The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia

Alessandra would carry the feel of the Straits with her all her life. It was there in the way a winter’s chill would remind her of the morning breeze off the city docks or how the first days of summer would almost instantly change her forearms from alabaster to honey. It was there, too, in her distaste for the way people often seemed to prefer fiction over truth. While most children were delighted to find themselves growing up in a world of gods and castles in the sky, Alessandra was unmoved. Stories of monsters and fairies were entertaining, but they also obscured the deadly reality of the Straits. Every summer, she watched as Messina’s coastguards heaved a steady procession of dripping, blanketed stretchers onto the docks. How could these regrettable, preventable deaths be part of some mystical grand plan? There was little logic, either, in the other spurious legends that Sicilians would spin to glorify their island. In 1975, when Alessandra was five, a twenty-six-year-old from Messina called Giovanni Fiannacca swam to Calabria in 30 minutes and 50 seconds, a record that was to stand for forty years. Alessandra’s neighbours proclaimed Fiannacca the greatest distance swimmer in Sicily, perhaps even of all time. The reality, as most Siciliens knew, was that he had timed his crossing to coincide with a particularly strong east–west tide which would have carried a rubber duck to Calabria.

In another life, in another land, Alessandra might have forgiven these illusions and the credulous adults who repeated them. But her home was the birthplace of Cosa Nostra. By the 1970s, the Sicilian mafia was operating all but unopposed on the island. It was a state-within-a-state, extracting taxes via extortion, dividing up public contracts among mafia companies, settling disputes, delivering punishments – and lying, cheating and murdering to preserve its position. Yet no one said a thing. To inquisitive outsiders, Sicilians would claim the mafia was a fable, a cliché or even a groundless slur. Among themselves, proponents would characterise it in more mythic terms, as an ancient Sicilian brotherhood built on courage, honour and sacrifice. Never mind that it was the mafia itself which cooked up these romantic legends and embellished them with more recent folklore, such as their story about how mafiosi rode Allied tanks to liberate Sicily in the Second World War. Never mind that in their hearts most Sicilians knew they were being lied to. Just as the islanders found it hard to accept the indifference shown to their city by Nature and Man, so most preferred not to confront the truth that their fellow Sicilians had grown rich by robbing and killing them.

Alessandra lamented her neighbours’ complicity in these deceptions, even as she understood it. Decades later, reading sensational newspaper accounts of mafia adventures, she would react the same way she had as a child. The facts about the tyranny and the killing were plain. Why dress them up as something else? What Alessandra truly detested, however, was the way outsiders assisted the mafia’s myth-making. A year after she was born, Mario Puzo, an American pulp magazine writer, sold the screenplay adapted from his book, The Godfather, to Paramount for $100,000. Two years later, Francis Ford Coppola was directing Al Pacino in the movie on location in Savoca, twenty-five miles south of Messina.

The film, one of the most successful of all time, contained elements of truth. The Corleone family was a crime syndicate from south of Palermo. There also had been a disagreement inside the mafia in the 1950s over whether to enter narcotics trafficking, a dispute which did lead to an internal war. What Alessandra found unforgivable was the way Hollywood used southern Italians’ daily tragedy as a device to make its dramas more compelling. She shared none of Coppola’s empathy for the men who murdered their wives and girlfriends. She could make no sense of the women either, passive, giddy creatures who allowed their men to lead them from love to betrayal to an early death. Nor did she recognise any of the film’s sombre majesty or mournful grandiloquence in the blood that stained the gutters as she walked to school. When Alessandra was ten, two ambitious bosses, Salvatore Riina (‘the butcher of Corleone’) and Bernardo Provenzano (‘the tractor’, so-called because, in the words of one informer, ‘he mows people down’), began what became an all-out mafia war by assassinating several Sicilian rivals.2 The decade and a half that followed, spanning most of Alessandra’s adolescence, became known as la mattanza, ‘the slaughter’. More than 1,700 Sicilians died. Mafiosi were shot in their cars, in restaurants, as they walked down the street. In a single day in Palermo in November 1982, twelve mafiosi were killed in twelve separate assassinations. Yet through it all, foreign tourists would arrive in Messina asking for directions to The Godfather’s village. No, thought Alessandra. This was a hideous, wilful delusion. It was a lie. It had to be corrected.

