'Ndrangheta

They're from Calabria, in the south of Italy.

They're called the Andrangheta, or Honor Society.

They're better known as the Mafia.

There is a general understanding in Italy that there is a lot of corruption when it comes to organised crime and football teams.

And this is just another of those crises.

This is Anna Sergi, a professor of sociology of law and deviance at Italy's University of Bologna.

The daughter of a journalist, she's seen firsthand just what the Ndrangheta is capable of.

I grew up in various parts of Calabria because my parents and my grandparents were living in different places.

I received serious death threats, not least one morning I found that all four tires of my private car had been slashed.

I received death threats that I have to say I had not received even in previous years when I had investigated and distinguished myself personally as a witness in trials against the 'Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia.

I asked myself, "Who did my investigation of possible masterminds threaten?"

[typewriter typing] The sky is pitch black, as there is a new moon on the night of the 6th of June 1981.

But what is the connection between the team of killers and the satanic sect? Who kept the killers in contact with the puppeteers? [gunshots fire] And which members of Florentine high society knew and covered for them? Many witnesses are dead and frontline investigators retired.

What is revealed at the end of the day is that the Florentine judiciary is compromised by hidden conflicts of interest and incapable of getting to the bottom of the case.

The last death threat came to my home, an anonymous letter written on a computer containing a single line in capital letters, "Every day that goes by, I get closer to you." This is something that an investigator who sent to jail the heads of Cosa Nostra, dangerous members of the Ndrangheta condemned for kidnapping people, would expect from them.

The indignation over the deaths of young people with their whole lives ahead of them has disappeared as the years have passed, and the very real possibility that Italian institutions were part of the cover-up is harrowing.

There is not movies for everything, but why the best movies are about Italian mafia? Why? Because they have culture, so I will talk about that.

So it talks about the Cosa Nostra, and then for the Calabrian mafia, which is called the 'Ndrangheta, which is actually today the wealthiest and most powerful of the Italian organized crime families.

So the, uh, guys think of this not as street gangs.

Like you hear crime, you think of people that are crazy or drunk or whatever.

Right.

Politics, political parties, NGOs, the biggest names in finance, all of them have the same structure, like the mafia, all of them.

First, uh, first and foremost, the mafia had very strong family ties, right? And even if they didn't, like the 'Ndranghetas, they, if you cut the, the, the head, everything, uh, falls apart.

No.

His kidnappers blindfolded him, loaded him into a vehicle, and drove him hundreds of miles south to Calabria, the rugged mountainous region at the toe of Italy's boot.

Calabria was the home turf of the 'Ndrangheta, one of the most powerful organized crime syndicates on the planet.

In the 1970s, the 'Ndrangheta had turned kidnapping for ransom into a business model.

They snatched wealthy targets and stashed them in remote mountain hideouts where police couldn't reach them.

Caves, shepherd huts, abandoned farmhouses guarded by tight-knit communities that would never talk.

The Getty kidnapping gets retold as a story about greed, and it is one.

But look closer, and it's a story about a child caught between two sets of adults who both treated him as an asset.

To the 'Ndrangheta, Paul was inventory, merchandise to be stored, maintained, and when the buyer stalled, damaged to drive up urgency.

Like, so once you get a bunch of money, you start a bank.

Prince Leo is a top owner of I- Israeli mafia, Orsino Ndrangheta clan.

So that's like southern Italian mafia, like Ndrangheta.

And then affiliated with the Cl- with the Cleveland crime family, managed the Rosicrucian Order of the Holy Cross, the arms, arms dealing, ecstasy.

Whatever.