Authors: Marisa Merico
He persuaded a beggar to give him some loose change to call the gypsy contact, but there was no reply. There were a
couple of Italian warships in port at Barcelona and he heard a sailor with a Calabrian accent asking for directions. Dad gave him a cock and bull story about being stranded in the city and the lad gave him a load of pesetas. Everywhere he went, he somehow talked people into helping. It was getting dark.
He chanced his luck on the last bus to the outskirts of Barcelona, a trip on which he might or might not be checked. It held again. And good fortune was his once more when he found a minibus at 3 a.m. He clicked it open with his corned beef key and had a couple of hours’ kip.
But even though it was July, the winds were howling, plants were jumping off balconies and the van was rocking. It was early morning when he got to La Rambla pedestrian mall in central Barcelona, but it was packed with tourists who provided people cover. It was before 8 a.m. when he rang the gypsy, who said he’d just got in from his evening and to call back at 1 p.m.
‘Hang on a minute! Look, pal, this is an emergency. I’ve been told you can help me…’
He told Dad to come round, get this bus, do this, do that, take another bus, do that. The front door was opened by a Spanish gypsy who looked like a flamenco dancer. When he and his wife realised who Dad was – his picture was all over the telly – they treated him like a king. They couldn’t do enough for him. This guy did robberies and Dad, the legendary ‘Lupin’, was one of his heroes. The guy showed him what he’d nicked, including some gold bars. While
Antonio was stuck in jail and the cops searched land, sea and air for Dad, he put his feet up with them for a week. He rested and plotted.
He always found a way to do everything. There’s nothing that can’t be done by my dad. A fake passport was arranged from Italy, and when it and money arrived he moved on. He took a plane from Barcelona to Madrid and then a train to Malaga and a taxi to Algeciras. From there he took the ferry to Tangiers, where he fell in with a Neapolitan–Moroccan man who entertained him while he waited for three days for the first plane to Rome.
His trail was complex but cold. A bodyguard-driver met him at Fiumicino Airport and they drove back to Milan, which with my family’s efforts was developing into one of the world’s most important drug-trafficking junctions. In tandem, the European ‘Di Giovine Connection’ was operating. It was a family business run from Piazza Prealpi, their estate, their fiefdom. My Auntie Natalina’s husband Luigi Zolla was appointed by Nan as ‘manager’ of the Piazza.
It was recognised, if reluctantly accepted by rival drug organisations, that the Di Giovine family had majority control. Drug suppliers dealt directly and exclusively with the family or there would be trouble. When one of the family’s dealers attempted to set up business for himself, Nan issued only one instruction: ‘Kill him.’
He was murdered within twenty-four hours.
Another dealer didn’t learn that lesson and tried to edge into Di Giovine territory. He died too.
The notoriety increased with the viciousness with which the family’s dominion was protected. Intrusion was not tolerated. Business had to be protected, no matter what.
When Dad’s sister Rita was sixteen years old, she was living at Nan’s with her boyfriend and they started dealing heroin. When thieves brought stolen TVs and other plunder to be fenced they used the money Nan paid them in the kitchen to buy smack off Auntie Rita in the bedroom. It was a clever crime carousel. But there was a big bust-up between Rita and her boyfriend. She was weighing the heroin and cutting it with sugar to make it go further. She didn’t see that as a rip-off. But she didn’t like it that her boyfriend was short-changing their buyers by putting less than the correct weight of heroin mix in the drug packets.
Rita was never Nan’s favourite. She was too needy, too eager to please, and Nan didn’t respect her as a result. She preferred the kids who spoke out and gave the finger to authority. She didn’t always treat Rita terribly well because of this, and when she found out what Rita and her boyfriend were rowing about she went ballistic. She didn’t want anyone in the middle. She wanted total control. After that when the druggies brought stolen goods
she
paid them in heroin, cutting out her own daughter.
Like a medieval warlord, Nan had an official taster-tester. Only in his teens, Mimmino, who lived out back in a lean-to, wasn’t employed to check the family food for poison but the strength of the heroin. His reaction to his fix would dictate whether the batch could be cut for more
profit. A risky business, and he eventually died from an overdose.
There was so much heroin being packed, unpacked, cut and doctored at Nan’s that a couple of neighbours, women who allowed her incoming calls on their untapped phones, were convinced their dogs were being affected, getting high on the aroma and behaving very oddly. In the mêlée of daily life no one else noticed, just gave a shrug when it was mentioned. The dogs seemed content.
