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

I can't remember where I became interested in this book.  It has been on my short non-fiction hunting list for years until I found it for $8 at Encore Books and Records. It is the journalistic account of three women who testified in the 2000's against the 'Ndrangheta Mafia who dominated Calabria (the toe of Italy) and controlled significant portions of international crime in drug smuggling, prostitution, extortion etc.  It is an astounding story worthy of a book like this.  The Ndrangheta at least according to this book, have such a vast criminal empire that it impacts major world financial markets.  The women who testified against them were incredibly courageous (two were brutally murdered) and whose actions triggered a significant culture change in Italy that then dealt a weakening blow to the Mafia.

The thing with these journalistic books, though, is that ultimately I just want the facts.  Because it's not an academic history, the writer has to make it into a "story."  For myself, these two demands make an end result that is not entirely satisfactory either for the facts or the story.  Perry's thesis is that women were ignored by the Mafia and the prosecutors going after them because of traditional Italian machismo and by finally paying attention to them, they were able to break the crime families.  These powerful and brutal families, rooted in the gangster history of poverty-stricken southern Italy, were not able to get past their misogynist culture and this is what undid them.  He does a good job arguing this thesis.  It's the narrative that I found a bit forced, as he hopes between the three women's stories (which were all connected but not that closely).  I was impatient to just find out what happened.  This isn't really a critique of the book, just that as I was reading it, I remember why these kinds of popular non-fiction books are not really my jam.

What this book did really help me with was understanding better the political geography of Italy and the Mafia.  I had heard of Calabria but didn't really get the deal with it.  I'm no expert but this book had excellent maps and Perry does a good job of giving an overview sense of the geography and culture of the region.  He glosses over it with a couple of sentences, but I also can understand how poor brigand families in remote mountain areas who met with revolutionaries could have evolved into a more sophisticated level of crime.  What is missing is how they could all just become so brutal and murderous, even (especially) to their own families.  Are they just this backward?  I would be interested in a more nuanced treatment of the culture of the region.  Still, humans.  We can be as shitty as possible.

The other thing that I still don't understand is how these local thugs who dominate a region can also be controlling major finance and law firms with international scope.  I guess this is the plot of the The Firm and it must be happening, but I'd like a clearer explanation with examples of where an archaic, country family can also be able to make decisions for billion-dollar firms.  How does that work?