The teenager who was chained in a hole by the Italian mafia for 2.5 years
At the age of nineteen, Carlo was abducted by the 'Ndrangheta. "I cried and screamed as loud as I could, but nobody heard me."
By Niccolò Carradori
February 13, 2020, 12:01 pm
ILLUSTRATION BY MASSIMILIANO MARZUCCO .

On January 25, 1988, nineteen-year-old Carlo Celadon was home alone in the evening. He lived in Arzignano, a village in northeastern Italy, and was eating alone. His father Candido, a successful entrepreneur, was on vacation with his sister, and his older brother was on a honeymoon. At one point, four armed men broke into the house. They tied Carlo, threw him in the trunk of their car and drove away. It was the start of the longest kidnapping ever in Italy.

The four men were members of the 'Ndrangheta, a powerful Mafia organization from the southern Calabria region. The 'Ndrangheta plays an important role in the global drug trade (especially in the field of cocaine), with an annual turnover estimated at 44 billion euros . Before they reached this position, they earned their money by abducting people from rich families and asking for ransom. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, they kidnapped nearly 700 people.

Italian journalist Pablo Trincia reconstructed Carlo's story for an episode of the Italian podcast Buio - that means "dark." "This period marked a turning point in the rise of Mafia organizations," Trincia says on the phone. "The 'Ndrangheta had developed an entire kidnapping system, with the proceeds invested in illegal activities that generated even more profit, such as real estate and drug smuggling."

After Carlo was kidnapped, the car drove for 17 hours without stopping to Aspromonte in Calabria, the home of the 'Ndrangheta. There he was chained and left in a small excavated hole in the ground, with only a bag of bread. Because Carlo was following the news, he knew that abductions like this could take six months because it takes a lot of time to negotiate and settle the payment. "I assumed a long agony awaited me," he recalls in the podcast.

Before Carlo was kidnapped, he sat watching the news with his father once in the evening, and a message came along about an abducted person who was released because ransom was paid. He asked his father if he would do the same if he were ever kidnapped, but he shook his head. No, his father would never pay that money. "I was afraid he would let me die," says Carlo.

In fact, his father immediately tore back home because he was willing to save his son. His family received fake phone calls for days from people pretending to have kidnapped Carlo. They waited three months in fear, until the real kidnappers finally made contact. A man who called himself Agip asked Carlo's five billion lire, which would now be 2.6 million euros.

Meanwhile, Carlo knew nothing. In the first months he was scared to death by the kidnappers, who tried to convince him that his father refused to pay. They had him write letters to his father, begging to help him, but they were never actually sent. When Candido asked if they could prove that Carlo was still alive, they gave a soundtrack on which his son accused him of leaving him, and he only cared about money.

After that first telephone conversation, the case came under the prosecutor Tonino De Silvestri. "There were two options," De Silvestri explains in the podcast. "Some felt that the family's ability should be frozen [to put pressure on the 'Ndrangheta to withdraw their claim], and that all contact should be avoided. Others suggested leaving it to the family. ”They opted for a middle way: the assets were frozen, but the family would negotiate with the kidnappers. If they paid the money, the police would arrest them.

Months passed and all the while Carlo remained signed in the gap. "Mice came for the food, so I pulled back in a corner," he says in the podcast. “I put a piece of cheese under a glass, and when a mouse came in, I squeezed its head off. Snakes have also come in twice. If they would bite me and I get infected, my kidnappers would never have taken me to a hospital. "I cried and screamed as loud as I could, but nobody heard me."

At one point, Candido and Agip made an appointment to pay the money. Candido followed his instructions and brought the agreed amount, but Carlo was nowhere in sight. The police followed the men who had picked up the money to a small house, and arrested five people there. But there was no trace of either the money or Carlo.

Shortly before that, the kidnappers had moved him to a cave in the forest, and from that moment the communication stopped for seven months. Carlo's family feared he was no longer alive. After a while, Agip contacted them again and asked for another five billion lire. His tone became coarser. "If you don't want to pay, just say it," he told Candido. "Then we'll just give you his head."

Months later an appointment was made again. Candido had managed to get the amount down to two billion lire (around one million euros). On the morning of May 4, 1990, 831 days after his abduction, Carlo was finally released . "They took me to a highway and put me down on the ground," he said. A driver saw him and called the police. Carlo had lost 30 kilos and was unable to get up. He refused to talk to his father on the phone because he still thought he had been detained for so long because he had not wanted to pay anything.

"What particularly touched me about Carlo Celadon's story is that he didn't even go completely crazy," says Trincia. “He spent two and a half years there, while he could only count how many seconds passed. And all the while he thought his family had left him to his fate, and that he could be killed any time. "

According to the Italian scientific journal for criminology, abductions for organized crime groups are not only a source of income, but also a way to scare people and make the authorities look helpless. Because the 'Ndrangheta distributes part of its revenue among poor villages in Aspromonte, it has a loyal network, which makes it very difficult to expose the members.

Trincia says the authorities succeeded in arresting Agip a few years after Carlo's release. “When the police listened to telephone conversations, his voice was recognized. It was pure luck, and he turned out to be just one of many intermediaries. ”The other kidnappers have never heard of anything again, and the same goes for the billions of lira they have put in their pockets.

This article originally appeared at VICE Italy .

https://www.vice.com/nl/article/d3a...anse-maffia-in-een-gat-werd-vastgeketend