The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia. Alex Perry

that made Alessandra do a double-take – La Mama. Overseeing all of it was a capo crimine, or boss of bosses, who could convene a court, or tribunale, of senior bosses to judge a peer accused of transgressing the code.6 ‘We’d always thought of the ’Ndrangheta as a lot of local, smaller organisations,’ said Alessandra. ‘Suddenly we realised it had a federal structure and was being run almost like a military organisation.’

      In the 1990s, carabinieri had picked up word of an attempt by the ’Ndrangheta to unite the clans. That had ultimately failed. From what the carabinieri were hearing now, this time the reorganisation had succeeded. Why? The old arguments in favour of better coordination to improve efficiency and discipline still stood. But in 2009 the carabinieri were detecting a more ominous motivation: to coordinate a concerted assault on the authorities through a series of assassinations and bombings. On 31 October 2009, the carabinieri filmed an especially brazen ’Ndrangheta summit outside Milan at which twenty-two bosses raised their glasses to toast the new city boss inside a memorial dedicated to Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.7 The ’Ndrangheta was abandoning its decades-old policy of discreet infiltration in favour of direct confrontation. Why the change? From what the carabinieri