When Alessandra was eight, her teacher asked her class to write an essay about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Let your minds wander, said the teacher. You can be anything at all, anywhere in the world. Excited by the chance to escape Messina’s violence and fear, most of Alessandra’s classmates wrote whimsies about becoming princesses or moving to America or flying a rocket to the moon. Alessandra said she would be staying put. I want to be an anti-mafia prosecutor, she wrote. I want to put gangsters behind bars.

It was to pursue her ambition that in 1987, at the age of nineteen, Alessandra took the train north to become a law student. Pulling into Rome’s central station the next day, she found herself in a different nation. But Alessandra quickly assimilated. She graduated from Milan University in 1990, qualified as a magistrate in 1997 and quickly became a specialist in organised crime. Over the next twelve years, she investigated the ’Ndrangheta’s expansion across northern Italy, assisted the prosecution of billion-euro tax evasion in the art world, sat as a judge in a high-profile terrorist recruitment case and, on a quiet weekend, married a rising anti-mafia carabinieri officer.3

No one was surprised that Alessandra married into the job. Few outsiders would tolerate the life of a mafia prosecutor’s spouse. The wide autonomy Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutors enjoyed in their investigations was about the only freedom they possessed. The constant threat to her life required Alessandra to exist in isolation behind a wall of steel – literally, in the case of her office door and her armour-plated car – and for her to be escorted by four bodyguards twenty-four hours a day. Spontaneity was out of the question; all her movements were planned a day in advance. A normal life – meeting friends and family, eating out, shopping – was next to impossible. ‘We go nowhere with crowds because of the risk to others,’ said Alessandra. For the same reason, she and her husband – whose identity she kept secret – had long ago decided against children. ‘I would have to fear for them,’ she said. ‘As we are, I have no fear for me or my husband.’

Alessandra didn’t relish the sacrifices the job demanded. But she had come to accept them as useful to developing the character she needed to face the mafia. Her response to the mafia’s romanticism and glamour remained what it had been in Messina: an insistence on the facts. To some, Alessandra knew, she could seem cold and aloof, living a grey half-life ruled by procedure, discipline and evidence. She told herself she needed this distance – from mafiosi, from their victims, even from life – to preserve her perspective. Passion and blood and family and tragedy – that was the mafia, and the mafia was enemy. She had to be the opposite: intellectual, forensic and dispassionate.

By forty-one, what once had been girlish obstinacy had matured into poise, stoicism and self-possession. In her office in the Palace of Justice, Alessandra kept her desk clear and her office spartan. Besides a photograph of the legendary Sicilian prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, she hung only a graphite drawing of Lady Justice and a pastel of the Straits of Messina. Among her staff, the young female prosecutor’s icy focus was a favourite topic of discussion. She wasn’t scared or emotional, as some of the men had predicted. Rather, she was unwavering, scrupulous and unnervingly calm – legale, they said – her rebukes all the more crushing for their dispassion, her smiles all the more disarming for their unexpectedness.

Inside this narrow, monotone life, Alessandra permitted herself a few indulgences. Every August she and her husband took off on a foreign holiday without their bodyguards, telling no one where they were going – ‘the only time I can be free,’ she said. On a shelf in her office, she kept a collection of snow globes sent to her by friends from their travels in Europe. Alessandra also liked to dress well. To court, she wore slim dark suits over a plain white blouse. To the office, she wore woollen winter shawls with leather boots, or stretch jeans with a biker’s jacket, or heels with a sleeveless summer dress, her toes and fingernails painted chocolate in winter and tangerine in summer. This was not about looking good to the world. Anti-mafia prosecutors were rarely seen by anyone. Rather, this was about freedom. To do her job and not be defined by it, to accept its restrictions and not be beaten by them, to face the threats of ten thousand mafiosi and respond with a woman’s grace and elegance – that was true style and, in a world of male brutality, a display of adamant and unyielding femininity.

