The Ghosts of Gioia Tauro
How Italy's Christian Democrats destroyed our civilisation
The death of a great civilisation is currently, judging by the number of books published on Late Antiquity, something of an obsession. Saint Augustine, writing after the Sack of Rome in 410, did not believe Rome was doomed, but had merely suffered a temporary setback. Like Virgil, he believed Rome to be eternal. But Rome was doomed and modern historians pinpoint the time when the end was determined as the Battle of Adrianople, on 9th August 379, when the Roman Emperor Valens was killed and an entire Roman army more or less wiped out. From this Rome never recovered, just as the Byzantines never recovered from the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, and the Germans never recovered from Stalingrad in 1942-43.
Forgive me the historical excursus, but perhaps when the history of the collapse of Western Civilisation is written a few centuries from now, the writers will concentrate on one place: Gioia Tauro.
The port of Gioia Tauro was the gift of the Christian Democrat government, a useless development project, a port attached to a steel plant that was destined never to be built. Emilio Colombo, a Christian Democrat grandee who held more or less every government post in a long and undistinguished career, was Prime Minster, when, in 1970, the Christian Democrats, in response to civic unrest in Calabria, embarked on the industrialisation project that gave us the port of Gioia Tauro. This exercise in government spending was meant to calm the situation in Calabria, but, thanks to the law of unintended consequences, it made things worse. There was so much squabbling over contracts in the building of the new port, that for a time Gioia Tauro had a higher murder rate than New York City.
The port would have remained a white elephant, un cattedrale nel deserto, a bit like the international airport at Lamezia Terme nearby, but the ‘Ndrangheta found a use for it. Here are just two stories about Gioia Tauro. The first is from 31st December 2021, reported by ANSA:
Three tonnes of extremely pure cocaine have been found hidden among bananas, peanuts and pepper in three containers in the vast Calabrian container port of Gioia Tauro through which 'Ndrangheta move most of its drugs from South America to keep up its chokehold on the European cocaine trade, police said Friday. A heavy vehicle driver has been arrested. The coke would have had a street value of over one billion euros, police said. 'Ndrangheta is Italy's richest and most powerful mafia.
And here is a second, dated 17th May 2023:
A dog with a nose for cocaine has helped Italian police seize more than 2,700 kilograms of the drug hidden in bananas shipped from Ecuador. A background check indicated the banana shippers were not in the business of moving large quantities of fruit. Police estimated the cocaine, which they described as being of the finest quality, could have brought traffickers more than 800 million euros ($1.3 billion) in street sales if it had reached its ultimate destination in Armenia. Customs police had become suspicious about two containers on a cargo ship that recently arrived at the port of Gioia Tauro — a stronghold of the 'Ndrangheta organised crime group. Officers used scanning machines and Joel the dog to uncover packets of cocaine hidden in boxes stacked metres high in container trucks. Joel began jumping when the officers opened the back doors of the truck, and pawed furiously at the unloaded boxes to try to move the bananas aside, police said. Had the drug eluded detection, the containers with the cocaine would have continued through the Mediterranean to a Black Sea port in Georgia for eventual transport to Armenia, authorities said. They did not specify just when the container ship arrived in Gioia Tauro. But customs police said that just days before the seizure, customs police at the same port found about 600 kilograms of cocaine in six container trucks also laden with exotic fruit from Ecuador. Those shipments were destined for Croatia, Greece and Georgia, the customs police said. The Gioia Tauro port, one of Italy's busiest, has long been under the watch of anti-mafia investigators because of its proximity to towns where the 'Ndrangheta has bases. The crime clan is one of the world's most powerful cocaine traffickers. Since the start of 2021, police at the port have intercepted and seized 33,565 kilograms of cocaine.
Every night, I bet you, the ‘Ndrangheta fall on their knees and thank God for giving them Emilio Colombo. The figures are staggering, and the profits must be enormous. And let us remember that these reports deal with the cocaine the authorities are able to stop. How much gets through? Some two million containers pass through Gioia Tauro every year. They can’t search them all.
The other thing the ‘Ndrangheta must give thanks for is the very invention of containerisation. This had changed everything. It takes a minute or so to unload a container; as soon as that container is off one ship, it is either transferred to another ship, or placed on a truck and driven off. Containerisation has benefited us all, as it means goods moved quickly and in bulk, and very cheaply. The price of transport is now very small indeed. But the downside is that it gives the mafias of the world a more or less free pass to ship goods wherever they please, and Gioia Tauro is the nodal point of this world-wide illegal trade. And no one can stop it.
There are two consequences to this. First there is the harm cocaine does to individuals and to our society. Just how dangerous cocaine ingestion is, I leave to others, but I presume it is not good for you. The second thing is worse. The cocaine trade has made the ‘Ndrangheta rich and powerful. Because of the huge wealth brought by cocaine, they have branched out into many other enterprises to wash the money, which means their interests are everywhere. They must have friends in the world of law, law enforcement and politics. How long before their political power reduces a European country to being just another failed narco-state, like some Latin countries and some Central Asian ones? Is Gioia Tauro our Adrianople, Manzikert, or Stalingrad?
When I started writing about the Sicilian Mafia, like everyone else I thought that they were the Mafia par excellence. Well, they are, when it comes to the romance (if I can call it that) of fiction. But in reality, their day is long past. The centre of power has shifted over the Straits of Messina. They like us, are the ghosts of Gioia Tauro. I have two images in my mind: the first is that of Mafia bosses sipping drinks in hotels in Taormina, and watching vast container ships passing through the Straits of Messina to places like Greece, Croatia and Georgia, and sensing that their day is past. And the second picture is dogs sniffing out drugs and in so doing earning the undying enmity of the ‘Ndrangheta. I love dogs, but I am sure that the ‘Ndrangheta must hate them.