F.
was accepted into the witness-protection program. The government put
her in a safe house, but she wasn’t allowed to have contact with anyone,
and she missed her children. When she tried to quietly begin a new
relationship—she was still in her twenties—her minders told her that,
for security reasons, her boyfriend, an oculist, could not visit her. In
frustration, she left the program. The government gave her seventy-two
thousand euros to start a new life, but, in a cruel twist, it fined her
tens of thousands of euros for unlawful offenses that she had confessed
to—such as transporting criminals in her car. She was destitute and a
marked woman, and she couldn’t even divorce her husband, because the law
required that an announcement, with her current address, be published
in her town of birth.
In 2002, F. reached
out to Ciotti, who by then was well known in Italy. They met at a bar
in Rome, and had chinotto sodas. Ciotti resettled F. and the oculist,
and even lent them money so that he could open an eyeglass store. Ciotti
also enlisted sympathetic administrators to allow F. to get a divorce
without declaring her new address, though she lost custody of her
children because she wouldn’t tell the judge where she was living. In
2009, Ciotti planned and attended the wedding of F. to the oculist.
Ciotti
asked an assistant to bring him a letter from a woman named C. As he
began telling me her story, I realized that I had briefly met her, at a
conference that Libera had organized in Rome in 2018. C., the mother of
three girls, is the daughter of an ’Ndrangheta associate. Her husband,
also in the Mob, disappeared in 2008; he left for work one day and never
returned. She went to the police station in her home town and asked to
file a missing-person report. Within hours, her family had learned of
her request, most likely through a corrupt police officer, and warned
her that the Mob didn’t get the police involved in its business. The
police never found the body of C.’s husband, but his family took care of
C. and her daughters. Still, the idea of raising her daughters alone,
and the prospect of them ending up with a life like hers, horrified her.
One
day, while buying diapers, C. ran across a pamphlet from Libera. The
store owner delicately asked if she wanted the organization’s help, and
took her to a church where the priest contacted Ciotti’s network. Later
that day, Ciotti travelled to C.’s town. Before going, he called some
local police officials he trusted, to insure that he wasn’t entering a
trap. “Verify, verify, verify,” he said. “One small mistake can get you
into big difficulties.” His police contacts confirmed that C. was
sincere, adding that she’d “always been a bit of a rebel.”
Ciotti
met with C. in a church overlooking the town’s main piazza, surrounded
by his bodyguards. When I had met C., she recalled what Ciotti had said
upon greeting her: “ ‘I don’t just want to know your history. You matter
to me—who you are. Your life.’ It was the first time
in two years anyone had asked me how I was.” At Gruppo Abele, Ciotti
told me that such empathy is essential. “The women need someone to
listen to them. They need you to have two ears and a mouth that’s shut.”
C. led him through the piazza, Ciotti remembered, to a pillar. “I think
my husband is in there,” she said, pointing. She meant that his remains might be entombed in the column.
Ciotti
pulled out a map of Italy and asked C., “Where do you want to live?”
Somewhere on the coast, she replied. He told her to gather her children
and sent her the address of a home by the water in northern Italy.
Sometime later, he drove to the new home and found her there, cooking
her children a Neapolitan favorite. “She made them meatballs, for
comfort,” he told me. “Little children can’t understand the idea of
escaping.”
The
town where C. resettled had a mayor who supported Libera’s cause. He
allowed the children to attend school under false names. Ciotti checked
in frequently with C., visiting with her in parks or along roadways. One
time, they met at Certosa, an abandoned thirteenth-century abbey west
of Turin. C. and her daughters have a modest life, he said, but C. has a
job, and they are grateful to be free of a culture of killing.
Ciotti
told me that he had first learned about Mob life—how gangsters think,
their tradecraft—from Don Italo Calabrò, a priest who had sent Mob
children into Ciotti’s care before Libera existed. Ciotti told me, “I
asked Don Italo how he had come to know what being in the ’Ndrangheta
was like. You know what he told me? From hearing women confessing.”
Ciotti has given lectures to generations of anti-Mafia investigators and
corrections officers on what he has discovered about organized
crime—such as the fact that the Mob never stops trying to recover its
women, but is primarily intent on retrieving their kids. Children are
still part of the clan; they will carry forward the business, or forge
alliances by marrying into other Mob families. These conversations have
helped Ciotti establish decades-long relationships with law enforcement.
“There are officers I met as cadets who are now generals,” he told me.