Throughout her time in the north, Alessandra had kept a close watch on the southern battle against the mafia. It had been a long and bloody fight. After the state intervened to try to stem la mattanza in the 1980s, judges, policemen, carabinieri, politicians and prosecutors became targets too. On 23 May 1992, the mafia detonated half a ton of explosives under an elevated highway outside the city on which Giovanni Falcone, Italy’s most celebrated anti-mafia prosecutor, was driving with his wife and three police bodyguards. The explosion was so big it registered on Sicily’s earthquake monitors. Hearing the news of Falcone’s assassination, his co-prosecutor Paolo Borsellino, who had grown up in the same Palermo neighbourhood and had always been somewhat in Falcone’s shadow, remarked, ‘Giovanni beat me again.’ Two months later, Borsellino and five policemen were killed by a car bomb outside the home of Borsellino’s mother in Palermo. Six houses were levelled and fifty-one cars, vans and trucks set on fire.

Falcone’s death was to Italians what President John F. Kennedy’s was to Americans: everyone can remember where they were when they heard the news. To the tight group of Sicilians like Alessandra who had taken up the fight against Cosa Nostra, the loss of their two champions was deeply personal. At the time, Alessandra was a twenty-four-year-old law graduate in Rome who had just begun training to be a magistrate. Falcone’s and Borsellino’s sacrifice only made the two prosecutors seem more heroic. ‘They were the inspiration for a generation,’ she said. ‘Their deaths made us stronger.’ To this day, the two prosecutors remain the titans against whom all Italian prosecutors measure themselves. A picture of either Falcone or Borsellino, and generally both, hangs on the wall of every anti-mafia prosecutor’s office in Italy, often accompanied by a famous Falcone one-liner. ‘The mafia is a human phenomenon and, like all human phenomena, it had a beginning, an evolution and will also have an end,’ was one favourite. ‘He who doesn’t fear death dies only once,’ was another.

In time, even Cosa Nostra would acknowledge that the murders had been a miscalculation. They gave the prosecutors’ political masters no choice but to abandon attempts to negotiate a peace with the mafia and try to crush it instead. Tens of thousands of soldiers were dispatched to Sicily. The two prosecutors’ deaths also prompted renewed appreciation of their achievements. The chief accomplishment of Falcone, Borsellino and their two fellow prosecutors, Giuseppe di Lello and Leonardo Guarnotta, was finally to disprove the grand Sicilian lie. After decades of denial, Cosa Nostra was exposed not as a myth or a movie but a global criminal organisation, headquartered in Sicily, with extensive links to business and politics in Italy and around the world. The climax of their investigations, the Maxi Trial, saw 475 mafiosi in court, accused of offences ranging from extortion to drug smuggling to 120 murders.

How had Falcone and Borsellino succeeded? Many of their accomplishments hinged on a new 1982 law, the crime of mafia association, which outlawed a mere relationship with the mafia, even without evidence of a criminal act. That effectively made it a crime just to be born into a mafia family and was aimed squarely at the omertà and close blood relations on which the mafia was built. The new legislation worked. First a handful, then scores, then hundreds of mafiosi turned pentiti (literally ‘penitents’). A host of otherwise innocent family members did the same. From their evidence, Italy’s prosecutors were able to construct a picture of Cosa Nostra’s internal structure for the first time.

The Sicilians’ other innovation was to abandon the mercurial autonomy traditionally enjoyed by individual prosecutors. Independence from political masters, who were often the target of anti-mafia investigations, remained essential. But prosecutors’ habitual individualism had often found expression in less helpful fashion, such as fighting each other for position. By contrast, Palermo’s anti-mafia prosecutors worked as an indivisible team, the ‘anti-mafia pool’, as they called themselves, which shared information, diffused responsibility and co-signed all warrants. In that way, they ensured their work was coordinated and efficient, and never depended on the continuing good health of any one of them.

So it was that in the months after the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, other prosecutors – first Gian Carlo Caselli; then the Sicilians Piero Grasso, Giuseppe Pignatone and his deputy Michele Prestipino – picked up where their storied predecessors left off. And in a further decade and a half, the Palermo prosecutors and Palermo’s elite flying squad largely finished what their predecessors had started. By the mid-2000s, nearly all Cosa Nostra’s bosses were in jail, its links to senior politicians were exposed and its rackets, while they still existed, were a shadow of what they had once been. Capping the prosecutors’ success, in April 2006 at a small, sparsely furnished cottage outside Corleone, Pignatone and Prestipino were present for the arrest of Cosa Nostra’s remaining capo tutti, seventy-three-year-old Bernardo Provenzano, who had been on the run for forty-three years.