Dad was making more connections with the Turkish gangs who were a developing influence in Milan. They operated easily in the shadow of Italy’s kidnapping epidemic in the years after the profitable snatching of John Paul Getty III. The kidnappers targeted kids from rich families and many of the victims were never seen alive again. In 1976 more than eighty men, women and children were held to ransom. The kidnap and murder of Aldo Moro, the two-time Italian Prime Minister, in 1978 remains an open wound for Italy. But with all the scrutiny and risks and no guaranteed profit, kidnapping wasn’t a business my family wanted to move into. Drugs were the future. Yet there’s always friction, with other organisations wanting to expand in the same line of business. It’s impossible to grow without taking up space that others believe belongs to them. There were plenty of ‘others’.
Dad was mixing with a lot of evil people. One sinister gang, nicknamed Kidnaps Inc, was responsible for grabbing twenty-one hostages, three of whom vanished for ever. A
Yugoslav called Francesco Mafoda was one of the leaders. He understood Dad’s contacts and influence and tried to recruit him into the organisation. This guy wasn’t just ruthless and mean; he was borderline psychotic. His unsmiling, pockmarked face was a signal he wasn’t a good bet. Dad said no.
Mafoda didn’t like being turned down but Dad was his own man. And a free one. Nan had paid off a judge from a new bank account in Marbella, to finally get the prison swap charges dismissed. Dad fobbed off Mafoda and concentrated on the drugs business. And keeping business in the family. Along with his brothers and sisters, Dad controlled teams in Milan dealing with the Turkish shipments brought in by road, kilos and kilos of heroin often hidden in giant canisters of cooking lard. Week by week the number of trucks, buses, consignments and millions of dollars involved grew and the heroin distribution crews took on new sales teams to spread the deadly but so lucrative product.
For Dad, it was a wonderful world. And something surprising had happened in his life. He was in love. Adele Rossi was only sixteen years old when Dad started dating her. He adored her. She went everywhere with him. He guarded her, looked after her, loved her. They went around hand in hand. They were always touching each other. Not in a sexual way but as though they were making sure the other one was still there; seeing wasn’t enough. She met Mum and me and we liked her. She was lovely, a joyful personality. And beautiful, with long legs and a cascade of blonde hair. Everyone
noticed how happy Dad was. He was even happier when Adele got pregnant. And I was delighted, and nervous, at the prospect of having a sister.
In this absurd world, Mum, estranged and separated from her husband, was also trying to have a romantic life but Dad’s power and personality were an ongoing obstruction. He didn’t want to be with Mum but he didn’t want anyone else to be with her either. It was ridiculous but so common in broken relationships. Dad didn’t love Mum in that way, didn’t want to be with her, but was jealous at the thought that someone else might pay her attention.
Some confused and irate husbands might make idle threats if any other man got close to their wife, estranged or not, but with Dad it would have been action not threats. With him so close by, how could Mum ever find happiness again? What man would want to be with her and play surrogate daddy to his little girl when he knew Dad was around the corner? One guy, Gianni, decided he couldn’t live with the risk of reprisals for getting close to Mum and me, and he broke off their relationship.
Mum did see other people, including one guy who was a friend of the family so they had to keep him all hush-hush from Dad. One night he stayed over at the Mussolini flat with its one big room with one big bed. Mum slept on one side, I slept in the middle, and this guy was on the other side. I was seven years old and slept in pyjamas. I didn’t have any underwear on. I woke up in the middle of the night and this guy’s hand was between my legs, on me. He wasn’t messing.
It was just there. Plonked on it. What could have happened if I hadn’t woken up? I was lucky he didn’t do anything more.
I pushed his hand away and cuddled up to Mum. I never told anybody. What if I had mentioned it to Nan or my dad? Well, Mum might not be alive. I’m not kidding when I say that. Dad would have taken me from her, chopped the guy’s hands off and killed him.
I can’t condemn Mum. She only wanted some personal happiness, as did Dad, but both in their own ways. Yet Dad had changed. Breaking his own rules about business and pleasure, for that’s all that women had meant before, he took Adele along to his meetings. One evening, on 2 October 1977, he got a call about a heroin shipment worth around £50,000 to the family; nothing to be concerned about, a simple distribution deal. He arranged to meet the contact man, Vittorio Bosisio, at a local coffee shop to make the arrangements for the next day’s delivery.
