With his shrewd eyes, flowing white hair, untucked black shirt, and black pants, Ciotti could have been a theatre director waiting for his lead to show up.
Rather, he was a priest.
He chatted with three bodyguards, who stood just behind him, their eyes fixed on the road.
Finally, a Fiat 500 approached. As soon as the car cleared the gates, the security detail slammed them shut. In the back of the vehicle was a young woman in a pink Converse sweatshirt and leopard-print leggings. On her lap sat a small boy with a pacifier. A teen-age girl was next to them.
Ciotti opened the car door and said, in Italian, “Welcome! Are you tired? How was the trip?”
All three were exhausted, and got out cautiously. Ciotti declared that it was a joy to see them. The boy began crying, and Ciotti promised him un ottimo dolce—a wonderful pastry—if he’d follow him inside. The mother echoed the promise, and the boy consented.
The building was the headquarters of Gruppo Abele, a social-services organization that Ciotti founded in 1965. We sat around a dining-room table with a chintz tablecloth. Coffee, a hazelnut tart, and cheese awaited us. The girl spoke of liking sweets. “You should become a cake-maker!” Ciotti told her. He was getting her started on imagining a new life.
The girl’s mother, L., was the wife of a mobster in the Camorra—Italy’s oldest organized-crime group, which is based in the area around Naples. Now thirty-one, she had met her husband when she was fourteen, and gave birth to their daughter at fifteen. After that, he grew violent with L., once beating her so badly that she couldn’t leave their house for a month. He controlled what she ate, what she did, and whom she saw. (L. was not from a Mafia family and had expected to lead a normal, modern life.) Roughly two months before L.’s arrival in Turin, while her husband was in jail on a charge of Mafia association, she fled her home with her children to a casa rifugio—a nonprofit shelter for abuse victims and their families. She abandoned all her belongings and locked her phone in a strongbox, afraid that her husband or his allies could use it to track her. The casa rifugio was set up to keep women safe from violent spouses, not to protect them from hit men. L.’s situation was considered so dangerous that she wasn’t allowed to even enter the back yard; her older child couldn’t attend school.
In desperation, a woman at the facility reached out to Ciotti, who has become famous in Italy as the priest who helps women escape from the Mafia. In Ciotti’s view, the Italian government doesn’t do enough to protect women like L. Men in the Mob generally insure that they discuss their illegal business activities out of earshot of their families, so women such as L. have often never been direct witnesses to crimes—making them ineligible for the country’s witness-protection program. Because they cannot help the state, the state won’t help them. Yet L. was in imminent peril. Mafia wives who leave their families are considered traitors, and some are assassinated. In 2011, Maria Concetta Cacciola, a thirteen-year-old whose parents were involved with the ’Ndrangheta, was married off to an associate. She eventually fled Calabria for northern Italy, leaving behind her three children. Cacciola’s mother lured her home, using her kids as bait. Less than two weeks later, Cacciola’s parents called her to the basement, where there was a container of acid. Most likely, she was forced to drink it—one of the Mafia’s punishments for being a snitch. Cacciola was pronounced dead at a hospital; her father told the police that she had died by suicide.
To help such women, Ciotti, who is seventy-nine, has spent the past twenty years creating an informal network of safe houses, burner phones, and coöperative policemen. When he needs an officer or a government official to facilitate someone’s flight, he often makes the request in person, thus avoiding any phone logs or digital traces. “You have to be smart,” he told me. “Any small mistake is enough to get people in trouble.”
In addition to Gruppo Abele, Ciotti runs a nonprofit network called Libera. Its primary role is encouraging Italians to oppose the organized-crime groups that originated in the south of the country, principally the Cosa Nostra, in Sicily; the ’Ndrangheta, in Calabria; and the Camorra. It presses politicians to pass stronger laws against organized crime, and runs a group of agribusinesses on land seized from the Mafia by the government. At these sites, Libera hosts summer camps where teen-agers learn about the harm done by crime syndicates. Libera has fifty employees and some ten thousand volunteers; just a handful of people are involved in its sensitive rescue operation, and Ciotti has previously discussed it only glancingly with the press.