Not
long ago, I met C. again, at Rome’s main police office. She had a
gentle voice and the warmth of a kindergarten teacher. The fear of being
murdered, she admitted, was never far away. She mentioned Maria
Concetta Cacciola, the Calabrian woman whose family had forced her to
drink acid. “If I went back, that’s what would happen to me,” C. said.
We also talked about Lea Garofalo, an ’Ndrangheta mobster’s former
girlfriend, who had joined the Italian witness-protection program along
with her daughter. Garofalo felt stifled in hiding, and wanted to leave
the country. In 2009, she decided to meet with her estranged boyfriend
and ask him for money to move abroad. Before she did so, she met Ciotti
at one of his presentations. He implored her to abandon the plan.
“You’ll end up being killed,” he warned. She said that she would bring
her daughter to the meeting, because her ex wouldn’t harm her in the
girl’s presence. Garofalo ended up being taken, alone, to an apartment
in Milan, where she was strangled to death.
Ciotti
told me that he’d been one of four pallbearers at Garofalo’s funeral.
Her killers had dismembered her body and burned it. Ciotti recalled,
shuddering, “The coffin was so light.” He said that, at Libera’s urging,
Garofalo had been interred at Cimitero Monumentale, among “the
illustrious people of the city of Milan—musicians, writers, artists.” He
added, “When you see her tomb there, you understand its value.”
As
for C., Ciotti said, she was not out of danger yet. People affiliated
with the Mob regularly called his internal number at Gruppo Abele,
pretending to be telephone-company employees needing to get in touch
with C. or other women he has hidden. C. had nearly been hunted down
several times. In 2012, two years after Ciotti had resettled her, her
brother and a friend stopped by the school in her new town and demanded
to see the children. (Ciotti suspects that someone tipped off the Mob
for money.) Fortunately, the family had slept through an alarm that day.
As the mobsters headed for the children’s classrooms, the principal
called C. and told her to keep everyone at home. C. then called Ciotti,
who came immediately and transferred C.’s family to a new safe house.
Six months later, both of C.’s daughters performed well in a local
roller-skating competition. When the girls’ real names were accidentally
published online, C.’s family noticed—C. believes they had set up a
Google Alert—and searched for them at the rink where the competition had
taken place. Once more, C. and her daughters had to flee.
Eventually,
Ciotti housed C. and her family at the Gruppo Abele headquarters, and
they stayed for several years; it seemed to be the only way they could
be safe. C. worked as a volunteer. Then he settled them at an
undisclosed location. He read me a passage from the letter that C. had
written to him: “I’ve learned so much about my past life, where
everything once seemed normal, but where I tacitly consented to all the
evil around me.”
In
May, 2023, the streets of Turin were full of the bits of fluff that
float along the spring breeze in northern Italy. Fifteen months had
passed since I’d last seen Ciotti, and the previous Italian government
had fallen, frustrating his attempts to get momentum on the name-change
bill. On the positive side, Matteo Messina Denaro—the Mob boss who
succeeded Totò Riina, and who had been convicted in absentia for
kidnapping Giuseppe Di Matteo—had been arrested after being discovered
near a Palermo hospital, where he was being treated for cancer under a
false name.
Ciotti himself was contending
with more medical problems: he had just had a coronary-bypass
operation. “They opened up everything,” he said, pointing at his chest.
He’d had the procedure at a Turin hospital, with his security detail
guarding him day and night.
His doctors
had ordered him to take it easy, or at least easier, but he clearly
wasn’t listening. Ciotti was going to the Turin International Book Fair
the next day, to promote “C’è Bisogno di Te”—“We Need You”—a new
children’s book on how to live a life of purpose. After that, he had to
be in Friuli, near the Croatian border, to celebrate a local priest who
supported the anti-Mafia fight. The day after that, he was flying to
Naples, where he’d speak at a memorial for the mother of a prominent
salami manufacturer who might have been the victim of a Mob hit. From
Naples, he’d go to Castrovillari, in Calabria. There, on the site where,
in 2014, Pope Francis excommunicated all members of the Mob, Ciotti had
to do something involving a bishop. (The matter was “very delicate,”
Ciotti said, and he couldn’t discuss it further.) Before returning to
Turin, he’d take a ferry and drive to Palermo, to celebrate a Mass in
honor of the thirtieth anniversary of Don Pino Puglisi’s murder. “We’re
going to have to do all those hours in the car,” he complained. “Can you
believe it?” It was the only time I ever heard him grumble.
