Within minutes, the carabinieri were setting up roadblocks. As Cerreti watched the G.P.S. screen, the dot approached the first checkpoint, then sailed through. Half an hour later, it passed a second one. Cerreti phoned the commander. “What’s going on?” she shouted. The commander, unaccustomed to being yelled at by a southerner, much less a woman, responded that his men were doing their best. But, one by one, his men all reported seeing nothing. When Pesce was three miles from the safe house, he told Cerreti, “We’ve lost her.”

“You do not give up, Commander!” Cerreti shouted.

The officer promised to keep the line open. A few moments later, he came back: “Hold on!”

There was a commotion, and then a brief silence.

“Don’t shoot!” a woman’s voice said. “My name is Giuseppina Pesce!”

Because Pesce had broken the terms of her house arrest, she was forbidden from talking to prosecutors for three weeks after she returned to prison. Cerreti waited anxiously. She was angry that Pesce had jeopardized the case, but there was a risk in going too long without contact. When Pesce was first arrested, fourteen months earlier, she had tried to kill herself. Now she was in jail again, and her children were back with her family in Rosarno. She could be forgiven for wondering what the benefit of collaborating was.

Cerreti was counting on a transformation. A year earlier, Pesce had been defined by the men in her life: her father, her husband, a group of violent relatives whom she had served as a faithful accomplice. In the past year, she had broken with all of them, and it was unthinkable that she would return. Her family evidently agreed. Monitoring Pesce’s mail, Cerreti read a letter from her husband, Rocco, that was filled with sarcasm and suppressed fury. Addressing her as “my dearest love (if I can call you that),” Rocco told her that Cacciola had had an affair and begun coöperating with the state. It was “something she should rightly be killed for,” he wrote. “Your situation, of course, is very different. Everyone’s forgiven you, me most of all. Still, I wondered if this reminded you of anyone?”

A bug in the prison housing Pesce’s mother, Angela Ferraro, revealed that she had stopped referring to her daughter by name. Now she was “the collaborator,” “the traitor,” or “that whore.” When Pesce’s daughters, Angela and Elisea, visited, their grandmother demanded that they reject their mother. “She doesn’t exist anymore,” Ferraro told them. “Tell her! She doesn’t care who’s in jail.”

In Rosarno, the clan was pressuring the children in other ways. Aunt Angela threw them out, and they were forced to live with their grandfather Gaetano Palaia, who often claimed to have no money to feed them. Elisea lost weight and developed leg cramps and insomnia. Gaetano regularly beat his grandson with a belt. One day, he took the boy to a game room, where he was set upon by older kids, as his grandfather watched.

Angela, the child with the most influence over their mother, was made to join in the campaign of blackmail. On July 18th, Pesce received a letter from her older daughter, accusing her of betraying the family. “Making this choice for the second time, you’re spitting in the pot you eat from,” she wrote. “If you want our happiness and our family’s, you should step back.” Pesce was devastated, but something in the letter rankled. The phrase “spitting in the pot you eat from” didn’t sound like Angela, or like any fifteen-year-old she knew. Four days later, a second note from Angela arrived. In this one, she said that she was writing in secret, and that the earlier letter had been dictated by her uncles. “You’re my mom, and without you I am nothing,” she wrote. “Whatever choice you make, I will follow.”

On the evening of August 20th, Cacciola’s father, Michele, pulled up to Santa Maria Hospital, in Polistena, near Rosarno, in the family’s Mercedes. Cacciola was immobile in the back seat, with burns around her mouth and foam spilling from her lips. After seven weeks of testifying, she had e-mailed her older daughter, and her parents had used that contact to reopen communication, saying that unless she retracted her testimony, she would never see her children again. Cacciola left witness protection on August 8th.

Within days, though, she had changed her mind and requested readmission. Cerreti was with a squad of carabinieri, waiting for Cacciola to call and arrange a ride to the safe house, when the news came from a police officer at the hospital that her witness was dead. Her father said that she had been found in the basement of the family home, an empty litre bottle of hydrochloric acid lying next to her. (The family claimed that it was a suicide attempt, even though it is all but impossible to voluntarily drink that much acid.) Three days later, Cacciola’s parents sent the prosecutors’ office a recording of their daughter retracting her evidence. Cerreti was shaken by the death, and by its effects. “If this phenomenon of women testifying gathered momentum with Giuseppina, it was going to come to a sudden stop with Concetta’s death,” she said. “Concetta was a symbol that the ’Ndrangheta could get to you.” Calabria Ora agreed. “The season of coöperation is over,” it declared.

If the killing was meant to intimidate Pesce, it had the opposite effect. On August 23rd, the day the Cacciolas filed their complaint, a letter from Pesce arrived at the Palace of Justice, addressed to a group of prosecutors who had worked on her case. “I think you already know my story, but here I wish to start from the beginning,” she wrote. “After six months of imprisonment, on 14 October, 2010, I expressed my desire to Dr. Cerreti to pursue this path, driven by my love as a mother and my desire to lead a better life away from the environment in which we were born and lived. . . . My hope is that we still have time.” Driving back from Lucca, she wrote, “I realized the importance of my motivation to collaborate: my children’s future, and the love of a man who loves me for who I am and not for my last name.” She feared that she had lost credibility, but she assured the prosecutors that her evidence was real. “Your Honor, I would like to tell you that I’m not crazy, like they said,” she wrote. “I never told lies. I just had a moment of confusion.”

The prosecution of sixty-four members of the Pesce ’ndrina opened the next month, with the full trial beginning in May, 2012, when Giuseppina Pesce was called to testify. The court convened in the grand marble courthouse in Palmi. The defendants were ushered past the columns of the portico and into a windowless room, where they were placed in a large cage. Pesce gave testimony by video link from a bunker in Rebibbia prison, in Rome; cameras had been arranged so that she could not be seen by her family members and mostly could not see them, unless they stood in the witness stand. For a week, Cerreti led her through the evidence. In forty hours of nearly continuous testimony, Pesce described the family’s empire and detailed numerous murders, the result of an endless war encouraged by the rules of clan feuding: “You killed one of ours, we killed one of yours.”