The rented Lancia Y10 flew down the darkened motorway. Reginald and Margaret Green had come from Bodega Bay, California, for an Italian road trip with their seven-year-old son, Nicholas, and four-year-old daughter, Eleanor. From Rome, the family headed south to visit the ancient Greek temples of Paestum and were driving down the toe of the boot, towards Palermo. Exhausted, Margaret wanted to find a place to stop and rest but, when they pulled into a service area, it was too bright and too loud. They decided to push into the night.
Around 10.30pm, Reginald looked in the rear-view mirror and noticed something wasn’t right. The vehicle behind him was coming on way too fast and had started to tailgate. Margaret stirred awake and watched, agape, as the car moved into the fast lane alongside them. Reginald asked his wife to look out of the window and tell him what was happening. She could see men inside the car. They were wearing black ski masks and began screaming in Italian. The Americans couldn’t understand, but it was clear they were being forced off the highway. Reginald slammed the accelerator.
Then, crrrrack, the Lancia’s back passenger window shattered. The men were firing at the rental. Reginald didn’t have time to process what was happening; all he could do was accelerate. Another bang. Reginald’s driver side window burst. Shards of glass sprayed him, lodging into his left forearm as he gripped the steering wheel tighter. He kept his foot down, thinking only of catching a glimpse of police.
Suddenly, the pursuing vehicle dropped back and disappeared into darkness. Reginald kept driving, wind rushing through the blown-out windows. In the back, Eleanor was crying. Nicholas didn’t make a sound. To shield the children from the cold, Margaret pulled some loose clothes over them. About 10km down the road, the Green family finally came across traffic officers. They pulled over and tried to explain what happened. It was only then they realised Nicholas was unconscious. He had been shot in the head.
An ambulance rushed Nicholas to a local hospital, which wasn’t equipped to treat the boy’s injuries, so he was taken across the Strait of Messina to a hospital in Sicily. Doctors there told the parents that his injuries were too grave for them to operate, and Nicholas Green was pronounced dead two days later. It was October 1 1994, and a seven-year-old had been murdered.
The killing appeared to have been a case of mistaken identity. The masked men had been trying to rob a jeweller driving a Lancia identical to the Greens’ vehicle. Even in a country accustomed to reports of violent organised crime, Nicholas’s murder shocked the Italian public. One national newspaper headlined the incident “Our shame”. An article in la Repubblica argued “Italy cannot absolve itself”, and concluded “there is a no man’s land run by bandits who decide the life and death of whoever passes through”. In the villages of Calabria, something terrifying had been born and its hour had come at last.
Salvatore Pititto and his cousin Pasquale were born one month apart in 1968 in Mileto, southern Italy. Their poor town of about 8,000 people was organised around a long central street with a cathedral and surrounded by olive groves and cheaply constructed block houses. In the late 1980s, the two cousins began hijacking trucks and extorting local businesses under the protection of more powerful crime bosses. The teenage Pasquale proved highly adept at shaking down the businessmen of Mileto. Early in their careers, an older criminal asked the boys to drop off a sealed envelope outside a policeman’s house. Pasquale couldn’t resist opening the missive. Inside, he found a letter written in block capitals making a chilling threat.
From then on, he adopted a similar strategy. As his extortion racket grew, he became fond of sending messages demanding payment with a potent symbol enclosed: a bottle filled with petrol. Not that Pasquale wasn’t blunt when he deemed the occasion required it, such as the time he dumped a dog’s severed head outside a victim’s home.
The Pitittos rose up the ranks without remorse, and they came of age in time to profit from a historic changing of the guard. By the mid-1990s, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, once Europe’s most well-known and feared mafia, was under assault by the Italian state. The Sicilians’ decline left a gap in the market for Calabrian organised crime families, known as the ‘Ndrangheta. The most ambitious sought to build close relationships with Latin American drug cartels, transforming themselves from a league of rural bandits into international criminal enterprises.