For many years, Ciotti has worked closely with Vincenza Rando, an anti-Mafia lawyer based in Modena. Rando was in Turin the day I was there, and she joined us at the dining table, wearing a cheery pink sweater. She had brought a carful of toys for L.’s son, to smooth his transition. As a lawyer who deals with Mafia trials for a living, she knows how to be cold-blooded, but she was empathetic with L., reminding her, “Now you can fall in love again.” Rando explained later that she and Ciotti had decided they had only a week to install L. and her children in a secret location. The husband had just filed a lawsuit against L. from prison, for taking his children without his permission, and was trying to terminate her parental rights. “This suggests she’s on his mind,” Ciotti told me. “If they find her, they will kill her.” He added that the husband was now being investigated on a murder charge.
Ciotti and Rando wanted to move L. and her family into the ground floor of a safe house in northern Italy. For the past few days, a dozen volunteers had been sprucing up the place, renovating the kitchen and repainting the walls with bright colors. L. and her family, Ciotti told me, would “have to heal in here.” He touched his heart. L. would be given a food supply that could last for several weeks—that way, they would not have to go outside until they felt comfortable.
A friendly family from southern Italy with a small child was already living upstairs in the house. (They would not be made aware of L.’s past.) Ciotti thought that it was unwise to stick a Mob family somewhere alone in the chilly north. “They need their culture,” he said. At the same time, he admitted, his job was to sever them from that culture—to furnish them with new names and new histories that would make their pasts untraceable and shield them from curious locals and Italy’s ubiquitous bureaucrats.
At the dining table in Turin, L. seemed bemused by all the attention, and said little. She mostly tried to care for her children. At one point, her son grabbed a focaccia and hit her in the face with it; she gently took it away. She did say that being the wife of a Camorrista was not as glamorous as many people imagined it to be. She noted, “I’ve never even been to the most famous piazza in my city.” Rando promised to dress her in a disguise and take her there. L. showed everyone her wrist—it was tattooed with her husband’s name. That would have to be removed, Ciotti and Rando agreed. What about the names of her children, which were imprinted on her shoulder? L. could keep those, she was told, even though the tattoos might provoke questions once the children had different names. “She has been through enough,” Ciotti explained to me.
In a corridor, Ciotti and the boy started playing soccer with a balled-up napkin—the boy had a lot of pent-up energy, but it wasn’t safe to play outside. The priest returned to the table with a flushed face. He has been undergoing treatment for a severe illness for a decade. He used WhatsApp to let L. watch a live video of volunteers sweeping and painting her new house. “At five-thirty this afternoon, this will be yours,” he said.
Ciotti was born to a bricklayer and a stay-at-home mother in 1945, in the Belluno province, in a valley in the Dolomites. Italy was economically devastated after the Second World War, and Belluno was poorer than most places in the north. When Ciotti was young, his family moved west to Turin, the embodiment of Italian affluence and sophistication, and his father found work in construction. Ciotti doesn’t remember much kindness toward his family growing up. His intolerance of injustice showed itself early. In first grade, when a teacher called him a hick, Ciotti threw an inkwell at her.
Ciotti began training to become a radio technician. Every day after school, he came across a homeless man who was underlining passages in a book with an elegant red/blue editing pencil. The man told Ciotti that he was a disgraced doctor. He’d performed a procedure on a friend’s wife while inebriated, and she had died. Ciotti offered to help him. “I’m old and don’t need anything,” the man told him, then pointed at some street kids nearby who were using drugs and alcohol. “Do something for them if you can.”
Ciotti took the advice. Instead of becoming a radio technician, he started working with charities that assisted people living on the streets. In 1965, with funds he’d received from a local priest, he opened the organization that came to be known as Gruppo Abele, in honor of the Biblical Abel—he would be his brother’s keeper. In the early seventies, when addicts were viewed as criminals or morally deficient, Gruppo Abele became a nonjudgmental refuge for homeless people and juvenile offenders. Anyone could come in for a hot meal and a place to sleep.
During these years, the Catholic Church’s social conscience was on the rise. A movement of clergy calling themselves Azione Cattolica gained prominence. Its doctrine held that priests had a responsibility not just to prepare souls for the afterlife but also to fight for the rights of the poor and the oppressed. The movement’s message appealed to Ciotti, and, in 1963, he decided to enter the seminary. “I had a girlfriend, not a very serious one,” he said to me. “But I told her, ‘Look, I have to see if this is my calling.’ ” He recounted, “During the day, I dedicated myself to my studies.” At night, he rode a motorcycle around Turin, offering aid to strangers.
