On 17 June 2018, from the confines of his cell in Catanzaro Prison, Italy, Emanuele Mancuso started to write a letter. For weeks, Mancuso had been locked up, awaiting trial for masterminding a multimillion-Euro cannabis plantation in the remote Calabrian hills. Though the charges were serious, they alone weren’t enough to faze Mancuso, who at 30 years old was a lifelong member of the ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia. “I would have [likely] spent a couple of years in prison and a couple more under house arrest,” Mancuso told me recently. Light enough work for someone used to pinballing in and out of the Italian justice system since his late teens.
The ’Ndrangheta is one of the most notorious and feared mafia groups in Italy and the world. Its cells have spread from its heartland in southern Italy, from Europe to Colombia, Melbourne to Montreal. At home, the mob’s presence is felt at every level of civic life, from regional politics to refuse collection. “All formal decisions come from Calabria. The power and the orders,” Emanuele Mancuso says. Once considered the poorest and most backward of Italy’s three dominant mafias, the ’Ndrangheta is now universally acknowledged as a global behemoth, with an estimated annual turnover of £44 billion – more than McDonald’s and Deutsche Bank combined.
Emanuele was intimately familiar with the mafia’s operations, for a simple reason: it’s the family business. The Mancusos are one of the most powerful families in the ’Ndrangheta; the clan’s leader, Luigi Mancuso, is Emanuele’s uncle. Many of his siblings and cousins work for the mafia, many of them notorious criminals in their own rights. Emanuele himself had been working for the ’Ndrangheta since he was a boy. For decades, he had done the family’s bidding, committing petty crimes and more violent ones, working his way up the clan’s hierarchy, until his arrest in 2018.
But, sitting in his prison cell, something changed. His partner Nency was heavily pregnant with their first child, a baby girl. In Emanuele’s telling, the imminent arrival clarified doubts that had been growing from the moment he saw the first ultrasound. The news had triggered something in him, as if his entire past was being refocused in real time. He wanted his little girl to have a chance at a different life, one free of the violence and corruption that had marked his own since birth. And so, in the early hours of 17 June, he decided to write a letter that went against everything he’d ever known. Its contents were short, the message direct. Emanuele wanted to collaborate with the Italian state. And he was looking to start immediately.
To understand the ’Ndrangheta (the name is thought to mean “society of men of honour”), you need to talk about power. “This is not a gang and these are not your ordinary petty criminals,” Emanuele says. It’s important, he explains, to think bigger. “Social power and economic power. Criminal power. But high level and extremely sophisticated. Power that has links with the whole of Italy and Europe, as well as South America.” Enough power to corrupt and disfigure almost anything it comes up against, whether individual or institutional.
The ’Ndrangheta’s origins trace back to the mid-19th century in rural Calabria (the toe in the boot of Italy), one of the country’s poorest regions. Today, it commands a vast criminal portfolio, ranging from old-fashioned extortion to high-level corruption and weapons trafficking. It is drugs, however, that account for the majority of their staggering wealth. Specifically cocaine: 80 per cent of the European trade is thought to be controlled by a constellation of tight-knit clans across Calabria. The Mancuso clan, which rose to power in the 1970s, is known to control the province of Vibo Valentia, on Calabria’s west coast. Their power comes in part from their reputed influence over the Port of Gioia Tauro, Italy’s biggest container port and one of the key staging points for cocaine entering Europe from Latin America.
Unlike the Sicilian Cosa Nostra or the Neapolitan Camorra, blood ties are everything inside the ’Ndrangheta, which has historically made cultivating informants in their ranks a notoriously difficult feat. In 2008, figures from the Italian government suggested that just 42 ’Ndranghetisti were known to have broken omertà, the infamous vow of silence and loyalty. (For the Cosa Nostra and Camorra Pentiti, that number is estimated at more than 1,000 and 2,000 respectively.) Inside the clan, that loyalty is enforced by fear – and the promise of swift violence. The consequences of switching sides are no secret. In 2011, a young mother died in agony after allegedly being forced to drink hydrochloric acid by her ’Ndranghetisti family after she was accused of talking to police. Other suspected informants have received a bullet to the head, or simply disappeared from their homes.
