How technology is changing the face of the 'Ndrangheta

«Today the mafias need people who know how to deal with computers more than with guns, so as not to lose ground compared to the pirates who operate in the shadows...».

In these few lines Nicola Gratteri , a magistrate at the forefront of the fight against the 'Ndrangheta for years, and the journalist Antonio Nicaso summarize the epochal change that has been characterizing organized crime for some time .

In an increasingly interconnected world, where distances are canceled out by a click and virtual meeting places are replacing real ones, even the mafias are adapting. And by exploiting the potential of technology, they enter the digital space as if it were a new territory of conquest.

A little-known phenomenon, which Gratteri and Nicaso tell us about in their latest work, “ Il grifone ” (Mondadori, 2023, pp. 180). An investigative book that starts from how technology is changing the face of the 'Ndrangheta , the most traditionalist of the mafias, to demonstrate once again how organized crime can often be extremely flexible and capable of keeping up with the times. It no longer uses only crude and flashy young men, but also skilled professionals with skills in the IT and financial sector. Its weapons today are highly sophisticated hardware and software, which allow it to insinuate itself into the darkest corners of the web, protected not by the ancient silence, but by the anonymity that digital space allows us to maintain.

Nicola Gratteri and Antonio Nicaso outline this metamorphosis by citing figures and documents , demonstrating the fact that the mafia, and in particular the 'Ndrangheta, now acts on a global scale, dealing drugs, laundering money, carrying out financial scams and selling weapons in every part of the planet, without even having to leave home.

The discovery of cryptocurrencies, then, has opened up lucrative and unexpected prospects, if we consider that in 2022 the volume of illicit transactions reached a record of 20.6 billion euros.

In this peculiar process of hybridization, the 'ndrangheta, as a griffin, a mythological beast with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle, embodies at the same time traditional values and disvalues and new instances, making the boundaries between legality and illegality increasingly fluid. Law enforcement agencies, consequently, find themselves faced with unprecedented challenges, which must be faced with the awareness that, in a transnational dimension, it is necessary to overcome political, cultural and legal differences in the name of a common objective: to protect society and future generations from the pitfalls of a silent, muffled and almost reassuring mafia, very skilled in the art of mimicry and metamorphosis.