In 1972, at the age of twenty-seven, Ciotti was ordained by Michele Pellegrino, a left-wing cardinal. He was assigned to the Archdiocese of Turin, where Pellegrino allowed him to continue working as a street priest instead of having him head a parish where he would have to focus on christenings, marriages, and funerals. Ciotti summarized his theology to me by quoting his friend Tonino Bello, the Bishop of Molfetta: “I don’t care who God is. It’s enough for me to know what He stands for.” When other priests criticized his social activism, Ciotti remembered, Cardinal Pellegrino told them to “come back when they’d done something to help people.” Ciotti celebrated one of his first Masses at Le Nuove, a historic prison. When it got cold in Turin, he sometimes slept alongside homeless people and drug users who sneaked inside trains that were parked overnight at the Porta Nuova station, and offered them a sympathetic ear. In the late eighties, after aids hit Europe, Ciotti provided free assistance to the sick. His politics were progressive and not always in line with the Church’s—among other things, he supported distributing free condoms, including to addicts. He is vocal in his support of gay and trans rights.
In Ciotti’s memoir, “L’Amore Non Basta” (“Love Is Not Enough”), from 2020, he writes that he became known in Turin for offering sex workers a safe haven at Gruppo Abele. He was more interested in aiding victims than in punishing criminals, but his work inevitably drew him into the orbit of drug traffickers, pimps, and others who lived outside the law, and he received many threats. When he was forty-three and visiting his parents for an Easter meal, two men lurked on a landing outside their apartment. A watchful neighbor screamed, and the men ran off—all Ciotti saw was their shadows. At about this time, Ciotti agreed to let the Turin police follow him around town. As the threats grew more intense, Ciotti recalled, an officer told him, “We don’t think you should keep using your car. You should travel in ours.”
Italian organized-crime groups were not significantly affected by Ciotti’s efforts in these early years. He was an irritant only in Turin, far from the southern regions, where their power was centered. Besides, he was a priest, and the Mafia claimed not to kill priests. But in 1992, when Ciotti was forty-seven, the Cosa Nostra shocked Italians by using bombs to assassinate the most important anti-Mafia prosecutor in Sicily, Giovanni Falcone, and his lieutenant, Paolo Borsellino. Shortly afterward, an anti-Mafia priest in Sicily, Don Pino Puglisi, and a priest outside Naples who opposed the Camorra, Don Peppe Diana, were also killed. For two centuries, the Mafia had been a parasite in Italy; now it was threatening to destroy its host. Ciotti, who knew three of the victims, was appalled not just by the murders but by their savagery—eight bodyguards also died in the attacks, as did Falcone’s wife. He decided to add fighting the Mafia to his life’s mission.
In 1993, Ciotti launched Narcomafie, an anti-Mafia magazine, and its unsparing reporting on such vicious crimes as the assassination of Borsellino made it harder for Italians to view people in the Mafia as romantic antiheroes. A year later, Ciotti founded Libera, and soon became the champion of a proposed law that would allow the government to give nonprofits land that had been seized from organized-crime groups. The bill passed in 1996. “We gathered a million signatures for it,” Ciotti told me. Previously, people were too afraid of reprisal to develop property formerly owned by the Mob. Now the confiscated land became agribusinesses and educational projects for teen-agers. The Mafia, Ciotti understood, would hate the idea of young Italians gathering on seized farmland to discuss how they could rid the country of organized crime, as if it were some sort of mid-tier social problem, like pesticide runoff or drunk driving. The law cunningly reframed Italy’s fight against the Mafia: taking away their land domesticated them, shattering the mystique that had allowed them to maintain control.
