegel offers a creation myth. Two forms of primeval self-consciousnesses confront one another for the first time. The one who is willing to fight to the death, and overcomes their will to live, becomes the lord. The other, done in by fears, becomes the slave. Evidence of Hegel’s psychological point abounds. The films coming out of Hollywood and shows streaming on Netflix bear witness to our fascination with individuals who prefer to play the part of Hegel’s lord, by putting their lives at risk. There is something transcendent about what Nietzsche would call “the will to power” overcoming the terror of death. Yes, just about everyone longs to be the tough guy, the guy who bucks up their courage, stands up to the bully and knocks him or her out.

For me, becoming the Jersey Shore version of Tony Soprano wasn’t just an instinct. There was a lot of love in my home but also a lot of violence, fists and backhands flying. My attraction to the Mob was like my determination to box: both came from a desire to be invulnerable and express the rage I felt coming from a home that was routinely turned upside down by family fights. There were no gyms in our summer beach town, but I was so smitten with boxing that at 15 I began hitch hiking 70 miles each way to Philadelphia, where I took a bus uptown to what was then Dan Bucceroni’s School of Boxing, but would later be Joe Frazier’s Gym.

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When I was a little older, I also started taking the bus into the Big Apple. On one ride, I sat next to an ex-con who hinted that he was involved with the Mob. Whether true or false, I ate up his tales about hijacking trucks like a good dish of Rigatoni.

Despite my chequered behaviour record, I was a fairly successful student, and a standout in football. Miraculously, I was accepted at Columbia University. But this didn’t end my mafia fascination; in fact, ironically, one philosophy class actually spurred it. “Question everything” is a piety amongst the lovers of wisdom. And question we did. In a course on ethics, the professor presented the four major theories used to justify moral judgments. It was evident that each of them had fatal flaws, which my sophomoric mind interpreted as licence to go beyond good and evil, and eased my conscience about entering a life of crime.

It didn’t help that college didn’t suit me. My football days were done for by an injury, and I was intimidated by my fellow students, who not only knew how to sit still but also a foreign language or two. I retreated to the boxing gym. After sparring sessions, I’d invariably be left with two shiners, which I wore like badges of honour. I would walk back to my apartment through Times Square strutting like John Travolta in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever. There were stops at topless bars. One of them, like the Badda Bing in The Sopranos, was run by the Mob. The more I stopped there and talked boxing the more I got to be buddies with a bouncer from Bay Ridge. I spoke a little Italian so with that, my Abruzzi roots, and boxing, I was a mafia draft choice, though my recruitment remained implicit, just a job in a Mob joint that might become something more.

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At the time, the Hall of Fame fighter Jake LaMotta worked as a doorman at my favourite watering hole. He was soon leaving for Los Angeles to help with the filming of the LaMotta biopic Raging Bull, in which he’s played by Robert De Niro. On my friend’s recommendation, I took over Jake’s 6pm to 2am shift at the club. You would have thought I’d earned a Rhodes Scholarship, that’s how elated I was about being admitted to the club within the club. Story had it that six weeks earlier someone came in and slit the owner’s throat from one side to the other, but that the owner had returned to his backroom helm in no time: fearless.

The night I started I was informed that the week before a doorman who was a former number one heavyweight contender had been knocked cold by a sucker punch. While working, I tried acting the badass by throwing guys out when they made over-the-top overtures to our dancers. Many of our patrons were sure that they would end the night with one of our nubile pole dancers. Not a chance. The frustration frequently boiled over into violence.

One of the senior bouncers in the joint rightfully sensed I was too soft, a poseur. In his mind, I should have been bashing heads and sending a message rather than simply getting the riff raff into a wrist lock and throwing them headlong unto the sidewalk. Still, me and the shark-eyed 5’6” sharply-dressed soldier were able to work together, though not for long. One inglorious evening, I was off duty, got smashed, made out with one of the girls and jumped up on the bar. It was curtains closed. I was immediately and roughly shown the door I used to throw people out of.

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For a time, I was crushed, but later I realised my drunken leap of faith probably saved my life. If I hadn’t been fired then, I suspect that within a few months I would have been ordered to break someone’s legs, or worse. I didn’t have the stomach for that kind of violence, but might have been too cowardly to resist. Getting drunk that night saved me.

While I continued to be intrigued by Mob life, I learned more about the helpless people they fucked over. Oddly enough I had two close friends at Columbia, one Jewish and one Italian, whose fathers had been defence lawyers for made men. For reasons to which I was never privy, both of their dads ended up in prison and debarred. And no, the Mob didn’t take care of their families, à la Goodfellas, when they were upstate or afterwards. Some of my re-education came from my grandfather, who grew up in the mean streets of Brooklyn, where the Black Hand, the Ur-mafia group, blackmailed small business owners and kidnapped poor people for ransom in their own Italian hood. (My bald-headed Nonno with his fearsome left hook once ran down a Mob guy who insulted him and kicked his ass.) Getting married and fathering a child also helped bring me to my moral senses, but maybe not entirely.

I once told the story of my close shave with the Mob to Italian-American Gay Talese, author of Honor Thy Father. During the five years he was writing his meticulously detailed book, the ever-debonair Talese was embedded with the vicious Bonanno crime family. As I unravelled my tale, I laughingly confessed, “I thought they were cool.” Though no fan of the cosa nostra, Talese surprised me with the curt response: “They are cool.” Killers, but cool.

