The Bridge over Sicily and Calabria: the Meaning for Mafia Groups Globally

It’s been in the making for about 30 years and in early proposal stage for over 50, but the stakes are so high we haven’t essentially moved any further than the planning phase. Lately, the European Commission has just approved funding for about 25 million Euros for technical support, but this would only amount to just a fraction of the overall cost (14 billion euros estimates) and is considered by some a very short-sighted move. The majestic project for a 3.6 kilometres suspension bridge, with pillars higher than the top floor of the Empire State Building in New York City, would connect the island of Sicily with the mainland region of Calabria in the South of Italy. Known as the Strait of Messina Bridge or simply the Strait Bridge, owing too near certain corruption risks, it shouldn’t see the light of day.

It’s certainly not only an Italian story. Year after year we have seen French, Arab, Canadian, Chinese companies interested and involved in the project. And every once in a while, until very recently, we have seen “expressions of interest” from organised crime groups with that peculiar entrepreneurial flair that is typical of the southern Italian mafias.

Seems like ancient history now – it was after all 2005 – that an engineer, Giuseppe ‘Joseph’ Zappia wanted in the affair of the construction of the Bridge, for which he had already “found” five billion euros to invest. Born in 1925 in Martingues (France), but of Calabrian origin, he was the son of migrants who had left the small village of Oppido Mamertina to make their fortunes first in France and then in Canada. Zappia had feeble interests in local politics in Montréal, but his expertise was in construction. Long story short, his attempts to finance the building of the Bridge led him to be arrested (and then convicted) in Rome for mafia association aimed at bid rigging, together with the undisputed boss of the American-Sicilian mafia in Montréal, Vito Rizzuto, originally from Cattolica Eraclea, in Sicily, home of the Cuntrera-Caruana mafia family.

“I remember” Zappia recounted in wiretaps, “that when I was a boy, old people, who had emigrated to America in the early 1900s, used to tell me that one day Calabria and Sicily would also be united by a bridge like the Brooklyn Bridge. I have decided to end my life here and I would love to see that bridge over the Strait of Messina realised”. He was a visionary, after all, but also capable to pragmatically capitalise on mafia contacts and their money.

Abandoned and revived so many times we lost count, the Bridge had a foundational stone-laying ceremony under Silvio Berlusconi’s government in 2009. For years, decades, the project has been the chimera of visionaries and the phoenix of each new government, emerging from the ashes of their predecessors’ failures. In the meanwhile, the only certainty was the squandering of public money and the fact that local mafia groups, from Cosa nostra in Sicily and from the ‘ndrangheta in Calabria, were getting ready to make a move as soon as anything was announced, and possibly together.

Recently, in March 2023, the Government chaired by far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and with Matteo Salvini at the Ministry of Infrastructure, approved a law decree to proceed with the construction of the Messina Bridge by remodelling the existing project. The works on the bridge should have begun by Summer 2024 and end by 2032. We are now instead looking at more delays, as in May 2024 the consortium handling the project requested at least four more months. Crucially, a technical commission found that the bridge might not be compatible with the other infrastructures (namely with the enormous ships transiting to and from the port of Gioia Tauro, one of the biggest in the Mediterranean for transhipment). Again, this is how it usually went in the past, bouncing between periodic announcements and delays until forgetfulness kicks in.

Joe Zappia, already in 2005, had figured out that the Messina Strait Bridge bridged, pun intended, Calabrians and Sicilians from all over the world. He even imagined winning the contract and using it to leverage political power to bring Vito Rizzuto back to Sicily – with that eternal nostalgic quest of many migrants to not to die far from their roots.

Both Calabrian ‘ndrangheta and Sicilian Cosa nostra are mobile, transnational, mafia groups. Their global character doesn’t just mean transnational crime, but it means that they are ubiquitous, they exist at the same time in Toronto, Melbourne, and Calabria or in New York, Germany, and Sicily. Their contacts travel, their ideas, money, and ventures too, their structures are like those networks we see in global trade, nodes of wider licit and illicit schemes. What happens abroad affects Calabria or Sicily, and what happens in Calabria or Sicily affects what happens abroad.  If an ‘ndranghetista in Gioia Tauro wishes to reinvest their cash through extra-virgin olive oil, that can be done with a cousin who knows someone who has a company in New York who can help with logistics (true story), and it’s all very normal.

Now, the problem with this bridge is not just that it will be vulnerable to global mafia appetites, but also that these appetites are going to be welded with the vulnerabilities that huge public works have historically shown in Italy. Mafia interests will meet the availability of cliques of corrupt and corrupting individuals. Like in the most recent major public work, the MOSE project of water barriers in the Venice lagoon, the ripe-for-corruption ring generated bribes in the order of one billion euro, raising the final price of the work to over six billion out of the 1.8 billion initially planned.

The risk is that the Bridge will remain unfinished, or it will take forever to get completed while many will be feasting financially over its huge pillars and stones. The attraction of large-scale works for the corrupt and the mafia is that the realisation and social utility of the work are of marginal interest: the more the realisation is diluted over time, the more technical difficulties produce delays, the more there are new investments, or changes to the original project, the malign actors will be able to fill their pockets.

It is known as the Strait of Messina Bridge and it has been announced as a flagship project for the current Italian right-wing populist government, but it shouldn’t see the light of day as we have the almost mathematical certainty it will be a public work catastrophe rife with corruption risks.

Dr Anna Sergi is a Professor of Criminology and Organised Crime Studies at the University of Essex. She specialises in mafia studies, corruption and power, as well as cross-border policing and justice. She has authored several books and peer-reviewed articles. She won the Early Career Award from the European Society of Criminology in 2023.

Main image Credit: Messina Bridge from Piale, from Stretto di Messina. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of RUSI, ECPR, Focused Conservation or any other institution.