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This chapter focuses on the 'Ndrangheta, a loose confederation of mafia families, most of which (eighty-six) operate in the province of Reggio Calabria in southern Calabria. This mafia has systematically forced local entrepreneurs to pay protection money, corrupted officials, and penetrated politics. Politicians have been threatened, wounded, and killed, while bosses have successfully stood in local elections. In the 1990s, the Italian government disbanded eighteen city councils due to the 'Ndrangheta's ability to pervert local electoral processes. In 2007, killers from San Luca, this mafia's stronghold, murdered six people outside an Italian restaurant in Duisburg, in northwestern Germany, bringing the ruthless nature and international reach of the organization home to the European public.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, numerous sources have mentioned, and sometimes described in great detail, stable mafia associations in both Sicily and Calabria. Today, members and branches of both Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta can be found in numerous northern Italian centers as well as in all those foreign countries that have attracted consistent migration flows from southern Italy. The cosche composing Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta may be considered fully developed organizations, clearly distinguished from the blood families of their members, because they have ruling bodies to enforce their normative order. For many years, the power apparatuses of the single mafia families were the sole ruling bodies within the two organizations. Only in the late 1950s, in fact, did Cosa Nostra families in the Palermo province create a superordinate body of coordination: the so-called provincial commission. Despite the experiments carried out in the last four decades of the twentieth century, the ruling bodies of single families remain the real centers of mafia power, and segmentation is the prevalent form of differentiation.

Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta gain much of their strength through reliance on a premodern contractual form. On entering a mafia family, the new member underwrites what Max Weber called a “status contract,” which is also a “fraternization contract,” as the members of a mafia cosca are obliged to consider themselves brothers. The key value of the mafia subuniverse of meaning—that set of cultural codes, rituals, and norms through which mafia associations justify their existence and impose a new status on their associates—is honor. The ceremony of mafia initiation is comprised of the three phases making up a rite of passage: “separation,” “transition,” and “incorporation.” Mafia initiation rites are not only rites of passage. By solemnly staging the stepping over of a line establishing a fundamental division in the social order, the ceremonies of mafia affiliation are also “rites of institution.” Though real life is often very different, relationships among Cosa Nostra and 'Ndrangheta associates are prescriptively a form of communitas.

Self-excluding from state jurisdiction through secrecy, mafia groups cannot do without violence to solve internal conflicts, defend common interests, or guarantee the effectiveness of their legal order. In Sicily and Calabria, the groups' adoption of secrecy has never been a matter of principle only, promoted by ideals or by the desire to copy liberal secret sects. Variations and discontinuity in the enforcement of secrecy can be seen in dimensions other than that of time. This is because, far from being an unchanging property, secrecy is relational. As the history of families belonging to Cosa Nostra and 'Ndrangheta demonstrates, the degree to which it is used varies depending on the external referents with whom the individual or the organization has to deal. The cultural code that symbolizes, despite its multivocality, the obligation of secrecy is omertà. In the Cosa Nostra, the boundary between the initiates and the outsiders created by the rite of mafia initiation is strengthened by the rigid obligation to silence on members.

In the reflections of several scholars, mafiosi of the past have been identified tout court with the few figures who showed a clearly modern acquisitive attitude in the traditional economic and social system of western Sicily and southern Calabria, and have been presented as the true expression of the local bourgeoisie. In their turn, contemporary mafia groups have been assimilated into the model of legal business firms. Far from being economic enterprises aiming at the maximization of profits, however, mafia associations are functionally diffused entities, which claim to exercise a political dominion over their areas of settlement. More than wealth, their members have always aimed to gain power over their communities, occupying the central points of the local social, economic, and political systems. Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta families have managed to mix politics and economics, as exemplified by the activities undertaken by them in the building sector, and specifically in the market of construction for the state.

The development and existence of mafia associations in Sicily and Calabria over the last hundred and fifty years cannot be explained without mentioning the longstanding incapacity of state institutions to guarantee order and public security over wide areas of the Mezzogiorno through the monopoly of force, and thus to gain full legitimacy in the eyes of the local population. Mafia cosche long enjoyed the consensus—or at least, the tolerance—of large strata of the local population, whose cultural codes they repeated and manipulated. Unlike the state, at least up to the 1950s, mafia power thus succeeded in transforming itself into authority. Empowered by popular consensus and the benign neglect of law-enforcement agencies, members of Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta met with little difficulty in accomplishing their roles as brokers and pursuing their own goals of power and wealth. The deterioration of relations between the mafia and politics is the result of a slow process of delegitimation that has invested mafia power during the whole post-war period, but has recorded a sharp acceleration from the early 1980s onward.

This book has shown that Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta are secret and multifunctional brotherhoods each composed of about a hundred units. Though these are usually called families by their members, they are clearly distinct from the latter's blood families. They rely instead on bonds of artificial kinship created through the ceremony of initiation of new members. Exploiting secrecy and violence, the families of Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta have traditionally employed the strength of mafia bonds to pursue a plurality of goals and to carry out numerous different functions, so much so that it is impossible to identify any one who is exclusive. The cosche are neither economic enterprises aiming at the maximization of profits nor an industry for private protection. Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta cannot be considered a universally valid ideal type of organized crime if it is understood as the provision of illegal goods and services.

The Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta have been singled out as Italy's largest and most powerful mafia associations. The mafiosi's illegal businesses and their infiltration in legitimate industries have been targeted by criminal investigations. Analysis of the defectors' testimonies, criminal cases, and other sources shows many analogies between the most lasting and successful Italian American mafia association, Cosa Nostra, and its southern Italian counterparts, particularly the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. Just like the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, America's largest and most powerful mafia association is a loose confederation of mafia families that mutually recognize each other but are independent on most issues. The two organizations, however, differ in their internal organization and activities and their relationship with underworld competitors, civil society, politicians, and law enforcement. Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta resort systematically to violence and secrecy to defend themselves from state repression and to pursue their aims. In addition, they have a plurality of functions within their social environment.