There is a bunker that I will not forget. One day the carabinieri took me to the countryside, where there was nothing but a chicken coop, and asked me: ‘Where do you think the bunker is?’ I looked around and there was nothing. I said: ‘Maybe underground.’ ‘No, not underground.’ The carabinieri had kept the area under surveillance for months. They spotted the fugitive walking around and smoking a cigarette, something which he evidently could not do in his hideout. When they got there, the fugitive, Domenico Trimboli – a boss known as ’u Crozza, ‘the skull’, accused of drug trafficking and mafia association – had vanished. After about ten failed attempts, the carabinieri were convinced that there had to be a trapdoor into which Trimboli disappeared. When they were about to give up for the umpteenth time, a marshal in the Hunter Squadron noticed that a section of the masonry dry-wall that separated the garden from the chicken coop was not as damp as the rest. Even though little plants had grown among the stones, there was no moss. It was the moving part of a dry-wall that allowed access to the safe place. When a man hides like that he is willing to give up his life, surrender his soul and forsake sunlight, just to cling to his power. There have been bosses who have lost their sight living down there, bosses who earned millions and millions of euros per day and lived like that, under a chicken coop.

I wouldn’t want these stories to seem like distant tales out of the Middle Ages, stories about ‘terroni’, ‘southern peasants’. The fact is that the fate of all of Italy is decided in those bunkers. Because it is in the North that the criminal organizations, especially the ’Ndrangheta, conduct their business. Lombardy is the region with the highest rate of criminal investments in Europe. The economy which these organizations infiltrate is Lombardy’s, the health services are Lombardy’s, the politics is Lombardy’s. In this sense, Milan is the capital of Italian criminal affairs. All you have to do is take a map of the city and highlight all the contracts and jobs that are ‘subjects of interest’ or infiltrated by criminal organizations, in this case by the ’Ndrangheta: Santa Giulia, Navigli Euro Milano, the Milano–Bergamo high-speed railway, the Milan–Bergamo highway, the Central Train Station, the new courthouse, Portello, City Life, Porta Garibaldi, the Milan-Rho Fair, metro line 5, the former Ansaldo area, a depot of the Milan transport agency, the Corvetto area, the customs agency.

My friend Nicola Gratteri, a courageous magistrate, has been telling me these stories for some time. But a recent investigation, conducted by Milan prosecutor Ilda Boccassini and Reggio Calabria prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone, has confirmed them, reconstructing, among other things, the attempts on the part of Milan’s ’Ndrangheta to break away from the organization in Calabria.