A hit squad compared to a “well-oiled murder machine”. A lawyer and journalist shot on the streets of Amsterdam. A blasé approach to killing the wrong person — there’s even slang for every accidental victim: a vergismoord. Welcome to the Marengo trial, where 17 men stand accused of involvement in six murders, four attempted murders and preparing for six others between 2015 and 2017.

Fear hangs in the air around this court case, telling a tale of a country where the hydra of organised crime has so many heads that it is threatening the very rule of law. When the trial resumed this month, journalists were asked to sign agreements not to name judges or prosecutors, for fear of them being targeted. After reports that co-chief suspect Ridouan Taghi was planning a jailbreak, the streets around the fortified courtroom known as the Bunker are ringed with police cars and trained teams made up of police and soldiers.

The Marengo is only the latest in a series of organised crime trials to shake the Netherlands. This year, Dutch courts are also trying alleged criminal druglord Roger P., accused of turning shipping containers into an underworld prison, with its own gruesome “torture chamber”. Meanwhile, a Marengo side-trial involves motorbike club Caloh Wagoh members charged with shooting dead five people, preparing three other murders and “putting another seven people on the waiting list to be killed”.

“I call The Netherlands a ‘narco-state 2.0’,” says Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union. “We aren’t Mexico, with 14,000 dead bodies, but in our parallel economy, there is an attack on public order and unprecedented numbers of people with personal security — politicians, judges, prosecutors, police staff, journalists — because there is still a serious risk from organised crime. It is a huge problem, being tackled on every front, but we have a long way to go.”

Struijs first raised concerns that this small, well-connected trading nation has “characteristics of a narco-state” four years ago. At the time, there was a muted political response. But then the brother of the Marengo crown witness Nabil B was shot dead and the crown witness’s original lawyer, Dirk Wiersum, was gunned down outside his house. Finally, last July, celebrated crime reporter Peter R de Vries, who had unconventionally agreed to act as Nabil B’s representative, was shot in the head on a busy central Amsterdam street and died of his wounds.

Today, few would argue that increasingly violent crime has clawed its fingers deep into civil society. But as Lieselot Bisschop, criminologist at Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, points out, before you can combat the crime, it is important to understand who is involved and how. She and a team of researchers have been looking at the key drug runners’ entry and exit point of Rotterdam port, where last year a Hit and Run Cargo team (HARC) confiscated a record 72,808 kilos of cocaine plus another record of 1,500 kilos of heroin. “Whether it’s a good thing that they are catching more, I don’t know — is more going through anyway?” says Prof Bisschop. “The quantity aspect is always very challenging. It’s a dark number, guesstimates.”

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Meanwhile, the Netherlands is apparently a centre of synthetic drug manufacture, with regular busts of “professional” crystal meth and MDMA labs, especially in Noord Brabant. When international police decrypted millions of messages on devices criminals thought were secure — such as Sky and EncroChat, and the Dutch decoded Pretty Good Privacy software for Blackberry’s in the Marengo case — they lit up a web of crime.

Experts agree the Netherlands’s infrastructure is key for both legal and illegal trade. In their 2020 book, Nederland Drugsland, Dutch police academy professor Pieter Tops and journalist Jan Tromp explored how criminals exploit its efficient ports, good roads, and strong financial and digital infrastructure. “The Netherlands has long been a trading country — not just the harbours but also our high-quality internet environment. We have huge numbers of bankers and our country is central in Europe in terms of all kinds of transport and transit,” says Struijs. “We have huge numbers of imports, which means a lot of drugs are mixed with legal trade, coming in containers of fruit or liquor. Organised crime takes advantage of the legal infrastructure.”

Corruption is another factor. As a nation, the Dutch are keen to make a deal — and regular businesses haven’t always been too fussy about carrying out background checks, as various banking money laundering cases and high tax haven rankings show. The NVB Dutch banking association says an estimated €16 billion in illegally-earned cash washes around each year.

Personal corruption is also a problem in a port 40km long and with 180,000 employees, says Bisschop. “Within Europe, it is definitely the gateway for any kind of trade and probably for cocaine. Over the years, the port has become more physically and digitally secure. We think this has contributed to more pressure on the people in the port. Basically, you need corruption to pull it off — both public and private, not just police and customs but also planners in container terminals. You need someone on the inside.”

So in court, says veteran crime reporter Saskia Belleman, there has been a spate of cases against allegedly corrupt customs staff, shipping and port employees, partly as a consequence of a Dutch gedoogcultuur of looking the other way. There are also concerns about so-called “collectors”, often young men who trespass into the harbour and collect drugs.

Nobody knows if the Netherlands is worse than other European port countries in terms of international organised crime, but its soft drug culture is undoubtedly a weak spot. Although smoking cannabis and coffee shops selling the drug are tolerated, it is illegal to grow commercially. This means that cafes offer a legally tolerated channel for criminal activity, and a training ground for young criminals.