For more than 100 years, Calabrian criminal families had operated on a secret ranking, known as doti (gifts). For a young thug to be promoted to a higher gift, known as “receiving a flower”, he had to undergo a masonic-like ritual. In 1988, in cell number 18 of Vibo Valentia prison during a brief incarceration for robbery, Pasquale became a made man. He — and, by extension, his cousin Salvatore — were no longer picciotti, petty street thugs.
The Pitittos came to rule over Mileto through robbery, murder and terror. When people disappeared overnight, everyone knew their fate. Relatives knew it was unwise to ask too many questions. One evening, a 78-year-old woman was abducted, taken to a field and shot in both legs. Such violence was so commonplace that a report of the incident took up barely a paragraph in the local paper.
And yet, Pasquale and Salvatore saw themselves as men of honour, noble criminals bound by a secret code. Salvatore called associates from other villages “clean people”. But, in Mileto, the stain that clung to the family was well known. Two members of the Pititto gang, one of them Pasquale’s brother-in-law, had been convicted for murdering the seven-year-old American boy in 1994, and given lengthy prison sentences.
During their violent rise, the Pitittos survived several shooting wars with rival families. They did not come out unscathed. In 1992, Pasquale was shot in an ambush and, partially paralysed, had to use a wheelchair. Later, when he was sentenced to 25 years for the murder of a rival boss, he successfully appealed for house arrest on account of his disability. From then on, Salvatore took over as Pasquale’s eyes on the outside.
Salvatore saw that the Pitittos presided over an empire of dirt. The crew remained a mere satrap with dominion over a grey little town. Salvatore, thickset with a large head, buzz-cut hair and darting eyes that were slightly too small for his broad face, was ambitious for his family. He was married to a woman named Antonella who, like him, had been born in Mileto and never left. Stocky with dyed black hair cut in a bob, she tended to the couple’s three sons and the small garden to the side of their house where, amid several large orange trees, she grew vegetables. Salvatore talked about their sons — Giuseppe, Gianluca and Alex — all the time.
By the time Giuseppe and Gianluca were in their twenties, they began helping their father out with his business and were known to deal drugs in town. Alex, Salvatore’s youngest, was still in his early teens and too young to be working for his father. He could seem distant and depressed, but it wasn’t clear how much attention his parents and brothers paid him. They were all, Salvatore often boasted, growing up to be just like him.
Oksana stepped off a train in Calabria ready to start a new life. It was 2000 and she was 24. She had come, without residency papers, a house or job, on the advice of a friend from back home in Ukraine, who’d made the journey several years before and who was now waiting to pick her up. Oksana’s friend had been driven to the station by an Italian man she knew from work, Salvatore. He wasn’t tall, dark and handsome, but he was powerful and authoritative.
Salvatore offered to help Oksana. He got her a job in the same place her friend worked. When he wanted Oksana closer, Salvatore arranged for her to care for the elderly couple who lived next door to his family. The couple’s home had windows that looked on to Salvatore’s. Sometimes Oksana spotted him, gazing at her as she worked. Their affair began shortly after.
When the old couple Oksana cared for died, Salvatore arranged for her to become an off-the-books checkout girl in a grocery store, with a small apartment of her own above the shop. The store was owned by an elderly woman who had three sons. One of them, a kind, sweet boy, began to take an interest in the pretty foreigner. Together they would take his mother out for walks, and the family increasingly treated Oksana like one of their own. Eventually, Oksana discovered the young man had told his uncle he had fallen for her. Yes, there was Salvatore, but he and Antonella had been married for over a decade. They had children. Perhaps, Oksana thought, it was sensible to consider other options.
Then, one day, the boy abruptly broke things off. Oksana later learnt that Salvatore had warned his uncle: “If I can’t have her, nobody can.”
