In Italy, the 'Ndrangheta aims to conquer the world discreetly<

At each bend, the road becomes more difficult, and it is while driving at a slow pace that you sink into the Aspromonte massif, with the sensation of entering untouched land. Soon, at more than 1,000 meters above sea level, a large desert complex spreads, which briefly housed a sanatorium at the beginning of the ^20th century. The presence of these buildings accentuates the impression of a vaguely disturbing strangeness, as does the crucifix of Zervo, not far from there, around which hovers the feeling that space and even time have subtly changed.

If we adopt the geologist's point of view, Aspromonte appears as the ultimate resurgence of the Alps, at the southern tip of Italy. From an administrative point of view, this micro-region has been a natural park since 1989. The walker, on the other hand, feels a bit lost in this forest saturated with misty legends and very real dramas.

It is here, in this seemingly wild and deserted nature, that the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, considered the most dangerous organized crime structure in the world, has its source. It is towards the neighboring sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi, no doubt built on the site of an ancient temple of Persephone, goddess of the underworld and the return of spring, that she directs her prayers. And it was in the shadow of Zervo's crucifix that dozens of captives were released for ransom in the 1970s and 1980s.

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Ancestral traditions

It took the massacre in Duisburg, Germany (six dead, August 15, 2007), for the general public to take the measure of the international ramifications of the organization. That night, in the pockets of one of the victims, Tommaso Venturi, who had just celebrated his 18th birthday, the investigators made a curious discovery: a pious image whose edges had been burned. Their Italian colleagues will soon allow them to interpret this sign. The young man had just been initiated into the 'Ndrangheta, probably in the back room of the restaurant. This affair referred to the slopes of Aspromonte…

To go back to the origins of this criminal history, where ancestral traditions mingled with Masonic rites before assimilating the mechanisms of globalization, a guide was needed. The writer Mimmo Gangemi, a child of Santa Cristina d'Aspromonte whose romantic work is worth all the treatises of local ethnology (three of his detective novels have been translated into French by Editions du Seuil), lent himself to the 'practice. “I understand their mentality. I grew up here, I breathed the same air as them, ”explains this 70-year-old man gently. It was he who led us in front of the cross of Zervo, to open up some avenues of understanding for us.

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