ABSTRACT
This chapter moves the focus to the most extreme of the roles that a deviant mason or an irregular lodge can take in the grey area of interaction with mafias and other political and institutional actors. The cases presented in this chapter mostly relate to decades of convulsed judicial history in Calabria, and specifically in the region’s capital city of Reggio Calabria. Here historical data reveals that a mafia-led masonic-like lodge had been formed by prominent members of the Calabrian mafia – the ‘ndrangheta – to curate political and institutional connections. This exceeds the role of guarantor that we saw in the previous chapter. These events also helped consolidate the external, and popular, view of a mafia-masonic shady and interconnected identity, which we critically unpack.