It wasn’t clear to Oksana back then exactly what Salvatore did for a living. But he had money, and people in the neighbourhood seemed to take what he said seriously. Sometimes, he brought strangers to Oksana’s apartment, telling her to leave the room so they could speak in private. The little she could make out seemed odd. Her boyfriend wasn’t a farmer but she overheard him telling someone on the phone: “I need to come and see the sheep today” and “I’m coming to bring you the cheese.”
Little by little, Salvatore’s caution around Oksana ebbed away. He started to share small secrets with her. One evening, snuggled on her sofa, the couple watched a television drama about an undercover policeman who infiltrates the Calabrian mob. On screen, the hero was firing a machine gun.
“I have two of those,” Salvatore said proudly, pointing at the TV.
“What? Kalashnikovs?”
“Yup. It’s true. It’s true.”
Eventually, the affair became an open secret. Sometimes Salvatore would take Oksana out to dinner with his friends or to watch him play bowls with his sons. She also found out about the man in the wheelchair with the tightly cropped white beard, sunken eyes and elflike ears. Despite his house arrest, Pasquale seemed to know everything about everyone in town. She decided it was wise to pay her respects so, after a trip to Ukraine, she gave Salvatore a gift for Pasquale: a bottle of cognac and an ornamental boat covered in seashells. Salvatore told Oksana his cousin had given the little boat pride of place on his windowsill. Perhaps it was Pasquale’s way of telling Oksana that, even though they had never met, he was keeping an eye on her.
Salvatore knew the biggest profits resulted from sourcing large quantities of cocaine at wholesale prices. The only way to do that was to establish a supply route directly from Latin America. Then, one day in 2014, Salvatore’s operation received a phone call he’d been working towards. “Today, I had the deadliest stroke of luck,” one of his fixers in Colombia reported breathlessly down the line. “I got right to the top, the one who runs everything here. As soon as I get back, I am going to talk to the very highest boss. Here, we are dealing with God himself.”
The god the Italians had made contact with was part of the Clan del Golfo, also known as Los Urabeños, one of Latin America’s most powerful and dangerous cocaine cartels. It was seeking to expand its business by finding partners in Europe, exactly the kind of opportunity Salvatore had been scouting. For the size of shipment he was planning, he would need investors.
Salvatore must have been thinking about the deal on the day he drove to a small square facing a terracotta church with blue stained-glass windows in the centre of San Gregorio d’Ippona, a small town near Mileto. A short, silver-haired man in his late fifties sat alone on a bench underneath an orange tree. The man was the boss of a mafia family far more powerful than the Pitittos, and Salvatore had come to arrange financing and favour.
He was taking an enormous risk, but this was his chance to finally put his family at the top table of Calabrian organised crime. Salvatore’s Colombian connection promised to let the Pitittos tap into a reservoir of drugs they would be able to sell across Europe. No more middlemen. No more disruptions to supply. His sons could become heirs to an actual empire.
Working out a deal would require sending Pititto men into the Colombian jungle. They would start with a small test shipment. If that went well, the cartel had eight tonnes of cocaine ready to send to Europe, with a street value of about a quarter of a billion dollars. By the time Salvatore left the San Gregorio d’Ippona meeting, he had secured the funds. Now he needed to send his men to Medellín to inspect the drugs with their own eyes.
Almost 20 years had passed since the murder of Nicholas Green. The stoicism and generosity displayed by his parents led to profound changes in Italy. Back in 1994, they’d decided to donate Nicholas’s organs to Italians and made a point of saying the transplants would lessen their pain. “I would have liked him to live a long time,” Margaret said of her son. “Now I wish the same thing for his heart.”
Nicholas’s heart went to a 15-year-old Roman boy, his liver to a 19-year-old Sicilian woman, one kidney to a 14-year-old girl from Puglia, the other to an 11-year-old Sicilian boy. His pancreas and corneas went to three others. At the time of the killing, Italy had one of the lowest rates of organ donation in Europe. The Greens’ example caused donations in the country to triple in a decade, a phenomenon dubbed the “Nicholas effect”.