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In the Netherlands, it’s become increasingly common to read about the ethnic aspect of organised crime — the so-called “Mocro Maffia” Moroccan-origin mafia which inspired a true crime book and spin-off television series. But Peter Schouten, one of the new lawyers for the crown witness in the Marengo trial, says: “It’s not true that it’s only people with another ‘heritage’. Certain gangs have a kind of micro-organism, a gangland where there’s a lot of the same culture, but there are other gangs arrested, and you read stories saying that the new kingpin is ‘Bolle’ Jos from Brabant.”

It’s hard to measure organised crime, partly because victims don’t always make reports, but ethnic minorities are overrepresented as crime suspects. Statistics Netherlands researcher Maarten Bloem says, though, that “if you correct for age, education level, socio-economic category, there is not much difference between different ethnic origins”. He concludes: “It’s not so much about someone’s colour but the situation in which they find themselves.”

It is unclear whether the segregated, Dutch grammar school system helps contribute to excluding certain groups, too: critics say it selects too young, hammers in socio-economic difference, and makes no account for innately-talented children who speak Dutch as an additional language.

Crime, after all, can be seen as a way out of poverty and an equal opportunities recruiter. So there’s a widespread recognition that long-term crime prevention needs to offer other options, especially to young men in problem districts. There’s a new drive targeting “vulnerable” areas in Utrecht, and projects such as working with the “top 600″ criminals and their families in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, international efforts have been led by the mayors of Rotterdam and Belgian Antwerp — where a record 90 tonnes of smuggled cocaine was found last year. They have visited South American counterparts and lobbied governments to ramp up international efforts against organised crime, increase barriers in harbours, and confiscate criminal assets.

In Rotterdam, there are promising signs of public-private cooperation, with busts by the multi-agency HARC, a new Information Sharing Centre, a business integrity initiative, and a “training container” to coach harbour staff in combatting corruption. A long-awaited law banning civilians from the container area is in place to help apprehend those vital ‘collectors’ picking up drugs from containers, while Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb is also enforcing a €2,250 anti-nuisance penalty. The new Dutch coalition hopes to add to these initiatives. It will start investing specifically in combating crime that “undermines” public order from 2023, ratcheting up to a €100m yearly investment by 2025. In the meantime, the last budget put aside an extra €434m to increase annual budgets for police, judicial organisation and subversive crime prevention, though experts warn that money must not be used to add to the layers of bureaucracy.

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Instead, some want a shift in public attitudes on drug taking: as the prosecutor said in the torture container trial, show users the “abhorrent” consequence of their habits rather than perpetuating the permissive, hippy culture of the Seventies. “It’s not done in the Netherlands to point in the direction of drug users,” says Belleman. “If you don’t use drugs, there’s no market. But people who use cocaine at the weekends don’t make the connection between organised crime and their drug use — and if you tell them, they are really offended.”

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, lies in how to prosecute those alleged criminals who are caught. In the mega-Marengo trial, hearings are currently mired in details such as whether the co-chief suspect Saïd Razzouki left his reading glasses behind when he was extradited from Colombia in December, and whether due process was followed in his subpoena.

The accused in the trial deny the charges, and Schouten doesn’t expect a verdict until 2023. “This trial is under an enormous amount of pressure,” he says. “This is about the rule of law, the dyke against injustice, and we must continue to protect this. But there is a lot of fear.” Even when the trial verdict is reached, until words turn to action, that fear is unlikely to go away.

But in his stories of the lowlife gangster milieu of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression — the snatchers and the shooters, the dimwits and the dolls, the potatoes and the players in Broadway’s “hardened artery” — Damon Runyon invented the main character of the late twentieth century: the good bad guy.

We’re so steeped now in anti-heroes that it hardly seems bold or daring for a writer to dive into the beating heart of a man who kills or kidnaps for money. Badly behaved men — and they are usually men — as the half-sympathetic moral centre of a story have been a staple of serious literature since the Fifties: amoral murderers like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley; everyman adulterers like John Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom; and distilled misanthropists like Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum (“The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone”).

The good bad guy moved from literature to film in the Seventies, and two decades later came into our homes on TV. You don’t have to look far to see the flowering of this quality in our culture. Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that without Runyon, there would be no Godfather, no Tony Soprano. Martin Scorsese would still be trying to think of something to make films about.

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By Rob Henderson

But when Runyon wrote his stories in the Thirties and Forties, he was bringing us news, softening us up for the century to come. He made us fall for the guy who is dubious in business and negligent in his home life and his love life.

The stand-out quality of both Runyon and his characters is that they’re funny. Runyon’s anonymous narrator is a lower-rent, warier version of P. G. Wodehouse’s tireless storyteller Mr Mulliner, and indeed Wodehouse is the writer Runyon most resembles stylistically. His rhythmic patter fits Wodehouse’s description of his own work as a “musical comedy without music”.

Runyon’s narrator trades in nicknames, neologisms, mock-formality, a language devoid of contractions and a perpetual present tense. When he tells us that “when Dave the Dude takes a guy out for an airing, the guy very often does not come back”, the threat is softened by the stilted idiom — but not too much. The same goes for the cracking line, “I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her”.

Comedy lowers the reader’s guard and enables the writer to slip in other things. We get unexpected moral complexity, in the story The Lily of St Pierre, in which a tragic woman suffers a death “that happens to a million dolls before and will happen to a million dolls again”. And there is a truly psychopathic viciousness in Sense of Humour, which begins with the aptly-named Frankie the Ferocious killing the family members of an associate who played a practical joke on him, and gets worse from there.

