On January 13, 2021, Italy began a trial of the century.
There were 600 lawyers, 900 witnesses, countless international journalists from all over the world, more than 1,000 auditors, and 355 mafia members and corrupt parliamentarians, police officers, and former senior officials.
In order to accommodate this overly large crowd, the trial had to be held in an abandoned call center. Soldiers patrol outside the building, and police helicopters hover over the building.
This is the largest gang trial in Italy in decades, and no one dares to slacken off. Because what they have to face is the cruelest and most terrifying criminal gang in the world.
The Provisional Court is located in the town of Lazuria Terme. This small, notorious place is where the subjects of this trial gather— the Mancuso family, the richest and bloodiest mafia gang in Italy.
In order to hunt them down, the police spent nearly a decade, more than 3,000 police forces involved in the operation, eavesdropping, undercover, collecting clues. A total of 438 indictments were listed at trial, ranging from drug and arms trafficking to extortion, and it took more than three hours to read the indictment alone.
This is a more realistic and shocking anti-black action than described in "The Godfather".
Sicily is the region with the most powerful Mafia in Italy, but brutal families like the Mancuso are now less common. (Their family is an important branch of the "Glory Society" faction of the Mafia.)
A century ago, the Mancuso family was just poor farmers in a remote mountain village in Sicily. Today, they help the Glorious Society, which controls 80 percent of Europe's cocaine trade and earns around £50 billion a year. What is this concept?
The illegal income of a single gang is almost 3% of Italy's GDP.
They run many towns in Sicily, and the local prosecutor says "if the boss of Mancuso doesn't give the order, the leaves here won't dare to move". At the same time, they have allegiance to South American and Albanian gangs and expanded illegal trade around the world.
According to Mafia studies professor Nikasso, the family's change of fortunes began with violence. They used force to seize a large local quarry, where the stone was supplied to Italy's largest seaport, from which they made a lot of money and began to form a gang.
The Mancuso family, literally, has a lot of people with the same surname and are all blood relatives. This is a means for the family to isolate other forces and ensure stability.
They almost only develop family members as gang members, so to speak, as long as you are born in this family, you are a natural gangster. Unlike other mafias, they also recruit women, and there are 44 female members in this century trial, each of whom is as fierce as the men in the family.
These are gang members of relatives who operate in the underworld with unique nicknames such as Big Nose, Fat Man, Blonde, Little Goat, Little Sweetie. Although it sounds a bit sand sculpture, no one can laugh when you hear the crimes they are accused of.
In 1973, the gang committed a major crime that shocked the world: the kidnapping of an American oil tycoon, the underage heir of the famous Getty family.
When the tycoon's grandfather refused to pay the gang's demand for a $17 million ransom, they cut off one of the child's ears and clipped the bloody ear to the child's lock of hair in the letter.
Heir after being rescued
Note warning: If the money doesn't arrive within ten days, your grandson's other ear will also be cut off, and then he will be slowly cut into pieces. Little by little, it will be sent to your home.
In the end, the kidnappers settled for $2.2 million, releasing the young heir of the Gedi family.
John Paul Getty III died in 2011 after being kidnapped by severe alcoholism
The family also fought to win a major port, and more than 1,000 people were murdered, surpassing the number of murders during the Gang Wars in New York.
Think about it, most of these people are relatives, for the sake of profit even their families can do it, then what else do they not do? Anyone who stands in their way has only the word "death."
One of the godfathers of the family branch " Uncle " Luigi
But this trial of the century is precisely thanks to a man who is not afraid of death. Gratley was an old prosecutor who had been investigating local mafia activities for more than thirty years, and from the moment his investigation began, he knew he was a dead man.
As early as a young age, Gratley, who was full of justice, found that the people around him were deeply harassed by the mafia and determined to study the law and let these evil gangsters get out of Sicily.
Relying on thousands of hours of information interception and surveillance, he got more and more criminal facts about the Mancuso family on the tip of the knife. But he was an outsider after all, and under the iron walls of Mancuso's bloodline, it was too unlikely that conclusive evidence would be discovered.
Gratley struggled between death and failure, and in desperation, a man no one could have imagined reached out to him.
The man who came to ask to go undercover was the son of the "godfather" of the Mancuso family.
The Mafia Road has always been a one-way street, and once you join, you must be loyal for life. Can only die or disappear, can not withdraw, can not regret.
But Emanuele Mancuso wanted to recant. He is the son of luni, the godfather of the gang, "Engineer". His father controlled a large military-like organization.
Emanuele, like his brothers, grew up thinking that crime was not a big deal, and petty theft, drug trafficking, were the childhood "entertainment" of their parents and even their grandfathers.
He was arrested several times at a very young age and asked by the police to do social services. However, at that time, he was not yet a full member of the gang, and the father even asked his son to treat the game as an inevitable experience in adult life.
So, as the son of the godfather, he was only 14 years old and naturally participated in the mafia initiation ceremony. The throne of power of the Mancuso family is similar to the throne, and it is completely inherited by blood.
That is to say, if Emanuele obeys and does what his father asks him to do, the future godfather must be him.
Part of the head of the family
Emanuele did do a lot of evil things in the beginning. For example, before the family wanted to occupy the land of a businesswoman, the merchant strongly resisted and disappeared.