But in Mileto, nothing good had come of the crime. Oksana knew Salvatore was capable of doing terrible things. But when they were alone, he could be gentle and affectionate. Her apartment seemed to offer him an escape. He spent hours with her at night, sitting on her sofa or watching her cook, as they talked about his dreams. The love nest wasn’t grand but, in summer, cascades of pink bougainvillea spilled out from the neighbours’ balconies. Oksana had arrived with nothing and, in Salvatore’s eyes, he had given her everything: a flat, a job, a life.
Every so often, Oksana was reminded that none of it was really hers. His violent temper could turn the flat into a prison. Once he punched her in the face so hard she had to go to hospital. On another occasion, Salvatore gave a friend the keys to the apartment so he could secretly meet a woman while Oksana was at work. After the man’s wife discovered this and threw him out, Salvatore demanded Oksana let him stay with her for two weeks. Still, despite it all, she loved him. And he trusted her. She had known it since the night in 2013 when the murder of Nicholas Green came back into Salvatore’s life.
By then, the men convicted for Nicholas’s murder had been released from prison. One turned co-operating witness and went into hiding. The other, Francesco Mesiano, returned to Mileto. He had been 22 when he went inside; now he was past 40. In the village, some called him “the madman” because of his impulsivity.
Almost as soon as Mesiano returned from jail, trouble began in the town. According to complaints made to local police, he grazed his livestock on another family’s land, ruining their crops. When the family complained, Mesiano became enraged. He was backed by the Pitittos, and he wasn’t going to apologise. “Tell your husband he needs to leave that land, or else I will kill him,” he warned his neighbour. “There are many of us. You don’t want to go against us.” As the conflict escalated, Mesiano’s elderly father was gunned down outside his home. Salvatore was called to urgent summits at Pasquale’s house.
Two months later, the rival family’s 30-year-old son was shot to death in his car outside a café in Mileto. In the refuge of Oksana’s apartment, Salvatore confessed. The man who had once insisted on talking about his business in hushed code now told her about driving a scooter up to the driver’s side. About idling while an accomplice riding pillion unloaded seven pistol rounds through the open window. About speeding away. About killing for his family honour. Francesco Mesiano was later acquitted of any role in the café murder.
Not long after this, on October 17 2014, a member of Salvatore’s crew landed in the sweltering heat of Medellín. He was there to open negotiations for the massive cocaine shipment that would transform the Pitittos. Doing so required travelling into Clan del Golfo territory, a zone ruled by armed gangsters in military fatigues. One of the cartel’s storage facilities was the Finca Aurora, a remote banana plantation hidden about 30km from the Colombia—Panama border.
After an eight-hour journey, the man arrived at the site where hundreds of workers lived in some 50 wooden huts with zinc roofs. The acrid odour of chemicals wafted through the air. In a bunker beneath the plantation, there were hundreds of large grey tarpaulin bags filled with pure cocaine, ready for transport. The Italians’ fixer had been right: they had made contact with the divine. Salvatore’s man flew back to Italy to report the good news.
Pulling off the deal of Salvatore’s life required a series of incremental, highly co-ordinated steps. The next one was for the Italians and Colombians to each dispatch a representative to stay with the other while the shipment was arranged. It was a negotiating framework as well as a hostage swap.
In January 2015, Salvatore and a junior member of his crew sped down the motorway towards Milan. They were on their way to pick up the Colombian sent by the cartel to thrash out terms. Behind the wheel, Salvatore’s man noticed the dull glow of a light behind the dashboard. “Look, look at this,” he said. “It has been here since this morning. God damn it, it’s connected!”
Salvatore was prone to paranoia. He knew that police could be listening to his calls, following him or installing spyware on his phone. Now, the boss began to panic. “We have to take the entire dashboard apart, to see where the wires are connected,” he barked. “Otherwise, what are we doing? What are we doing? Do you understand, asshole?”