To be a Mancuso is also about power – the power to dominate and control. At least, that’s the education that Emanuele received as a boy growing up in Limbadi, a small village surrounded by rolling hills and picturesque olive and citrus groves. Like much of Calabria, its economic prospects are generally dire. In 2020, unemployment across the region stood at 20 per cent. Infrastructure is poor or non-existent. For many in Limbadi, the Mancusos are the state, or at least its most visible alternative. “If you need a job, the clan finds you one in half an hour,” Emanuele explains. “The state doesn’t find you one. If your car is stolen and you go to the police, they might find it in a month or two, in the very best case scenario. With the clan, it’s a quarter of an hour. That’s the power that they have.”
In April 2018, the municipality of Limbadi was declared unfit for purpose and dissolved – not for the first time – by decree of Italy’s central government, due to mafia infiltration. This isn’t simply a Limbadi problem. As an infamous leaked 2008 cable from the US diplomatic service in Naples put it, so thoroughly had the ’Ndrangheta corrupted the civic life of its home region that “[if] it were not a part of Italy, Calabria would be a failed state”.
When I visited Calabria, last October, I stopped by the UniRiMI Rossella Casini, an anti-mafia research institute, in the heart of Limbadi. Its founder, an avuncular priest named Don Ennio Stamile, showed me around the spacious headquarters, a bright, airy building that backs onto a view of rolling green hills. The villa belonged to the Mancuso clan until it was confiscated by the state in 2018. Just inside the main doors hangs a multicoloured painting of Rossella Casini, a student at the University of Florence who was disappeared by the ’Ndrangehta in 1981, aged 24, after convincing her Calabrian boyfriend to collaborate with state officials; the institute is named in her honour.
Stamile spends much of his time here, in a town where the Mancuso family still holds deep influence. The 57-year-old refuses police protection, despite having received numerous threats over the years. Anonymous phone calls and menacing letters have become a fact of life; in 2012, he discovered a severed pig’s head outside his front door. But he has refused to be intimidated. In his words, it is everyone’s duty to resist the ’Ndrangheta. “It is people who will make a difference. Good people,” he says. “That’s why it is important to fight.”
From childhood, Emanuele knew his family was different. His father Pantaleone, a well-connected mafia boss better known by his alias “The Engineer”, spent much of Emanuele’s youth in prisons across Italy. Police would regularly raid the family home, whether Pantaleone was there or not. At school, Emanuele could feel the wariness from his classmates and teachers. Neither he nor his younger brother Giuseppe were disciplined when they misbehaved. Their fellow villagers would stay silent when they were caught throwing stones at passing cars.
What Emanuele calls “the indoctrination” started young, almost from the cradle. Being a Mancuso, particularly an eldest son, came with a series of non-negotiable values drilled in at home. Family was everything. Problems were to be settled with force, whenever threats failed. “I was taught not to trust [teachers],” Emanuele says. “You never asked for help. Institutions were the enemy.” Violence was too routine to be remarked upon. By his early teens, the suffocating pressure at home had transformed Emanuele into a troubled, rebellious boy who had already begun to chafe against his family’s expectations. It was different for his younger brother Giuseppe, a gun-loving “natural criminal” who enthusiastically bought into what Emanuele dubs “the mafia mentality”. “If he’s at ten, then I’m one”, he says about his brother. “My parents noticed this and preferred [him].” (The wider Mancuso family did not respond to requests for comment.)
Emanuele Mancuso is no stranger to violence, as he freely admits. His first arrest came at 17, after he assaulted a local Limbadi businessman who had refused an extortion attempt; the crime saw him locked up for nearly four months. Emanuele didn’t deal with incarceration well. He felt weak, he says, and vulnerable. In 2009, the then 21-year-old was sent north to Rome after whispers that police were planning to open a fresh investigation into him. The news followed on the heels of an internal conflict within the ’Ndrangheta, which had escalated into a series of tit-for-tat shootings, with his brother and uncle Luigi pitted against a group of their cousins. “Three people nearly died. To calm the situation, my father took a house and [bought] a bar [in Rome]. We all moved for two years. My whole [immediate] family.”
