Authors: Marisa Merico
He had lots of organisation to do before he could make the move to Mozambique. For the time being he based himself at his villa in Albufeira, in Portugal. Between October 1991 and July 1992, he was jet-setting from the Algarve on a false passport. All over Spain and Portugal, Italy, Slovakia and, of course, making money visits to Switzerland. Which is where we went for the New Year. We spent Lara’s first Christmas with Bruno’s parents in Milan and then drove off to bring in the New Year of 1991 thousands of metres up in the Alps.
Valeria was used to a luxury lifestyle from the gun-running profits. She skied, knew her way around resorts and yachts, the jet-set and the wet-set; she had a well-developed appetite for the high life. She’d persuaded Dad that the only place to be on New Year’s Eve was Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St Moritz.
Bruno wasn’t so sophisticated. We accidentally headed off to Saint Maurice in France, got lost for three hours, and only our 4x4 Lancia Integrale got us through the thick snow. We finally arrived late at night in the grand reception area of Badrutt’s Palace. It was gorgeous, like a palace on the side of a mountain. Valeria had booked all the rooms using false documents. I’d now got Marisa Merico on my UK passport. Dad was Giovanni Roberti. There were no Di Giovines at this celebration.
On New Year’s Eve, Lara was being looked after by a nanny in the room – the hotel had an ‘approved’ list – and Bruno and I were wandering around all dressed to the nines. We’d had dinner and there was a big function going on for the residents of the hotel. Pregnant Valeria had gone for a rest.
One of the guests partying there was Adnan Khashoggi, who for the previous decade had been known as the richest man in the world. He was a happy zillionaire that New Year: a US federal jury had only just acquitted him and Imelda Marcos of racketeering and fraud. Dad was impressed by his business – and his lifestyle. Khashoggi operated everywhere and had companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein to handle his commissions.
With him at Badrutt’s Palace was his one-time brother-in-law, Harrods owner Mohammed Al-Fayed. And there was Dad chatting away to them. They had no idea who Dad was for he used his name of the evening, Giovanni Roberti.
‘Ah, Italian! I bought the Ritz in Paris from your countrymen,’ Al-Fayed said.
Khashoggi joined in and they all began talking. Before they moved on, I heard Dad saying: ‘Let’s keep in touch.’
It was a great holiday, but as 1992 wore on I was too afraid to go and see Dad. The fuss over his escape from prison had not dissipated, the drugs were still pouring in from Morocco, and he had at least four police and security agencies after him. There were a score of fugitive warrants for his arrest.
I did go and see my baby sister Giselle after she was born in Zurich in June 1992. She was a beautiful baby. Valeria
couldn’t use the Di Giovine name on her birth certificate so she used her own name. It was about four weeks before Valeria took Giselle to Dad in Portugal but I went back to Milan. I was still afraid for him. A lot of my family – my cousins, my uncles – were going up and down on business trips. The cops followed them and that’s how they caught up with Dad in Albufeira on 31 July 1992, as part of Operation Kingpin.
The Portuguese, Spanish and Italian police all arrived – more than 100 of them on the doorstep – and arrested everyone at the villa, including Grandpa Rosario, Uncle Guglielmo and Valeria. Luckily, Valeria’s mum Aurelia was there and she could look after my little sister Giselle.
We were in Sardinia on a three-week holiday. Bruno’s sister Silvia, Auntie Angela and her boyfriend, and a group of others were there with us. When we got the call about Dad’s arrest they all looked at me.
I left Bruno and Lara there. Lara wasn’t even a year old but I knew Silvia was great with her. I flew to Milan to get money to bankroll whatever I had to, and caught another flight down to Lisbon. I’d never been to Portugal in my life. I stepped out to the taxi rank at Lisbon’s Portela Airport and looked for a youngish, hungry guy at the wheel.
‘I need to go to the Algarve, Albufeira.’
The driver was delighted. He wanted a few hundred quid and I offered him more. I needed his help. I had the name of the villa but nothing else, not even the street name. It was big news that this great Italian Mafia guy had been arrested
five days earlier. I was paying in bundles of
lire.
The taxi driver must have known.
Dad was still being interrogated in the cells in Albufeira three days after his arrest but they let me speak to him. Among all his stuff they found Mohammed Al-Fayed’s business card with his private number on it. They had to check Al-Fayed out, but when they saw he was legit they left him alone.
Valeria had been released. She decided to get out of Portugal as fast as she could so she left Giselle and her mother and flew to Vienna. She just went!
Dad was in the same clothes he had been arrested in. He was wearing a necklace I’d bought him for his fortieth birthday a couple of years before, a twenty-one-carat gold chain with tiny balls of gold on it, and that was sweet, important to me.
