Police Fear Bloody War of Succession After Seizing Mafia Boss in Calabria

'It's me' the man said. 'I'm the real Pasquale Condello.' I Cacciatori, the Hunters - the Carabinieri's specialist man-trackers entrusted with the last stage of the operation to net 'The Supremo' - had left nothing to chance. They were convinced the 57-year-old mobster lived in one of 12 flats on the outskirts of Reggio Calabria.

But was he, as they first believed, the retired priest? Or the blind man who had recently come to live with his mother? After a two-week stake-out, they opted to mount 12 separate, simultaneous operations.

The team that burst into Condello's comfortable apartment immediately realized they had the right man - his two dinner companions reached for their pistols, only to be stayed by Il Supremo. In the refrigerator the Carabinieri later found a plate of oysters and two bottles of champagne.

But on Monday night it was the law enforcement community that was popping corks. Operation Meta (the Italian term for a rugby try) had opened a sizeable fissure in the hardest nut that it is their job to crack.

Condello was not a godfather of Sicily's Cosa Nostra but the most feared and respected leader of the 'Ñdrangheta, the mafia of Calabria, Italy's 'toe'. As a report last week from the parliamentary anti-mafia commission underscored, the less well-known 'Ndrangheta is now Italy's prime security concern.

It was 'Ndrangheta hit men who, three years ago, carried out the country's most notorious recent political assassination - that of a prominent regional parliamentarian, Francesco Fortugno. It was 'Ndrangheta gunmen who last August killed six men in the German town of Duisburg in a slaughter reminiscent of the 1929 St Valentine's Day Massacre.

The report said the 'Ndrangheta was spreading 'in the same way as al-Qaeda, with an analogous, tentacular structure, without a strategic leadership, but characterized by a kind of organic intelligence [and] the vitality of cancer'.

While the attention of politicians and the media has remained fixed on Sicily's Mafia, the 'Ndrangheta has crept silently into much of the rest of Italy. And following emigration by the inhabitants of Italy's poorest region, it has spread across the world, to other parts of Europe, Latin America, Canada, and Australia, where it is known as the Honoured Society.

Switching metaphors, the authors of last week's report highlighted the crime syndicate's remarkable ability to replicate itself globally, like a fast-food chain. 'It offers ... in different places an identical, recognizable and reliable "brand" and criminal "product",' it said.

Today the 'Ndrangheta's main source of wealth is its involvement in the transatlantic cocaine trade, in which it invested at a time when the Sicilian Mafia monopolized heroin trafficking. Much of its rise, and Cosa Nostra's recent decline, can be explained by the subsequent switch in the relative popularity of the two narcotics.

Though euphoric politicians compared Pasquale Condello's arrest to that of Bernardo Provenzano, the Sicilian Mafia's 'capo di tutti capi', who was seized in 2006, there is a key difference. The 'Ndrangheta may be intensely hierarchical, but it does not have any overall, controlling body or individual. It is one reason it has proved so resistant to attack from outside.

The 'Ndrangheta's cells, or locali, are independent yet akin, using similar quasi-religious rituals and ranks, their members all harking back to the same mythical roots (the 'Ndrangheta, like some ethnic groups, has a 'foundation legend'; it traces its origins to three exiled Spanish knights).

Its uniformity does not preclude conflict. The syndicate has been rent by two wars that have split more blood even than those of Cosa Nostra. Pasquale Condello was a major player in both.

'They both had their faces covered,' said an eyewitness who saw the killing of Antonio Macri. 'Before they left, one of them, who saw Macri was still breathing, got out of the car and put two more bursts of sub-machine gun fire into his chest and head.'

It was 20 January, 1975. The elderly Macri, from Siderno on the east coast of Calabria, was the leading figure of an older generation of 'Ndrangheta bosses who had tried to halt the crime syndicate's drift into kidnapping and drug-running. According to a mobster who turned state's evidence, Condello was one of his 'executioners'. The murder unleashed a battle for the 'Ndrangheta's soul that was to cost some 300 lives.

By the time of the second mob war, which cost 600 lives in the six years to 1991, Condello was a godfather in his own right. In the 'peace treaty' that ended it, the regional capital, Reggio Calabria, was split in three. The north went to Condello, but his influence has since spread far further.

An intelligence report submitted by the Carabinieri of Reggio Calabria in 2006 referred to his 'growing power, not only in this province, but throughout the region'.

Police and prosecutors will now watch anxiously to see whether the removal of 'The Supremo' sparks another bloody power struggle in the 'Ndrangheta's heartland.