Ciotti was also instrumental in passing a law to establish March 21st as a day of remembrance for innocent victims of Mafia violence—now estimated at more than a thousand people. For the first time, families of victims could receive public consolation for their loss, rather than feel frightened and isolated. The day has become an eventful one in Italy, with commemorations, marches, and speeches. Every year on the holiday, Ciotti hosts a prayer vigil for family members of organized-crime victims. In 2014, at the Church of St. Gregorio VII, in Rome, Pope Francis joined Ciotti to bless the families. An image of Ciotti and the Pope walking into the church while grasping each other’s hands—allies in battle—was broadcast around the world. A newspaper in Bergamo praised the “delicate, disarming gesture.”
Libera’s actions may be largely symbolic—the ’Ndrangheta alone makes an estimated fifty billion dollars each year, and Ciotti’s group has done little to change that. But he believes that the Mafia’s status in Italy depends on a fragile mixture of inevitability, invisibility, and apathy on the part of some Italians. A small crack might cause a bigger rupture, he told me. The key to breaking the Mafia in Italy, he added, was to convince Italians that it could be beaten, and that it was not an inextricable part of their society. He uses the word mafiosità to describe the attitude of Italians who adopt the unscrupulous behavior of mobsters.
Ciotti’s campaigns—from the exposés of Narcomafie to the lobbying by Libera—turned him into a household name in Italy, and they have also infuriated the Mafia. In 1993, Salvatore (Totò) Riina, then the chief Mafia don, who had ordered the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, was convicted of murder and Mafia association and was sent to a maximum-security prison. While incarcerated, Riina was secretly taped giving a confederate some orders regarding Ciotti: “You’re going to get out, and I’m not. When you’re out, I want you to kill this son of a bitch.”
In 2018, on the final day of an anti-Mafia conference in Calabria, a man with a hidden weapon sneaked past a barricade and into a conference hall where Ciotti was speaking. Ciotti’s security detail spotted the man moving through the crowd toward him, and wrestled the man to the ground just twenty feet from where the priest was standing. Within minutes, a helicopter had spirited Ciotti away.
The state now provides Ciotti with five bodyguards and an armored car; whenever he travels to a new place, the local police sweep the area. Ciotti calls his security team “a deterrent” to assassination but said that the Mob could still kill him if it really wanted to. (Riina, who died in 2017, once said, with grudging admiration, that Ciotti was so relentless that he should have been a police commissioner, not a priest.)
Ciotti told me, “My protective detail is now part of my house. They’re part of my family.” He has officiated at marriages and christenings not just of members of his detail but of their parents and children.
One night, in the summer of 2021, I met Ciotti at a restaurant in Rome, in the working-class neighborhood of Ostiense. He travels almost every day—giving presentations; meeting with lawyers, prosecutors, magistrates, police, and other priests; supporting the workers and volunteers under the Libera umbrella. The restaurant was crowded and loud, but, for security reasons, Ciotti and an assistant were in an empty room in the back. At a table near them, five burly men with soft stomachs—Ciotti’s security guards—were quietly enjoying a meal and watching a soccer match on TV. Their guns were out of sight.
Ciotti speaks only Italian. He is lithe, and his skin is pink and mottled. That evening, he was wearing what I came to recognize as his usual priestly ensemble: a long-sleeved dark-blue knit shirt, black trousers, black lace-ups. (He doesn’t like to wear a clerical collar outside church; “I just feel more at ease in other clothes,” he told me.) With his light eyes, strong nose, and long bangs swept across his forehead, he could be mistaken for Liam Neeson—if Neeson never slept in the same place two nights in a row.
Ciotti may live on the run, but that does not wall him off from the joys of ordinary experiences. He enjoys good restaurants, supports the Turin-based soccer team Juventus, and is able to discuss brutal crimes while savoring a vitello tonnato. His frantic travel schedule clearly suits him. He told me that he had visited the U.S. several times. (Once, in New York, he was repeatedly recognized by Italian tourists while he roamed around moma.)
Ciotti ordered one of his favorite dishes, carciofi alla giudia—deep-fried artichokes—and a glass of the house white. As we ate, I asked him what had motivated his anti-Mafia work. He said that it was part of a lifelong attempt to grant dignity to the powerless. “My two points of reference, as a man and a Christian—as a person—are the Gospels and the Italian constitution,” he explained. He added that, wherever he goes in Italy, he tries to do two things: meet with the families of Mob victims, and recite Mass with a priest at a local church. “There isn’t a province in Italy I haven’t celebrated Mass in,” he told me.
