Italien/Elfenbeinküste. For Love or Money: An ‘Ndrangheta Daughter on West Africa’s Cocaine Trail
Italien/Elfenbeinküste. For Love or Money: An ‘Ndrangheta Daughter on West Africa’s Cocaine Trail
It’s hard for anyone to leave Italy’s secretive, clannish ‘Ndrangheta crime families. For women, doubly so.
The organized crime group, whose home is the southern Italian region of Calabria, is a global juggernaut that controls, among other things, the import of tens of billions of dollars of Latin American cocaine into Europe every year. It is also deeply traditional, relying on strict, generations-old codes of behavior and secrecy.
On the surface, Jole Figliomeni appears to have built her life away from the mafia. Nearly a decade ago, Figliomeni, the daughter of an ‘Ndrangheta leader, fell in love with the wrong man, triggering a scandal that brought the clans to the brink of war. Caught between two angry families and facing the arrest of her father, she packed her bags and struck out on her own, moving to the West African country of Ivory Coast.
Jole said she left to find a society that’s not based on who you are and who you know.
But Italian law enforcement documents obtained by the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI), an OCCRP partner, show that the move may not have been quite so clean a break. Jole’s new home placed her at the center of what has become one of the most important hubs in the ‘Ndrangheta’s cocaine importation network.
Wiretap transcripts obtained by IRPI show that she never severed her ties with her family. (OCCRP - Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, 13.11.2017)