He seemed flustered: ‘Help the baby, help Aurelia, but just be careful…’
He told me where the villa was. Aurelia was in her late sixties and frightened to death. She had the baby to look after and her money was running out. No wonder she was delighted to see me.
But I thought, ‘You know what? This is too much. I’m not staying here. What if they come and arrest all of us?’
Valeria’s mum didn’t speak Italian or English. She had a Slovakian passport but Giselle was on her mother’s passport. I thought: ‘My God, how am I going to get this baby out of the country?’
We had a solicitor in Malaga who was very well in with Dad and at midnight I paid the taxi driver to take us to Spain. As we drove, I planned it. Giselle would have to be Lara at the border so she could get through on my passport. We rolled up with this old Mercedes belching diesel and handed over the two passports. Giselle was asleep.
The customs guy asked, ‘Baby, Lara?’
‘Yes, yes.’
We were in Malaga at 6 a.m. Within a couple of hours the lawyer was on the case, Giselle and her Nan were asleep in a hotel and I was on the phone making more arrangements. Valeria moved fast when I spoke to her. She was in Bratislava but through our contacts we managed to get Giselle her own passport. Within a week I had her mum and Giselle on a flight to Slovakia.
Dad expected to be on a flight to freedom. He’d been taken to a high-security prison between Lisbon and Oporto, and Bruno had been to check out the area. He’d done a helicopter reconnaissance. While I was looking after Giselle and her grandma, Bruno was planning to spring Dad from the jail. It was simple – they were going to go in shooting and whisk Dad out by a rope ladder dangling from a helicopter. He and Dad did a $1 million deal with Theodor Cranendonk for an armed chopper and a platoon of mercenaries to provide the distracting firepower. It was all set up but something in the prison kicked off and the guards found out about it and the helicopter escape didn’t happen. Dad remained in jail.
I was twenty-two years old, with a baby daughter. I also had a baby sister I felt responsible for. And Dad. And Bruno. And Mum in England.
The political and police pressure was on us all.
There was an international business to run.
And I had to face up to men who’d think nothing of shooting me dead.
Tutto èpermesso in guerra ed in amore.
[All is fair in war and love.]
ITALIAN SAYING
I needn’t have worried. Like any good CEO, Dad had a system in place. He could run the business from wherever he was, whether in a horrendous Portuguese jail or in an outlaw haven like Mozambique. Deals were still going down and there was merchandise and money to deal with.
Yet my head was spinning. My priority was Lara. I went to see my mum, to my little getaway. Blackpool had never seemed so welcoming.
Bruno went to southern Spain to pick up the pieces and keep the operations safe. If rivals thought we were vulnerable they’d have tried a very unfriendly take-over. They were always waiting in the shadows.
The year before I’d put 10,000 US dollars into the Midland Bank Trust Corporation on the Isle of Man to cover a rainy day in Blackpool. Then there was all the money in Switzerland. Among the accounts at Coutts in Geneva, Dad had set up what he called a ‘trust fund’ for his children. It was a busy account. I’d put a little more than £1.6 million through it in a calypso of currencies. Dad had dipped in and now there was just short of $400,000 left. I had to act fast or risk it being lifted by the cops after Dad’s
arrest. I opened up an account with Mum at the National Westminster Bank in Cleveleys near her home. A local businessman, a friend from my teenage years, gave me a reference as a favour, without knowing what was going on. The transfer of $385,211.54 went all the way around the world, including Nassau in the Bahamas, before it got to Cleveleys on the Lancashire coast. I wasn’t trying to be clever or devious about any of this; it’s how bank transfers worked in 1992. It took two weeks to get there and by then I’d left England.
Mum and I had spent 2 September at the beach and had an early night with Lara, then Bruno’s mum called around 2 a.m. to say that he’d been arrested. A lad in Spain had contacted her to let her know that Bruno had been picked up by a police squad in Malaga on 7 September.
Dad, and now Bruno! It was his twenty-fifth birthday and Lara’s first birthday on 11 September. Bruno was going to come to England and we’d been planning to celebrate with a party at Mum’s. Instead, I was with Lara on a flight from Manchester to Madrid, where they’d sent her dad from Malaga. I had a long black-and-white flowery dress, and Lara on my hip. It was boiling hot and the prison was disgusting, one of the worst prisons I’ve ever been in. At the visitor contact point I couldn’t see where he was. We had to talk through cut-outs. We couldn’t touch each other, could only hear each other’s voices. Lara was sitting there with me and I burst out crying.
Bruno muttered, ‘Don’t get upset. Please.’
I couldn’t afford to stay upset for long. I was on permanent prison visits for the next eight months to see both Bruno and Dad. I kept everything together, from Milan to Blackpool, because Nan had her own problems, ducking and diving with her deals, and she never left home any more.
