Mafia Princess

Her education didn’t take too long. There was little to do most evenings, after the cooking and the washing up, but talk. And, more importantly, listen. She never heard the words Mafia or ’Ndrangheta for they were never spoken. She realised there was a lot of ducking and diving going on, but if Emilio was making money dealing in dodgy cigarettes it didn’t seem too serious to her. On the crime scale she thought it was a bit like bringing in too much duty free. Certainly, that’s how the family’s ever-growing mass smuggling operation was presented to her. And Mum heard what she wanted to hear. She was wise to do that for she was about to be recruited by the ’Ndrangheta.

Dad’s smuggling crews criss-crossing in and out of Switzerland at the Italian border town of Lago di Lugano were being increasingly hassled at the checkpoints. He decided to ‘disguise’ the trips as sightseeing and romantic days out and sent drivers across accompanied by women. Dad began taking Mum on his own runs. It worked: the police pressure eased, and the volume of cigarettes being brought back to Nan’s doubled within a few weeks.

Dad tried not to let Mum in on the extent of the family operations. It was a feeble effort. She saw him carrying a gun. She saw the police arrive threateningly and leave happy. If she did question any of the bewildering events the answer was always: ‘There’s no need to worry or get involved, so don’t.’

Her big question – to herself – was when our family was going to get its own home. So, in her protective way, she was just happy Emilio was out earning some money, which she hoped would bankroll an escape from the shoebox life at Nan’s. That we would be a family unit, not part of a daily and increasingly crazy cavalcade at Nan’s. She wanted to raise me in Italy where she had made friends.

Vital to that dream of domestic bliss was her relationship with Dad. She couldn’t ignore her inner self which told her she didn’t truly love him; they were brought together by circumstances. Yet falling pregnant was a big deal and, rebound guy or no rebound guy, the rules were you stayed together and tried to make it work. Well, that was how she saw it.

After the long kitchen table drama when I was born and she held me in her arms, her emotions, her heart and mothering instincts, took over. Her life purpose was now to care for me and she didn’t want to do it as a single mum. She wanted me to have a mum and dad.

For Dad, his only concern then was business, which was booming and expanding into even more dangerous territory. The Turkish gangs running drugs throughout Milan were hiring ‘money collectors’, teams of hard men to bring in the payments. Dad started making tidy sums from this but saw the dealers themselves getting lavish payoffs of more than £10,000 a time, which was enticing. He was still indulging in his favourite pastimes, stealing cars and dating girls. When the girls met him he always had a polished Porsche, a red Ferrari – he likes red – or a new Alfa Romeo. A racing driver? It didn’t look or sound to the girls like the buckets of bullshit it really was.

Mum was just keeping her head above it all. Dad was gone a lot of the time and she was pretty sure he was having affairs but she couldn’t prove it. She was lucky to be single-minded and determined, for the toll on her was incessant; flirting with postnatal depression and not knowing what shocks or surprises would present themselves each day – and there were usually one or two – she remained strong.

Mum desperately wanted her own space, and Dad finally got us out of Nan’s and into a small rented apartment. It wasn’t grand but it was our home and an escape from the bedlam of Nan’s house, where there was another baby, Auntie Angela, who was only a month older than me, and the raging testosterone in the house with all my uncles. They were growing up, doing their own thing, having their own bit of business here and there. There was fighting between them but nobody would dare fight with them. It was ‘I hate you, but nobody else can hate you.’ If any harm came to one of them, then everybody would band together. It was like a circus with lots of zany characters and hoops being jumped through. Nan was the ringmaster in a sauce-stained apron. Some people would shrink back when she shouted but I knew she only raised her voice to those she loved. If she shouted at you, everything was OK. Silence wasn’t golden, not at all.

I was now very much part of it, by blood, and that’s a lifetime bond. And because of me, so was Mum. But for much of the time it was the life of a single mum. She didn’t know what Dad was doing, where he was going or who he was seeing from one day to the next. He was all over the place with his smugglers. The consignments grew and grew. But the bigger they were, the bigger the problem of moving them into the country.

