Mafia Princess (10 page)

There was a back stair and she pointed at me and then at it: ‘Marisa! Get out! Run, run!’

There wasn’t time. The door was kicked in. I’d never seen so many cops in my life. There was a swarm of them.

Two fresh-faced officers marched over to me and put their hands on my shoulders: ‘Sit down.’

I started to ask something.

‘Quiet! Don’t move.’

‘But…I…what…?’

‘Quiet or we’ll arrest you.’

I shut up.

When I looked over they had Auntie Rita and Salvatore handcuffed and banged up against the wall. The cops were tearing through the apartment, emptying drawers, looking inside cupboards, pulling up the carpet. They took each room in turn, double-checking and then checking again. They found scores of bags of heroin in the kitchen, hidden in soap-powder boxes beside the washing-up liquid, squeezy sponges and thin bleach underneath the sink.

They escorted Auntie Rita, Salvatore and the kids out of the apartment. They just left me there. On the couch. I stared at the TV, which was still on, showing a bizarre soap opera called
Licia Dolce Licia.

I was mesmerised, but not by the TV antics of Manuel De Peppe. I couldn’t think. Moments before I’d been bouncing a baby on my knee. I was hurt and angry – at myself as much as anything or anyone. Because I didn’t understand. I’d thought the family was untouchable.

I went to Nan’s and questioned Uncle Guglielmo. He couldn’t understand my concern and was laughing: ‘Marisa,
quit worrying about it. None of this has anything to do with you. They didn’t take you away because they know you are Emilio’s daughter. They know you are not involved. It doesn’t matter. This is life for us.’

And for me if I stayed in Milan with Bruno. Mum knew that and when she heard a whisper about the drugs raid and the arrests from one of my cousins she came to get me. She had to take the train – I was the one running around in high-powered cars and living well – as she couldn’t afford the air fare. She demanded I come home with her there and then. I was screaming at her to let me stay. I didn’t want to be bossed around by her but she had the ace argument: until I was eighteen I had to do as
she
said. I had no choice but to go back to Blackpool.

Mum was so determined to get me out of there she’d brought enough money to fly us both back to Manchester. I met Bruno before I left. We had no time to say more than goodbye.

I went with Mum but it was a terrible time between us. She was trying to look after me, but I didn’t see it that way. She never sat me down and said: ‘You could be involved in murder and drugs and all that goes with it. You could get killed.’ She would just say: ‘Your dad’s a thug, he’s this, he’s that.’ And I didn’t want to hear any of it. I shut myself off from everything she was saying.

Auntie Rita and Salvatore were sentenced to six years each for drug trafficking. Nan’s lawyers put in the appeal. Early in December 1987 they got out of jail. Auntie Rita was
freed completely, while Salvatore was put on house arrest in Calabria. It was business as usual, life pretty much as normal for them. And several judicial contacts of Nan’s had an extremely good Christmas.

When I heard of their release, I realised that although the family was not always immune, Nan looked after us all with the power of her imperfect morality.

And herself. In March 1988, just after my eighteenth birthday, Nan was released on bail. She moved back into her new three-bedroom Via Christina Belgioso apartment, which allowed more space for her activities. It looked like a high-street-store showroom, because everything was spanking new. Of course, everything was stolen.

She had chandeliers, marble floors and carpets so thick it was like marching through the jungle from one room to another. There were gleaming, wall-to-wall reproduction antiques, highly polished by some of the drug-dependent houseboys she had running around. She had a Florentine desk in her bedroom with drawers where she kept the few bits she considered precious, keepsakes rather than valuables. On top of the desk was her favourite item: a shiny black electronic bank-note counter. It was protected by her one indulgence – scores of perfume bottles, all shapes and sizes, from the traditional houses like Chanel, Dior, Fendi and Givenchy, gifts she’d collected over the years.

She’d gone high tech with the money machine because even her lifetime experience of counting cash with her thumb and forefinger, faster than the speediest bank teller,
couldn’t keep up with her cash turnover. This device counted the money and sorted it into denominations, great piles of notes kept in similar cellophane packs to those used for the tons of heroin.

Nan had her system, her priorities. Drugs were weighed in the kitchen by the baskets of aubergines and courgettes, cash in the more fragrant environment of her boudoir. For her, nothing would get in the way of her return to pre-jail life. Even the police in her home.

Ezio Dorigatti, the copper given the job of ensuring that Nan was behaving and living within her bail conditions, failed to report anything untoward. He wasn’t a problem. Not for one minute. Why should he be? Nan looked after him. He was around the apartment most of the time and she fed him. In his early thirties, with a couple of kids, he complained about the money he was making and how difficult it was to make ends meet. She paid him handsomely. In return he ignored the drug dealing, and even concealed guns at his own home for the family and alerted her to any police action.