On visits back to Sicily, Alessandra saw the transformation in her homeland. In the streets of Palermo and Messina, a new popular movement called Addiopizzo (‘Goodbye Pizzo’, mafia slang for extortion) united shopkeepers, farmers and restaurateurs in a refusal to pay protection. Thousands of anti-mafia protesters marched arm-in-arm through the streets. Cosa Nostra, in its weakened state, was unable to respond. When mafiosi firebombed an anti-mafia trattoria in Palermo, the city’s residents found the owners new premises on a busy junction in the centre of town where they opened up again and quickly became one of the city’s most celebrated destinations. In time, Palermo and Messina could boast city-centre shops run by an activist group called Libera (‘Free’), which sold olive oil, sauces, wine and pasta made exclusively by farmers who refused to pay protection to Cosa Nostra.

But as the war on Cosa Nostra wound down, a fresh threat took its place. During la mattanza, across the water in Calabria the ’Ndrangheta had initially toyed with joining Cosa Nostra’s war on the state, and even killed a couple of policemen for itself. But the Calabrians soon realised that with the Sicilians and the government so distracted, the strategic play was not to side with Cosa Nostra but to take its narco-business. The ’Ndrangheta paid the Sicilians’ debts to the Colombian cocaine cartels, effectively buying them out as the Latin Americans’ smuggling partners.

Carlo Cosco arrived in the north in 1987, the same year as Alessandra. Carlo’s intention was not to fit into northern Italy, however, but to conquer it – and his timing was perfect. The ’Ndrangheta was pushing its drug empire north across Europe. Milan, Cosco’s new patch, was a key beachhead in that expansion. And there had never been a business like cocaine smuggling in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s. After saturating the US market, South American producers were looking to other territories for growth. Europe, with twice the population of North America and a similar standard of living but, in the 1980s, a quarter of its cocaine consumption, was the obvious opportunity. With the ’Ndrangheta’s help, the cartels flooded the continent with cocaine. By 2010, the European cocaine market, at 124 tons a year, was close to matching the American one. In Spain and Britain, the drug became as middle class as Volvos and weekend farmers’ markets.

In the estimate of Italy’s prosecutors, the ’Ndrangheta accounted for three-quarters of that. So rich, and so fast, did the ’Ndrangheta grow, it was hard to keep track. On wiretaps, carabinieri overheard ’Ndranghetisti talking about buried sacks of cash rotting in the hills, and writing off the loss of a few million here or there as inconsequential. At Gioia Tauro port on Calabria’s west coast, officers were seizing hundreds of kilos of cocaine at a time from shipping containers but reckoned that they found less than 10 per cent of what was passing through. A glimpse of quite how big the ’Ndrangheta had grown came in the early hours of 15 August 2007 – the Ascension Day national holiday in Italy – when two ’Ndrangheta gunmen shot and killed four men and two boys aged eighteen and sixteen connected to a rival clan outside a pizzeria in Duisberg, in Germany’s industrial heartland. Northern Europe was apparently now ’Ndrangheta territory.

Italy, and Europe, had a new mafia war to fight. And though its empire was now global, the ’Ndrangheta remained as attached to Calabria as Cosa Nostra had been to Sicily. In April 2008, two of the prosecutors who had humbled the Sicilian mafia, Giuseppe Pignatone, now sixty, and Michele Prestipino, fifty, had their requests for transfer to Calabria accepted. Their friend and ally in the Palermo flying squad, Renato Cortese, went with them. As the three cast around for a team who might do to the ’Ndrangheta what had been done to Cosa Nostra, they realised they faced a problem. Many Italian prosecutors baulked at the idea of an assignment to what was universally regarded as both a backwater and enemy territory. In 2008, only twelve of the eighteen prosecutor positions in Calabria were filled and the province had just five anti-mafia specialists. In Milan, however, Alessandra applied. She was ready to return to the south, she told her bosses. She understood the work would be ‘riskier’ and more ‘difficult and complicated’. That just made it all the more urgent.4

In April 2009, Alessandra and her husband packed up their apartment in Milan and flew south, following the sun down the west coast of Italy. As the plane started its descent, Alessandra saw the Aeolian Islands to the west, then Sicily and the snows of Etna to the south, then the streets of Messina below. As she passed over the broad blue of the Straits, she regarded the white foam trails of the rusty freighters as they rounded the tip of the Italian peninsula and turned north to Naples, Genoa, Marseilles and Barcelona. Not for the first time, it occurred to Alessandra that the lazy arc of this shore would, from a suitable distance, form the shape of a very large toe.

