Mafia Princess (8 page)

Nan took him clean sheets, clean clothes, new clothes. He was living like a Roman emperor, his every wish a command. Every weekend he was invited to go and have a slap-up meal at a politician’s house. At the first dinner the politician’s wife asked who their guest was and Dad was described as the politician’s new ‘executive assistant’.

The five-star hotel treatment suited him. He felt stronger when he pulled me up in arms. He seemed to have put on weight but his grey designer suit still hung sleekly on him. The guards had cordoned off an area of the visiting room
and we walked around. When we sat he gave me a silver bracelet. While the other visitors were hustled out, we were left alone.

Dad’s VIP treatment, the big-screen telly in his cell, the showers when he wanted them, were all in return for Nan’s payoffs. The prison guards’ families received regular goodies, all manner of stolen gear, and it was always apparent who wanted drugs. Dad made sure there was no trouble in the prison. Everybody was happy. Especially me.

On the Italian visits we would always go down to Calabria, so there was sun and the seaside too. It was a ten-hour drive but it was fun because Auntie Angela was with me as well as various other family teenagers, cousins, aunts and uncles, and my Uncle Filippo’s girlfriend Alessandra.

Mum was sort of in charge of us, along with Auntie Milina, but Auntie Milina never let us out. We’d have to be escorted, we couldn’t go out on our own. Because we came from Milan, from the North, we were a novelty and all the lads there were desperate to be around us. I was tall and blonde and they were like flies buzzing round. We loved it. But when we gave our surname they’d run a mile. Or most of them would.

It was the brave ones who stayed. And they got slapped for talking to us. We didn’t think it was fair. We wanted to go for a walk, to meet some of the local lads, but it didn’t happen. We were housebound except when we were being chaperoned to the beach and back. We got fed up with Auntie Milina.

One day when she wouldn’t let us out, Alessandra held a séance with a wooden ouija board. We all sat with our fingers on the glass and suddenly it started going really fast.

Alessandra said, ‘Do something to Milina. Who is it? Who is it? Do something to Milina.’

Next thing, the glass spelled ‘death’.

‘No. No. No. Don’t do that.’ We were just young girls and we were terrified by this.

That same night there was an almighty thunderstorm. When we got up the next day and went down, Milina’s arm was in a bandage. We all wanted to know what had happened to her and she told us: ‘The windows and shutters flew open with the storm. I went to close them and I don’t know what happened, but I stumbled out of the window onto the balcony.’

We were astonished. The balcony had just been built. A few weeks before it hadn’t been there and she would have stumbled not onto the balcony but to her death. She was lucky, but it felt like an omen.

It was a scare but it didn’t spoil the fun, and Mum was enjoying herself. Being a camera freak she took lots of photographs and in a fit of defiance we all posed topless. It was a huge joke and all of us are laughing in the pictures. It was a prank, a delight for us giggly girls, because all the relatives were so old-fashioned in Calabria compared to Milan. You couldn’t even go out on a date alone. You had to take a chaperone. You weren’t allowed to have a boyfriend.

One day I went to visit an old grandma while I was wearing a sun top. It was a very dry heat and in the summer it can get up to 40 degrees Celsius.

She said: ‘You’re not going out like that, are you?’

I said: ‘I’m going to the beach!’

She said: ‘You should cover your shoulders.’

I went off to the beach smiling. I was witnessing two different worlds, yesterday and today, in Italy. Mum and I spent six weeks there every summer and I absolutely loved it. I really wished I could live there. I hated coming back to a windy, cold, rainy Blackpool coast. I hated it. Of course, we always came back in September and straight into the cold and the gloom. That made it worse.

Yet I was young enough to get on with my life. I was well over first love Michael – we didn’t split up, but before my fifteenth birthday we had drifted apart and gone our separate ways. I had a laugh, I had a lot of friends. But all the same…

Mum had the history to support her constant argument: ‘It’s no good for you over there. I know that better than anyone. Forget about it.’

I couldn’t.

In the summer of 1985, when I was fifteen, my school friend Dawn came along with Mum and me. We stayed at Nan’s, and Dawn saw that life was fast and furious and she loved it. She saw the luxury and the money. Uncle Antonio, who had created his own empire, had an absolutely sensational penthouse in Nan’s block. He’d bought two apartments
and knocked them through, and he also had a villa by the Lakes where we used to go.