I didn’t want the ‘trust fund’ money to sit around in the Nat West. Mum was a signatory to my account so I got her to pick up the money. She went on her second-hand 1986 Honda Spree moped, which had one of those Miss Marple baskets on the front while the rear end belched smoke. It always needed a service. She went and got the cash and stuck it in a zip-up bag in her moped basket and brought it home again.
We’d found a massive metal box with a lock in the loft and when the cash was put in there I paid £1,000 to someone I could trust to look after it in their home. I invested £10,000 of the money into a garage business with my girlfriend Naima’s husband James. I wanted to help them but also to legitimise myself and show an income source, as a silent partner in a business. I put another £10,000 in the Bradford & Bingley building society.
In November 1992 I started looking for a house to buy, and by the following month I was the owner of 7 Sheringham Way, Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, which cost me £89,950. Cash. Now I had somewhere for Lara and me if we needed to escape. It’s an address I will never forget, but I didn’t live there straight away as I was still based in Milan.
Every weekend I would fly to Madrid on Friday night and on Saturday I’d visit Bruno. In the evening I would fly to
Lisbon and see Dad on the Sunday then I’d fly back to Milan. Once a month Bruno and I would be allowed a conjugal visit. He’d bring the sheets from his cell and they’d lock us in a room with a toilet area for two hours and let us get on with it. I felt sorry for Bruno and I still cared for him as the father of my child, so I would close my eyes and imagine we were on a beach somewhere rather than in a prison cell. The theory of conjugal visits was that they gave the men an incentive to behave inside. Most of them didn’t. Being Madrid, there were a lot of Colombians and they all but controlled the prison.
Bruno wanted money and weed. On a visit they’d strip-search me; they’d look around in my bra and I had to take my knickers off but they didn’t search me internally so I used to put the dope for Bruno in a condom and insert it in a tampon. He’d put it in his pants, between his balls, or in a cut-out in his trainers with the inner sole covering it. With the money he’d pay the guards and get them to buy cigarettes for him. Anything else he wanted, the Colombians could get.
Bruno’s parents looked after Lara during my weekends away. They were kind and comfortably off people and were in shock because of what had happened to their son. They didn’t know what had gone on, although they might have had suspicions because we obviously had a lot of money. For young people to have so much didn’t seem possible. Unless there was something illegal going on. Which, of course, was the answer.
And I was now in charge of it. On my visits Dad would give me instructions. My voice was my dad’s voice. I was running the organisation through him. I had the help of a lad called Mauritso, a friend of Bruno’s. Dad trusted him and had a lot of respect for him. Mauritso was like a
capo
running a crew of other trusted guys.
Dad would tell me: ‘Get them sorted. Get that done.’
I could easily have made up my own instructions and they would have followed them to the letter.
With Dad inside, my uncles were doing their own thing. And so was Nan. I was walking around giving orders. My Uncle Antonio had prospered but never had as much respect in the family as his brother. Now, with Dad out of the way, he wanted to muscle in. I had to watch my back with my own uncle.
There’s a recording in which he threatens me: ‘Tell her to do what I say or I’ll pull her fucking head off. I’ll pull her by her own…I’ll kick her up the arse…’
My response to this was simple: ‘Who does he think he is? I’m not doing anything he says. I’m speaking for Dad – you’ll all do what I say.’
These grown men, who in their ruthless world would think nothing of pulling out a gun and shooting you, had to agree: ‘Yes, Marisa.’ They had respect. Whatever I said, went. They would have killed for me. That’s the sort of people that I had around me. They cushioned and protected me.
Nan was very much a wheeler-dealer and tried to take advantage of the situation: if she could make another buck
out of Dad she would have. In a complete turnaround, I was now lending money to her because too many of her deals were going wrong and she had overstretched herself.
In their minds they thought I was just a young girl but I wasn’t having any of it and the people around me weren’t either. They were loyal to my dad. They had a lot of respect for my nan but ultimately it was what I said that went. Not what my nan said. And certainly not what my uncle said. Nan started calling me
pazzesco criminale
[crazy criminal].
My most important jobs were retaining my dad’s authority and making the right moves with our money, especially the investments in Switzerland. With that, I had the help of a very smooth operator called Fabio. He was a refined guy who didn’t raise suspicion. He wasn’t family, he was business, but he was trusted with collecting money. He escorted me to the bank accounts.
He was especially good at Coutts, the Queen’s bankers, on Quai de l’Ile in Geneva. I placed an astonishing amount of cash there in hard currency – US dollars, sterling,
lire
– in specific currency accounts Dad had set up with the help of the two Seville middlemen. This was one way in which he laundered money from his drug-trafficking profits. There were also some safe-deposit boxes for emergencies.