Unknown to Dad, Vittorio Bosisio was a dead man walking. He had run up hard against a brutal, no-nonsense Yugoslav called Mimmo Pompeo who carried machine pistols like cowboy six-guns. Bosisio hadn’t paid off on a drug shipment and Pompeo issued an order to take him out. But Vittorio Bosisio, hard-faced and streetwise, was crafty and had kept himself alive for three months. Now he needed money, needed a deal. And someone tipped off the Slav where he’d be that evening at 9 p.m.
No one knew that Dad and Adele would be there too. They and Bosisio ordered three double espressos, water and
a biscotti each on the side, and were talking quietly when the first spray of automatic fire riddled the windows. The Slavs were determined Bosisio would die. There were eight gunmen firing from behind a line of parked cars. A thunderous rat-a-tat sounded as bullets howled into the cafe. Vittorio Bosisio took the full blast of the assault and his body was punctured from head to toe.
Adele tried to escape by running out of the front door but she rushed headlong into the guns. She was shot in the head, killed instantly, spilling on to the pavement. She’d just turned seventeen years old and was three months pregnant.
Dad acted instinctively, turning his body and throwing his hands up in front of himself, trying to block the gunfire. A barrage of bullets caught him in the arms and legs. The blood spurted and he collapsed onto the tiled floor in a coma, near death.
When the police teams arrived, they arrested him.
‘In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.’
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Dad woke up with flowers and a detective by the side of his hospital bed. The
investigatore di polizia
was there to see that no harm came to him. The flowers were from Mimmo Pompeo, who was concerned about his own protection since he had ordered the shooting. Adele’s death and Dad’s almost-fatal injuries were collateral damage. He and young Adele were not meant to have been there. The floral arrangement was a message of apology.
Sorry for killing your pregnant girlfriend.
Sorry for shooting you full of holes.
And, probably, sorry for not finishing you off. Which would have happened if not for emergency surgery and clever doctors.
The police didn’t have to think like Sherlock Holmes to realise that, when he fully recovered, a bunch of roses wasn’t going to be enough to calm Dad down – he wanted revenge. Vendetta? He wanted a massacre. Adele was the love of dad’s life. He was devastated by her violent death.
On the front pages were photographs of her blood-soaked body splayed across the ground, a pregnant, teenage victim of mobster gunplay in central Milan, and it made
provocative and controversial news. It sparked heavyweight political pressure from Rome. This was a national scandal. Something had to be done, lessons learned, the usual useless political claptrap.
Still, with Rome on their backs, the authorities in Milan were determined to prevent open warfare between the Yugoslavs and the Di Giovines. They wanted no more bodies on the streets, no further voter-upsetting mob mayhem in the newspapers.
They’d arrested Dad in the aftermath of the killings and now they charged him with a string of old robberies and burglaries. They dug up anything they could from the unsolved files to convict him, to stop revenge shootings by getting ‘Lupin’ off the street. They had him bang to rights on the robbery of furs and artwork worth several hundred thousand pounds from Countess Marzotto Trissino’s villa near Verona. He wasn’t happy about that. Unknown to Dad, his brother Francesco had photographed the proceeds of their burglary and sent the snaps to the Countess demanding a ransom. That wasn’t smart, and the enraged Countess immediately blew the whistle. Dad and Francesco were identified as thieves, so there was one genuine problem in the long but generally token charge list waiting when he was carried into court on a stretcher and laid out next to the dock.
I was seven years old, but that moment is a locked memory card. It was scary for me at the back of the courtroom where I sat with Nan. I kept grabbing her hand. She kept telling me quietly not to worry, not to fuss.
Dad had a beard and long hair and was on a stretcher wearing a white gown covering his bullet-punctured body. It was the first time I had seen him since the shooting.
He looked like Jesus. Appropriately, for the plan was to crucify him.
He was so red-eyed and pale and lost-looking, I wanted to jump over the wooden railings and get to him. I just wanted to hold on to my dad. I never wanted to lose him. It was then, at that moment, when I was seven years old, that a lifetime love, a precious bond, was forged. There was a strange, psychic thing. He hadn’t made eye contact with me up to that point, but then, as my emotions were boiling over, he looked straight at me. While the judge was sentencing him to return to San Vittore prison for a year, Dad smiled and blew me a kiss.
As he was stretchered from the courtroom by two armed guards, he craned his neck and gave me another smile, blew a second kiss and mouthed: ‘
Spiacente
[sorry].’
I was no longer just his little princess. I was his Mafia Princess. I would do anything for him.
Nan murmured to me: ‘Don’t worry.’
