How the tentacles of the Calabrian Mafia spread

Six Italians were murdered in the industrial heart of Germany last night in an unprecedented Mafia hit.

The men, from Calabria in southern Italy, were aged between 16 and 38. They were gunned down outside an Italian restaurant in the city of Duisburg, western Germany, after celebrating one of the group’s 18th birthday.

An anti-Mafia police squad from Calabria and Interpol officers based in Rome have been dispatched to help local officers, who are not used to investigating mass gangland killings.

German police found the six Italians, who were riddled with bullets, in the early hours of this morning. Attackers ambushed them and sprayed countless shots into their two vehicles as they returned to the restaurant, Da Bruno’s, which is owned by Sebastiano Strangio, 38, the oldest member of the group.

The other victims were Tommaso Venturi, the 18-year-old, Francesco Pergola, 21, Marco Pergola, 19, Francesco “G”, 16 and Marco Marmo, 25. They were all part-owners or workers in the Da Bruno restaurant.

Three of the men were permanently resident in Duisburg, one was from neighbouring Muelheim, the other two had recently arrived from Italy, according to the German police.

The six have been linked to the notorious 'Ndrangheta branch of the Mafia in southern Italy. In Rome, Giuliano Amato, the Interior Minister, said the murders were apparently part of a long-running feud between two mafia clans within the group.

The feud began with a seemingly innocuous egg fight at an annual San Luca carnival in 1991, but soon escalated into a clan war between the Nirta-Strangio families and the Pelle-Vottari.

The battle between the clans has intensified this year with up to 11 people killed in the past eight months, but it is extremely unusual for killings to take place outside Italy.

“This score-settling is unprecedented, also because it happened in a foreign country,” Luigi De Sena, deputy police chief in Reggio Calabria, told the ANSA news agency. “People from Calabria have a very strong presence in Germany but so far they had kept a low profile, trying not to attract attention.”

The small city of Duisburg, with a population of around half a million, has a fairly large southern European community with around 3,500 Italians living there. The Italian football team stayed in the city during last year’s World Cup finals in Germany.

Rolf Kassauer, a spokesman for the German Police Federation, said it is well known that the Mafia are active in the country.

“Germany is a market for cocaine deals and the sale of stolen cars. This kind of killing shakes up the police and the local population, so I don’t understand why they committed such a crime in a country where they want to do business.”

The clans of the ‘Ndrangheta were originally far more parochial than their better known counterparts from Sicily, the Cosa Nostra, but in recent years they have spread their operation across the world.

They are estimated to have 10,000 "members" both in Italy and abroad, largely through Calabrian emigres. "The 'Ndrangheta has become as adept at money laundering and online transactions as it once was with sawn-off shotguns and extortion rackets in the wilds of Calabria," said Mario Venditti, an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Milan.

According to Italian anti Mafia police the 'Ndrangheta is now one of the most powerful criminal organisations in the world, with 80 per cent of Europe's cocaine passing through the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro.

Giuliano Amato, the Italian Interior Minister, said that Strangio was apparently involved in the San Luca feud. Mr Amato said he “probably was expecting something would happen because it seems he was looking for weapons to defend himself”.

However, he said the other victims seemed to have been taken by surprise by the gunmen. It was the “tail-end of the fight between families in San Luca” according to the minister.

The feud between the Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans began with a fight which broke out when a group of youths from the rival clans hurled eggs - and insults - at each other during the town’s annual carnival procession. The ensuing fighting left two dead.

The origins, however, have long been overtaken. Last Christmas Maria Strangio, 33, the wife of Giovanni Nirta, head of the Nirta family and a convicted drugs baron, was gunned down at the door of her home, a killing which sparked off four further tit-for-tat killings.

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