ORGANIZED CRIME

STORY OF "RUBBER HAND", THE BOSS WHO WANTED TO BECOME THE HEAD OF THE 'NDRANGHETA



04/09/2023 In the biography of Nicolino Grande Aracri by Antonio Anastasi a glimpse of the Calabrian clan system and the x-ray of their devastating power

You can read in one breath "The story of the rubber hand" by Antonio Anastasi, journalist of the Southern newspaper and collaborator of "Famiglia Cristiana". It deals with the rise and fall of Nicolino Grande Aracri, the ruthless boss of Cutro who had challenged the 'Ndrangheta of Reggio. A "Shakespearean" story set between Emilia and the West, where the West is the Calabria of "bandits", in Pasolini's sense of the term, or of the excluded, of the victims of a "social ban" which sees so many people deprived of their most basic civil rights.
A determined leader Nicolino, known as the "rubber hand", but also intelligent, visionary, enterprising, capable of challenging the centuries-old equilibrium of the 'Ndrangheta (the one that gathered around the old sanctuary of Polsi, which has now become a symbol of the redemption of civil society) to projecting himself into the new financial and economic markets of globalization. The book reconstructs the boss's relationships with entrepreneurs (capable of "invoicing" millions and millions of euros of dirty money out of thin air in order to recycle it for the use of his clan), Freemasons, politicians of the "third level" up to the attempt of collaboration with the justice in order to save his family from revenge.

Millennial traditions, such as the "colonization" of the ruthless Cutrese mafia of the rich Emilia, are mixed with sophisticated recycling systems linked to national and international markets. From the latest trials "it emerges that even the biggest Emilian industrialists, despite solid relationships with red cooperatives and local institutions, went hand in hand with the reference entrepreneurs of a criminal organization that continues to have huge capitals that are tempting even in the north" , writes Anastasi. The author, page after page, describes the social and criminal context in which the life of "rubber hand" takes place to the point of making it a paradigm of a humanity that dies hard, that of a "silent, chameleonic and increasingly delocalized. Until the surprise epilogue of this story: a story that will see the prosecutor of Catanzaro Nicola Gratteri as protagonist, capable of thwarting an attempt by the boss to connect to the ganglia of justice to save himself. This story, full of cool scenes, told like a novel, even if it is true story, as Antonio Nicaso writes in the preface «must be known to understand how much the legitimacy of the ruling classes was decisive for the affirmation of a group of violent people who alone they would never, ever have acquired so much power as to condition the lives and hopes of hundreds of thousands of people».