They bombed down the motorway searching for a place to stop. Eventually, they pulled into a shopping centre. The two men began ripping out the dashboard. As soon as it came away, they could see there was some kind of electronic device inside. They tore it out, and the glowing light went dead. “What the fuck is this?” Salvatore said. “A microphone? Is it a power supply? An antenna?” His driver didn’t know.
Salvatore considered what to do. The sensible move would be to abandon the vehicle and destroy any evidence of their plans. But failing to show in Milan, let alone giving the Colombians indication the Italians were possibly being surveilled, would nullify months of work. And if they backed out, the man the Italians had sent to stay in Medellín could be slaughtered. It was too late to give up now. They dumped the electronic device in a bin and got back on the road.
Over the following months, the two sides successfully concluded negotiations. Then, one Sunday evening in August, the vessel TG Nike left the Colombian port of Turbo. The 210-metre South Korean-built ship, named after the Greek goddess of victory and flying a Liberian flag, was carrying Salvatore’s cocaine aboard. TG Nike would stop first at Livorno, where some of its containers would be offloaded, before continuing to Genoa. The plan was for Salvatore’s men to break into the Livorno port in the middle of the night and unload the packages before any inspection could take place.
Salvatore was on the brink of something not even his ruthless cousin Pasquale could have managed — to make the Pititto name respected across the whole of Calabria. Millions of euros were on the line. So was Salvatore’s future. “If this job doesn’t go well, I will be financially destroyed,” he told a member of his gang. “I could be shot.”
Finally, they got word that TG Nike had docked in Livorno. Salvatore’s men waited for nightfall, preparing to surreptitiously retrieve the shipment. But when they arrived that evening, the docks were crawling with law enforcement. Helplessly, they watched as Italian police opened their container, discovering 63 bricks of cocaine covered in anti-scanning foil and hidden in banana boxes.
Back in Oksana’s flat, Salvatore was scrambling. He needed answers for his investors. If they suspected theft, he wouldn’t get a chance to fix things. He had to bring them some proof of the raid. “It has to come out in the newspapers that it was seized,” he told one of his men. Days later, the Italian national news agency Ansa ran a report of the seizure — enough to keep Salvatore alive for the time being.
But the seizure effectively meant the money lent to him by his business partners had vanished. He had to find a way to bring in a new shipment to make up for the loss. The Colombians declined to send more product without being paid in advance. In desperation, Salvatore tried to convince them to front him another shipment by offering to send Giuseppe, his firstborn, to Medellín as a human hostage. The cartel refused.
In search of advice Salvatore consulted his cousin Pasquale. But there was little he could do. Before long, men representing his lenders were arriving at Salvatore’s front door in the early morning, asking about the money he owed and how he was planning to pay it back. He did not need help understanding the threat implicit in their demands, having made a living doing the same.
Salvatore tried to sell some of his agricultural land to raise cash and call in loan shark money he was owed, but it wasn’t nearly enough.
Every member of the Pititto family would have to pull their weight if they were going to survive. Antonella, Salvatore’s wife, knew her family duties went beyond bringing up her boys and keeping house. She had known about her husband’s affair for more than a decade. Antonella and Salvatore still slept under the same roof — when he was not staying with Oksana — but no longer in the same bed. Theirs was a loveless marriage of routine and inertia, and perhaps Antonella had come to accept all this. But it upset her that her husband seemed to think she could not be trusted with the simplest of tasks.
Now, she got a chance to prove him wrong. Salvatore asked Antonella to accompany their son Giuseppe to drop off a package of cocaine he had sourced from an Italian supplier. It would only raise a small amount, but it would help. At 6.30pm on a December evening in 2015, Antonella drove with Giuseppe to a shopping mall about 20 minutes from their home. Giuseppe was her first child. At 23, he was also a hardened criminal.