Mum had been to England to show me off to her parents and returned with a present, an elaborate carrycot with lots of side pockets for nappies and all the other baby paraphernalia. When Dad examined it, he noticed there was also a slot underneath where he could hide dozens of cartons of cigarettes. Instead of a traditional family lunch, he began taking us out in the grey Fiat 500 for a 45-minute drive to Lake Como, where we would collect the cigarettes and then return for tea with some of the contraband concealed in the car and me lying in my cot on the rest of it. Dad was so pleased with this scheme, he took photographs of me lying on a Marlboro mattress. There’s one picture where I have a cigarette on my lips, the Marlboro baby. Little did he know that the police would come upon these pictures one day in the future.

Mum and Dad’s life appeared to settle, but there’s no smoke without fire. He was still vanishing without warning and leaving no message telling where he was. Business. Always business. But he was around enough for Mum to get pregnant again. An accident. And a tragic one in so many ways.

Dad continued fooling around. He was still only twenty-one years old when he got involved with a blonde English dancer called Melanie Taylor, who was touring with a cabaret show. She thought she was in love with him. She was only one of the girls he’d been seeing but it had been going on for some time. Mum, heavily pregnant, heard his brothers talking about the relationship. Finally, she lost it. She marched off to the bar where the dancing girls went in the evening. She burst in, telling them to let this slag Melanie know that the guy she was screwing was her husband and she was expecting another baby with him.

When word got back to Dad about what had happened, he calmly walked into the bar and told Melanie and her friends that Mum was mad. He was cold and calculating and claimed she was pregnant by someone else and he was leaving her over it. Everyone believed what they wanted to believe.

Mum had vented much of the rage from her system, and she was mentally and physically tired and weary of it all, so she got on with having her second baby. She knew it was going to be another little girl. Dad didn’t bother to turn up for the birth, which this time, at Mum’s insistence, was at the local hospital. My sister Rosella was born but it was two days later before Dad visited and even then he turned up with another woman.

Nan saw red at this and dragged the girl, who didn’t know any better, out of the car and battered her, shouting: ‘You ugly whore!’ She loved my dad, but she didn’t like what he was doing, so she took it out on the nearest person who wasn’t family.

When Dad got to the bedside my mum said: ‘You’ve just been with other women, haven’t you?’

‘I swear on this baby’s life I haven’t.’

It was terrible, tragic. Tiny Rosella died three weeks later. She’d had lots of health complications but officially her death was down to tetanus.

Mum was devastated. She felt lost, and she knew that was definitely it with my dad. It was over. I was a little more than a year old. Mum had one baby and no income. She couldn’t afford to keep paying the rent at the apartment, so she had nowhere to stay.

She went ‘home’ – in other words, she went to Nan’s. That’s all that made sense to her. Nan was on Mum’s side. Family.

And, of course, business. Nan paid for Mum to have driving lessons. When she had her licence – Nan didn’t want any traffic laws being broken – she started in the cold mists of winter doing solo cigarette runs. She’d drive to Lake Como and also into Switzerland when cheaper consignments were on offer. Sometimes one of my uncles would go along.

It was her way of displaying loyalty to the family and earning some money for them. All the time I was happily being looked after by Nan and her troops of helpers. Dad? He was going up in the underworld, his enterprises far more dangerous and lucrative than before. His lifestyle reflected that.

For Mum it was make do as she could. She wanted us to get our own place away from the crowded craziness of Nan’s and put us down for council accommodation. It didn’t take long. I was nearly three years old when we moved into Quarto Oggiaro, into the ‘Mussolini flats’, the largest social housing district of Milan. The concrete camp of a neighbourhood started by the Italian dictator was home to immigrants, first from southern Italy and, when we moved in, from Turkey and Yugoslavia, making it a colourful melting pot.

For Mum it was our first home together and special to her. But not to anyone else. It’s the roughest place in Milan, and Milan’s a big city; a poor, grey downtrodden estate for thousands of poor people, chilled in the city fogs of winter, oppressive in the summer heat.