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Runyon used comedy as a balance to danger, then; his inheritors developed this, using it as a source of danger, too. In the famous scene in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Joe Pesci’s Tommy turns laughter — “Do I amuse you?” — into blood-chilling fear. Like Runyon’s stories, like any good portrayal of the good bad guy — like any good art — it operates in multiple registers.

Connected to this is another strength of Runyon’s good bad guy: he is real. Runyon certainly knew the world he wrote about, both from his work as a newspaper reporter covering sports, politics and murder (which he called “the main event”) and from personal connections: he knew, among others, Al Capone. His portrayal of gangster culture in his stories was an exaggeration, usually for comic purposes, but it’s the authenticity that provides the frisson: Runyon’s biographer said any decent New York detective would recognise most of the crooks in his fiction, from Harry the Horse to Nicely-Nicely Johnson.

And so reading about, or watching, a good bad guy is like a rollercoaster ride: a brush with danger within a safe environment, all the more so when we are strapped to his viewpoint. We can’t help but come round to his way of thinking when we watch the serial killer’s serial killer Dexter Morgan in Dexter, or read Alex’s own words in A Clockwork Orange. After all, to paraphrase one Runyon character, many legitimate guys like you are interested in the doings of tough guys.

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By John Self

The guys and dolls come and go in Runyon’s stories, but his world is held together by that constant narrator, a bystander to the action (“I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around”) who rubs comfortably alongside the criminal underworld, even if he is not strictly part of it, and gently expresses theoretical disapproval of, say, kidnapping. “Snatching is by no means a high-class business, and is even considered somewhat illegal.” (Then again, we get the sense that he would help out if they were busy, and occasionally he provides a turning point in one of Runyon’s clockwork plots.) But the intimacy of the first person narrative makes us want Jo-jo and Spanish John and Dave the Dude to succeed — because reading is an act of empathy, but also because we see them within their own community, where they don’t seem so bad at all. They are, like Puzo’s mafiosi in The Godfather, bound by their own code of honour, however twisted.

The novelist Howard Spring summed up this appeal by describing Runyon’s people as “jungle-dwellers, hateful and horrible men and women, who yet please us because they are alive and completely integrated.” Fictional violence, in other words, is thrilling, and all the more so when we’re made to care about the characters dishing it out. In The Sopranos, the most simultaneously beloved and bloodthirsty of Tony’s henchmen was Paulie Walnuts, who murdered more people than anyone else, but was also a comic figure, cladding his furniture in plastic and forever repeating his jokes to impress Tony. In Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, when Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher delivers a theatrical “Whoopsy-daisy!” as he “misses” while chucking his knives at Cameron Diaz’s Jenny, we feel the same sense of uneasily disrupted danger that Runyon detonates in his darker stories.

In capturing the Broadway gangster era, Runyon created it, just as Fitzgerald did the Jazz Age — which operated at the same time but in a different world. But Runyon’s influence goes even further: he prefigures the wisecracking Noo Yawk idiom of countless sitcoms. And by offering a gangster environment that was fundamentally comic in nature, he opened a gap between his creations and the traditional villain for others to fill, and fill it they did, forming characters who flatter our appetite for complexity by being good only in parts.

After Runyon’s death in 1946 — from a lifelong smoker’s throat cancer — a plane was flown above Manhattan and his ashes were scattered over Broadway, the avenue he dusted with his own peculiar genius. It was a tribute befitting either a city grandee or a legendary crime boss — and therefore perfect for the man who in straddling both worlds created his own, and laid the path for ours.

It would be an exaggeration to say that The Sopranos whacked the kind of movies Chase loved, but it certainly helped to put television and cinema on a more equal footing. As Hollywood gave up on the once-fertile territory between blockbusters and low-budget indies, viewers found that their appetite for sophisticated storytelling could be met by the likes of HBO, AMC and, later, Netflix. Today, The Sopranos’ successors dominate the cultural conversation and provide safe harbour for fugitive movie stars and directors who are tired of scratching around for movie financing.

The days when the inner conflict of a dangerous man was sure-fire Emmy material may be over, but The Sopranos remains the Beatles of prestige TV: it was the first and, in many people’s eyes, it is still the best. In 2019, the Guardian crowned it the greatest show of the 21st century so far, ahead of The Wire and Mad Men. A soup-to-nuts Sopranos rewatch became a popular lockdown activity among a certain constituency, who revelled in the skewed black comedy, eccentric detours and endless subtleties. Talking Sopranos, a nicely timed hit podcast by former cast members Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, has led to a book deal for an oral history. If there hasn’t been a backlash yet, there never will be.

Yet even in 2010, three years after The Sopranos’ fearless cut-to-black finale, Chase was still conflicted about his role as the godfather of prestige TV. “Look, I do not care about television,” he told Brett Martin, author of Difficult Men. “I don’t care about where television is going or anything else about it. I’m a man who wanted to make movies. Period.”

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Tony Soprano: villain or victim?

