Gioia Tauro (Italian: [ˈdʒɔːja ˈtauro]) is a comune (municipality) in the Metropolitan City of Reggio Calabria (Italy), on the Tyrrhenian coast.

In the 1970s, Gioia Tauro was the main centre for industrial development in Southern Italy, following a burst of violence in Reggio Calabria in 1970, signalling frustration over the central government's neglect of the region.

[3][8] The 'Ndrangheta, a Mafia-type criminal organisation based in Calabria, and in particular the Piromalli clan, exploited the construction of the steelworks until the project was abandoned in 1979, when the crisis in the steel industry could no longer be ignored and the government decided there was no economic basis for it.

"[3][8] The seaport has seven loading docks with an extension of 4,646 metres (15,243 ft); it is the largest in Italy and the seventh-largest container port in Europe,[10] with a 2007 throughput of 3.7 million TEUs[11] from more than 3,000 ships.

[13] In 2014 the US FBI and the Italian police made arrests in a joint operation aimed at smashing a new trafficking route for drugs and weapons that officials said had brought together the Gambino crime family of New York and the 'Ndrangheta.

The government ultimately completed construction of a huge seaport at Gioia Tauro (the sixth largest in the Mediterranean) which was originally meant to service the steel plant....[Alex] Perry [in his 2018 book, The Good Mothers (2018)] notes that ‘the railway that connected Gioia Tauro to Europe stopped 1.5 kilometers short of the port, meaning all the cargo’ — legal and illegal — ‘from one of the biggest Mediterranean container ports had to be loaded onto mafia-owned trucks and driven three minutes to the station.’[15] The port's legitimate business has struggled in recent years, no doubt a result of Mafia control.”[16] The Piromalli-Molè clan managed to condition the management of the new container terminal.

[17][18] In February 2008 the parliamentary Antimafia Commission concluded that the 'Ndrangheta "controls or influences a large part of the economic activity around the port and uses the facility as a base for illegal trafficking."

In its report it said that "the entire gamma of internal or sub-contracted activities is mafia-influenced, from the management of distribution and forwarding to customs control and container storage."

"It effectively eliminated legitimate competition from companies not influenced or controlled by the mafia in providing goods and services, performing construction work and hiring personnel.