Exploring the mafia's underground world

I don't think I've ever been so relieved to see sunlight. Since dead of night I had been crawling through tunnels strewn with rat excrement, personal effects and the paraphernalia of the cocaine business.

The dust and damp were choking. How long had I been underground? Four hours? Five? Eight? Then at last, filthy, tired, and disorientated, I surfaced into a gorgeous mountain landscape, and a breeze bearing the perfume of wild oregano.

I felt as if I had just escaped a brush with insanity, with evil.

The tunnels were in the town of Plati, on Aspromonte, the "harsh mountain" that dominates the landscape at the very toe-tip of Italy's boot.

Plati has been notorious for a century as a stronghold of the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia.

Its bosses are among the world's leading cocaine traffickers, and they have particularly strong links to the 'Ndrangheta's outposts in Australia.

But recently they have not been having things their own way.

Pursued by a newly determined police, the 'Ndranghetisti constructed an astonishing network of secret hiding places under the streets and houses.

It is virtually a parallel city, an underworld Plati where bunkers located behind sliding staircases, hidden trapdoors and even inside a pizza oven are linked by endless tunnels.

There is a kind of madness to the bunkers of Plati.

Even the deepest and best-concealed bolt-holes have secret escape routes within them.

The tunnels merge and separate, feed into the sewer system, and branch out again for hundreds of metres, emerging right outside town, amid the bushes of a dry river bed.

Now the tunnels have been discovered, and left to the curiosity of rats and mafia historians like me.

Plati is not the only place in southern Italy that has seen an epidemic of bunker-building in recent years.

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