By ROB HENDERSON

Eventually he did make one, but his rock’n’roll coming-of-age-story Not Fade Away suffered the fate of many serious mid-budget movies. Released in 2012, it earned just $600,000 from a $20m budget. I’m sure that Chase sincerely wanted to make a Sopranos prequel (now 76, he doesn’t do things he doesn’t want to do) but I suspect that his latest project was also his last shot at the big screen. Thus The Many Saints of Newark, released this week, finds him leveraging his phenomenal success in a medium he doesn’t respect to get him back into one that he reveres. As Alessandro Nivola, who stars as dapper capo Dickie Moltisanti, recently told Rolling Stone: “For a movie like this to be made at all was an anomaly, and it was only being made because [of] the IP of the show, the brand of the show.”

Chase and co-writer Lawrence Konner offer fan service to a fault. As the movie begins in 1967, most of the cast have the tricky task of embodying unfinished iterations of some of the most memorable characters in modern television, with mixed results. Corey Stoll is deftly hilarious as Tony Soprano’s uncle Junior, a tetchy, charmless sub’s-bench gangster desperate for a level of respect that he is incapable of earning, but John Magaro gives a sketch-show impersonation of Steve Van Zandt’s Silvio Dante, with his tonsorial slapstick and perpetual fuhgeddaboudit grimace. Michael Gandolfini excels at the emotionally gruelling job of playing the younger version of his late father James. He has the same melancholy weight, that physical unhappiness, and the sense of someone caught reluctantly, but not reluctantly enough, in the tractor beam of familial violence.

This embryonic rogues’ gallery revolves around the most important new character introduced by the prequel, Nivola’s Dickie, the doomed father of serial fuck-up Christopher Moltisanti. He foreshadows Tony’s agonies of leadership far more than Tony’s own father, played by Jon Bernthal as a dim, swaggering thug. By comparison, Dickie is a Shakespearean figure whose attempts at operating by a moral code (well, by Mafia standards) are ruptured by uncontrollable outbursts of violence and poisoned by guilt.

Casting Goodfellas’ Ray Liotta as Dickie’s monstrous father, whose laboured grunts through the bedroom wall are somehow the most disturbing sound in a film that also features a hideous bit of freelance dentistry, is much more than a mob-movie in-joke — but it adds a layer of irony, given that the Mafia depicted here is pre-postmodern. The mobsters in the TV show were shaped by seeing themselves on screen, as if performing a wise-guy routine for an invisible audience. Would they have behaved in quite the same way before The Godfather? Tony has a famous line in the pilot episode — “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over” — which suggests that he grew up in the glory days; now those glory days are on the big screen, but the only thing more glamorous about them is the wardrobe. There’s already the stink of decay.

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What’s genuinely new for a franchise that previously confined people of colour to supporting roles is the introduction of Newark’s black population, specifically Dickie’s runner-turned-rival Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.). The movie uses the famous riots of 1967 both to cover up a crime and to spur Harold into demanding more than scraps from the table. Once it snaps into the 1970s, we see how the growth of radical black consciousness filtered into organised crime and glimpse the white flight that turned the Sopranos into suburbanites, although there’s a sub-plot for Harold which unpleasantly plays into the Mafia’s racist paranoia.

This conflict between the declining Italians and insurgent black gangsters invites unflattering comparisons to Fargo’s similarly themed fourth season, which has enough time to give both sides of that war equal attention, and much more besides. Harold’s transformation relies on clumsy shorthand (ballooning afros, a Last Poets concert) in lieu of scenes that might have given him real depth and agency. He is less a person than a symbol of the social change that the Moltisanti/Soprano empire can’t even understand, let alone halt, and his arc is wrapped up in a mid-credits sting which feels like a mildly insulting afterthought. Vera Farmiga as Livia, Tony’s mother and master of mindfuckery, also smoulders with untapped potential.

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By Christopher Caldwell

I have no bias towards television. Some potentially great movies have been fattened into slow-moving miniseries solely because that’s where the money is. But it’s hard to watch The Many Saints of Newark, entertaining though it is, without wondering why it needed to be a movie. Solidly directed by Alan Taylor, whose spotty CV ranges from some of the best Sopranos episodes to the absolute worst Marvel movie (Thor: The Dark World), it’s neither as strange and grubby as the TV show nor particularly cinematic. With its ensemble cast and myriad sub-plots, this is a narrative that could have done a lot more with six hours (at least) than with two, and ends with Dickie’s story concluded but the adolescent Tony’s just beginning. Had it come out as a stand-alone movie in 1997, we wouldn’t be wondering about these alternatives, but our viewing metabolism has changed, and it was The Sopranos that changed it. Like Tony, Dickie and Harold, we want more.

“Someone once said that movies are a cathedral, and I do still feel that,” Chase told Brett Martin. “A cathedral is big. It’s epic. It’s intense.” It’s almost tragic that Chase made a watershed TV show that was as big, epic and intense as any movie and then refused to accept it. Now he’s made a movie that feels smaller in every way. I want to tell him that he built his cathedral years ago.

Tony Soprano was a figure uncomfortable with the modern world. He used his shrink as a means to alleviate his guilt about his selfish and violent behaviour, but he was also sceptical of the radical ideas behind psychiatry. Conceived during a decade when public emotional behaviour changed a great deal, the Sopranos featured Tony frequently referring to his preference for the reticent “strong silent type” symbolised by Golden Age movie star Gary Cooper.