I asked Ciotti how many people had made use of his escape operation, and he said about forty, nearly all of them women; another two hundred or so women and children had come to Libera and been placed in safe houses, through the judicial system. “The numbers are growing, because they see that there’s someone to give a hand,” Ciotti said. When I asked why women were likelier than men to make use of Libera’s services, he gave an old-school answer: “Women are the generators of life. They have an extra gear where this is concerned.” He added, “In the town squares of the world, it’s the women who battle for liberty.” He talked forcefully, making chopping gestures with his hands, and it wasn’t hard to imagine him behind a pulpit, delivering impassioned sermons.
Ciotti noted that he has been proselytizing in southern Italy for a very long time. Sometimes, he explained, “I run into Mafia wives who tell me they remember seeing me lecture against organized crime when they were in grade school.”
In Italy, it is extremely hard to disappear. Every citizen, at the age of five, is given an identity card. The carta d’identità guarantees health care and social services, but in return the state can send police officers to citizens’ homes to verify that people live where they say. If you move, you generally must report your new address within twenty days. Businesses in Italy can’t legally sell anything without giving a receipt. Typically, nine signatures are required to open a bank account and fourteen to close one. Through the medical system, the state can access your health history.
But in other areas of its citizens’ lives the Italian state is curiously feckless. In 2019, the value of underground and illicit activity was eleven per cent of the country’s G.D.P. (In a confidential 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks, a U.S. official characterized Calabria as “a failed state.”) And Italy’s witness-protection program is both narrow and cumbersome. There is no governmental organization tasked with protecting someone who is seriously threatened by anyone outside the small group who can testify at a trial. The state has essentially outsourced this work to Ciotti and Libera. Anna Sergi, a professor of criminology at the University of Essex and an expert on the ’Ndrangheta, told me, “Libera is an aspiration that is completely organized around Luigi’s ideas.” Roberto Di Bella, a magistrate in juvenile court who is often the first point of contact for women and children who want to leave the Mob, acknowledged, via text, “Many women who have requested help have done so after hearing him speak.”
Halfway through my dinner with Ciotti in Rome, his cell phone rang. He looked at the caller I.D. and answered it. I noticed that he covered his mouth with his hand, to prevent lipreading. After hanging up, he told me that the call was from the girlfriend of a young man who was the son of an ’Ndrangheta member. The boyfriend, whom Ciotti called un bravo ragazzo—“a good boy”—had gone to the police several weeks earlier and agreed to testify against his father, who was involved in drug trafficking. A prosecutor who knew Ciotti had interviewed the boyfriend, who had asked for the state to hide him and his girlfriend, to keep them safe from reprisals. The prosecutor contacted Ciotti and said, “We don’t have enough yet to get state protection. As always, I’m counting on you.”
Ciotti found the couple a safe house within a few hours, but there was a special complication: the girlfriend was about to give birth, and wanted to be in a hospital for the delivery. The Mob is “looking for them everywhere,” Ciotti told me. “If they catch them, they’ll massacre them.” He made arrangements for the woman to be admitted to a hospital anonymously.
The girlfriend had called Ciotti to say that she had just gone into labor. He had reassured her that the doctors and Libera would protect her and her baby. We finished dinner with sorbet. I asked Ciotti where he was sleeping that night. He told me that his security detail would decide. “If you get into a routine, that’s when it’s dangerous,” he said.
The next day, I met with Ciotti on the Via Giosuè Carducci, in the nineteenth-century part of Rome, where he was conferring with General Antonio Marzo, who was part of the Carabinieri’s anti-Mafia squad. They discussed a key item on Ciotti’s agenda: a law that would make it easier for Italians to legally change their names. Current law stipulates that when a change is made both your new and your old names must be posted in front of the city hall closest to where you were born—rendering the process useless for those fleeing the Mob. Ciotti told Marzo that, if the regulation was revised, “there would finally be an opening” for people in this predicament. Proponents of the law nearly had the votes they needed to secure passage. The general offered his support, and they had photographs taken with each other. Afterward, Ciotti called the woman who’d gone into labor. She had safely delivered her baby. He told me the infant’s name, but asked me to keep it to myself.