Rome came as a revelation to Emanuele, by then a young man who had barely left Calabria aside from snatched prison visits to see his father. He enrolled at Sapienza University to study for a diploma in agricultural science, a choice he describes as a diversion designed to throw off any prying eyes watching from back home. It was in Rome that Emanuele met Nency Chimmiri, a pretty fellow Calabrian four years his junior, who came from a working-class family (her father was a postman, her mother a housewife). There was never any ambiguity about his family, Emanuele stresses. Nency knew exactly who he was and where he came from. Even so, their relationship began to blossom.
It was only after they had moved back home to Calabria that the two became a formal couple, in April 2012. Emanuele continued to work for the family. He was always good for a favour: jobs, money, whatever, Emanuele could always sort it. When Nency had a car accident, the other driver hastily dropped the claim when they heard about the Mancuso connection; they even offered to pay Nency damages for the inconvenience. There was no doubt about it, Emanuele says. “The poor guy got screwed.”
As the years passed, Nency grew closer and closer to the family. She took to the claustrophobic climate of suspicion like a natural, according to Emanuele. “She knew everything and saw everything. She did everything. She got on with everybody. She’s a big personality. She’s strong and determined. Devious. She was a Mancuso.”
Though often eclipsed by his younger brother, Emanuele gradually began to carve out his own niche within the family. He had always been technically minded, and in the early 2010s became the internal go-to guy for anti-surveillance hardware, investing tens of thousands of euros in instruments to detect wiretaps and GPS trackers for relatives and other clan members. Then there was the marijuana, “the green gold”, as he puts it. Back in Calabria, Emanuele put his agricultural studies to good use. In 2014, he set up a weed farm in the hills of Vibo Valentia, cultivated by a group of migrant workers from outside the EU. Production was overseen by drone. At its peak, Emanuele and his associates were making millions in profit a year for the family. When the farm was eventually busted after a lengthy police operation, Italian police confiscated over 25,000 plants, with an estimated value of £15 million. “I dedicated my life to those plants,” says Emanuele. “I became an expert. It was a very reliable market.” And business was good, right up until his arrest on the morning of 8 March 2018.
When Nency became pregnant, both she and Emanuele were convinced that it was going to be a boy. It was impossible to imagine anything else. Just another little Mancuso boss in waiting. The same month that Emanuele was arrested, Nency went for her first ultrasound scan, which revealed a girl. For Emanuele, then being held at Reggio prison before his transfer to Catanzaro, the news that he was expecting a girl changed everything. He wanted to change, he says. To be a good father. A present father – one who didn’t spend his daughter’s life boomeranging in and out of high-security prisons. When a heavily pregnant Nency came to visit him, seeing her bump was “a moment of weakness.” They exchanged long emotional letters. As the months passed, his visions of a fresh start grew more vivid. On 16 June, a long letter from Nency arrived. It explained how much she loved him and how sorry it made her to see him living the way he was. Emanuele Mancuso took it as a sign. The next day he wrote the short, explosive note to the Catanzaro Antimafia Directorate, agreeing to cooperate. The baby, Lucia* Mancuso, was born a week later, on 25 June – straight into the middle of a family that was already tearing itself apart.
When the news of Emanuele’s defection arrived at the Catanzaro Antimafia Directorate, staff initially laughed it off. No Mancuso had ever been willing to spill the previously impenetrable secrets of one of the most powerful and ruthless mafia clans in Italy, let alone the eldest son of one of its most important factions. The very concept seemed absurd.
Any levity evaporated the following day, after Anna Maria Frustaci, a young anti-mafia prosecutor, held a face-to-face meeting with Emanuele in the early hours of the morning. It immediately became clear that he wasn’t bullshitting, and that he knew what he was getting himself into. Emanuele knew that his decision would immediately sever ties with his family and confer instant pariah status back home. It would also come wrapped up with a mandatory death sentence, or at least the promise of a lifetime spent perpetually looking over both shoulders.