She could afford to be relaxed. She knew there wasn’t going to be too much hardship. She had made arrangements for Dad to have his favourite foods in jail and any wine he wanted. He’d also have drugs and cigarettes, but not for his own use – he never touched them. The cigarettes were the pennies and pounds of prison, dope of any kind the top currency, to barter and bribe.
Of course, I did worry. Mum was not there with the rest of the family for the court case. She’d already decided she’d had enough of our life in Milan. While Dad was locked up in San Vittore we travelled to Blackpool and stayed with her mum and dad and my auntie Jill. We hung on longer than our usual trips because Mum wanted to see how I would take to life in the UK, but I got physically ill because I was so desperately homesick for Italy, for the family.
When Dad got out of jail in November 1978, it wasn’t a game of Happy Families. I hardly saw him and never knew when I would again. He was totally single-minded about business. And ruthless. Adele’s killing had hardened him even more. He ploughed everything into narcotics smuggling, operating with the Turks to bring in even more heroin. The deals were running into multiple multiples of tens of thousands of pounds. Sometimes a week, always a month.
It didn’t take long for the clock to turn to High Noon. There were other just as determined people as the Di Giovine family. There were gun battles over territory, beatings and killings, and one death led to another and, of course, there was the vendetta. The Yugoslavs were the big threat and Adele’s death still had to be avenged. All I knew of it was that Dad seemed distant most of the time. He didn’t seem to have as much time for me, for anyone.
The family concluded what they called ‘the negotiations’ in a territorial battle that ended with five of the Slav gang dead in a week.
The Di Giovine enterprise, like the drug supply, was endless, and there were always new customers, always the search for more outlets. Patricia Di Giovine, my mum, on the other hand, was searching for an escape. In the August of 1979 we went on holiday to another world, to Calabria, and stayed with my nan’s family. She had relatives, brothers and sisters and their families, throughout the area. My godfather, Uncle Demitri Serraino, was our main host, the patriach. He was lovely, a nice, very particular, elegant man and a bit of a lad. His wife Lidia couldn’t have kids and they’d fed her with hormones that made her really hairy; she looked like a man and had a smell like a man as well. Mum and I had to stay at her house. She was lovely to talk to, but she had bushy hairs under her chin and she used to get Mum to pluck them out.
I sat there worrying: ‘Oh my God, please don’t let me have to pull out the hairs.’ I dreaded the thought of it.
Uncle Demitri and the Calabrian family were set in their old-world ways, their attitudes as ingrown as Lidia’s chin hairs. Nan had bought land, and her brother and his wife, Uncle Giuseppe and Auntie Milina, kept rabbits on some of her acres, which were near their farm. Auntie Milina was unpleasant to everybody and I couldn’t stand her. They told me she could kill people with her bare hands; she was a
generale in gonnella,
a general in a skirt.
One day I went across to the farm where they kept the pigs and these gorgeous rabbits. Just as she was killing a rabbit for our tea, I pleaded, ‘Please don’t kill that white one!’
But she killed it right in front of me. Just battered his head, and skinned it. It was awful. I’ll never forget it.
I cried and asked: ‘What are you going to do with the skin?’
Auntie Milina held it out to me and said, ‘You can make a pair of knickers if you want.’
It was horrible. I was miserable, fed up with that. Nan tried to cheer me up as we sat by the olive groves, fanned by the gusts of
zagarna,
orange blossom breeze. She said Dad might visit on Thursday. That brought a smile to my face. It seemed so long since I’d seen him. I didn’t want to get too excited in case he didn’t turn up but I couldn’t help myself. I counted to one hundred and then one hundred again to make the time go faster.
He appeared in the early evening, and as I ran into his arms he said he had come specially to see me. He hadn’t brought any presents or luggage – no change of clothes, no toothbrush. All he was carrying was a Benelli 12-gauge shotgun.
The next morning after breakfast he took me out to learn how to use that big gun, with its worn stock and oiled barrels. He carried the weapon slung over his shoulder on a loose, tan leather strap. The red shells he gave me to load the shotgun were warm from his pocket. He stopped me with a gentle smile when I tried to put in more than five cartridges. It was a nice grin, but faraway, not familiar.
We were out near the olive groves, close to orchards of lemon and lime. My face was flushed with the heat and
excitement, cooled only a little by the breeze with the orange bouquet from the bergamot trees.
I had to concentrate on the lesson. When I’d loaded the gun he explained that each shell was packed not with pellets but with a single, rifled slug of lead.
‘What’s the difference?’ I asked.
