A notable women group is challenging the power structures of Sacra Corona Unita, Italy’s fourth largest organized crime group operating in the south of Apuliathe heel of Italy’s boot.
They are doing this at great personal risk, arresting and prosecuting clan members, exposing their crimes and confiscating their businesseswhilst working to change local attitudes.
Here’s a look at some these women:
Carla Durante
During Lecce’s office heads the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia, Italy’s interagency anti-Mafia police force, but his rise through the ranks encountered obstacles from the start.
When she told her high school Latin teacher that she wanted to be a police officer, the response was typical of the southern Italian macho spirit of the time: “How vulgar.”
The reception wasn’t much better at Durante’s first job, as a police officer in a small mountain town in southern Calabria, dominated by the ‘ndrangheta mafia. The residents of Taurianova were hostile to all police officers and were not afraid to show it.
For example?
“When they set my car on fire,” she says matter-of-factly.
Now, back home, Durante is fighting the local Sacra Corona Unita mafia and hitting its leaders where it hurts most: confiscating their ostentatious properties, farms and shell companies they used to run. launder the proceeds of drug trafficking.
“We learned that this is really the most incisive tool, because taking assets from mobsters means weakening them,” she says.
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Marilù Mastrogiovanni
Mastrogiovanni is an investigative journalist and professor of journalism at the University of Bari. She has reported extensively on the Sacra Corona Unita mafia’s infiltration of Apulian local communities and public administrations on her blog “Il Tacco d’Italia”.
Her reports so angered the local government in her hometown that at one point the city was plastered with giant posters attacking her work, one of them depicting her in a hole up to her neck. After several threats, she was placed under police escort and finally decided to move her family out of the city.
According to the patriarchal culture of Sacra Corona Unita, “a woman should not have a voice”, especially if she uses it to write about the mafia, she said.
She is afraid?
“I don’t believe those who say they are not afraid. It’s not true,” she says. “Courage is moving forward despite fear.”
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Rosanna Picoco
Picoco is a volunteer for the anti-mafia group Libera, an activism inspired by a childhood event.
When she was at primary school near Lecce, three bombs exploded in her school one night. Local store owners created the city’s first anti-extortion association, refusing to bribe local mobsters, and the bombs were a clear warning from Sacra Corona Unita that their children were at risk.
But instead of backing down, the parents did something remarkable that stuck with Picoco forever.
“The next morning, our parents – all of them – accompanied us to school,” she remembers. “In the entire city, no one remained silent and I think that has always stuck with me: the importance of not turning your back, of being on the side of being an active citizen.”
Picoco is now a volunteer at Libera, a national network of anti-mafia associations that, among other things, takes legal possession of confiscated mafia assets and transforms them into socially useful projects and products.
In a Libera store in Mesagne, the Apulian city where Sacra Corona Unita was founded, Picoco sells wine made from grapes grown in vineyards confiscated from the mafia. The bottles bear the names of mafia victims.
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Maria Francisca Mariano
Mariano is a preliminary investigation judge at the Lecce Court. At 24, she became the youngest judge in Italy. Now 55, she lives under 24-hour police escort.
In July 2023, she issued arrest warrants for 22 members of the Lamendola clan, of the organized criminal group Sacra Corona Unita, on charges of mafia association, drug trafficking and other charges.
Then, in October, she began receiving letters written in blood with death threats and satanic messages. On February 1, a bloody goat’s head stuck with a butcher’s knife was left on his doorstep with a note that said “like this.”
The police added a bulletproof car to their security apparatus.
She still works as a judge, but in her spare time Mariano writes books, plays and poetry about the mafia in Apulia.
“The mafia has social consensus,” she says. “If we want to dissociate the phenomenon of organized crime, it is not enough to work in a court. We have to start with the people.”
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Carmen Ruggiero
Ruggiero is Lecce’s promoter. She leads a prosecution team in the “Operation Wolf” case against the 22 defendants from the Lamendola clan of Sacra Corona Unita.
She did not give in to her efforts after threats against her life, but now appears in court from Lecce prison accompanied by a three-man police escort.
Shortly after Judge Mariano issued her arrest warrants, Ruggiero went to Lecce prison to interrogate one of the defendants who had expressed his desire to cooperate.
Instead, Pancrazio Carrino carved a knife out of a porcelain toilet in his prison cell and hid it in a small black plastic bag in his rectum, planning to “cut the jugular” during the meeting, according to court documents that followed the incident.
Carrino told investigators he asked to use the bathroom to retrieve the makeshift knife and hide it in his underwear until he could attack. But a suspicious police officer searched him when he left and took him away.
“If I had been as lucid that day as I am now,” Carrino said later, “Carmen Ruggiero would already be history.”
Ruggiero declined to be interviewed, saying her work speaks for itself.
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Sabrina Matrangelo
Daughter of a mafia victim, Matrangelo is now a Libera activist. She was 15 years old when her mother, Renata Fonte, was murdered as she returned from a town council meeting in the town of Nardò, Puglia.
Fonte, a councilor for culture, became an anti-mafia spokeswoman as she tried to protect 1,000 hectares of parks along the Puglia coast from illegal development.
The mobsters fired three bullets and killed her, but her legacy lives on: thanks to her efforts – and the outrage that erupted after her death – the park remains a protected area and Fonte’s daughter, Matrangelo, took over the your cause.
“These places will always be in danger,” Matrangelo said from a viewpoint above the sea in the Porto Selvaggio Nature Reserve.
“And therefore, the battles of those who shed blood for these civil struggles must walk on our legs, must be perpetuated by our daily courage,” she said.