Every time I went through the Swiss border I was taking money in or out of the country. I went through Lugano by car as the Italian–Swiss border was minimal risk and flew on to Geneva. When I first went after Dad’s arrest it was to make a huge withdrawal: a quarter of a million pounds sterling
alone was going to Valeria. I took Lara with me. The cash was in US dollars and the bundles were bigger than I expected. Remembering the photos of me as a baby lying on packs of Marlboro, I lifted the cloth on the bottom of Lara’s carrycot and beneath it was perfect to fit these seven sealed Coutts packs of cash. In this way I carried Lara and a hell of a lot of money out of the bank.
I used to try and make a point of staying over, because it was gorgeous in Geneva, but sometimes I had to get in and out in a day.
On my next visit to Dad, he said: ‘You’d best go to the deposit boxes in Zurich. Valeria’s mum has a couple. See what’s happening with them.’
Valeria couldn’t risk leaving Slovakia in case she was arrested so I met up with Aurelia, her mother, again. When we got there, the bank manager said the boxes had been cleared out by the police. I was as wild as shit. What if that had happened to the ‘trust fund’? We stayed at the Mövenpick Hotel and we were having a coffee in the hotel café when I realised we were being spied on. I was in a compromising position and the police could have arrested me then and there but for some reason they didn’t make a move. I got a flight direct to Milan.
That experience changed me. I woke up to more things, became a bit more devious, more streetwise. I had to learn to judge people, to see through them to their real motives and intentions. I started to listen to my instincts if I didn’t get a good vibe from someone. I learned to judge people straight away – but I didn’t always control my power.
Lara and I were living in my apartment in Milan and we used to drive to Bruno’s mum’s every day for lunch or dinner. One night I got back about 11 p.m. and was about to park when a young girl stole my spot.
I jumped out the car. ‘What are you doing? I’ve got the baby in the car. I was going to park there.’
She snarled and gave me the finger.
I was furious and I called a lad who worked for me: ‘Get round here and puncture all her tyres. Do them all. Don’t ruin the car but ruin her tyres.’
He came round an hour or two later and did it. It was no problem. I didn’t go too far and get her car burned out, which I could easily have done. At least I stopped there. I know I shouldn’t have done anything at all but when someone does something like that or talks to you like dirt, you can suffer a bout of road rage.
In March 1993 I was on one of my weekly visits to Dad. On the way back I checked my bag in at Lisbon for the Milan flight and while I was in the departure lounge I called Bruno’s mum to check up on Lara.
‘Marisa, don’t come back,’ she said. ‘They’ve arrested your nan, your auntie, your other auntie…they’re arresting everyone in the family.’
I looked up at the constantly flicking departure board and a London flight was listed. I feigned a medical emergency and got my bag off the Milan plane, then I flew back to England, to Mum.
But Lara was in Italy.
I couldn’t go back to Milan but neither could I stay in England without my daughter. There was no way. It would be better getting arrested than being kept from my daughter, me in one country and her in another. I had to risk it. They was no way I was going to be without her. She was just a baby.
I booked a flight to Nice. I told Bruno’s parents to bring Lara to a spot that’s just over the French–Italian border and said I’d meet them there. I bought a dark wig in Blackpool, telling the saleswoman at the seafront dressing-up shop that I was following my husband as I thought he was having an affair. They’d be on the lookout for blonde-haired Marisa Di Giovine. In Italy when you get married, you keep your maiden name. I was Di Giovine on my Italian ID papers, Marisa Merico on my English passport.
I wore the wig at Manchester Airport but at passport control the official said, ‘You look so different in your picture,’ so I gave up on that idea. I was drawing attention to myself. I left the wig in the toilet and put my hair in a French plait. From Nice I caught a train across the border into Italy. We met up, I had Lara in my arms and within half an hour I was back on the train.
It was nervy at Italian–French customs on the way back. Lara was on my British passport. The border guard took forever looking at us and at the passport because it was Marisa
Merico
and Lara
Merico.
He thought I was a single parent; in Italy a mother wouldn’t have her child’s surname. If the passport had said Marisa Di Giovine I’d never have
got Lara out. He would have asked: ‘Does her father know she’s leaving?’
It was the longest few minutes of my life. I prayed Lara wouldn’t say anything in Italian. She did say something but it was just toddler talk.
The guard said: ‘English, yes? Daughter?’
‘Oh yes, daughter.’
‘OK. OK.’ Much, much more than OK.
I’d felt physically sick standing there but I acted cool as a cucumber. I’ve got a split personality. I can be a bit devious in that way; I’ve had to be to survive.
In the carriage, two lads were smoking away and I resented that around Lara but I didn’t want to move. I just wanted to stay in that spot and get to Nice.
When we arrived it was too late for a flight to England that night. Money was no object and I got our cab to stop at the first great-looking hotel on the Promenade des Anglais, the Hôtel Negresco. I sat on the bed half the night staring at Lara as she slept and thinking, ‘I’ve got my little girl. Thank God!’