Alessandra’s new security detail met her at Reggio airport. They took the expressway into town as a two-car convoy. The road climbed high above the city, skirting the dusty terraces that led up into the Calabrian hinterland. Below were the cobbled streets and crumbling apartment blocks whose names were familiar to Alessandra from dozens of investigations into shootings and fire-bombings. Somewhere down there, too, were the bunkers, entire underground homes where ’Ndrangheta bosses would hide for years, surfacing through hidden doors and tunnels to order new killings and plan new business.

As they reached the northern end of Reggio, the two cars took an off-ramp and plunged down into the city, dropping through twisting hairpins, bumping over ruts and potholes, plunging ever lower through tumbling, narrow streets before bottoming out just behind the seafront. Once on the flat, the drivers accelerated and flashed through the streets, past abandoned hotels, boarded-up cinemas and empty villas before turning back up towards the hills and sweeping through the gates of a carabinieri barracks. In its 3,500 years of existence, Reggio had been a Mediterranean power, the birthplace of the kingdom of Italia, a Norman fortress and a Riviera resort. Now it was bandit country. Entire neighbourhoods were off-limits to carabinieri or prosecutors. For Alessandra, home for the next five years would be a bare-walled officer’s apartment jammed into the barracks roof with a view of the Straits of Messina.

IV

Denise slept for an hour and a half the night Lea disappeared.1 The next morning, 25 November 2009, she ate breakfast with her Aunt Renata, walked with her to the kindergarten where she worked, then spent the morning silently smoking cigarettes with Andrea and Domenico in a nearby piazza. In the afternoon, Carlo phoned and told her to meet him at Bar Barbara. On the way there, Denise ran into a cousin from Lea’s side of the family, Francesco Ceraudo, who lived in Genoa. She told Francesco that Lea was missing and asked him if he had seen her. Francesco blanched. ‘Do you know anything?’ Denise asked. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said, and walked on.

The entire Cosco clan were in Bar Barbara: Carlo, his brothers Vito and Giuseppe, and Aunt Renata. Giuseppe and Renata were playing video poker in the corner. Giuseppe won 50 euros and, clumsily, gave the winnings to Denise. After a while, the carabinieri called Denise on her mobile and said they needed to speak to her. During the call, a squad car pulled up outside. Vito asked what was happening. ‘Lea’s missing,’ Carlo told him.

The Coscos weren’t about to let one of their own go to the carabinieri alone. Vito dropped Carlo and Denise at the station around 8.30 p.m., and father and daughter entered together. Inside, however, carabiniere Marshal Christian Persurich told Carlo he had to talk to Denise unaided. Persurich showed Denise to an interview room. He informed her that in Calabria her Aunt Marisa had reported Lea missing. Marisa had also told the carabinieri that Lea had testified against the ’Ndrangheta and that she and Denise had spent time in witness protection. Lea had now been missing for more than twenty-four hours. Persurich needed the whole story. Denise should take her time and leave nothing out. The interview would be strictly confidential.

Denise nodded. ‘If my mother’s missing,’ she began, ‘then it’s probably because she’s been killed by my father.’

Marshal Persurich interviewed Denise for five hours, finishing just before 2 a.m. Denise emerged to find Carlo pacing the waiting room, demanding that the officers let him read her statement. Seeing his daughter, Carlo confronted her. ‘What did you tell these people?!’

‘You asked us to Milan,’ Denise replied blankly. ‘We spent a few days together. You were meant to pick her up. But you couldn’t find her. Then we looked for her all over.’

Carlo looked unconvinced. Five hours for that?

On the way back to her cousin’s, Carlo and Denise stopped at a restaurant, the Green Dragon, named after the symbol of Milan. Inside was Carmine Venturino, the cousin who had given Lea some hash to smoke. Carmine had a babyish face and looked like a born truant, and Denise had liked him from the moment she met him at a wedding in Calabria the previous summer. But that night they had nothing to say to each other. After Carmine and Carlo had a brief, hushed discussion, Carlo walked his daughter back to Viale Montello. There, Denise slept in Andrea’s room for a second night.