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Meet Ilda Boccassini, the lady who scares the Italian Mob

A fearless anti-Mafia judge has launched a new onslaught against the country's most dangerous gangsters, writes Philip Willan in Rome. Making mobsters see red: flame-haired prosecutor Ilda Boccassini is hated by Italy's gangsters Photo: EPA/MATTEO BAZZI ANSA

7:00AM BST 18 Jul 2010

Ilda Boccassini has had some spectacular moments in her 30-year career as a prosecutor, taking on the Sicilian Mafia, corrupt fellow magistrates and the terrorists of the Red Brigades.

But none have been quite so dramatic as the morning last week when “Ilda the Red” – as she is known for her flame-coloured hair - helped launch the biggest police operation against the Calabrian Mafia for 40 years.

In the space of a few hours beginning at dawn on Tuesday, 3,000 police officers across the length and breadth of Italy broke down doors and raided secret bunkers in operation “Crime”, capturing more than 300 suspected members of the 'Ndrangheta - now considered the most powerful and dangerous of Italy’s organised crime outfits.

Among those captured were four members of the Carabinieri paramilitary police, suspected of complicity with the enemy. Tens of millions of euros worth of property were also seized in an operation whose geographical scope underscored the ’ndrangheta’s infiltration of the industrial north as well as the poorer and more routinely corrupted south.

For Ms Boccassini, 60, the “Iron Lady” of the Italian judiciary, it was another bitter-sweet moment in a long battle to restore law and order to areas in the grip of organised crime - and to hold true to the memory of the man who inspired her, the assassinated anti-Mafia pioneer Giovanni Falcone.

Ms Boccassini had worked with Falcone on an investigation into Cosa Nostra’s laundering of its criminal assets in Milan and the two became close friends. She was devastated when, in 1992, Falcone was blown up by the Mafia in retaliation for his ground-breaking investigations against them.

She jealously guards her private life, doesn’t suffer journalists gladly and imposes strict secrecy on all her professional colleagues. But she gave a glimpse of her inner self three years ago when she spoke candidly of her experience to pupils at a Milan high school. Separated from fellow magistrate Alberto Nobili, she has a grown up son and daughter.

She had felt a compelling moral imperative to hunt down the killers of her friend Falcone, she told the children.

“Fifteen years have passed since Giovanni’s death. I still feel resentment and anger. That’s not nice, but I have to admit that's how it is. You have to recognise your mistakes, in order to grow.”

She said her own children had paid a heavy price for the stress and anxiety that went with her job, especially when she moved to Sicily to help track down Mr Falcone’s killers. “I still feel guilty about it,” she said.

But that has not stopped her quest to tackle Italy’s remaining organised crime gangs. Her most recent investigation began two years ago following the murder of Carmelo Novella, the head of the ’Ndrangheta in Lombardy, who had made the mistake of seeking too much autonomy from headquarters in Calabria.

It culminated on Tuesday with the arrest of 80-year-old Domenico Oppedisano, the ’Ndrangheta’s alleged “head of crime”, and 305 of his followers.

The inquiry has revolutionised investigators’ understanding of the ’Ndrangheta - whose name, from a dialect still spoken in Calabria, derives from ancient Greek and means “heroism and virtue”. Wiretaps and secretly recorded videos have confirmed the group’s curious blend of the archaic and the modern, but revealed the existence of a much more hierarchical structure than had previously been suspected.

Rather than a loose federation of blood families, notoriously resistant to penetration by supergrasses, the ’ndrangheta appears to have modelled its structure on that of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra. The organisation is divided between three main geographic regions in Calabria and governed by a body similar to Cosa Nostra’s Cupola.

Oppedisano, until recently unknown to police, drove around the town of Rosarno in a humble three-wheeled van but had authority equivalent to that of Cosa Nostra’s “boss of bosses”.

Police filmed his election to the post of “head of crime”, a rotating position held for just 12 months, in the course of a wedding banquet last August. That decision was ratified a month later during religious ceremonies at the shrine of the Madonna of Polsi in the Aspromonte mountains.

Though only in office for a year, Oppedisano made it clear that his word was law not only throughout Italy, but in the 'Ndrangheta far flung crime fiefdoms in Canada and Australia as well.

Religious symbolism permeates the ’ndrangheta traditional rites: from the initiation ceremony – known as Baptism – during which a small cross is cut into the initiate’s skin and ash from a burnt religious card - or santino - sprinkled on to the wound, to the rank of Evangelist, for senior criminals who have sworn allegiance to the mob with one hand resting on a Bible.

