Sons of the guns

Can children born into Italy's mafia families be saved from lives of crime? One judge is helping them to establish new lives in a bid to break the cycle

- Clare Longrigg

BEFORE DAWN ON A JUNE MORNING in 2010, police burst through the high security gates of a palazzo belonging to a notable mafia family on the edge of a small town in Calabria. As agents swarmed through the building, turning the place over, family members moved frantically to hide any evidence. Maria, the family's 12-year-old daughter, was given a page ripped from a notebook. It was a list of debts owing. She was told to hide it: "Put it in your knickers, they won't touch you." Her brother Cosimo, 14, watched in helpless rage as his father, mother, even his grandmother, were handcuffed and led out to the waiting police cars.

After the arrests, Cosimo was the only male family member outside prison, and it became his responsibility to collect money for the lawyers' fees. He was a baby boss with his own driver, visiting local businesses who were on the family's books, and demanding payment with menaces. "He was recognised as the boss," says journalist Dario Cirrincione. "If he went to a bar in the village, older men would get up to greet him. People waited on him, drove him around, did anything he needed. This sort of treatment turns these kids into little kings." The Calabrian mafia, the 'Ndrangheta, is based on family groups in small towns along the coastline of Italy's toe. The area is littered with half-built factories, projects paid for by state development funds and abandoned once the 'Ndrangheta got its hands on the money. Since taking control of the port at Gioia Tauro on the west coast, the organisation has become one of the biggest importers of cocaine to Europe.

The authorities have made sweeping arrests over the past decade, and staged a series of maxi trials in reinforced bunkers, involving hundreds of defendants. But the family structure means the organisation is hard to dismantle. As fathers and grandfathers are serving life sentences, many in high-security jails, the younger members are starting their criminal careers ever earlier.