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 neighbors could be involved in anything like that.
Eventually, though, Sanne began to realize 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 organizations 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. And of course, it took a while also for me to kind of 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.
So 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** (2:04)
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** (2:29)
She never even called them. 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. Eventually, she quit her job and she moved away, sadly enough, as well.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:02)
It's a very telling moment that everybody else understands what's happening. The Ndrangheta also has quite a presence here in Australia and has done for a very long time, and it does in Holland, it does all over Europe, America, and I think responsible for most of the cocaine movement around the world. Is that fair?

**Sanne de Boer** (3:23)
That is what Italian law enforcement has said for many years, early 2000s up until maybe 10 years ago, they were definitely a very large factor in the cocaine smuggling all over the world.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:38)
And Ecstasy was our, I'm sure you've read about it.

**Sanne de Boer** (3:40)
Ecstasy, yeah.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:41)
At the time was the biggest Ecstasy hall in the world that happened here in Melbourne a couple of probably 20 years ago now.

**Sanne de Boer** (3:47)
That's probably Australian Dutch connection as well there, because it's in Holland, it's in southern Holland and Belgium that most of the world's Ecstasy is produced. So it was very probably producing the Netherlands, then brought to Italy and transported to Australia.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:04)
And put in cans, remember putting cans that looked like crushed tomatoes?

**Sanne de Boer** (4:08)
Tomato cans, yes.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:10)
Amazing.

**Sanne de Boer** (4:11)
15 million Ecstasy pills.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:13)
An amazing story. So is that their main industry still, drugs, narcotics?

**Sanne de Boer** (4:18)
Yes, I believe it's their largest part of their income. They do of course also make a lot of money from just public contracts and some extortion, not always extortion as in asking for protection money directly, but often also forcing people to buy products that are really highly priced.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:42)
Because we know that's the formula, right? That's the mafia formula is to open legitimate businesses for many reasons to gain control of other sectors of the economy, legitimate sectors. So all those things go on in all of the countries that they're in?