Taking on the 'Ndrangheta Mafia

Published: July 19, 2018, 11 a.m.

One of the few people able to strike fear into the international organised crime syndicate. Kate Adie introduces correspondents’ stories and insights from around the world: In Italy, Andrew Hosken meets Nicola Gratteri the single-minded judge who has put 6,000 Mafiosi behind bars. Today, he says, the biggest threat comes from the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria whose power spreads far beyond their native Calabria. In Peru, Grace Livingstone meets some of the thousands of indigenous women who say they were forcibly sterilised in the 1990s as part of a government family-planning scheme. In the Sinai desert in Egypt, Fleur MacDonald meets the monks who have become the custodians of some of the oldest surviving Christian texts. While it was good enough for the makers of the Taj Mahal, Grace Banks hears how millennials in India show little appetite for Pietra Dura – the craft of creating images out of finely cut stone. And in Ireland, Andy Jones attends the Killorglin Puck fair – a three-day celebration in memory of the time a goat helped save the town from would-be British invaders.