Shortcut: Living Among the Mafia - ATC International

**Meshel Laurie** (0:00)
This is Australian True Crime International with Michelle Laurie.
In 2006, Dutch woman Sanne de Boer had a small financial windfall and became one of those people we read about who bought an incredibly cheap rundown house in a picturesque village in Italy's Calabria region. She was aware of the region's reputation as a mafia stronghold, but found it hard to believe her sweet neighbours could be involved in anything like that. Eventually though, Sanne began to realise that the very fabric of everyday life in her village was controlled by a strict code enforced by the Ndrangheta, one of the most powerful crime organisations in the world. Sanne has written a book about her observations and experiences. It's called The New Mafia, and she joins us to talk about it.
This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, and a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

**Sanne de Boer** (1:06)
I was invited by an author to help them write their book. So I was working there actually as an editor. I had never been in the south of Italy.
I was immediately, I fell in love with the natural beauty of the place. I was living on this beautiful hilltop village by the sea. The people in the village was super welcoming to me. It was just, I had never expected to want to stay there after finishing that book, but I couldn't help it.

**Meshel Laurie** (1:37)
It feels like you turned a dream into reality. You turned something that seems like a ridiculous fairy tale into reality. You're actually doing it.

**Sanne de Boer** (1:45)
Maybe I had an idea that it would teach me a lot about the world as well, but of course I couldn't know at that point.

**Meshel Laurie** (1:52)
Yeah, absolutely. I think it is important to note that you were an editor, you were working for a publisher, right? So you weren't working as a journalist. You didn't move there to write a book about this.

**Sanne de Boer** (2:03)
I certainly didn't move there to investigate the mafia.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:06)
That's what's so great about it because initially it really is, it's a story about someone who moves into this environment. I guess maybe like a lot of us, in the back of your mind, you're aware that or you've heard the term Calabrian mafia.
Maybe there's some movies about it. But when you got there, you write in the book that you just thought, as if my beautiful sweet neighbors, these people are so lovely, they're so good. I can't see any evidence of anything nefarious around here.

**Sanne de Boer** (2:33)
Right. That's right. Of course, it took a while also for me to get to understand a little bit more about the local mafia clans because it's understandable that people wouldn't be very ready to speak about it with me. Also, another factor was my Italian was still very basic. Yeah.
It took me quite some years to be able to read the papers and to be able to eventually start reporting on the subject and to go and speak to all kinds of people about it.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:09)
I've been telling people about the book and the story I always relay to them is, one night you heard a car explosion and everyone went out on the street and you realized that it belonged to a lady who worked at the council who gave out building permits and eventually you realized she mustn't have given a permit to someone who wanted one, but significantly the police never came, the fire brigade never came.

**Sanne de Boer** (3:35)
She never even called them.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:36)
Right.

**Sanne de Boer** (3:37)
It was in the middle of the night, it was such a shocking event, everybody came out of their houses, everybody was also very supportive of that family that was obviously heartbroken and shocked and very much afraid of what this would mean, but it was very significant that I realized nobody was calling the police, she never filed a police report, everybody helped to put out the fire and eventually she quit her job and she moved away sadly enough as well.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:07)
So it's a very telling moment that everybody else understands what's happening and you still didn't really get it.

**Sanne de Boer** (4:14)
I was trying to be as discreet as possible and still get some information, but I realized the complexity of this all and the great emotional impact that this criminal presence had on regular people and I think that was probably also a very important factor in me wanting to investigate eventually because actually, I'm not very much of a true crime reader or I wasn't even so much into the subject, but living in Calabria realizing how normal criminal power looks and how sophisticated this just infiltrates into society, also in the Netherlands, which was another important factor that made me want to get to know more about this, was just eye-opening to me and it really helped me fuel all these years of research and writing.