In between racketeering, extortion and the occasional murder, Tony longs for a simpler moral universe where social norms are clear-cut; a world which would make this anxious middle-aged man feel more at peace, less edgy. That moral hypocrisy, although in Tony’s case extreme, is characteristic of what Matthew Walther recently termed “barstool conservatism”.

Writing in The Week on life after Trump, Walther wrote:

“What Trump recognised was that there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. Instead he correctly intuited that the new culture war would be fought over very different (and more nebulous) issues: vague concerns about political correctness and ‘SJWs,’ opposition to the popularisation of so-called critical race theory, sentimentality about the American flag and the military.”

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The fantasy of English freedom

By Ed West

And while these barstool conservatives “accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalised gambling”, they dislike attacks on their country, the rapid cultural change brought about by immigration and an elite, urban caste who clearly despise them.

This appears to be true of Britain, too. The Tories were able to make huge gains in the last election because, when it came to values, the party aligned more closely with a lot of Labour voters. But those voters aren’t “social conservatives”. Like their Trump-voting counterparts, the new Tory voters are more likely to have kids outside of marriage than the liberal elite in California or London, who tend to “talk the 60s but walk the 50s”. They don’t oppose abortion or sex education, don’t have any particular issue with homosexuality, and they’ll probably come around on the transgender debate.

The real social conservatives are not generally found in former industrial towns that appear on TV vox pops; they tend to be middle or even upper-middle class, well-educated, married and religious, and in Britain are more common in shires and in parts of west and south London, at heavily upper-middle-class Catholic parishes and the high-performing schools attached to them. These are the people who talk the 50s and walk the 50s, too.

There is a big difference between cultural and social conservatism. The former could be said to be the default in almost all human cultures. The latter is learned and cultivated, and today is a counter-cultural movement popular with a relatively small number of well-educated people.

Cultural conservatism, however, is natural to human society. Researchers at Oxford University, studying 60 different cultures, found that they all share seven basic cultural codes, which involve bravery, helping your family, helping your group, returning favours, deferring to superiors, dividing resources fairly and respecting others’ property.

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These are the moral norms that all cultures naturally observe, but have been slightly adapted in what Joseph Henrich first called “WEIRD” cultures. Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic cultures have values suited towards very large-scale societies, where people are unusual in sharing resources with non-family members. There is far less emphasis on the group and the family as a result.

In almost all hunter-gatherer societies, 300 is about the maximum number of individuals that can live together before people start ripping each other’s heads off (and that is much better than our closest relative, the chimpanzee). Yet humans were able to scale up and enjoy the benefits of modernity with one simple trick — religion. Henrich cites the anthropologist Donald Tuzin, who investigated an unusual New Guinea tribe, the Arapesh, unusually living in a group of up to 2,500 without bloodshed; Tuzin found that they had developed beliefs about gods that allowed them, unlike their rivals, to nurture solidarity.

Religion allows humans to co-exist in much larger groups, but as Heinrich’s book argues, one particular religion was able to accelerate this on an unprecedented scale — Roman Catholicism. By banning marriage between cousins in particular, the medieval Church crushed the strength of clans and created a society in which people were willing to cooperate and share with strangers. WEIRD societies.

Even today, people from countries in which cousin marriage was banned the longest still consistently donate more blood, give more to charity and are less likely to cheat in exams or avoid paying parking fines — and also have the most successful democracies. Those parts of western Europe in which the Catholic Church struggled to ban cousin marriage also, and not by coincidence, produced Don Corleone and Tony Soprano.

One result of this high-trust form of society was, of course, liberalism, an entirely novel worldview that relies on people thinking way beyond their clan, to far more abstract levels of society — even to humanity in the general. Yet liberalism is still unnatural, after centuries, and most people are “default conservatives” — they believe that family should come before strangers, and countrymen before foreigners. They feel stung if their flag is burned or their ancestors mocked. However anti-social their own instincts, they, like Tony Soprano, feel an obligation to defend their country from external threats. Conservatism is our default setting, designed for a world that is dangerous and in which we need to be courageous, defend our family and group, defer to superiors and share acquisitions fairly. Liberalism, with its focus on individual rights, is a mutation.

Yet “social conservatism”, as we imagine it in the West, is not the same thing; like liberalism, it is an interpretation of Christianity, although a more disciplined (and perhaps less immediately enjoyable) one. Christianity is the most unnatural of self-disciplines; loving your enemies and laying down your life for non-kin go against all our instincts and Tony Soprano would never be foolish enough to do so. Sexual restraint, especially among powerful men, requires a role model as persuasive and powerful as St Paul, one who can overcome their Roman urge to dominate with guilt.

Sure, historically mafias paid lip-service to Catholicism because that was the cultural norm — the Church was strong and they craved respectability. But modern mafias don’t; the Camorra of Naples have in recent years had a lesbian and even a transgender boss, which is very brave and progressive of them.

Western social conservatism, like liberalism, is weird, and WEIRD. It takes discipline and education, and social conservatives tend to be highly conscientious and well-educated, partly because Christianity is complicated and requires great self-control. The most “consistently conservative” Americans, for example, are found not in trailer parks drooling over Fox & Friends, as their opponents might believe, but in universities.