We had a big room, twenty by twenty, that we slept in, ate in, did everything in. It was token rent, the equivalent of a couple of pounds a week. We didn’t get much for that: one bed for the two of us, a small kitchen corridor and a little toilet. We didn’t have a bath or a shower. We’d go to Nan’s house to have a really decent wash. If not, we used to have to go to the public showers. I’d grip Mum’s hand as we stood in line to take our turn under the water. It didn’t matter what time or what day we were there, the water was always freezing cold: almost refreshing in the summer but cruel in winter.

It was about a fifteen-minute ride on the number 7 or number 12 tram and then a ten-minute walk from the Quarto Oggiaro over to Nan’s where I still saw my dad. He was always smiling when he saw me and I loved it. I wanted to hug him for ever. Yet, in a little kid way, I couldn’t understand why I didn’t see him every day. Didn’t he love me as much as I loved him?

He wouldn’t be seen dead at our place, the poorest area in the city. He drove a chocolate-coloured Porsche – this one was paid for – and lived in a really exclusive area. ‘Why are we like this, and my dad has got all that?’ I wondered.

He took me to meet Daniella, one of his girlfriends, who had a son about my age. We went to a toyshop and he told us to choose something. I was used to having the cheapest things and picked a little dressing table with make-up and hairbrushes. The lad picked a powered pedal car that you sat in – it would have cost a fortune. I liked my dressing table but later the family teased me that the lad’s present was much better than mine and I got fed up with my dad about that.

Mum was the star. She worked all hours at the Upim market, which sold everything, a sort of mini Tesco. She did shifts to work around my school timetable.

I didn’t speak English, only Italian. I understood ‘sit down’ and ‘thank you’ but Mum only spoke Italian to me. She wanted me to belong. We had picture books, Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland and other kids’ stories. The teachers made you eat courgettes and go to sleep in the afternoon and I hated all of that. They’d prop up cot beds and we had to lie there for about forty-five minutes and have a little sleep. I pretended I was asleep because you’d get told off if you moved or said a word.

We had white overalls and each class had its own different-coloured little collar – mine was red and orange. The overalls would be various shades and sizes, some better, some worse, depending on where you bought them, but you had to have them on top of your normal clothes. It was like any school uniform, an attempt to stop there being any ‘them’ and ‘us’ in the class or playground. Most of the kids were deprived anyway for it was that sort of neighbourhood, and on the stifling hot days of summer that left you breathless it could smell like a bad Spanish holiday.

For Carnival Day on 17 February I always had to borrow an outfit from Auntie Angela. She got the costume and I had to borrow it. Whatever she had, I wouldn’t get a choice. I was a fairy one time when I was very little. One year I got a Spanish flamenco costume that Angela had never worn and I was very happy; that was special.

The school was a five-minute walk from home and Mum would drop me off just before 8 a.m. when lessons and her Upim shift began. It was all co-ordinated. I finished school at 1.30 p.m., just as Mum’s first shift ended, so she picked me up and we’d go to Nan’s, then she went back to work until 7 p.m. Nobody from school ever came back to my nan’s. Mum kept that part of our life separate. Classmates would visit at Mum’s. Her friend Linda’s daughter Simona was in my class and her son Luca was a little younger. I played ball and rode my bike with them and a lot of other kids in the yard at the Mussolini flats.

I also caught nits, one of the neighbourhood hazards. I heard Mum saying, ‘Marisa, you’re not going to like this but I’ve no choice,’ and the next thing huge clumps of hair, my long, curly ringlets, were falling to the ground. When I looked in the mirror a little boy was staring back at me. I stood there screaming with tears rolling down my face. I was wearing red wellies, a red top and jeans and a shaven head. Mum took one of her ‘arty’ photographs.

That was a big drama for me. As a youngster I was protected from all the other dramas that were going on around me. Nan’s was always warm and comfortable when I stayed there in the afternoons and early evenings. There were more people and more room than at our place, and I loved my nan’s food. Meals seemed to last for hours. I had my cousins to play with and the family would never, ever leave us out in any way. It was ‘my house is your house’. When I went there it felt like my home. As soon as Mum and I walked through the door Nan stopped whatever she was doing and walked across the room and scooped me up in her huge arms. As she wrapped me up, pulled me close and kissed me on the end of my nose, I felt as though no one could hurt me. In her arms I would never come to any harm. She was always very giving and cuddly. I thought it was an amazing place. I’d never seen so many people in one house at the same time. It was full of excitement and love.