After the meeting, we flew to Sicily, the power center of the Cosa Nostra. On the way in from the Palermo airport, we saw a big, hand-painted sign on Mt. Pellegrino: “NO MAFIA.” In town, we had coffee in a central piazza where a shop run by Libera sells pasta and other food from its agricultural holdings, along with buttons and T-shirts. We then drove south to a Libera agritourism hotel in Piana degli Albanesi, a gorgeous village surrounded by mountains. The land had been seized from the Mafia and handed over to Ciotti’s group in the late nineties.
In Libera’s early days, Ciotti told me, locals were reluctant to work on confiscated land, and the Mafia sometimes sent arsonists into fields to burn crops. Once, mobsters let sheep loose to eat chickpea seedlings planted by Libera; the following morning, they collected the herd. But the Mafia has eased up on its opposition to the government’s policy, and these days it mostly leaves the agribusiness coöperatives alone. Many Sicilians are now eager to work at such places, which pay relatively well. We had lunch at the hotel’s restaurant, and I sat next to a man named Vincenzo Agostino, who often participated in Libera activities. He told me that his son, an undercover police officer, had been killed because he had investigated an earlier attempt to assassinate Falcone. Agostino had a white beard down to his chest, and said that he wouldn’t cut it off until the people who had murdered his son were convicted. (This past April, Agostino died. He had not shaved in thirty-four years.)
The room was filled with young volunteers, who were helping with the farmwork and running the restaurant. Ciotti gave a speech in which he said that, when young Italians come together and reject a culture of crime, “this is the sharpest slap in the face citizens can give the Mafia.”
After the meal, I noted how peaceful the area seemed, and Ciotti urged me not to be fooled by appearances. The Cosa Nostra had learned a lesson from the excesses of the Totò Riina years and now operated more subtly. Spectacular assassinations were out of fashion, but the enterprises that the Mafia profited from—illegal drugs, shakedowns of legitimate businesses—continued to prosper. Ciotti worried that Italians would think that the problem of organized crime had been resolved because of this apparent “normalization—less blood, less death, fewer massacres.”
From Piana degli Albanesi, we drove along unmarked roads through a landscape of olive trees and palms to a farmhouse outside the village of San Giuseppe Jato. In the nineties, a boy named Giuseppe Di Matteo was held by a Mafia capo there and tortured for nearly two years, because the boy’s father—a mobster turned informant—was set to testify against his fellow gang members. In January, 1996, the boy was strangled, and his body was dissolved in acid. The murder of Piccolo Giuseppe, as he is known in Italy, alerted the public that the Mafia no longer spared women and children. Thanks to Ciotti, the farmhouse has become part of a memorial garden. The village built an outdoor amphitheatre, set up a classroom area, and designed an informative exhibit about the case, and about other children murdered by the Mafia.
The next day, we returned to Turin. At Gruppo Abele, Ciotti updated me on the couple with the new baby. He recalled that they had fled in a car that was easy to track, so he had worked to get them another one quickly. He had reached out to a friend, the sister of one of Falcone’s slain bodyguards, who ran a used-car dealership in Puglia. The woman sold Libera her own car for less than a thousand euros. “Save their lives,” she’d urged Ciotti. The car had been shipped to Turin that day. I asked him what had become of the couple’s old car. “It’s disappeared,” he said. “And we’ll destroy it.” When I said that he was the first priest I’d met who knew how to get rid of a car, he smiled.
I asked Ciotti who the first person he’d hidden from the Mob was, and he told me the story of a woman named F., who had escaped in 1994. Born into an important ’Ndrangheta family—her father was a capo—F. got married at nineteen and had two children. After F. learned that a rival clan had put out a contract on her brother, she intervened and warned the hit man that she knew who he was (and could therefore tell the police, if necessary). Her brother, rather than being grateful, was furious: such conflicts were to be handled only by men. He threatened her with a gun, and she fled.
F. reached out to the head of her clan, hoping to be forgiven. He told her to meet with him in the town square. When she arrived there, the piazza, normally bustling with pedestrians and Vespas, was eerily empty. Then F. saw people who lived on the square shutting their windows. Terrified, she called a policeman she knew from school. He raced to the square and drove her to the state police barracks in a nearby city.
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.