When the call came through from Catanzaro prison, Antonia Nicolini didn’t need to think twice. At first, Nicolini, a defence lawyer, was only told that a prisoner had decided to collaborate. On arrival, she was introduced to Emanuele Mancuso. Her first impression was of a dog-tired young man who seemed to be rapidly approaching the end of his tether. The room was crowded with figures from the prosecutor’s office and the local police. A number of other lawyers had turned Emanuele down, Nicolini told me, citing “incompatibility”. He suspected it had something to do with his surname. But Nicolini wasn’t scared or overawed about his family connections, having previously represented state witnesses, and having grown up with two uncles high up in the carabinieri, the Italian military police. Instead, she told me, she felt a sense of responsibility towards the figure sitting in front of her.
For Emanuele, the situation inside jail had deteriorated quickly. At the time, Giuseppe Mancuso was also in Catanzaro prison and word of his brother’s collaboration soon reached him via a couple of corrupt guards. The threats began. Emanuele says that he wasn’t naive; he knew his family’s reaction would be swift and merciless. They let it be known that they could easily find pliant lawyers and doctors to certify he was too unwell to collaborate. That he was mad, a drug addict, or both. Emanuele’s mother, Giovanna, even made an appointment with Nicolini at her office. The lawyer stresses it wasn’t about threatening her, but instead sending a message to Emanuele indirectly. “They said that he needed looking after and wasn’t to be taken seriously. He needed to be cured,” Nicolini remembers. She didn’t agree. She saw a lucid and intelligent young man who was realistic about his predicament and increasingly steadfast in his belief in the decision he had taken.
Those first few days carried a surreal quality for Emanuele. He was moved to solitary confinement, after scandalised word began to travel that the eldest Mancuso boy was about to sing. Emanuele’s thoughts, however, were somewhere else, fixed on Nency and his daughter. But the next time he saw Nency, he says, it was like being visited by a different person. Any of the old warmth was gone. She brought a message from the family and told him that she had no intention of leaving Calabria, or of allowing him custody of Lucia without a fight. If he recanted, however, there would be a reward: after serving his sentence, the family could set him, Nency and Lucia up with a new life in Spain, with a cushy business and a couple of million in the bank. But when Emanuele refused, the threats began to change tone. Photos arrived of the baby being cradled in Giuseppe’s arms back in Vibo Valentia. The meaning was obvious. The child was theirs – and there was nothing Emanuele could do about it.
After agreeing to give detailed testimony, Emanuele was moved into police protection. There, he quickly began to provide prosecutors with what they had been desperate for: the inside track on the Mancuso family, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, and their most violent secrets. Italian anti-mafia police had been trying to bring the Mancusos to justice, with only sporadic success, for decades. But due to omertà, little evidence had e scaped from inside the family. Emanuele, however, had information that no other witness could provide: details, dates, and people, set down with painstaking accuracy. He could name names, such as in the case of a drugs trafficker who killed a woman and allegedly fed her body to pigs.
In the early hours of 19 December 2019, Italian anti-mafia police launched one of the biggest operations in its history. Around 3,000 officers from the elite cacciatori (literally, “the hunters”) participated in raids across Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Bulgaria. Suspects were plucked from bunkers and hidden trap doors, from manhole covers and behind sliding staircases. One suspect was allegedly caught after officers followed a stray plume of cigarette smoke coming from an abandoned house in a half-deserted village. In total, detectives arrested around 330 people, and seized an estimated £13.5 million in cash and property. Nicola Gratteri, the esteemed anti-mafia prosecutor who led the investigation, claimed that the dawn raids had “completely dismembered the ranks of the Mancuso family.” The operation had been informed, in part, by Emanuele’s testimony.