Not long before, Giuseppe and his younger brother Gianluca had attacked a marijuana dealer selling in an area of Mileto they controlled, breaking his cheekbone, jaw and ribs. The man was taken to hospital, where he underwent surgery, and later told doctors there he’d fallen off his motorcycle. But when he complained to another powerful family, Salvatore was forced to step in to smooth things over. Despite the inconvenience, Salvatore was proud of his sons for maintaining the family’s honour. He told Oksana that his youngest, the 14-year-old Alex, would be like them soon enough.
Antonella stopped the car in the car park and waited. Finally, the man they were scheduled to meet arrived and took the wrap of cocaine. On the drive home, Salvatore rang Antonella’s phone. Their son picked up. He told his father the drop-off had gone as planned. After Giuseppe hung up, he informed his mother that Salvatore called because he was worried the meeting was taking so long. Antonella told her son that she had expected his father to do that. Salvatore thought she was stupid, she said, and never trusted her. Giuseppe said nothing.
Antonella pitching in didn’t seem to lessen tensions between the married couple, and she became increasingly furious about Salvatore’s affair. One evening, as they stood in the little vegetable garden, Antonella pulled a gun out and pointed it at Salvatore’s head. She knew it was a futile gesture. “Even if I shoot her in the kneecaps, you will still want her,” she said. “Because you are in love with her.”
Later, when Salvatore told Oksana about what happened, he didn’t appear bothered by the fact that his wife had threatened to kill him. He was angry at Giuseppe for clumsily hiding his gun in the garden. “As soon as I saw her tilling the vegetables outside, I knew that she would find it,” Salvatore said. “‘You are a fucking idiot,’ I told him.” His children keeping guns in the house was fine; the mistake was letting their mother find one of them.
Oksana told Salvatore that there was still time for him to get out, that he could walk away. He could leave Mileto until things calmed down. Salvatore stopped her. If he left, he asked, would she stay faithful to him? Oksana told him she would never betray him.
It was just after 9pm on November 29 2016, and the television was on in Oksana’s apartment. Salvatore was agitated. She knew how much trouble he was in and that every time he left her, she might never see him again. In the dark, lonely hours, Oksana would lie down on her bed and pray, begging God to protect Salvatore.
“I fell asleep praying today,” she told him.
“You have to stop it,” Salvatore snapped. “Every time, you throw it in my face.”
“I don’t throw it at you. I pray every time you leave. If you don’t want to believe me, then don’t believe me.”
The man in her kitchen was a cold-hearted and ruthless gangster, but he was now vulnerable. The criminal network that had enabled and protected Salvatore was failing him. If not for Oksana, he would have been entirely alone. “I’m telling you, and not as a joke, I have no options left,” he said. “I really don’t.”
A few weeks later, Salvatore arranged to make another small drug sale in a nearby village in the mountains. Oksana, he told her, was going to come with him. That morning he came to pick her up at the crack of dawn, the dull yellow beams of his headlights boring through the winter darkness. Oksana was nervous. She told Salvatore that she had a bad feeling about travelling in a car transporting drugs, but he assured her it would be fine.
As they pulled out on to the motorway, they spotted a police roadblock. They stopped and police officers searched the car, finding the contraband. The next few moments must have passed in slow motion as the months of planning and dreaming and despair and scrambling closed in on Salvatore. As what was happening dawned on the couple, Salvatore seemed to think only of saving himself. Oksana watched as Salvatore slipped his burner phone into her handbag. He was planting evidence. Both of them were placed under arrest.
Not long before this happened, thousands of miles away, Colombian police commandos had raided the Clan del Golfo banana plantation. The country’s president congratulated the force on what was, he said, the largest cocaine seizure in its history, estimated to be worth as much as $250m (NZ$405m).
The raid in Colombia also set the stage for Italian anti-mafia police to swoop on the Pititto empire. On January 24 2017, they launched dawn raids across Italy, arresting 54 people who had been involved in Salvatore’s drug-trafficking scheme. The arrests included his wife Antonella, his two eldest sons and almost every member of his gang. A multiyear, co-ordinated policing operation taking in thousands of hours of surveillance and wiretaps from Italy, the UK’s National Crime Agency and Colombian law enforcement had been watching Salvatore and the men from the cartel the entire time. The electronic device Salvatore had discovered in the car was just a tiny part of an operation that had been following his every move for more than two years.