Ciotti didn’t have time to worry about dying. “You have one life,” he said. “Find your calling, live your life—and basta.” Not that he was without regrets. He sometimes thought about what it would have been like to have a family; he spoke of “the marvellous, unique generative force women have.” He added, “Such choices can cost you. But I’ve been repaid by the pleasure of spending a big part of my life giving a hand to so many women, so many young women.”
Vincenza Rando, his lawyer colleague at Libera, had just been elected a federal senator, and this would be a help with the name-change bill. But there was a whole new set of ministers to contend with, a setback that Ciotti was familiar with. (Italy has had sixty-eight governments since the end of the Second World War.) The fact that Italy’s new government was right-wing could cause difficulties—the name-change bill could be portrayed as feminist legislation—but he did not say so explicitly.
Meanwhile, the women and children Ciotti had brought north remained in need. They were his parish now. F., who had married the oculist, often expressed frustration with her life in hiding. “Let God’s will be done,” she once told me. “I’m tired of the lying and the escaping. If God decides they should find me and kill me, then let it be.” Whenever F. saw on her cell phone that Ciotti was calling, she wondered if he was about to announce that her cover had been blown. She needed frequent emotional support, and was grateful that Ciotti kept in touch. Last October, Ciotti took her to meet the Pope. “It was beautiful,” she said.
C. was feeling a bit more optimistic. She was excited that her oldest daughter was enrolling in a university. Ciotti had gone to speak to the school’s rector, to explain why the girl’s real name could not be used. I asked him why he didn’t just make a phone call. “Some things you don’t do on the phone,” he said, chuckling.
I recently reached out to L.—the woman I had seen brought to safety at Gruppo Abele—via video chat. Soon after she had arrived in Turin, Ciotti had advised her, “Be prudent. But don’t be timid.” Once Libera had set her up in a home, he told her, she should explore the town and get to know her neighbors. On the call, L., who wore a black pashmina scarf over a gray sweater, looked much healthier, and she frequently smiled and laughed. But her new life remained shadowed by her old one. A few months after she’d moved, a letter from her husband arrived. (According to government intercepts, L. told me, someone in the police had tipped off her husband.) She and her children had to be moved quickly—all those upgrades to their home had been a waste. They were put up in another house, but her husband soon let her know that, yet again, he was aware of her location. Officials in Naples told Ciotti that more had to be done to protect L.
To escort the family to safety, Ciotti put them in an ambulance that Libera sometimes used. “No one looks inside an ambulance,” he told me. L. still didn’t feel out of danger, though. Too many staffers at Libera knew about her situation, and people could be corrupted or pressured. You could never be sure that you had outsmarted the Camorra—widely considered the most violent of the three main Mafias. L. said, “Ciotti answered me, with great humility, that they were figuring this out alongside me. That we were learning together how to deal with this situation.” She added, “To talk about errors or sloppiness wouldn’t be fair, because I’ve seen the work, the humanity, the caring for me, my story, and my children.”
L. and her kids were placed in a locale that not even Ciotti had visited—an anonymous condominium in a midsize city. In the meantime, the police raided the husband’s jail cell, seized a cell phone, and placed him in indefinite solitary confinement. Italy’s solitary-confinement policy—a regulation called carcere duro, or hard prison—is controversial in northern Europe, where it is seen as an example of southern barbarity. But Ciotti believes that carcere duro is a necessity if the Mob is ever to be broken. Otherwise, mobsters can run their business empires from inside prisons—including assassination plots.
Now that L.’s husband was in solitary, she and her kids could breathe a bit easier. The cover story that L. tells locals is that she and her husband are separated. (She still wears a band on her ring finger.) Libera pays the family’s daily expenses, as L.’s situation remains too fraught for her to work; her daughter goes to school and is making friends. “My daughter has a strong personality,” L. said. “She tells her friends to go fuck themselves and stop asking questions. I’m more polite.” Her little boy tells classmates, “I have no father.” He is getting counselling. “He has a lot of anger,” Ciotti told me.
L. worries that she will live to see her children become adults only if the name-change law is passed. “I have always said that I signed my death warrant,” she told me. “I know this man.” She doesn’t fear death so much as the torture that her husband would inflict on her first. She has told Ciotti, “Whatever happens, save my children, because if I die I don’t want to die in vain.”