I was eighteen years and six weeks old when I telephoned Nan. I told her about Bruno. About Dad not speaking to me. About Mum going ballistic. How miserable I was.

Nan talked to Mum, who was finding it hard to accept that I was of age to go. But she’d known it was just a matter of time. It was her life repeating itself. In some ways it was a relief from the horrible tensions we’d had, which were so contrary to our true feelings for each other. It was a
mother–daughter stalemate. Mum is made the way she is and wasn’t going to change. I hated staying in England. She was always getting at me and we had no money. I’d had enough. I’d done a year of business studies but had no prospects. Everything I wanted in my life was in Italy.

When Nan said she would make a home for me in the apartment and look after me, Mum was in a corner. She didn’t like it but there was nothing she could do. Nan sent me £500 for the air fare and ‘a nice dress’. She made everything fine. She said to everybody: ‘They are in love. Leave them alone.’

I got on the first flight, on my way to begin my proper Mafia apprenticeship.

‘I’m a good girl, I am.’

AUDREY HEPBURN AS ELIZA DOOLITTLE
,

MY FAIR LADY
, 1964

Bruno’s grin when he met me outside baggage claim could have grated a carrot. I’d never seen anyone so glad to see me and I couldn’t keep my hands off him. We were such new lovers we couldn’t get enough of each other. He’d brought a bright red BMW to collect and impress me and with a big smile he drove it into the forecourt of a bed and breakfast place, where we spent the entire day in bed. I didn’t notice anything about our surroundings. I didn’t care about that. It had been a long time and we made love like there was no tomorrow.

That night he took me to Nan’s. The next day Angela said she’d seen the car outside the B&B. She was laughing, in hysterics. She told me it was a knocking shop, notorious as the place the airport hookers took their clients. I couldn’t believe it. I told Bruno it was a disgrace but he just grinned and shrugged. And what did it matter? There was a bigger problem facing us – Dad.

He was nearing the end of his time inside and was on day release at the bakery. He wanted to see us. Nan told me he still wasn’t happy about Bruno and me but smiled: ‘Don’t worry about it. I told him, “They’re in love. You can’t do
anything about it. They’re together. What are you going to do?” I’ve sorted it out but you still need to see him. If you don’t, there’s nothing more I can do to help you.’

She’d done enough. Dad couldn’t have been nicer to us. He hugged me. He embraced Bruno, but there was a warning in his eye as he told him, ‘Be good to her.’

Nan was the star of this show. She’d made everything wonderful for me. I had Dad on my side and Bruno beside me. It was what I’d been waiting for. In England it had been difficult; I was missing my Nan and my family. I missed the culture, the lifestyle. And now I had it.

Nan was always giving me money for nice clothes, and I stood out. I was English and the Italian guys were interested in that. I attracted a lot of attention everywhere I went. But Bruno was my man – during the day at least. I would go to his house and spend a few hours with him, then I would have tea with his parents Giordano and Dina, who loved me. I got on brilliantly with them and his younger brother Dario and his sister Silvia. After tea I would go back home to my nan’s.

At night Bruno would vanish to illegal gambling clubs and we girls would stay in and watch videos and get stoned. There was plenty of puff going around. We used to smoke the whole
panetto
[block of hashish], then we’d go in the kitchen and eat ice cream and, half an hour later, go and make pasta. There was me, Auntie Mima, Auntie Angela and her boyfriend Ricardo, who was allowed to sleep over but not in the same bed. We’d make a right mess in the kitchen and not clear up and Nan would go absolutely ape in the
morning. She had a woman who used to come in and clean. We were just being lazy.

But Nan made us work too. She taught me, just as she had my mum, how to make hot tripe – which I hated – homemade meatballs with fresh tomato sauce, stuffed artichokes, risotto and fresh bread and cakes. She bought crates and crates of cactus figs and sat for hours picking the needles from them, sucking and shaking her fingers every time one cut her. This was
La Signora.
A contradiction.

She would get in the face of people who upset her and ask: ‘What’s wrong with you? Do you want to get killed?’

And for hours on end she would dutifully prepare fruit on the chance that her sons might want some when they came to dinner. And no matter how many turned up – twenty, twenty-five or thirty – it was Angela or me who had to clear up. The washing-up we had to do! We used to go mad because my uncles brought their girlfriends, and we’d be cleaning up after all of them. It was like a restaurant.