After meals I’d play with my skipping rope in the yard along with Auntie Angela, until it was too dark to see and we had to come inside. Then we’d chase the family dog, an Alsatian called Yago, all around the house until his barking became so loud that Grandpa would tell us to quit winding him up.

Everyone loved that animal but Grandpa. He hated it. One week when he had to travel to Calabria on family business he packed up his truck and hid Yago in the back. When he reached Calabria he turfed the dog out into the woods and drove off.

Nan was beside herself when he told her Yago had gone missing in Calabria. Then a miracle occurred. Three months later when Nan answered the door to a neighbour, in walked Yago. Like everyone else, he had come back to my Nan. It turned out Grandpa hadn’t taken him quite as far as he said he had, but Yago had still found his way home from right across the other side of Milan.

I used to sit next to Nan and put my head on her generous chest and she’d talk quietly and scratch my head. I would fall asleep to that and her voice. It was lovely. It felt comforting. I didn’t know what she was thinking about. Or what she was plotting.

While I was at school, Nan and Dad were also getting lessons: about other ways to make money, including the Italian gangster growth industry – kidnapping. Huge worldwide headlines revolved around the abduction for ransom of John Paul Getty III. His father ran the Italian end of the family oil business from Rome and he’d grown up there. And that’s where he was snatched in July 1973. The kidnappers from the ’Ndrangheta wanted 17 million US dollars for the sixteen-year-old’s safe return.

The family, headed by John Paul Getty I, believed it was a hoax. The next ransom note was held up by a strike by Italian postal workers. The ’Ndrangheta decided to emphasise their seriousness. In November 1973 an envelope was delivered with a lock of hair, a human ear and a note saying: ‘This is Paul’s ear. If we don’t get 3.2 million US dollars within ten days, then the other ear will arrive. In other words, he will arrive in little bits.’

Astonishingly, the boy’s fabulously wealthy grandfather continued to negotiate. Finally, he paid 2.8 million US dollars and his grandson was found alive in southern Italy in December the same year. No one was ever arrested.

Everyone in my family took great interest in the case. Nan and Dad saw it as part of the Wild West that some areas of Italy were turning into. And an opportunity: not to get involved directly with their ’Ndrangheta brethren in the South, but to exploit the situation.

It was only a few years after the ‘French Connection’ – the huge operation that trafficked heroin from Marseilles to New York, which was turned into the 1971 Oscar-winning movie – and the stories of the profits involved remained legend. While the Italian authorities, politicians and carabinieri were focused on the plague of kidnapping, their attention and resources were taken away from drug trafficking, now the other booming business of the age. For Nan and Dad the mechanics were exactly like dealing in cigarettes. The big difference was the product. It was much, much more international and profitable, a multi-multi-million dollar industry.

And lethal for all involved.

CHAPTER FOUR ROOM SERVICE

‘We seek him here, we seek him there…

Is he in Heaven? – Is he in Hell?

That demmed, elusive Pimpernel.’

BARONESS EMMUSKA ORCZY,

THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, 1905

Dad was a captain of the new industries, a crime lord, and was acting and living like one. He was turning into a proper Godfather, with scores of soldiers under his command. He seemed to be everywhere but nowhere. He was always wanted by the police for something, even if it was just some petty crime. He was never in one place for long – he scowled out of many passport photographs. The family knew him as ‘Gypsy’ because he criss-crossed the borders of Europe and into Turkey and North Africa.

His power base was Milan. Companies, bars and restaurants were on the payroll, as well as, most importantly, the authorities. This was Nan’s speciality, her business version of tender loving care – bullshit and cash, and lots of both. In pecking order she tied up the lawyers who brought in the magistrates who knew the right judges to approach and fix. She flicked through the corruption process like a pack of cards.

And Dad was just as quickly shuffling his affections. It was rare that he had Italian girlfriends. They arrived on his arm from all over the planet. Mum made sure she had good relationships with his girlfriends now, for she wanted me to stay close to him and she wanted to be comfortable with the girls if I was going to spend any time with them. It wasn’t so difficult for Mum because she had never really loved Dad anyway. She just let go. She was never real friends with him; they tolerated each other because of me.

