One morning in March 2018, three police officers working for Italy’s elite division of antimafia investigators entered a DHL warehouse in Rome. They were looking for a package that had just arrived from the city of Lagos in Nigeria. After the DHL manager retrieved it, the police opened it carefully and pulled out the contents: two small booklets, each 30 pages long. They were copies of the same document. The printing was sloppy, the layout cheap. One of the covers was upside-down, but both featured a picture of a green beret and the words “Proudly Maphite.” In English at the foot of each page ran the words “Maphite Constitution: What we represent.” One officer, wearing blue latex gloves, placed the booklets on a sheet of white paper next to a ruler and photographed their pages.

The police were there at the behest of a 10-person forensic unit charged with catching human traffickers, but the booklets took on a broader significance. These were copies of what would soon be called the “Green Bible,” the single most important document in the Italian government’s war against alleged criminal gangs of Nigerian immigrants that supposedly number in the thousands, including a group called the Maphite. For years, many Italian law enforcement officials, media outlets and right-wing politicians had been describing the Maphite and similar groups as Italy’s 21st century equivalent of the Cosa Nostra. In the course of a single investigation, the antimafia police listened to a half-million wiretapped phone calls, tailed suspected gang members and bugged their meetings. Still, the evidence remained flimsy, and the police were looking for a smoking gun. At the DHL warehouse, they say, they found it.