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A twist of paper holding a £50 snort of cocaine changes hands in a street in Britain.

The buyer, someone who thinks illegal “recreational” drugs are trendy, has just added to the riches of an evil global crime network called the ’Ndrangheta.

Never heard of it? That suits its ­murderous godfathers just fine.

For the ’Ndrangheta is a branch of the mafia which, having taken control of parts of Italy, is rapidly spreading its tentacles around the world.

If you’re an Italian, you can avoid the organisation only if you give up food, booze, cigarettes, clothes, travel, drugs, porn, betting, share-trading and renting a flat because it has interests in every aspect of daily life.

It also deals in fraud, counterfeiting, theft, gun-running, loan-sharking, ­kidnapping and people-trafficking.

But it’s the brutality of the ’Ndrangheta that is most shocking – a boss has just been arrested for killing a rival by feeding him alive to hungry pigs.

The organisation is based in the region of Calabria in the toe of Italy but controls banks, malls, building firms, supermarkets and clubs throughout the country.

Top anti-mafia magistrate Roberto di Palma warns: “The ’Ndrangheta is like an octopus and wherever there’s money, you’ll find its tentacles.”

The power of Sicily’s mafia – the once- ­untouchable Cosa Nostra – has waned in recent years thanks to a ­relentless war waged by prosecutors and Italian police.

But its place has been taken quietly by the ’Ndrangheta.

And it now imports 80 per cent of Europe’s cocaine from Mexico and Colombia through the container port of Gioia Tauro.

The Italian government doesn’t mince words, declaring in an official report: “It is one of the most powerful criminal ­organisations in the world.”

And prosecutor Mario Venditti said: “The organisation has become as adept at money-laundering as it once was with sawn-off shotguns.”

The ’Ndrangheta’s crime business pulls in a staggering £40billion a year.

And one of the easiest sources of cash is EU grants.

In the past five years Brussels has given £2.5billion for projects such as new roads and wind-farms in Calabria, one of Italy’s most backward areas.

But crooks are said to have ­syphoned off millions in “pizzo” – or Mob Tax.

Gioia Tauro got £33million in EU grants in the 1990s – which helped transform it into a port capable of handling international drug shipments.

A third of the syndicate’s income is said to be ploughed back into crime.

The rest is invested in “legitimate” business and in backhanders to cops and politicians.

The result is an iron grip on public life in southern Italy which has inspired to a proverb: “The only thing that can’t be bribed is the weather.”

So how did such a shadowy organisation become so powerful?

The ’Ndrangheta initiates its members with rituals designed to bind them to silence for life.

Membership is concentrated in poor towns and villages, such as San Luca, which is the ’Ndrangheta equivalent of Corleone, the Sicilian village made famous in The Godfather movie.

Its maze of alleys has long been a place of pilgrimage for followers from as far afield as Canada and Australia.

Members of rival families meet there for peace summits – especially after the so-called ’Ndrangheta War of 1985-91 which cost more than 700 lives.

Until then, its best-known crime was the 1973 kidnap in Rome of 16-year-old John Paul Getty, grandson of the world’s richest man.

Oilman Getty at first ­refused to pay a cent for the boy. But he gave them £1.7million when the gang cut off one of the lad’s ears.

One of the kidnappers was notorious thug Saverio Mammoliti.

Nicknamed The Playboy, he had enjoyed the good life with a string of beautiful women ­before being jailed for mob activities.

But he broke out of prison in 1972.

And he had local law enforcement agencies so completely in his pay he lived openly without fear of arrest for the following 20 years.

He even married his 15-year-old girlfriend at a church next door to a police station.

A string of charges brought by prosecutors from outside Calabria came to nothing.

In 1975 Mammoliti was seized with shipments of heroin and cocaine – and got off.

After a mass-trial against the ’Ndrangheta in 1982 he was caged for 33 years – but the sentence was quashed on appeal.

Two year later he was charged with murder and his property was seized.

But the charge was quickly dropped and his property handed back.

Mammoliti and his wife Maria were arrested for corruption in 1992 but soon freed for “lack of evidence”.

But within months he was finally charged with a litany of crimes that stuck including a murder, six bombings and 19 arson attacks.

The monster was caged for “life plus 20 years”.

A decade in jail broke his spirit and in 2003 Mammoliti collaborated with the Italian Anti-Mafia Commision and became a supergrass, revealing the depths of corruption in high places and how crime money was laundered through legitimate business ventures.

He also confessed he had been one of Getty’s kidnappers in 1973 – and would have cut off a lot more than the boy’s ear if a ransom had not been paid.

Mammoliti’s confessions have pushed the ’Ndrangheta even further underground in more ways than one – cops have discovered a network of subterranean fortresses across Calabria.

Bunkers linked by tunnels are made from shipping containers brought up from the quayside at Gioia Tauro, welded together then fitted with mod cons, running water and drainage.

In the ’Ndrangheta-controlled town of Plati, cops unearthed a hidden city of bunkers behind staircases, trapdoors and even one inside a pizza oven.

The linking tunnels – which also provided escape routes into surrounding countryside – were openly dug in the main street of Plati using heavy machinery.

Yet no one breathed a word to the authorities.

But since Mammoliti turned nark, security fears within the ’Ndrangheta have led bosses to form La Santa, a secret society within a secret society.

The membership is known only to fellow members – and to a handful of carefully vetted politicians, supposedly affiliated with the group through freemasonry.

And to foil phone-taps, they use impenetrable dialect and a whistled code used by Calabrian shepherds.

The ’Ndrangheta is now so invisible it has branched out almost unnoticed across the world.

Its influence is particularly strong in Europe, Australia, Canada and America. An exasperated lawyer in Florida called it ­“invisible, like the dark side of the moon”.

And last year an Italian prosecutor warned: “The ’Ndrangheta runs the international cocaine market. I urge you not to underestimate the organisation or it will be too late.”

It was certainly too late for Australian detective Geoffrey Bowen.

In March 1994, the day before he was due to give evidence in court against an ’Ndrangheta drugs gang, he was murdered by a parcel bomb.

Bowen had been investigating Italian organised crime in Australia after discovering some immigrants showed extraordinary allegiance to two ­seemingly insignificant Calabrian ­villages – Plati and San Luca.

Nigel Blundell is author of The World’s Most Evil Gangs, published by John Blake at £7.99