Lunches I didn’t mind because Bruno was around. He’d become an operator for Nan, who used him the way she had Dad when he was younger. Bruno was put in charge of deals all over the city; he would ‘mind’ shipments and look after any dealer who didn’t deliver or pay up. Once he and I were a couple, Nan trusted him more and more.

I was car mad but had never learned to drive. Bruno taught me in a new Lancia Delta Dad bought me. Bruno and my uncles sped around the city in Maseratis, Mercedes and Porsche sports cars as if they were in glossy motoring
adverts. I just accepted that this was the life, which was going as fast as the cars. There was always something happening.

We used to go to clubs and be first in the queue. It was VIP treatment everywhere we went in Milan. At a mention of my surname, doors opened instantly. They’d know about me, and they’d know not to mess. Sometimes it was ridiculous, with Bruno or my uncles beating people up just because they dared to look at us across the roped arenas.

Even the police were wary. But they couldn’t ignore us. Nan’s early warning system was brilliant, and before raids anything incriminating would be circulated around the ‘safe’ neighbourhood apartments. Except for the money. Nan never let that go. The cash was hidden in the freezer inside plastic containers of frozen pasta sauces.

She was rarely caught off guard, but one morning I was still in my dressing gown, sitting in the kitchen sipping coffee, when she came bundling down the stairs from her bedroom.

‘Take this! Hide it!’ She handed me an envelope bulging with money.

‘Where?’

‘There.’

She was pointing between my legs.

I shoved it in my knickers and tied up my gown. I was stuffed with money.

She looked at me. ‘Keep your mouth shut. And put your foot on that tile.’

She was pointing at the kitchen floor by my chair. I moved my left foot over the loose tile just as the cops waltzed in the front door. I was alert and just had to do it. I prayed they wouldn’t force me to get up because the cash would’ve spilled out and the cops would have taken it; they wouldn’t have reported it. But they didn’t bother with me, a teenage girl.

And there was nothing to find elsewhere. They left after only fifteen minutes; it was as if they were going through the motions. After they’d gone, curiosity made me lift the tile and reach in. I pulled out a pistol. I’ve no idea what type it was but it was big, heavy and ominous.

It was the start of the most tumultuous times of my life. Shortly after the raid I found out about an arrangement to murder someone. Dad was finally out of prison and was back at the family table for the daily business meetings. I wasn’t part of it but I was around, in and out of the kitchen as they talked, and that’s how I heard.

The family had a friend, a guy who’d worked with the Camorra, the Mafia organisation which has infiltrated almost all of Naples and beyond, as powerful and effective as the Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta. An influential
Mafiosi
from the Camorra flew to Milan to see my dad and asked permission to murder this guy. He had to ask consent because it was my dad’s turf. Dad couldn’t have gone to Naples and just shot somebody. He’d have to ask and explain: ‘This person has done something wrong to me. This is what he’s done. He’s taken it to the extreme. I have to
show that he can’t get away with it. If not, everyone else will do the same.’

I knew the man they wanted to kill. When Mum and I moved out of the Mussolini flats in 1979 my family – not the council – put this family in our place. They’d come from Calabria. So it was a bit more personal. It wasn’t a guy I didn’t know. What made it worse was that I knew he had a wife and kids. He’d wronged the Naples
Mafiosi
and Dad couldn’t condone it. He couldn’t save him. To be honest, Dad wasn’t that bothered about it. If it had been a family member it wouldn’t have happened. If it were someone he cared a lot about, it wouldn’t have happened. But Dad and Nan gave the go-ahead. If they’d turned the request down it could have caused a war between them and us. That’s how it was.

I don’t know what was said, but I did know in advance it was going to happen. I was nineteen years old. I’ve had to carry that. I couldn’t go to the police, and I couldn’t stop my dad. What could I do?

A lot of the time I would bury my head anyway. I was quite happy living in my own little world. I was just a young girl. I didn’t see into the future. I didn’t see the seriousness. I know right from wrong, I can’t deny that. It was my dad. It was my family. That’s the difference. I can’t explain it.

I was being pulled in, groomed in their ways. Unless you’re put in a situation like that, you don’t know how you’d react. I was a young girl. What was I supposed to do?

There was a lot of agonising about death. And the heroin trade. Uncle Filippo’s girlfriend Alessandra and Auntie
Mariella had died, and Auntie Mima and Dad’s youngest brother Alessandro were heavy users. A heroin addict with AIDS, called Rosolino, lived in Uncle Antonio’s house and did housework for smack.

