It should be a blissful time in life, but for kids raised in the mafia, childhood is more likely to mean dealing drugs and collecting protection money.
It could even mean killing your own mother, while education could include watching animals being slaughtered and learning to shoot guns.
Now authorities in Italy are expanding a Free to Choose program that aims to end the brutal bloodline divide generation after generation by placing children in foster care.
Judge Roberto di Bella of Catania is credited with saving 150 children in Italy’s Calabria region, home to the feared Ndrangheta – one of the most powerful organized crime groups in the world.
Last week, officials announced that the policy would be expanded to Sicily, where Cosa Nostra operates, as well as the Campania region, the base of the Camorra mafia group. Di Bella calls the advance a ‘historic day’.
Speaking to The Sun, he said: “Unfortunately we have seen terrible situations, such as 14-year-olds being ordered to kill their mothers.
“This happened because these women decided to divorce their mafia bosses’ husbands, who were imprisoned, fugitives, or had had extramarital affairs.
“Then, according to the mafia code, the shame within the family must be washed away.
“That is why family members such as parents, fathers, mothers and uncles pushed these children to commit these terrible crimes.
“We had accused a 16-year-old boy of six murders. He was a full-fledged mafia killer.
“For example, we have tried 16- and 17-year-old boys who murdered carabinieri (police) representatives.
“We try to avoid all this and intervene earlier, but this is the kind of criminal indoctrination that these children undergo from an early age.”
The ISTAT website shows that 315 murders occurred in Italy in 2019, with 9.2 percent involving organized crime.
Di Bella says he has seen 50 children in court accused of murder – and says mafia kids are being initiated in a similar way to ISIS terrorists.
He has heard that little ones had to watch horses being slaughtered to get them used to witnessing and smelling death.
However, he has met children “who still have light in their eyes, who hope for a different life.”
Thanks by Mafia Boss
Those who are rescued are placed with foster families many miles away in other regions of Italy.
Since the start of the scheme in 2012, a total of thirty mafia mothers have decided to follow their children to state retreats to avoid a life as a submissive housewife under the mafia.
Seven later became state witnesses against the crime bosses.
One jailed boss even thanked Di Bella for saving his four grandchildren, aged between four and 14, from a life of crime.
Di Bella wrote the book ‘Free to Choose’ about his work, which has also been made into a film, which can be streamed on Netflix.
He said: “The Sicilian mafia has lost some of its power, but it is still there.
“The Ndrangheta is the most powerful global drug trafficking organization after Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel.
“The cartel imports cocaine from Central and South America and distributes it throughout Europe. It has enormous economic power and has a family structure, where all members are related.
“We have seen children as young as seven and eight years old used as pushers or lookouts for drug gangs in drug trafficking plazas.
“We told children aged 12 to 14 – and some even younger children aged 10 or 11 – to shoot guns to get used to using guns.
“I must say that we are also achieving important results because, after interventions on their children or even their grandchildren, some bosses have decided to change their lives and become a worker of justice, a repentant person.
“We say to these bosses: ‘You are suffering in prison, help us save your children from your suffering.’
“The most beautiful thing for me is to see the happiness in the eyes of the children and mothers we have helped – those who have managed to emancipate themselves from the culture and contexts of the mafia.”
Most Chilling Case
When asked to describe a case that stands out to him, he said: “I remember a ten-year-old boy looking for police cars at a port while his family waited for a container of cocaine from Latin America.
“We have had children as young as 14 collecting protection money on behalf of their parents in prison.
“I’ve seen a lot of them, but there was one involving a 10-year-old child.
‘He went to the country with a crime boss who wasn’t his father.
“At one point the child had fallen asleep in the car when the boss was met by two murderers, who shot him dead.
“The child, who heard the shooting, got out of the car and saw the killers, who shot him because he had become an eyewitness.
“They wounded him, but he didn’t die. The child was hospitalized and the bullets were removed.
“Then it was necessary to hide him, to make him leave the mafia areas, because he was a witness and the killers were looking for him.
“With this project, we made this child disappear as soon as he left the hospital and we rescued him. And he then testified against the two murderers.
“The mafia feeds false myths about the man of honor, about the boss. But by going to schools, we make children understand that organized crime only causes suffering, a lot of suffering, both inside and outside the mafia families.”
Born to be killers
A man who knows exactly what it’s like to grow up in a mafia family is Emanuele Mancuso, whose uncle Luigi is the ‘Godfather’ of the Ndrangheta.
Trained in the family business from an early age, he worked his way up from petty crime to extortion and was first imprisoned at the age of 17 for a violent attack on a business owner who refused to pay protection money.
When he was arrested in 2018, he shocked the world by tailoring evidence against the family – resulting in last year’s ‘Mafia Mega Trial’, which saw 200 members of the Ndrangheta jailed for a total of 2,200 years.
At the time, his wife Nency was pregnant and Emanuele was determined that his own child would not be forced into a life of crime.
The decision to testify against them earned him a bounty on his head of one million euros (£860,000). Nency and the girl were taken to a state foster home for their own protection.
Other infamous figures raised as ‘mafia children’ include Matteo Messina Denaro, the son of a mafia boss and who is said to have committed his first murder at the age of 14.
Dubbed ‘The last godfather’ and ‘The Devil’, he was arrested last year after 30 years on the run, before dying in September after being diagnosed with cancer.
Assunta Maresca – known as Pupetta, which means little doll – was 18 years old and six months pregnant when she shot Antonio Esposito, her husband’s killer.
The former teen beauty queen, the daughter of infamous Camorra member Vincenzo Maresca, later became the head of the powerful Camorra mafia clan and died in 2021 at the age of 86.
‘Not all mafia are the same’
Italian criminologist Anna Sergi from the University of Essex says the Free to Choose program represents an important step forward.
She said: “The program aims to show that alternatives are possible.
“If you give people choices, they may not make the choice you want. There have been cases where the children, as soon as they turned 18, returned to their original family.
“This is the problem with Free to Choose. State support usually stops at the age of 18 and this is unfortunately not good enough.”
She added: “Not all mafia families are the same. Some of the most orthodox are more dogmatic. In this case, children will have a rather deterministic lifestyle: the sons will support and teach the father, the daughters from the mothers.
“Daughters will marry in a manner approved by the family to support alliances and cooperation between the families, sons will try to find a place in the family business.
“Mafias are organized crime groups interested in both power and profit.
“But the life of average mafia members is less glamorous than we think.
“Most mafia families try to achieve stability and wealth, but are constantly attacked by the state.
“We can estimate that only one to three percent of mafia families in Italy are really rich and powerful enough to be immune from prosecution.
“The life of a mafia member is often a matter of avoiding prison or surviving prison without losing his assets to the state.
“Unfortunately, for the children, their fate is often already written for them – so if they follow their families, they will end up in prison or dead. It’s not grooming, it’s the way they live.