One day he decided to take Dawn and me to Rimini. It was the usual summer nightmare on the roads with massive queues. Uncle Antonio steered his Maserati onto the hard shoulder and drove almost all the way to Rimini speeding past the blocked lines of cars. It was like an oven outside, but we had the radio and the air-conditioning full on, speeding along in this Maserati. Dawn and I felt like royalty – especially when we took a suite at the Grand Hotel in Rimini.

Uncle Antonio was a huge cocaine fiend and he travelled with suitcases of cocaine. We went out to long lunches and lived the high life. My Auntie Domenica, known to all as ‘Mima’, who’d joined us for the trip, was ten years older and more sophisticated than us. She’d looked like a bloke – a strong face, if I’m being kind – before the nose operation that she had while Dad was in New York. Now she was quite startling-looking, and she took a liking to some of the younger men. Though not quite as much as the liking she had taken to heroin.

She wasn’t the only junkie I knew, not by any means. Sadly, Uncle Filippo’s girlfriend Alessandra had a problem with that as well. Tallish for an Italian girl, beautiful and vibrant, she was only a couple of years older than me, and I was deeply shocked by what happened to her. It was a warning bell, if any of us had cared to listen.

‘Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.’

MARCUS AURELIUS, AD
172

It was as if the ouija board was sending another message, for the family fortunes suffered a severe knocking in 1986.

It kicked off with Nan’s arrest. It made sense to the police not on the payroll. Milan was turning into a suburb of Colombia, there was so much drug traffic. The cops believed Dad was no longer a problem as he was in jail. So they took Nan off the streets on a drug handling and stolen goods list of charges. They couldn’t prove much but she was sent to San Vittore prison for two years.

I was heartbroken. Nan had been my guardian angel, had organised everything, and now she was in jail. I thought I would never see Dad or the rest of the family again.

Then I heard that Alessandra had died, and I felt everything around me was crumbling. She’d taken a drug consignment to America for the family. She was a mule; all she had to do was deliver the package. It’s still a mystery exactly what happened to her. What we know is that she overdosed on heroin and whoever she was with bundled her out of a speeding car and into a Manhattan side street. She was thrown into the trash and left to die. We don’t know who she was
with, what she was doing or why it happened. But that’s what the cops said she died of.

Of course, she was seen as a minor casualty in a billion-dollar business. Uncle Filippo was devastated, as were her family. My uncle tried to find out what actually happened but there wasn’t much of a result. If it had been a family member it would have been different. I know that sounds awful but because it was his girlfriend, not family, the odds of business against vendetta came down on the side of business. It’s brutal, but that was the way of it. When I heard the news I was horribly sad, and it felt freaky thinking about the strange night with the ouija board when she’d sent Auntie Milina the death message. Had it backfired?

Drugs were taking their toll on the family. Dad’s lesbian sister Mariella, who’d had the affair with his girlfriend, had become a serious heroin user and became infected by a dirty needle. She contracted HIV and died from full-blown AIDS. But it didn’t stop business.

With Nan imprisoned, Dad quickly got on with the job of setting up new operational headquarters. He was open all hours inside the all-mod-cons Parma Hospital. He reinvented his scam from Barcelona with a series of clever twists: instead of working in the prison hospital to case it out, he was living in the nearby regular hospital in grand style. A doctor had ordered Dad to have twenty-four-hour care as he claimed he risked dying of an infection from lead left in the gunshot wounds he suffered in the café attack when Adele was killed. There were no guards, only the consultant, chain-smoking
tax-free cigarettes, who’d been enriched in return for the dodgy paperwork to get Dad into hospital. When the prison authorities asked how long it might take for him to get better, the consultant said he could give no time limit.

Dad ran everything from there, organising the family’s affairs – and his own – like a free man. Sometimes contacts and my uncles would visit four or five times a day with meetings going until late in the evening. Information was received and orders given about the international drug shipments. Every night someone from the family, usually Auntie Rita, would drive out to Parma and make deliveries to Dad and hand out any necessary payoffs. They’d go over the accounts, the drugs sold and money made. Given the enormity of the deals, maybe it was appropriate that Dad wore a blue business suit for his hospital board meetings. But it was crazy. He was in hospital because he was meant to be near death from lead poisoning and he wasn’t even in pyjamas.

Sex was Dad’s recreational drug. He was enraptured by one of the nurses and he engaged in quite a passionate affair for a man in critical condition. Nurse Leggy – yes, she had long legs – and her husband couldn’t have children but she got pregnant by Dad. Her marriage survived, with her pretending the boy was her husband’s. Nurse Leggy thought enough of Dad to send him a photograph of the baby, who they named Alessandro, and tell him: ‘This is your son.’

