Italy: The Mushroom Mafiosi

It was a fine day for a Sunday drive, all right, but the men tooling up the road to Montalto, a rugged 6,417-ft. peak in the toe of the Italian boot, were hardly your average weekend motorists. Noting the stream of big cars —Pëugeots, Mercedes and Citröens—a cruising carabiniere radioed his suspicions to Police Chief Alberto Sabatino in nearby Reggio di Calabria, capital of dirt-poor Calabria province. Chief Sabatino agreed that such a caravan could mean only one thing.

Sabatino dispatched four twelve-man patrols to Montalto. The local cops and national carabinieri Jeeped to within a mile of the peak, then fanned out on foot. Climbing through oak and beech, then pine and fir, one of the carabinieri patrols suddenly flushed a man with a gun, who appeared to be some sort of sentry. Persuaded by the gun in his back, the sentry led the police up to a glade where some 130 men were gathered. Six of the men, apparently wary of informers, wore black hoods. Most were heavily armed, and all were obviously members of L’Onorata Società (the Honored Society), Calabria’s branch of the Mafia.

When the patrol commander squeezed off some warning shots, most of the Mafiosi melted into the mountain woods. The rest, taking cover behind rocks or in the scraggy Calabrian underbrush, opened up with pistols, shotguns and hunting rifles, wounding seven cops and taking two injuries of their own in a half-hour firefight. When it was all over, the police gathered up a sackful of weapons, 35 cars that had been abandoned on goat paths, and 21 gunmen aged 19 to 75. But the pezzi grossi (big shots) got away.

Power Struggle. Why all the artillery? As the cops figure it, the thugs were less afraid of a police bust than of each other. The meeting in the mountains was apparently called to settle a power struggle between the younger Mafiosi, who are keen on such things as dope smuggling, kidnaping and other urban crimes, and their extortion-oriented elders, who have been taking a pounding from the police lately. Over the past two years, Calabrian officials, using special legislation, have sent 274 Mafiosi into “enforced residence” in Northern Italy, threatened another 789 with similar exile, put 198 under surveillance, and revoked the driver’s licenses of 452 others.

According to the police, last week’s mass meeting was “without precedent” in Calabria. The hoods did, however, steal a few lines from some distant cousins. After the famous 1957 raid at Apalachin, N.Y., the 60 mobsters who were seized there explained that they had assembled for nothing more sinister than a friendly cookout. To a man, the Montalto Mafiosi insisted that they were just “gathering mushrooms.”