Its name and initiation rites are linked to the Catholic faith, with the “corona” or crown, referring to the beads of a rosary.

Slowly but steadily, the SCU wove itself into the fabric of Puglia’s society, mixing its illicit activities in with legitimate businesses. Today, it has roughly 30 clans and some 5000 members, almost all of them men.

“Drug trafficking is the main business,” said Carla Durante, head of the Lecce office of the Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate, an inter-agency police force. “That is always accompanied by extortion, usury. And now, like all over the nation, we have infiltration into the public administration.”

The SCU takes the billions of euros it earns from drug trafficking and launders it through legitimate businesses, often in Puglia’s booming tourism industry.

One of the most effective ways to fight it has been by confiscating mob-owned assets. Durante’s team sequesters mafia properties, such as vineyards or farms, which are then turned over to local organisations to be transformed into socially useful community centres or projects.

“By now we have learned that this is really the most incisive tool, because taking assets away from mafiosi means disempowering them,” Durante said.

But the SCU has in some ways become more effective than Italy’s other mafia groups in inserting itself into the local community and gaining social acceptance. In recent years, it generally avoided headline-grabbing acts of violence in favour of more nuanced forms of intimidation.

“Organised crime is still organised, in the sense that it enjoys a certain consensus in Italy,” said Sabrina Matrangola, whose mother, a local politician, was killed by the mob in 1984 after she campaigned to preserve a coastal park from illicit development.

“And as long as there is this consensus, as long as not everyone chooses the right side, and someone will not be willing to roll up their sleeves to help, these places will always be in danger,” said Matrangola, who now works as an activist with the group Libera, which converts mob assets to serve the community.

For those who challenge it, danger persists.

Two weeks after Mariano sent out her arrest warrants for a mob crackdown dubbed “Operation Wolf”, the lead prosecutor on the case, Carmen Ruggiero, nearly had her throat slit by one of the suspects.

Pancrazio Carrino, one of the 22 people named in the warrant, had signalled his desire to collaborate with Ruggiero’s investigation. But when Ruggiero showed up to interrogate him in the Lecce prison, he had other plans: he had chiselled a knife out of a porcelain toilet bowl in his prison cell and hid it in a small black plastic bag in his rectum, planning to “cut her jugular” during the meeting, according to court documents.

“If I had been as lucid that day as I am now,” Carrino later told investigators, “Carmen Ruggiero would already be history.”

In the end, a suspicious guard searched him before he could strike and found the makeshift knife.

Seven months after the threat, Ruggiero walked confidently into the Lecce prison courtroom for a recent hearing in the case, accompanied by a three-officer police escort.

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She has remained undeterred by the death threats, as have the other women who have challenged SCU’s power. But they have had to take precautions, including with around-the-clock security.

Mastrogiovanni, the journalist, moved her young family out of her hometown after her reports on her blog Il Tacco D’Italia about SCU’s infiltration so angered the local government that at one point, the town was plastered with giant posters attacking her work. One depicted her up to her neck in a hole.

According to the patriarchal culture of the SCU, “a woman shouldn’t have a voice”, she said, and all the more if she uses it to write about the mafia.

Mariano, the judge, also lives with around-the-clock police escorts but believes that her job challenging the SCU goes beyond the halls of the courtroom. In her downtime, Mariano uses her passion for writing books, poetry and plays to try to change attitudes at the grassroots level. Recently, she staged a play about the mob in Lecce’s Apollo Theatre.

“We have to start with communication, which is fundamental to transmit values of dignity, courage, responsibility,” she said. “The ability to say no, the ability to be indignant in the face of things that are wrong.”

AP

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