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By Peter Franklin

As both Left and Right have proved throughout history, education and cultivation can produce the worst type of intolerance. If you look at European history, the most religiously intolerant time was not the Dark Ages, or early medieval period (c.500-1000). Surviving chronicles of that mostly illiterate era recall people talking and laughing throughout Mass, fornicating priests, and a widespread belief in unorthodox, often pagan ideas. You wouldn’t get burnt for heresy in the Dark Ages, contrary to the stereotype, but you might well do in the Late Middle Ages, the Renaissance era, when literacy had become widespread. Some of the worst torturers and sadists of the time could discourse on the Latin poets while turning the screw on a torture rack.

But the society they lived in was far safer and far more restrained; there were far fewer births outside marriage, and therefore lower infant mortality; men had become less inclined to have mistresses; violence, in particular the impulsive violence that plagued earlier medieval history, was in steep decline. That sort of social conservatism has to be learned; it is against our instincts.

Modern conservatism is a sort of alliance between these two ways of thinking, but it is an uneasy one, as Trump showed. His success was to appeal to default instincts in a society where powerful people openly provoke many of those seven basic human moral values. And it is a powerful selling point; far more sellable than the social conservatism that once dominated the American Right, but which depended on a shrinking churchgoing population.

Yet, unfashionable as social conservatism may be, there is a lot of evidence showing that churchgoers are less prejudiced than other conservative voters. They are more trusting, are more likely to volunteer and more satisfied with their neighbourhood and with family relationships. And since 1992 the share of Americans with no religion has quadrupled — and trebled even among conservatives.

There is a danger, therefore, that as social conservatism fades, the Right becomes a repository of the depressed, the disappointed and those in need of a cause and a leader; people who, to some extent like Tony Soprano, are anxious and confused by today’s moral confusion but lacking a firm moral code of their own. Social conservatism may appear off-putting but it offers a real vision, while the barstool variety, appealing to basic emotional brain responses, is little more than a political version of the social media clickbait, porn, junk food and opioids that pervade our time and overloads our minds.

The reality, however, is far more subtle. Today, the biggest mafia trial in Italy for 35 years begins in Lamezia Terme, on the Calabrian toe of the Italian boot. More than 900 witnesses will give evidence in a cavernous call centre which has been converted into a court to seat nearly 1,000 lawyers, judges, prosecutors and spectators. But what is noticeable is that the majority of the 355 indicted criminals — who will be locked in cages ­— are not thick-set, unshaven toughs, but suited professionals. Indeed, the mugshots of lawyers, accountants, managing directors, politicians and even a police chief speak of an organisation that is far more white-collar than we might imagine.

At the end of last year, I spent two hours with Nicola Gratteri, the magistrate who has led the “Rinascita Scott” investigation, which involved raking through 24,000 wiretaps and months of surveillance footage. Inside his office fortress in Catanzaro, he repeatedly told me how far removed Italian mafias are from stereotypes. The proceeds of criminality, he said, are far more likely to be invested in international stock-markets than in seedy clubs. It’s a similar message offered by the National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor, Federico Cafiero de Raho, who last October warned that “the mafia’s strategy at present is focused more than ever on loans to, and acquisitions and infiltrations of, companies”.

The reason for this is simple: Italy’s mafias — Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples and Campania, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia and the biggest, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria — are now so rich that they make money out of money itself. Figures purporting to show their worth are always controversial — it’s not like they file a statement of accounts — but estimates suggest that the ‘Ndrangheta alone enjoys a turnover of between €36-€55 billion per annum, the equivalent of roughly 3% of the country’s entire GDP. In the space of a century, mob bosses have gone from being agricultural gangmasters to sophisticated investors and fund managers. Rather than stalk the streets, today their sons typically graduate in business studies and, often, in chemistry.

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But what has changed organised crime more than anything in the last year is, of course, Covid-19. Today, mafias are in effect multinational empires, and, like every international organisation, have been hit by travel restrictions and lockdowns. Drug-routes have been disrupted, people trafficking channels have narrowed, closed stadia have put paid to ticket-touting and their restaurants – those constant, small earners and useful cash laundromats – have no diners.

Yet even so, national crises have always offered opportunities for organised crime. Whenever the Italian state appears flat-footed or absent — earthquake reconstruction is a common example — their “operational flexibility”, to borrow a phrase from a recent UN Office on Drugs and Crime report, allows mafias to fill the void. In particular, the pandemic has provided organised crime with something even more important than money: a chance to cement territorial control. For example, with many Italian families now struggling to make ends meet, a number of mafiosi have taken to showily distributing food packages. Last spring, the brother of a Cosa Nostra boss in Palermo was seen distributing packets of pasta. The Camorra, meanwhile, went one step further and suspended collections of the pizzo (protection money) and started distributing sugar, coffee and pasta instead. It’s an ancient strategy, not dissimilar to Al Capone opening a foodbank in Chicago in 1930, though the Italian Internal Ministry only recently came up with a term for it: “mafia welfare”.

And this “welfare” serves an important purpose. As Oxford criminologist Professor Federico Varese wrote in Il Regno last autumn: “These episodes remind us that some criminal groups are looking for a precious and intangible commodity: the legitimacy that is based on social consensus.” So the gangs’ largesse isn’t altruistic. It’s a rhetorical pose which says that “we are more generous and better organised than the mighty state”.