So I’ve got a half brother I’ve never seen who doesn’t know who we are. But there are probably more; one thing
Dad never struggled to do was attract the eye of women. Sometimes he’d happily see double.

I was seeing red. I was angry at I don’t know what. My situation, my circumstances – at Mum?

I did pretty well at school despite the usual distractions, the crushes and the fashion moments, and decided on a college degree in business studies, which was as much for Mum as for me. But my mind wandered from management and economics to what was happening with Dad and Nan and the rest of the family in Milan. I’d seen the glamour and excitement, I’d been part of it. Now I wasn’t.

My seventeen-year-old’s moods and ‘it’s not fair’ attitude didn’t help my relationship with Mum. She was doing everything she could to keep a good and happy home – in England. And I was going on about the family in Italy. I wouldn’t call them all screaming matches but we had many exchanges of opinion. Our lives were very difficult. Every seventeen-year-old knows she’s right. Every Mum knows she’s right. It’s a Mexican stand-off that neither can win.

When the 1987 Easter break arrived I’d done six months of college and what seemed like a century of mum-and-daughter disputes. We were both at our wits’ end when I called Auntie Angela in Milan to get the latest news and gossip. Auntie Rita answered the phone and everything poured out of me – the frustration, the boring life in England, the wanting to see Dad, all of it.

She got the message: ‘Marisa, come here! Stay with me. You can see your dad every day.’

I had college holidays, money saved, and Mum didn’t have the energy to fight me about it. It was agreed I’d only go for a month until it was time to come back for college. Mum was fine, helping me get organised for the trip, helping me pack, but for all that her face told another story – one of resignation. Like mother, like daughter. Life was repeating itself in front of her eyes.

I hadn’t seen my family in more than a year and never without Nan. Uncle Guglielmo, who met me at the airport, was the outside organiser for Dad, who was masterminding everything from his hospital rooms. Just because Nan and Dad were in jail didn’t mean they weren’t still running one of the biggest drug rings in Europe with the USA their biggest customer.

I was desperate to see Dad again and Uncle Guglielmo arranged for me to have a driver, a young guy called Bruno, for my trips to the hospital. I didn’t pay much attention to him at first. I saw him give me the eye, the up and down look. I was young with a good figure and long blonde hair so it wasn’t the first time I’d been ogled. Hey, I’d have been upset if he hadn’t!

But it was Dad’s attention I really wanted. It was as if he was in a corporate office; he had his own airy, private ward with nice big windows on the second floor of the hospital. I spent the day with him and the next and the next.

‘I’m sorry I wasn’t around so much for you when you were growing up,’ he said. ‘But soon I’ll be out and things will change. Things will be better. I want you here as much as you can be. I want you around more.’

I’d no real idea of the scope of what Dad and Nan and the family were involved in but I wasn’t stupid either. My father and grandmother were in jail, most of my uncles had been in jail, so I was aware they weren’t running Disney World. I knew their business must be dodgy but I didn’t ask questions. I was just happy to be there, to be
home.
For that’s how it felt. I feel Italian, I always have. When I was seventeen I just wanted to stay.

I spent most days with Dad but there were regular interruptions with his constant stream of visitors. Whenever he spoke to people they listened to his words as if their lives depended on it. And there was no better example of that than Bruno. I could see Dad liked him and they would often spend time alone talking about business. On the first visit they finished their conversation by shaking hands and as we left Dad kissed me and shouted to Bruno: ‘Don’t fuck it up, Bruno. And make sure you look after my princess.’

Bruno did, but more than Dad imagined or wanted.

I found myself warming to Bruno more and more. He was a good-looking, big strong guy with nice brown eyes. He was four years older than me and wore decent clothes, designer jeans and shirts, sharp suits and cap-toed leather brogues. He looked good, he looked successful and he was trusted by my dad. What wasn’t there to like?

He was also fun. In the car he would do silly things, pull faces or tell me jokes and make me laugh. I was young and giggly and he was confident and he knew how to press the
right buttons to amuse and impress a seventeen-year-old girl. The problem – there’s always one – was that he was impressing lots and lots of girls. All the girls who used to come and go from the apartment fancied him. He had an on-off relationship with my cousin Magda, who was my Auntie Santina’s daughter from a previous marriage. I say on-off but for Bruno it was basically off except that Magda did everything for him. She would run around asking him if he wanted anything to eat and do his washing and he mostly ignored her. She was totally smitten but I thought he was a jerk the way he treated her.