He explained that pellets can catch game birds from the sky, while one spinning slug would bring down a charging wild boar. Stop it in its tracks.
The shotgun was difficult, too heavy for me to handle properly. He smiled and I could see the squinty white lines around his eyes where the sun hadn’t reached. He shouldered it. With a soft click, he slid the safety catch off, pulled me out of his line of fire, and blasted several times into the distance, at targets of his imagination. Acrid cordite masked the orange blossom, as I clapped applause at my baptism of gunfire.
My father put his strong, tanned arm around me and I could feel his breath in my right ear as he whispered:
‘Amo la mia piccola principessa.’
[‘I love my little princess.’]
My heart swelled. I adored him. I would do anything for him, anything he wanted. He only had to ask. And then later that day he was gone. Just like that.
There were no explanations from Nan, and Mum avoided talking about him. That was typical now. She always spoke about ‘the two of us’ and finding a nice place to stay. I wanted us all to be together as a family. I loved my dad. I wanted us to stay with him, or near him at least.
We returned to Milan at the end of the month but I didn’t go back to class. I was going to another school. Our bags were packed, our whole life in Italy in six cases. Mum was more than ready to leave Milan, leave Dad and Nan and all the Serraino–Di Giovine family and connections, to leave their underworld, the
malavita.
Dad was mad about it but there was nothing he could do. Mum had made up her mind and deep down I think he knew it would be better for me to get away as there was so much violence going on.
When Nan hugged and kissed me goodbye, it didn’t feel right. I knew she didn’t want me to leave her and, inside myself, I never did. I was upset and I didn’t want to go, but Mum made much of the novelty of living in England. And there’d be a nice new school. It would be fun, like another holiday. She was trying to convince herself that it was not just the only plan but also the best plan.
It was a sunny morning in early September 1979 when we left Milan. A day later our train rolled through the rain at Fishergate Hill and along platform five at Preston Station. My mum’s older sister Auntie Jill met us and I remember she had brought a spare Marks and Sparks umbrella to keep us dry in our scamper with our stuff to the car park. We moved into Auntie Jill and Uncle Adrian’s detached house on a very posh new estate in Carlton, Lancashire. Mum had already written to the local authority from Milan and got us on the council house list but Auntie Jill would have let us stay forever. Despite trying, she and my uncle didn’t have any children of their own so they were happy to spoil me
rotten. I loved the attention but also the space and the constant hot water. Baths – hot baths! – were part of the day, not a dream. I was given my own bedroom but for more than six months I still slept in Mum’s bed because at only nine years old I was scared of my new world.
I kept wondering about Dad, where he was, and when, if, he was going to come and see me. I would dream about him and look at pictures and photographs and wonder if that’s where he was. I would see a photo of a building and wonder if he’d walked past it. I was constantly searching for something to give me a connection to him.
As a little girl you need reassurance. I wanted my dad to tell me he loved me. I adored him. I loved him. I would tell him. Why wouldn’t he speak to me, tell me he loved me? But for this little girl there was no point in tantrums. I knew stamping my foot would get me nowhere:
L’albero vecchio non si drizza piu
[An old tree cannot be made straight].
But time played its part and I began to settle. Auntie Jill had a budgie called Joey, which used to sit in its cage saying, ‘Hello, I’m Joey Sheppard.’
My uncle and I liked to play a game where we waited until Mum and Auntie Jill were talking thirteen to the dozen and we’d open Joey’s cage and he’d zing out. Joey’s flight plan was always directly to Auntie Jill’s head. She used so much spray her hair was like a helmet and Joey would land without her even noticing. He’d sit there, perched on her head, and she’d be talking and talking. It was only when Mum collapsed in a fit of laughter that she realised and chased me around the house.
We’d go to Blackpool for the day and walk along the beach and throw stones into the sea. Dinner-time specials were fish and chips and caramel puddings. It was all so simple, normal, a different life.
But also a different language. I didn’t speak more than a few words of English. When I was first given Smarties I thought they were counters, not sweets. I couldn’t write English or count in English or understand lessons in English, which means that the staff at Carlton Green Primary School must have been fantastic because I flourished there. The teachers gave me plenty of attention, one-to-one classes, and so a couple of years later when I went to Hodgson High School, where Mum had gone to school, I’d caught up with the others. In fact, I was better at English than most kids my age.
I cherished the school uniform Mum laid out on my bed every morning. Wearing the grey skirt, bright blue sweater and blue and grey tie made me feel important. I’d never worn a tie before and I felt smarter and grown up.