A lone woman entered the interview room and sat down at a table. Sitting opposite her, with a recorder, was a man in a dark suit and tie. He started the tape, and she began to speak: “My name is Oksana Verman, I was born in Cherkasy in Ukraine on the 23rd of November 1976. I have made mistakes, and I want to change my life.”
Oksana’s hands were trembling. Tears streamed down her face. Camillo Falvo, a Calabrian public prosecutor, listened to her intently. The 48-year-old lived under near-constant police protection as a consequence of pursuing cases against men like Salvatore Pititto. Though sharply dressed, Falvo had the sympathetic face of a man who spent his career excavating the souls of the damned.
He was interviewing Oksana in a maximum-security prison in the town of Paliano, about an hour’s drive from Rome. The facility is inside a 15th-century fortress on a hill 500 metres high and protected by a double row of ramparts. It was intended to protect prisoners from people on the outside. The word in Italian for a mobster who turns state’s witness is pentito, repentant. That was what Oksana was here to do, repent.
“I met Salvatore Pititto the first day I arrived,” Oksana continued. She had never known life in Italy without him. She had cared for him, prayed for him. His dreams were hers. And he had betrayed her.
For Falvo, Oksana’s confession and evidence was the final piece of his investigation. The operation against the Pitittos was just one part of a broader crackdown by the Italian state on the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta. In 2021 prosecutors charged more than 350 defendants for crimes including murder, drug trafficking and extortion. It was the largest proceeding of its type since the “maxi trial” of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in the 1980s.
Falvo showed Oksana pictures of Salvatore’s family and associates. One by one, she fingered every person involved in the cocaine-smuggling conspiracy. Antonella, Giuseppe, Gianluca — Oksana identified them all. She was not only condemning Salvatore, she was obliterating the future he had imagined for his family. She knew that this, more than any prison sentence, would devastate him.
Three months after Oksana’s arrival in Paliano, Pope Francis came to deliver a private Easter mass. He washed and kissed the feet of inmates in imitation of Jesus’s gesture of humility towards his apostles before the crucifixion. In an impromptu sermon to the prisoners, he spoke about betrayal and forgiveness. “To love to the end,” he said, “it’s not easy because all of us are sinners.”
The Pitittos’ small grey house in Mileto was quiet, the little garden with the orange trees unkempt. Four of the five family members who lived there were in jail. Only Alex remained.
He had recently celebrated his 15th birthday without his parents or his older brothers. Until now, he’d lived a life similar to the other teenagers in town, hanging out with friends, smoking joints and eating pizza in the local squares. Since the arrests, Alex had officially been placed in the care of his grandparents, but he appeared to spend most of his time unsupervised. His friends noticed he had started to act erratically, getting into arguments and threatening people.
On the evening of May 29 2017, Alex asked his friend Domenico to drive them to meet another boy, Francesco. A year older than Alex, Francesco was popular and handsome and captain of the Mileto youth football team. Alex wanted Domenico to take them all to the countryside, so he could show the boys something special.
The three of them arrived at a remote dirt road leading into an olive grove, bathed in the dappled gold of early evening. Alex told Domenico to turn the car around and wait for him and Francesco. The two boys went into the field. Domenico heard several loud bangs. Scared, he started the engine and looked up to see Alex running towards the car without Francesco. As Alex got back into the car, Domenico noticed he was holding something in his hand. It was a small, dark pistol.
“Where is Francesco?”
“I killed him,” Alex said, without emotion. He instructed Domenico to drive back to Mileto.
