Authors: Marisa Merico
“‘The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax –
Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.”’
LEWIS CARROLL
,
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
, 1871
The electric Warrior Wagon Frank bought that weekend when he first got out of prison is in his son’s Wendy house now. He got over the novelty of it quickly, but it needs a little care. One of the big tyres has gone. Lyon the dog chewed it. He enjoyed his weird feast but it left the car off balance, wobbly.
Which I can still be.
If I’ve talked to Mum and maybe to my dad, wherever he is in the world, and Lara and young Frank are tucked into bed, I can mostly get off to sleep easily. I’m so tired anyway, knocked out. I try to get to the gym every day and I like to clean the house from top to bottom. I like clean.
But you can’t stop the tricks of the brain, or the actions of things we don’t understand.
Sometimes in the night I feel a chill like the night Frank died but it’s probably more the breeze coming across the Irish Sea than any supernatural blarney drifting over.
We’re all the architects of our own dream houses. My dread arrives in my sleep. The dream always begins and ends in the same way.
I’m running hand in hand with Dad through a mirrored airport terminal with images of us duplicated all around me.
The crowd of armed police chasing us gets bigger and bigger as we spring for a hazy horizon. The cops are shouting, screaming like sirens: ‘Stop! We will shoot you.’
I hold Dad’s hand tighter and we keep going, keep running from the men with waving guns towards a nothingness.
Dad turns his face to me. His hand slips out of mine. I stop running and cops are all over us. I’m handcuffed and shackled and I can see Dad running but now I don’t know where he’s going. There’s a big jet ahead of him. The cops are shouting ‘Shoot him’ and he’s not going to reach the plane on time. He’s a moving but easy target. I scream at him to stop and put his hands up, to surrender.
There’s no surrender. They hose him with bullets and take him down. Everything freezes. People are looking at Dad lying face down in his own blood. I break free and throw off my shackles and run to him. I bend down, take him in my arms…
And then I wake up.
To a reality from which I know there can never be unrestricted freedom.
‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.’
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON AND FRED FOSTER
,
‘ME AND BOBBY MCGEE’
, 1970
It was on 21 September 2009, ten days after Lara’s coming-of-age party, that the dream turned into a nightmare. The past hammered on my front door.
The weekend had been one of tears and fears. Mum had been for medical tests and the news was not good. She had cancer in her bones and the doctors were not sure how serious it was but the prognosis was not good. It would, as always, take time and more tests to know the full story and how they and we could deal with it.
I was in total anguish. My mum? She’d always been there for me, always around to pick up the pieces, patch my life back together again. She’s suffered before when I was in prison, and now, when our lives seemed to be settling down, this happened.
I’d been on the phone to her on the Monday morning and we were planning to meet that afternoon, but then I saw two men outside the house. In a moment they were at the door. The police. Two officers from Preston. They came in and sat down on the sofa opposite me.
The Italian
Ministero della Giustizia
had requested my extradition. They wanted me to complete my sentence – four years, eight months and eight days in jail.
My legs turned to jelly. Mum! Lara! Frank! Please God, not now.
I’d been released on a technicality but I’d been living openly and innocently for more than a decade in England and no one had bothered us. In 2007 my sentences effectively ran out. But legally, I didn’t know. I’ve got an arrest warrant against me in Italy. If I set foot in the country, could I be arrested to serve the end of my time?
Trevor Colebourne, my solicitor, and I had calculated, with everything taken into account, that I’d have six months more to serve. That’s with everything going well – but it’s never like that, never simple, in Italy. Trevor deals a lot with extradition and human rights and says it’s against the law for them, after all this time, to arrest me again: ‘It’s through their fault you were released. They knew you were a British national. You’ve not lived in hiding. You’ve got a National Insurance number, you’re on benefits. Somebody could click a button and they can find you straight away. How can they arrest you after all these years, when you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong? You’ve got three points on your licence and that’s it. How can they justify coming to re-arrest you for extradition for something you’ve already done time for? There is no judge in this land who would allow them to get away with that.’
