The slaying of six young Italians in the German town of Duisburg this week has brought out of the shadows the toughest and most inscrutable of the Italian Mafias, the 'Ndrangheta of Calabria.
The six men, apparently victims of a feud within the organisation, had been celebrating a friend's 18th birthday; most worked in the Italian restaurant trade and nearly all were from the district of San Luca in the Aspromonte mountains, a pimple of inhospitable rock on the toe of the Italian peninsula.
Unlike the other powerful Mafia cultures of Italy - the Cosa Nostra of Sicily, the Camorra of Naples, and the United Holy Crown of Puglia - the 'Ndrangheta works on a loose clan system and has unified command. Today there are some 100 families, who specialise in cocaine and heroin trafficking, money laundering and
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contract killing. Because the clan system is so hard to penetrate, the contract killing business, which now runs to America and Asia, has a reputation for untouchability in the international underworld.
The town of San Luca, of only 4,485 inhabitants, has been gripped by a blood feud for nearly 17 years. Two members of the Strangio-Nirta clan were killed and two injured in 1991. The wife of the presumed head of the clan, Mario Strangio, was killed just before last Christmas. The killing of a woman, once off-limits in the Mafia code, triggers serious trouble; there have been five killings and eight attempted slayings in the past eight months.
The very name 'Ndrangheta is steeped in legend. It appears to come from corrupted Greek dialect - Calabria was an area of Byzantine Greek settlement. This suggests that the organisation,
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