Bruno’s parents owned a bakery in Milan which supplied food on contract to schools. It was a steady and financially rewarding business. His folks wanted him to work with them but Bruno was too independent in his attitude. He liked life working for Dad. Which gave him every opportunity for drinking with my uncles and indulging in the free-flowing cocaine always on call.

He spent more time at the apartment than at his parents’. We girls would sit around in the evening watching videos when most of the men were out on the town. Bruno stayed with us one night and we all watched
Scarface.
Bruno started imitating Al Pacino as the cocaine-crazy Tony Montana waving his machine gun, ‘my little friend’, in the air. I thought he was being really stupid, but Magda and the other girls were in hysterics.

Suddenly Bruno called out to me: ‘Hey, Marisa! This guy is just like your daddy.’

He was pointing at Al Pacino blasting people to bits on the screen. I must have looked puzzled for he quickly said, ‘No, no, beautiful. I’m only joking.’

Bruno realised I didn’t know as much as he’d thought about Dad’s empire. Before visiting Dad the next day he took me for a spin on his Vespa. We sped around the streets and he was joking with people we passed.

‘You’ve dropped some money back there,’ he yelled, and they’d walk half a mile back to look for this imaginary money. It was silly things like that as a seventeen-year-old I thought were hilarious. He was always laughing and fun. He was a nice guy. And he was good-looking. I found myself looking him up and down.

Dad instantly saw there was a spark between me and Bruno and didn’t waste his breath. ‘Bruno, if you’ve been playing around with my princess I’ll cut your cock off.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Bruno nearly fell off his chair.

‘Emilio! You’ve got it all wrong. You think I would be that stupid?’

Bruno
was
that stupid. And I loved him for it. But there would be no romance for a while. He was a close friend of my Uncle Guglielmo and together they were running the family business on the outside. Huge drug shipments were arriving at Gioia Tauro and being trucked to Milan, where they had to be processed. Organising the distribution involved team work and the family had a workforce numbering sixty – guys of Bruno’s age who had earned
Nan and Dad’s trust and who had been vouched for by them.

Blood family and non-kin membership of the ’Ndrangheta overlap. Marriages like Nan and Grandpa Rosario’s help smooth relations within each
’ndrina
and expand membership. At the bottom of the chain of command are the
picciotti d’onore
[soldiers], who are expected to perform tasks with blind obedience until they are promoted to the next level of
cammorista.
That’s when they’re given command over their own soldiers. The secret of the power and success of the ’Ndrangheta is that only an inner circle of relatives and trusted commanders have the core knowledge of all the operations of the family.

Bruno, at only twenty-one years old, was a
cammorista.
He was one of the few of their operators Uncle Guglielmo and Dad trusted to listen and understand what had to be done in the drug trafficking and make sure people did it. He’d be told precisely when and where shipments were coming in, the amount and where it needed to go. And Bruno only needed to be told once. Dad never liked to say anything twice.

But Dad didn’t mind doubling up with girls, especially when they were as stunning as Mara and Marina. The twins. They were identical. Even in their heroin habits. They were both in Parma Hospital’s drug rehabilitation centre. They had blonde hair, blue eyes and were slim, very sunny-looking and attractive women. They wore funky clothes and were spoiled rotten by their parents, who had plenty of money, a
very rich Parma family. Their parents would have paid anything to get them clean.

Dad’s interest in the twins wasn’t purely for pleasure. He knew he couldn’t stay in the hospital for ever. He knew he had to go back inside at some point. He had to make other arrangements. He hooked up with Marina, who was a bit of a devil. He told her that if her parents invested some money, they could open a bakery partnership. He told her to tell her father it would be good rehab therapy. It worked, and when Dad went back to prison he started working in the bakery on day release and going back to his luxury cell at night.

It was his own business, but it was in the twins’ name. He needed to keep them sweet. But they fell out because Dad started liking the other twin, Mara. The
ménage à trois
didn’t quite work. The bakery did, though, allowing Dad all the freedom and time he needed.

I was due back at college. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay, with Dad, with Bruno. Mum was going crazy back in England. She was on the phone all the time demanding to know what plane I’d be on. I avoided the question, stuck my head in the sand about all of that. Bruno was foremost in my mind almost all the time.