If the two-year investigation has enabled Ms Boccassini and her colleagues to learn much about the ’Ndrangheta, there is little doubt that the ’Ndrangheta knew a lot about her too.

A collaborator of the domestic intelligence agency has been arrested on suspicion of tipping off mobsters about progress in the judicial inquiry.

Police wiretaps registered the alarm at the news that Ms Boccassini was in charge. “That one’s a tiger. I’ve seen her on TV sometimes,” a suspected ’Ndrangheta member, Giuseppe Pelle, is alleged to have exclaimed. His informant allegedly replied: “In the face of something like this, you need to have your eyes open 360 degrees. This is someone who stops at nothing.”

Since becoming a prosecutor in 1977, Naples-born Ms Boccassini has repeatedly proved the truth of that. Today she is responsible for investigating organised crime and terrorism and is probably the most highly protected magistrate in Milan, having received numerous death threats in the course of her long career.

“She is very irascible and gives way to no one,” said a person familiar with the workings of Milan’s Palace of Justice. “She has quarrelled with everyone. She has not spoken to Armando Spataro – the prosecutor who heads Milan’s special anti-terrorism unit – for years.”

Relations broke down when it became clear in the course of a joint anti-Mafia investigation that Ilda the Red didn’ t fully trust her illustrious colleague, the source said.

Ms Boccassini broke memorably with another Milan colleague, anti-corruption prosecutor Gherardo Colombo, in the wake of Falcone’s murder. The rift with Mr Colombo began at a magistrates’ meeting to commemorate Judge Falcone. Overwhelmed by grief at his death, Ms Boccassini launched into an emotional diatribe against her colleagues: “You are responsible for Giovanni Falcone’s death. You killed him with your indifference, with your criticism,” she told a packed meeting in the Palace of Justice. “Gherardo, you too didn’t trust Giovanni. Why did you go to his funeral?”

In fact Mr Colombo and other magistrates had misgivings about giving Falcone details of their corruption investigation into the former Socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi, after Falcone moved to an administrative post at the Justice Ministry. His boss in Rome was Claudio Martelli, a fellow Socialist and close friend of Mr Craxi’s.

The feud eventually blew over some years later when the two met by chance in a lift. “Ciao, Ilda,” said the absent-minded Mr Colombo, who had forgotten all about it. Ms Boccassini, who has the memory of an elephant and finds it hard to forgive, burst into tears.

Their friendship picked up where it had left off, and the two collaborated fruitfully in the corruption prosecution of Cesare Previti, one of Silvio Berlusconi’s lawyers and a long-term political associate of the current prime minister.

Those who know her say she is a naturally ebullient, fun-loving personality who has been forced to become severe and reserved by the pressures of her job.

Taking on Silvio Berlusconi in court - where Ms Boccassini pursued corruption charges that ultimately failed to stick - has also come at a price, with allegations of misconduct levelled against her and a prolonged campaign of denigration by Berlusconi-owned sections of the press.

Her “Iron Lady” side was on show last week as she revealed how police had succeeded in bugging 40 ’ndrangheta summits in the north of Italy and identifying the presence of at least 500 mobsters in one of the richest and most productive industrial areas of Europe. Investigators fear that the millions of euros of cocaine profits flowing into the ’Ndrangheta’s coffers will be spent on corrupting local officials in Lombardy and establishing a stranglehold over forthcoming construction projects, including preparations for the Expo 2015 world trade fair.

The physical intimidation associated with the far south has already spread to the northern financial capital and its hinterland. In one extraordinary recent episode, clan members followed an unmarked car used by plainclothes investigators from the outskirts of Milan into the centre, finally stopping the vehicle to ask the men what they had been doing on 'Ndrangheta territory.

Ms Boccassini acknowledges that last week’s police operation is only a start. Those arrested will face trial on charges of Mafia conspiracy, drug and arms trafficking, murder, extortion and usury. And investigators are already beginning the hunt for more associates and accomplices.

Ilda the Red has little patience, though, for citizens who succumb to the mobsters’ intimidation. Earlier this month she noted that many northern businessmen had been subjected to extortion demands from the ’Ndrangheta but no one had the courage to complain to the police.

And she made clear her uncompromising view that there can be no middle ground in the battle against the mob. “Either you are with the state or you are against the state,” she said.