Assignment: Italy's mafia whistleblower
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last year in Italy the biggest anti-mafia trial in 30 years reached a climax. On the stand were the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta: they are estimated to run 80 percent of Europe’s cocaine and to make more money in a year than McDonalds and Deutsche Bank put together.
With access to mafioso-turned-collaborator Emanuele Mancuso, journalist Francisco Garcia looks at why Emanuele testified against his powerful family. What has this trial meant for the 'Ndrangheta? And has it changed life for Calabrians today?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:03.8 | Francisco Garcia is on assignment this week in Southern Italy. |
| 0:07.0 | A lot of the |
| 0:10.0 | So I remember it was the 18th of June 2018. I was working in my office and then my phone |
| 0:17.8 | started to ring. |
| 0:20.3 | Antonio Nicolini is a lawyer in a city of Vibo Valencia in southern Italy. |
| 0:25.0 | It was a secretary from the prosecutor's office and they asked me if I was available. |
| 0:31.0 | They had someone in a prison cell who wanted to collaborate with the state, but they couldn't find a lawyer to work with him. |
| 0:38.0 | Partly, that was because of the identity of the man in the cell. He was called him Manueli Mancuso and he was a member of the Indira, |
| 0:44.6 | one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world. |
| 0:47.8 | In the region of Calabria, the Mancouso family is infamous. |
| 0:52.2 | Already three lawyers had been asked. The Mancuso family is infamous. |
| 0:53.0 | Already three lawyers had been asked, but they'd all refused. |
| 0:56.5 | They said there was a conflict of interest, but some of them probably feared defending |
| 1:01.0 | in Mamele. |
| 1:02.0 | And Tonia, however, felt differently. |
| 1:04.6 | She'd grown up with two uncles in the Italian military police and she had experience defending |
| 1:09.1 | state witnesses. |
| 1:10.6 | She decided to visit him in his cell. He seemed very frail, fragile really. |
| 1:15.0 | I felt like he was someone torn between his family and his desire to pursue justice |
| 1:20.0 | and break free from them once and for all. |
| 1:25.0 | What happened next would help bring hundreds of members of the secretive and close-knit criminal organisation to the stand. |
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