Since I met L., numerous other fugitives had found their way to Libera’s underground railroad. One day in Ciotti’s office, he pulled out a stapled list marked “For your eyes only.” “It’s been a good time,” he said. “We are starting to get whole families who want to come north.”
Looking at his list, Ciotti described some people Libera had recently assisted. Many were minors, particularly young women who did not want their families to marry them off to a Mafia associate. Local magistrates who referred such women to Libera had the difficult job of assessing whether they really opposed the Mob or were just trying to get out of an unwanted relationship (or criminal charges). “I believe this woman is sincere, and has the potential for reform,” one magistrate had written to Ciotti. If such language is oddly moralizing, Ciotti goes even further, often describing applicants in a quasi-religious tone. He speaks of “rebirths” and says that it’s important for victims to feel that their suffering has meaning. Such language, critics have pointed out, unintentionally reinforces the power of the Mafia. Anna Sergi, the University of Essex criminologist, who generally admires Libera’s work, explained to me, “It kind of pushes away and elevates the victims of the Mafia, as if they were taking some sort of religious stand. That is not beneficial in the long term to fighting the Mafia.”
Some of the people Ciotti had helped eventually headed back south, to resume their old lives. Abandoning your culture, even a criminal one, is difficult. One young woman had told Libera that she wanted to study music, so Ciotti and his team had bought her a violin and paid for lessons. But she missed home and returned, even if it meant that she might end up a Mob wife.
Ciotti was particularly haunted by one fallimento, or failure. He leafed through the list until he came to the case of a man named Rocco Molè, whose family was in the ’Ndrangheta. According to Ciotti, around 2013, when Molè was not quite eighteen, he was convicted of being involved in the family business. He asked Libera for aid, promising to go clean, and the court agreed to the arrangement. At the time, Libera had dealt almost exclusively with women and with the children of mobsters. Molè came from a famous Calabrian clan with century-old roots in the crime syndicate, and his father was also imprisoned, for multiple murders. Ciotti knew that for Molè the pull to return would be strong, especially since he was now the male head of the family. Ciotti even wondered if he might be playing a double game. “He was clever, smart, a bit of a manipulator,” Ciotti told me.
After spending time in the north under Libera’s watch—and doing well in the program—Molè eventually asked the magistrates in charge of his case if he could visit his mother, in Calabria, to help her “with the orange harvest.” Permission was granted. Not long after, Molè quit the Libera program. In March, 2020, the police arrested him after finding an enormous stash of cocaine buried on his family’s property. Ciotti told the Italian press, “He chose us, and we believed him. But he couldn’t break away from his world.” One Italian publication characterized Ciotti as amaro—bitter—but that wasn’t my impression. He seemed almost excited by how audacious a criminal Molè had become. “More than half a ton of cocaine!” he exclaimed to me.
Molè was now in a prison in Bari, and Ciotti told me that he planned to visit him when he could. “He got along well with me,” he recalled. When I asked if he would press the young man to return to Libera, he said that he planned simply to listen. “I go from the point of view that he’s just another human,” he said. “It’s what you should do.” He then said, almost sympathetically, that Molè could not resist “taking over the father’s role.”
Ciotti realizes that the Mafia and mafiosità may be unbreakable forces in Italy. Libera’s annual budget for its escape operations is a hundred thousand euros—a comically small amount compared with the Mob’s billions. Yet Libera, Ciotti told me, is itself becoming an entrenched part of Italian society. This past March, the government and Libera signed a memorandum of understanding that formalizes their partnership, though the Bishops’ Conference of Italy will continue to cover the group’s bills. Still, Libera was no longer just a charity; it was an official force.
The last time I spoke with
Ciotti, he was about to spend two days with the Pope discussing the
problem of organized crime. Rando, the Italian senator, is currently
preparing the name-change bill for parliamentary consideration, and
Ciotti thinks that it could get passed in the next few years. “I’m
convinced we can do it,” he told me. Individual disappointments like
Molè wouldn’t matter, because the path of escape would finally be
unimpeded. Women such as F., C., and L. would no longer need years of
assistance. Then, he added, “so many others can be free.”