There is a date that acts as a watershed in the gloomy history of the Calabrian mafia, a day circled in red that marks the transition from the era of the old godfathers to that of the new bosses. There sixth and final episode of “Mammasantissima”it’s a dive into the past that takes us back to when it all began. On January 20, 1975, with the killing of Antonio Macrì alias “Zi ‘Ntoni”the foundations are laid for the birth of the ‘Ndrangheta as we know it today. That day, in fact, he who, until then, had embodied the absolute power of the old Honored Society dies.
Friend of the Sicilians and the Camorra, a man capable of extending his influence to the United States, who became rich thanks to cigarette smuggling, the then seventy-year-old Macrì was shot dead, in his Siderno, while he has just finished a game of bowls with friends. The images of the time, with a procession of ten thousand people which follows his coffin to the cemetery, document what the elderly boss had represented up to that point, but also give consistency to the epochal change underway.
In this regard, the thoughts of the justice collaborator Giacomo Lauro it’s very clear. The original audio of his testimony in the courtroom during a trial sounds almost like a funeral oration: «I believe that Macrì’s funeral was attended by all those who had an interest in pay homage to a man who, until the moment of his death, had honored the ‘Ndrangheta».
What was taking place at the time was a profound mutation that would be punctuated by a trail of blood and mourning. It was his brothers who wanted Macrì’s death Paolo and Giorgio De Stefano from Reggio Calabria. They are the ones who, strong of a solid alliance with the Piromalli family of Gioia Taurodare to violate the precept of the unity of the ‘ndrangheta sanctioned in 1969 after the Montalt summitor. After all, it was a fragile balance that had been reached six years earlier, which could not resist the shocks of time, the social and, in some ways, anthropological transformations of the underworld.
Images, as usual, are worth more than words. A very young Paolo Pollichieni brings Joe Marrazzo in front of a left find: the carcass of the car used by the hitmen to kill Macrì. «Wolf, obviously», the great investigative journalist and writer takes for granted. “No, bursts of machine gun fire as well as wolf fire» replies the then reporter of the Gazzetta del sud. The modernist turn of the crime also passes through these details.
Thus began the first mafia war which between 1975 and the following year would leave a mark on the field 194 deaths. Macrì’s heirs, in fact, are not willing to leave their mark on the leadership. They form a common front with the group of Mico Tripodo, boss of Sambatello. “But the honored society cannot withstand that modernization process”, highlights Francesco Forgione, former president of the parliamentary Anti-Mafia commission. The story will go exactly like this.