I got on with most of his girls. Melanie, whose father was a bigwig in the RAF, even took a comb to my nits, which is beyond the call of girlfriend duty. I stayed with her and Dad a few times. I loved the sleepovers and being close to my dad. Dad being there was the most important part of the visits. There was a subliminal feeling I could not experience with any other person. That father and daughter connection. It was different and exciting to be with him. Dad was always very affectionate. He’d mess around with me, we’d have fun. All his girls made a fuss of me, and I liked that.

There were lots of them but Effie the Paraguayan – Miss Paraguay – was special. She looked like a proper Inca woman and behaved almost like a man. She had one of those Aztec top haircuts, and she sat there at my Nan’s smoking a cigar! The family all thought this was great.

Dad lived well. He moved into a luxurious apartment in Milano 2, a residential set-up in Segrate, a new town built by one of Silvio Berlusconi’s companies. It was traffic-free, with bridges and walkways, a gym and a lake in the grounds. It was very upmarket and far removed from the lifestyle Mum and I had. But if Mum ever said anything about this, he retorted, ‘My mother’s looking after you, isn’t she?’

Yet Dad didn’t always get it all his way. He was seriously involved with a stunning French girl but she took a fancy to his sister, my Auntie Mariella. They used to come to my mum’s to be together, to get it on. I came home from school one day to find them in the back of our blue Mini with the white roof. ‘What are they doing?’ I wondered. ‘Why is my dad’s girlfriend in there with my aunt?’

Much as Mum tried to keep it quiet and help, Dad found out and gave my Auntie Mariella a right kicking up the bum; he broke something on her spine, almost crippling her. He didn’t do anything to his girlfriend. Family weren’t meant to betray you.

I was puzzled about it in a little kid sort of way. I couldn’t understand why everyone was upset. Mum told me not to say anything about seeing them together. She probably thought ‘Up yours!’ to my dad. I hope so. No one else would have dared do that.

Dad was doing whatever he wanted, whatever he felt like, but he was too much of a showman and Nan’s payoffs couldn’t guarantee one hundred per cent protection. In 1974 there was a sudden clean-out at City Hall and the appointment of a new police chief with his own set of magistrates. It takes a little time for corruption to seep through the system so, against the odds, a warrant was issued charging Emilio Di Giovine with handling stolen goods. The hunt, the game, was on.

Nan’s apartment is in a courtyard block of about twenty homes. It’s quite a walk from corner to corner. When the police came for my dad one day he thought he was being clever and stole quickly over to the opposite corner from Nan’s. He walked straight into the cops.

They had no photograph of their suspect. They stopped him. Looked at him. Then asked: ‘Do you know who Emilio Di Giovine is?’

‘Oh yes, I’ve heard of him.’

‘What have you heard?’

‘He’s a right one, him.’

‘Do you know if he’s in the area?’

‘I think I saw him about twenty minutes ago.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

Dad could see police trooping into Nan’s. He pointed across the street: ‘He went that way, I think.’

‘Right, thank you.’

Dad had the girlfriend of the moment stashed around a corner. He grabbed her, jumped on a tram and was off. That was his style of stunt. He wouldn’t panic and start running. He would – and could – think on his feet. He would face them up, take the mickey. He loved it.

The newspapers compared him to gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, a fictional and glamorous French criminal who’d been turned into a cartoon character when I was growing up. The people he gets the better of, with lots of style and colourful flair, are always nastier than Lupin. He’s a Robin Hood-style criminal, like Raffles or ‘The Saint’. Lupin! It all added to the cult revolving around Dad.

Still the press kept searching for new descriptions of him. After his next exploit he was compared in the same sentence to Lupin and Rocambole, another popular fictional antihero. Rocambolesque is the tag given to any kind of fantastic adventure. And Dad had many Rocambolesque moments.

The flamboyant publicity just brought more pressure on the cops to get Dad off the streets. Finally, in the summer of 1974, when he was twenty-five years old, they got him into Central Court on robbery charges. He was sentenced to a year in San Vittore prison, Milan’s number one jail, which is renowned for its security.