Shortly after 10pm, Alex walked into the Mileto police station alone. He told police there had been a terrible accident. Alex had gone with his friend Francesco into the countryside to recover a gun buried in a field. He told them that, once they had found it, Francesco grabbed it and pointed it at Alex’s head. In an act of self-defence, Alex lunged at his friend, the two of them struggling and rolling around on the grass. The gun went off. Alex said he had run away in a panic, without checking on his friend. He threw the gun into a bramble hedge as he fled.
After being arrested, the members of Alex’s family hadn’t said a word to the police. But something in the youngest boy made him talk — even if his first instinct had been to lie. A search team found Francesco’s body, slumped on the ground with a gunshot wound to the head. The pistol Alex said he had thrown away, however, couldn’t be located by officers with metal detectors and sniffer dogs.
Back at the station, Alex admitted there hadn’t been a struggle. He’d deliberately killed his friend. At some point during the weeks running up to the murder, Alex had become jealous of Francesco. “I falsely claimed that I had a fight with a boy,” he said, “that we had struggled and two gunshots had been fired.” Then he went quiet, refusing to answer any more questions. Alex’s friends later told police that he suspected Francesco of flirting with his ex-girlfriend.
Once again, news of a Pititto murder stunned Mileto. It was a sickness that had been passed from father to son, an inheritance of violence bequeathed to Alex before his birth. Salvatore’s youngest son had been surrounded by remorseless cruelty his entire life. He would have known when his older brothers beat other boys in the street. He would have heard the stories about his uncle, and his family’s connection to the murder of Nicholas Green. He would have understood Salvatore thought he was doing it all in the name of the Pitittos’ honour.
The family’s long and violent rule over Mileto formally ended on September 3 2018, when Alex Pititto was sentenced to 14 years for the murder of Francesco. A state psychologist had concluded that despite Alex’s suffering, his “capacity to understand and to make decisions” was not diminished. His father Salvatore was sentenced to 18 years for attempting to import cocaine from Colombia. Salvatore’s wife and two eldest sons were also convicted for drug trafficking. Pasquale remains under house arrest. Oksana was sentenced to three years and eight months on appeal and, after serving her time, entered Italy’s witness protection programme.
Twenty-three years after Pititto thugs gunned down a seven-year-old, mourners walked slowly towards a church in Mileto for the funeral of another murdered child. The town was silent, apart from the ringing of church bells. Posters of Francesco were pasted on closed shutters and banners hung across the streets with the words “Ciao Ciccio”. At the front of the procession, three priests wore white robes with purple stoles draped around their shoulders. Members of Francesco’s family carried his coffin, white with colourful flowers laid on top, towards the cathedral.
Inside, Father Salvatore Cugliari began his sermon. The priest knew about the sickness that had taken hold in his town. After he had given sermons denouncing the mafia, the door to his home had been doused with petrol and set on fire. Francesco’s parents sat in silence as Cugliari spoke. “It is difficult to find words in circumstances like this,” he said. “Perhaps silence would be better as a sign of respect for the pain.”
Cugliari finished by quoting from the epilogue of The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s novel ends with the Speech at the Stone, a eulogy for a boy who pays for the sins of his father with his life.
It asks the mourners to never forget the kindness and goodness of the dead child, and to let their own memories of youth serve as an inner moral compass. “If only one good memory remains with us in our hearts,” the eulogy reads, “that alone may serve some day for our salvation.” Today, there are 120 monuments in places across the country, including 27 schools and 50 squares and streets. They are named in honour of Nicholas Green, a child murdered in 1994, in Calabria, Italy.
Written by: Miles Johnson
Miles Johnson is an FT investigative reporter. This article is adapted from his book “Chasing Shadows: A true story of drugs, war and the secret world of international crime”, which will be published by The Bridge Street Press on August 3.
The reporting for this story is based on court documents and judicial evidence from multiple criminal cases spanning three decades, including wiretap transcripts, surveillance photographs and witness testimony, as well as interviews.
The Nicholas Green Foundation: nicholasgreen.org
Executive production: Cinema Key. Producer: Francesco Durante Viola. Driver and fixer: Loris Costa. Special thanks: Francesca M
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