I was wanted in my maiden name, as Marisa Di Giovine. My passport says Marisa Merico. But arresting me in England and in Italy means we’re talking in two languages again.
The Preston officers, acting on the request of the London-based Serious Organised Crime Agency, were very pleasant. They noted my circumstances, my responsibilities for Frank and Lara, and I told them about my mum’s cancer. They didn’t arrest me on the spot. I surrendered my passport and they said I’d be given a date to appear in extradition court in London as soon as possible.
It was like the atom bomb had gone off inside my head. My thoughts were all over the place. I wasn’t worried about myself – I’d do the time if I had to. Or even Lara, who is eighteen now and a strong girl. But Frank is just about to turn nine years old. Would I be free for his birthday on 21 October? And Mum? How would she cope? God, this was so unfair on her.
I was in turmoil – and then that other part of me, my stronger personality, took over and I began making arrangements. First, to fight the extradition warrant, and then to ensure my family would be safe if I was sent back to Italy and to jail.
I was straight with young Frank – I didn’t want to be carted off in handcuffs without him being warned. No matter how absurd everyone told me the situation was, I was the one who had suffered it before and I knew anything could happen. So I told Frank I might have to go away but assured him he would be safe. My assurances didn’t stop his tears or his anguish, and with every tear he cried, my heartbreak became more and more. You think you’re going insane when you consider the prospect of your child being taken from you; it makes your mind rattle.
Lara and I were able to speak more freely about it. But it was one thing bang after the other. The day in 2009 when the Preston police came to my front door, Bruno was finally being released from prison in Italy. He is a proper free man now. Lara was happy for her dad but shaking her head at what was going on around her:
‘After seventeen years – just about all my life – my dad’s out of prison and I have him back, I can see him in the open air. At the same time they’re trying to take my mum away from me. What is happening?’
I could understand her confusion. It was a mess. But one I couldn’t clean up myself. I had to work with the system. It wasn’t comforting. When we studied the paperwork being delivered from the Italian authorities – the European arrest warrant described me as a Mafia operator in the 1970s, when I would have been little more than a toddler – it was hard to comprehend, and hard not to laugh. They’d got their paperwork wrong and the dates were all askew. But no matter how silly some of it seemed, I knew just how very serious the situation was.
There’s not much more terrifying than faceless bureaucracy.
On 1 October 2009 I arrived at Westminster Magistrates Court in Horseferry Road, London, wheeling my overnight bag. Trevor Colebourne had travelled south on the early morning train but I didn’t want to risk not being on time so I stayed in a cheap hotel near the court the night before. It was very much a formality but my nerves were jangling. The
main reception area was quiet, people just whispering to each other, and I was taken into a side room by Trevor and a tall detective. I was officially arrested but not taken to the cells. Instead we went directly into a brightly lit, modern courtroom to hear if they would lock me up to wait for a decision on the extradition or whether I could get bail.
The police were not opposed to me being free and suggested ideas like me checking in from my home phone to show that I had not skipped the country. And to give up Frank’s passport as well as my own. They knew me well enough to know I’d never leave the kids behind.
I was sitting at the back of the court when the magistrate ordered me into the dock. I looked around, a little lost. At first, I was also lost for words and could hardly confirm my identity, my name. I couldn’t hear my voice as I spoke.
But I clearly heard the lawyer acting for the Italian authorities say that I had four years, eight months and eight days of my sentence to run; there was no mention of my time spent in Durham or Italy. The girl from the Crown Prosecution Service didn’t push too hard, although she said the charges involved narcotics trafficking. Legally, it was a mishmash of technicalities and precedent and of the time that had elapsed.
I also had to think about what might happen to me in the Italian prison system. I’m the Mafia Princess, the daughter of a man giving testimony against organised crime families. Genuinely, there was every reason to believe that I might be murdered in jail just to get at my dad.
Trevor explained that my case was unique – ‘I’ve never known of such circumstances before’ – and as he talked it did seem ludicrous that there was even a remote chance of me being extradited.