When the trial began in January 2021, its sheer scale attracted worldwide coverage. Every story was invariably accompanied by mention of Emanuele Mancuso, the mafia princeling who had committed the unthinkable and crossed the criminal divide. Though the ’Ndrangheta had been on trial before, there had never been anything like this. A total of 355 defendants, 900 prosecution witnesses and a small army of lawyers and journalists all passed through “The Bunker”, a heavily fortified converted call centre on the outskirts of Lamezia Terme, a small city around half an hour’s drive from Catanzaro prison. Spread over 3,300 square metres, upon completion it became the largest courtroom in the western world. When in session, soldiers with machine guns patrolled its perimeter alongside a phalanx of armoured vehicles. Inside, the charges ranged from murder and extortion to drug trafficking, loan sharking and the abuse of public office. Defendants included notorious Mancuso clan members as well as their white-collar enablers, including lawyers, bankers and corrupt politicians. Among them, a wave of Emanuele Mancuso’s old acquaintances and relatives, damned by his explosive testimony.
To date, over 70 convictions have already been handed down, though the trial still has at least a year to run. Many of the highest-profile cases are still waiting to be heard, including that of Emanuele’s uncle, Luigi, the clan’s notorious de facto boss. Excitable comparisons have been made with the famous 1986 “maxi-trial”, which decimated an entire generation of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and led to the murders of legendary anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in July 1992.
More than four and a half years after writing that letter in 2018, Emanuele lives a peripatetic life under state protection, moving between a series of anonymous addresses across Italy. Time has taken on a strange, uneven rhythm. Here one day, perhaps gone the next, sometimes at a moment’s notice. Strict limits are placed on where he can go and who he can see. Armed guards are never more than a couple of minutes away. His ongoing testimony in the trial is given via video link from a secure location, though he occasionally meets Calabria’s anti-mafia prosecution team in person. I spoke to him exclusively by Skype; Emanuele looked tired, with dark rings of exhaustion under his eyes. He chain-smoked as we talked, having spent the morning tidying his apartment in preparation for one of the weekly visits from Lucia, who is now four.
After Emanuele rejected his family’s offers to retract his confession, the threats began to change tone, a process that accelerated as their attempts to rubbish his credibility failed. According to a report in The Times, the clan put a €1 million bounty on his head. Nency and Lucia were moved to a state-run foster home outside Calabria, though Nency remains in close contact with the Mancusos, including his father and brother. Emanuele and his lawyer have fought a long-running campaign to increase his visitation rights, with little success. He continues to share custody of Lucia; until recently, his access was limited to no more than a few hours a week. That, he told me, has been the toughest part to take. It is, Emanuele says, why he has felt “abandoned by the state”, despite his sacrifices.
Even in the face of the threats and continuing scare tactics, Emanuele says that the government refuses to listen. He has long suspected his family of exerting pressure on social services, as well as the family court. It’s the only explanation, he says, for why things are continuing to play out the way they have, leaving him stuck in limbo between two opposing forces. There have been times over the past few years when he has packed a suitcase and threatened to leave protection in order to see Lucia. It’s the only way anyone seems to listen. “The back and forth [just] isn’t viable. They know she is being indoctrinated by my family,” he says.
Though technically a free man, Emanuele’s new reality doesn’t conform to many people’s ideas of liberty. “I thought [the state] would look after my daughter’s rights and my rights as a father,” he says. Instead, “they have left and abandoned me. I am free but imprisoned in the house.” His days are almost entirely empty, aside from the weekly visits from Lucia. A few hours of joy, followed by crushing emptiness. “If the state isn’t integrating me back into society, then what can I offer my daughter?”
Emanuele’s relations with the wider Mancuso clan remain hostile. The same is true when it comes to Nency. She remains, Emanuele says, a Mancuso in all but name – though one wonders what other options are available to her, considering the mafia’s well-documented ruthlessness against transgressors, including women. For as long as he continues to collaborate, Emanuele represents the despised forces of the state, and is therefore putting himself, and his family, at risk.
As for the ’Ndrangheta, even the most optimistic observer would tell you that it will take more than a single trial, however historic, to fully slay a monster so deeply entangled in Calabrian life. But these are still steps forward, Emanuele says. If he has a message, it would be that change is possible. “We need a culture of honesty. It’s important that families, schools and politicians create a culture of honesty and respect and legality. That’s the only way.”
Although he finds it hard not to be pessimistic about his own future, Emanuele says he still has high hopes for Lucia. He dreams about how her life will be different from his own. He would be delighted, he says, if his daughter grew up to be an anti-mafia prosecutor.
*Name has been changed