Nan would give them all heroin. She didn’t want them getting it from anywhere else, stuff that might not be right. As a mother, she was stuck between wondering, ‘Do I give it or do I let them go on the streets for it?’ She was whispered about as
Mamma eroina,
Mummy Heroin. She purposely looked older than her age and others called her
Nonna eroina,
Grandma Heroin. She was killing them herself and she was probably killing other kids. It’s a puzzle. She was so generous on one side yet this was her way of life, of living. She did not know what else to do.

When my dad got back from jail he said: ‘This isn’t life. We can’t carry on, we can’t carry on. People have died.’ He also argued the commercial point. ‘And there’s not as much money in heroin.’ He’d recognised a gap in the market and wanted to start dealing hashish. ‘There’s not much of it around – and nobody dies from it. This is the money now.’

There was soon a great deal of hash worldwide as Dad created a super-efficient smuggling empire. He was a very, very good businessman, the articulate one. He’d never had any schooling yet he’d made millions, and wanted more.

I knew what was going off. I can’t hide that. Dad was flying around here, there and everywhere. And so was I.

On Dad’s first hash operation in the summer of 1988 he sent me, Bruno, another girl Annie, and three strong-arm
lads to Marbella with an expensive, big 7 Series BMW. The car was to be exchanged for merchandise. He forked out for all of us to stay in a smart hotel near the beach. I can’t emphasise enough how to me it felt so normal; I didn’t even stop and think about it.

Annie was there because she had a false document to say she was aristocracy. On your documents in Italy they put what your employment status is, then you can also have
bene stanti –
wealthy. Annie’s ID had
bene stanti.
She was to take this ringer car over to Morocco when the time was right. But there were delays by the supplier.

One of my uncles had a bar in Marbella and we took over the town. I spent a full month there just waiting. I’d go to bed at 4 p.m., get up by midnight, have something to eat, go out until 8 a.m. clubbing and then go on the beach. That’s how I lived. We slept on the beach and then went back late afternoon and we did that for a whole month.

We got to know the locals. The sister of one of Bruno’s friends brought her lad along, who had recently arrived from Milan. I had very long hair and that day I’d had it all scraped back at the hairdressers’, where they’d twiddled it around into a bun. It looked really sophisticated and I was wearing smart clothes as well. This lad, who was about our age, said, ‘Who’s she? Has she just come out of college?’ He didn’t quite call me a ‘snotty cow’ but he tried to take the piss, almost but not quite to the point where I’d be offended. I sat there amused by what he was doing. Then the sister must have said something to him about why I was there and who
I was with. He hadn’t realised who I was. When he was told he absolutely shat himself: ‘Oh my God, they’re going to kill me.’ He couldn’t stop saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’

Finally, it was time for Annie to go across. She took the car as planned but they wouldn’t let her into Morocco. She didn’t look wealthy enough. She didn’t have a delicate look about her. She just got turned back. It was all an expensive mess.

Naturally, Dad wasn’t happy but he had already made a connection with two highly dangerous and well-connected dealers in Seville. They paid the way for the ringer cars, and the Morocco shipments began. He had teams working out of Marbella. Spain became home from home.

Dad never wanted anybody to know these guys in Seville. He was very protective over things like that. He watched out. They, the shadowy international competitors, wouldn’t dare, but you never know…Dad thought like the fictional ‘Lupin’ he was often nicknamed after by the Press, and was just as devious.

The Seville collaboration was golden, a bonanza, and the British market was one of the most profitable. Dad had a connection with a London gangland family we knew as ‘Santos’, who would fly over to Spain with payoff money, sometimes as much as £750,000 – and that was a down payment. There would be two further instalments of the same or more as required. And it was, as elsewhere, repeat business.

The Seville partners had to be paid too. I was recruited into the financial side of the operations. Bruno and I were to
take the money and hand it over to the actual guys, the Mr Bigs.

Dad didn’t tell me what to do. He just asked, ‘Marisa, will you go and take that money to Seville? Are you okay with that?’

And I said yes. I wasn’t nervous about the trip. I was too young to get scared at such things. Besides, I’m very adaptable; I’ve had to adapt wherever I’ve been. Some people find it hard but I had to deal with it. Once I’d made deliveries a couple of times, I was trusted enough but never completely. No one ever was. I had the ability to get from A to B, and I had my head screwed on enough to be responsible for the money. I always had an air of ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ and Dad saw that in me, that I wouldn’t raise suspicion. I was quite mature for my age. I always wore nice clothes. I didn’t look posh, but I looked like someone who was well-off, middle class and spoke well. Dad would always going on about me being
rispettabile
[respectable]. I knew where I was going, and I knew what I was doing. I take after him in that way, thinking on my feet, getting myself out of anything that might be a problem and cause trouble.