I knew better. It had happened to me before. I put the odds at 50–50. Still, I’d have to wait till 20 October when the full extradition hearing was to begin. Then, within days of the international paperwork starting to land on Trevor’s desk, it became clear that date would come and go. It had to be postponed into nearly December 2009. And after that, postponed again.
There was a London hearing in January 2010 and a couple of weeks later another appearance, which I can only call a cameo, at Westminster Court. Each time I was up and down the country by train, not knowing if I’d be going back to Lara and Frank.
Then, in early 2010, it started in Italy. Dad was knocked down in a hit-and-run incident just before he was due to give evidence in a case involving one of the international arms dealers from his past. The case involved the dumping of toxic waste and had the potential to be extremely embarrassing for the influential people involved.
Immediately afterwards, the offices in Calabria where Mafia investigations were being co-ordinated were firebombed. My aunt’s bar there was attacked. A very violent message was being sent, and it wasn’t hard for anyone to understand. Especially me.
I became really paranoid. I had an alarm system installed in the house. I’m careful and I watch who is around, but it is
in Italy that I know there is most chance of paying for my father’s new life with my own.
In the extradition courts I believe I wasn’t just fighting to stay in England with my children and mother, I was fighting for my own survival. I knew I was strong enough to fight, for I have much to hold on to, but in the early hours of the night I would sometimes lie there and wonder. In 2010 I’d been back in Britain for more than a dozen years. Would it be another dozen before I’d be truly free?
Will I ever escape my life with the Mafia, a life I was born into, bonded to by love, and for which I’ve been paying for such a long time?
Will I end up paying the ultimate price?
But, even alone in the dark of the night, I know I will come through. I have got this far. I am a survivor.
They say life begins at forty. I hit that landmark at the start of 2010 and I plan to attack the rest of my time with a ferocious intent. No matter what happens to me, or what the future holds.
As the extradition horror invaded my life, I received firsthand evidence that our family’s 21st-century Mafia generation is firmly established. A group of teenagers and kids in their early twenties from our family visited Nan on the Piazza Preapli. They were not there to offer condolences about her failing health or her imminent demise. They were there to talk about the death of my dad and my Auntie Rita.
They were to be killed for providing evidence to the authorities. My dad’s brothers were also going to be wiped out, not, it seemed, for any offence other than being related to Dad.
Not long ago these punks would have risked death and certainly punishment simply for turning up unannounced. Now they arrived with threats. The word on the streets of Milan is that a territorial battle, something big, is going to happen.
The intelligence says there is something or someone behind the threats, not just a bunch of wannabe
Mafiosa.
But the youngsters are the ones carrying the weapons. I learned one vital lesson from my life in the Mafia and it’s that the real power is in the hands of the gunmen.
And once again they are on our doorstep, the new guntoting generation of the Serraino–Di Giovine clan, putting a family at war.
By 2010 the ’Ndrangheta had overtaken the Cosa Nostra as Europe’s most powerful Mafia organisation. The influence may still come from the South, from Calabria, but the action is going on in Milan.
The ’Ndrangheta’s power infiltrates the catwalks, the fashion industry as pressured as the governing bodies of the city’s other big crowd-pleaser, the soccer teams, who are regularly urged to be generous with their profits.
At present the Mafia are eyeing up a fifteen billion euro government investment fund aimed at helping Milan
prepare a proper welcome for the Expo World Fair in 2015. It’s not if, but how much of that cash will go into the Mafia coffers. In the second decade of the 21st century the ’Ndrangheta has an annual turnover of £30 billion. It supplies at least 85 per cent of the cocaine in Europe. Like Dad before them, they have cut out the middlemen. The ’Ndrangheta buy direct from Colombia at a cost of 1,000 euros a kilo, which is sold on the streets at a rate of 30,000 euros a kilo. They’re snorting all the way to the bank. And the profits are being invested in legitimate businesses across the North of Italy. There are high-level board meetings about the corporate plans every working day.