In fact, a gang member closely associated with Emanuele, he followed orders to kill the businesswoman and feed the carcass to the pigs to destroy the evidence. Emanuele has nothing to do with this.
Victim Maria Chindamo
But as he grew older, his father had a new idea that changed the trajectory of his life—sending him to college.
In the family, the vast majority of middle-aged and elderly people have been mixed with society since childhood, and they can't read one of the big characters. But if the gangsters want to gain a foothold in modern society, they must have the means to launder black money.
So Emanuele was sent to the University of Rome, far from Sicily, where the subject was ironic — law. His father wanted him to receive higher education so that he could help the family go deep into finance, art, and even politics, and run the family under the guise of a legitimate industry for the elite.
But the father's desire to cultivate Emanuele into a Sven scum deviates from his son. Emanuele's friends in college are all innocent peers.
They don't abuse violence, and their fathers don't think every day about how to smuggle drugs and human trafficking. He also met his future wife, Nancy, who married and had children while in school.
From childhood in the dark, Emanuele lived a normal life for the first time, and while he was happy, he began to examine his past and that of his family, who had no lower limit than the ordinary mafia, and women and children killed without scruples:
Diagram
They shot and killed his 3-year-old granddaughter in order to kidnap an old man.
The girlfriends of two family members reported to the police, who arrested her and forced her to drink sulfuric acid, torturing her to death.
Because of their failed land acquisition, they killed the son of a female farmer with a car bomb.
They stuffed the traitors into sulfuric acid barrels and locked them up for three days and three nights until the bodies were completely dissolved.
They assassinated the killer in the family just because he was gay
These terrible memories, the things that his father often talked about, began to seriously trouble his conscience.
But that wasn't enough to get him out of the family's control completely. After graduating from law, he was assigned to study agriculture. It has to be said that this man was very clever, and soon he had the ability to grow cannabis on a large scale and sell it on the Internet as part of the family's assets. His wife is also increasingly connected to the gang.
But he didn't know that he had been abandoned by his family. Father found that in recent years, Emanuele has become less and less active in the family business. Emanuele's "conscience discovery" dodge, in their eyes, is cowardly and incompetent, and is not as useful as the uncultured bastards.
In the father's view, Emanuele's child is "raised" and will not become a godfather in the future. So they ruthlessly marginalized Emanuele from the family.
When Emanuele was sentenced for drug trafficking in 2018, no relative, including his father, was willing to visit him.
Emanuele is like a plastic bag that is thrown away when it is used up, and he realizes that in this family, there is never affection, only interest. The so-called underworld lecture on morality and righteousness is simply nonsense.
After 4 years in prison, he finally figured it out: he was just a pawn in his father's eyes, and he had to choose the right path.
So he took the initiative to contact the old prosecutor who had been tracking down the mafia for many years, and wanted to become an undercover agent, on the one hand, to get the protection of the government to start a new life, and on the other hand, to completely break off relations with his father's evil kingdom.
For herself, in order not to create bloody cases, and for the sake of her daughter who was just born outside the prison, she has the right to choose her own future, rather than being manipulated by the family like herself and repeating the same mistakes.
The old prosecutor and Emanuele quickly reached an agreement that Emanuele would go undercover and collect as much evidence as possible from the family's incriminating, and he risked his life to hand over thousands of hours of audio and video recordings of senior members such as his father, uncle, brother and other senior members to the prosecution.
But the whistleblower was soon revealed, and father himself ordered Emanuele's head. His name was written on the hunt list, and as long as he could kill him, a reward of 1 million euros was offered.
Emanuele fled in all directions, while the old prosecutor worked day and night to speed up the processing of evidence, all of whom knew had a knife hanging over their heads. If you don't hurry up, everything will be in vain.
On the left is Emanuele's older brother, also a gang member, who was arrested in 2018
Sicily will not be quiet, and children will not have a bright future.
Finally, at the end of 2020, the time is ripe. According to the wire, more than 3,000 and Italian police ambushed near the family stronghold in the Calabria region, rushed into the venue, and arrested more than 300 core family members on the spot.
A month later, the Trial of the Century began. Both Emanuele and the old prosecutor were added to the witness protection program and moved to a safe place to live in a different capacity.
But Emanuele's nightmare wasn't over yet. Joining a gang is as irreversible as a drug addiction, it will always follow you, torture you, and ruin your life.
Zoom screens used for remote trials
Although his father, brother, uncle and others have been arrested, there are still a large number of middle and high-level members of the gang who have fled or have not yet been controlled. They continued to hold Emanuele hostage.
What broke Emanuele most was that her wife, now a loyal member of the family, refused to leave. He also kidnapped his two-year-old daughter as a hostage to blackmail Emanuele and ask him to stop revealing more clues to the police or kill his daughter.
Think about a few years ago, this girl was just an ordinary, kind female college student. Now, she has entered the family because she is married to herself, and she has become as ruthless as his father.
His daughter may still not have the right to freely choose her future. And although he has destroyed the House of Sin, he must live in the shadows.
Maybe in anti-gangster movies, he will become a legendary hero, and in gangster movies, he is a hateful traitor. But reality is not a movie, his complex life experience only the tragedy continues, and the source of everything comes from the mafia - this overdone thing itself...