In the recently-published COVID-19, Gangs, and Conflict, Steven Dudley wrote that the current situation perfectly suits this aspiration to territorial control: “life during and immediately following the pandemic promises to be hyper-local, as does this criminal governance”, giving gangs “both a physical and metaphysical presence”. It’s a presence which is also online, with some mobsters now using social media accounts to reinforce their reputations. Organised crime obviously uses some very lethal sticks, but this pandemic has been a rare chance to dangle a few carrots too.

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Still, anyone who has taken a nibble will have been noted. Their gratitude will be weighed and tested. If you accept a favour, you’ll be asked for one in return. That might be an order to vote for the correct candidate in an upcoming election, conceal a package or even a person, host a meeting or just lend a phone – a small act to show the generous donor whose side you’re on.

Crucially, day-to-day mafia business during the pandemic has extended well beyond food hand-outs. For right now, what both Italian businesses and impoverished families need more than anything else is the one thing of which organised crime is king: liquidity. Poverty figures in Italy are repetitively alarming. Recent official figures show that 7.7% of Italians are living in “absolute poverty” with another 14.7% in “relative poverty”. Moreover, the black economy is such a large part of Italian GDP – roughly 12% – that huge numbers of almost-honest workers have no hope of a social security safety net. Against this grim economic crisis, many are turning to loan-sharks as a last resort.

In every town and suburb here in Italy, everyone knows which bars you should visit to be introduced to a broker who can provide a large and immediate loan. Usury, or loan-sharking, is a crime which is always reported well after it happens, if at all, but 2020 saw a recorded increase of between 6.5% and 10%, according to which sources you read. Unofficial figures are far higher: the founder of an anti-usury hotline, SOS Italia Libera, tells me that he believes (from the volume of calls to his hotline) that usury has probably increased by 50-60%. It’s a crime, it must be said, which is greatly increasing in areas not traditionally associated with the mafia: in places like Emilia-Romagna in the north, where I live. In this formerly affluent, industrialised region, businessman Stefano Maioli recently took out a €7,200 bridging loan from cash-in-hand criminals. He repaid €10,000 a few months later, but as much as a loan, it was a bet: “I was risking everything”, he said afterwards.

Because in the end, the aim of loan sharks — called “strozzini” in Italy, from “to strangle” — isn’t just huge returns. (The annual rate is 200-250%.) It is the opportunity to slither inside a company if the debtor can’t repay. When that happens, businesses become puppets: employing who they’re told to, storing unregistered merchandise, running cash investments through the books and so on. The effectiveness of that strategy can be seen in research showing that 43,688 Italian companies changed hands between April and September 2020: not all, of course, fell into criminal ownership, but the number of new owners choosing anonymity through offshore solutions and opaque trusts was ten times the national average, suggesting strongly that many did.

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By Douglas Murray

Another indicator of rising mafia infiltration into Italian businesses is the recent increase in prefectures introducing “interdittive” which preclude companies from, among other things, bidding for public contracts. In the first nine months of 2020, Emilia-Romagna saw an 89% increase in these preventative measures, while in Tuscany there was a 150% rise. But the Italian government is still faced with a strategic conundrum. If its own coronavirus subsidies and loans don’t rival those of the mafias, people and businesses will seek support from the underworld; yet when it does offer financial support to struggling businesses and traders, those funds are frequently intercepted.

Yet Government expenditure has obviously rocketed during the pandemic, with investment particularly assiduous in a sector where the mafias are deeply embedded: health. Sometimes the criminals’ slide into health provision is very low-level, like the Camorrista with a car-wash who suddenly, last spring, muscled in on the huge sanitisation market, earning €1.50 for every square metre of floor space he disinfected. Specialist waste disposal is another speciality of organised crime, and demand for such services is on the increase as masks, gloves and medical PPE require removal or sterilisation. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, where new pharmaceutical contracts are huge and rushed, recent audits are not reassuring: there have been over 61,000 local, regional and national tenders related to the current emergency, of which ANAC (Italy’s national, anti-corruption agency) analysed a sample of 311 worth €301 million and found issues and anomalies in a fifth.

And perhaps the biggest injection of cash in living memory is just around the corner. As one of the most-indebted EU nations, Italy is due to soon receive €209 billion from the EU’s Recovery Fund. In the past, the ‘Ndrangheta has proved itself exemplary at cultivating friendships at the highest level of national and international government to siphon off such funds. And so it’s seen by many in Italy as almost inevitable that a large percentage of the Recovery Fund will be captured by organised crime.

What this week’s trial is likely to reveal, however, isn’t only that the Italian mafias continue to thrive, but that international efforts outside Italy to stop them are in woeful shape. Italy has a serious mafia problem, but it does at least have some rigorous laws and dedicated agencies. Gratteri’s constant lament is that the UK and other European countries are now the favoured investment destinations for Italian organised crime, and that this threat simply isn’t being acknowledged, despite many of those accused in today’s trial having been arrested in Germany, Bulgaria and Switzerland.

The problem arises, in part, because of all those tropes we have in our heads: we expect the mafias’ presence to imply bullets and blood, rather than money-laundering and investment irregularities. But that’s where organised crime is now most active, especially since — thanks to the pandemic — the taps of state intervention are about to be turned on full. It’s what one magistrate has called the “transparent mafia”: it’s so clean that, unless you look closely, you won’t even notice it’s there.