Mafia Princess (11 page)

It was like him taking Mum on the cigarette runs while she was pregnant, and while I was a baby. Women in the ’Ndrangheta are part of the game, always active, especially during vendettas and wars. When the men are under threat the women have to organise everything. Women are never war targets. During war times the men would often crossdress to escape attack. Some of them tried to get away with long wigs but without shaving off their moustaches.

Dad used women’s freedom to move around undetected for his drug trafficking and the payoffs and cash collections. People, including the police, didn’t usually think of women, never mind young girls, as gangsters. They didn’t enforce the same restrictions on us.

Tight dresses, short skirts and spilling cleavage were useful distractions when encountering border guards. Manipulation became a way of life; you go on a bit of a power trip. If I went by plane, I’d strap the money around me. I’d wear granny knickers, big Bridget Jones numbers, and lots of loose layers of clothes. The cash would be in plastic sleeves all over my body, from top to bottom. I was walking money, a cash Christmas tree.

For the amounts I used to take to Spain to pay for the hashish, security companies would use armoured vehicles. It was loads of
lire,
about £80,000 or £90,000 worth at a time if it was me on my own. If it were a couple of us, we would have that much each. If there was a particularly large amount of money, I went by car and it would all be put in the panelling. Bruno would do the driving because although I knew how to drive I hadn’t got my licence. We didn’t want something like that to cause a problem.

We could put up to £500,000 in a car and we’d motor gently across Italy, France, Spain – two borders, three countries.

Once we stopped in a hotel in France overnight, and I got the money out of the car and into my big cash bag. It was
lire,
packets of it worth up to about £250,000. The next morning
before I took a shower I took it out of the bag and put it under the sheets for safety. I didn’t want anyone walking in and nicking it.

I repacked and we were off, but in Seville I found it was about £13,000 short. I panicked: ‘Oh my God!’

When I told Dad he was a bit suspicious. ‘Are you sure, daughter of mine, that you haven’t…’cos I’d rather you told me.’

It didn’t matter who you were when it came to business: ‘Dad! I swear…’

I wondered if Bruno had taken it but he hadn’t. We’d left it under the sheet. I must have missed it. I trusted Bruno. He wouldn’t have taken it. He never had. He never did. There was no point. Why lose yourself over something like that, when you’re making enough money anyway?

When I was back in Milan I phoned Mum and told her that I’d been moving some of Dad’s money for him for tax reasons and a chunk had got lost. She was working as a chambermaid at the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool and with her innate Lancashire trust in the system she said, ‘Hopefully the maid will find it. You might be lucky.’

More likely the maid would be. Of course it never did turn up.

I lost £13,000 but out of the millions I transported, that was the one thing that ever went wrong.

Often we drove straight down to Seville, a ten-, twelve-hour car journey on the dual carriageways. We’d go around the Granada region, through the mountains, and see trucks
full of merchandise with the locals on their bikes hanging on the backs trying to get in to steal stuff. It was pitch black. We had far more money in our car than any of them could get in those trucks.

Bruno always said, ‘They’d better not stop us.’

But we didn’t have any weapons to defend ourselves. It was a risky business.

Bruno got badly hooked up on one Seville trip. We stopped in northern Spain, and he couldn’t sleep because he’d taken so many drugs. He was curled up in a corner looking at me and telling me I was a witch. I thought: ‘Oh my God, we’ve got all this money, about half a million pounds, and he thinks I’m a witch.’

Finally I lost it: ‘What are you doing?’ I shouted and shouted at him but he was out of it.

I’ve a rational brain. What if he’d killed me? They’d have found me dead in the room with all that money and then Dad would have killed Bruno. He never considered the possible consequences of being quite so doped up. But he slept it off.

Dad never seemed to sleep. He based himself in Spain and was always busy. The phone was either on his ear or in his hand every hour of the day. He’d doze off with it next to him. I didn’t see much of him, maybe a day here or there, as he was moving around the whole time.

He was now the CEO of a growing empire with nearly 200 people working directly for him. He had contacts in Holland, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, throughout the UK
and in Colombia and America. The best routes were from Morocco to the UK and Colombia to Milan.

He was in constant touch with Nan in Milan. She was in charge of sales and distribution and was the tough negotiator. Even family members had to pay up front for their supplies. There was constant family rivalry. Dad’s brother Antonio and his wife Livia De Martino were the most enterprising of my relatives, with a turnover of hundreds of millions of lire.

The family profits from narcotics trafficking – despite the deaths of Mariella, Alessandra and all the other people we knew, it still went on – were being invested in apartment blocks and shopping malls, being laundered every which way possible. Bank accounts were held worldwide.

I was at the centre of it now and events tumbled one after the other. It was like being on a rollercoaster – thrilling and scary all at the same time. But I learned not to break sweat, no matter what.

Even with the hard men of Seville, Dad followed the family policy. He cut out the middlemen and went straight to the source, dealing direct with the man known only as ‘The Sultan’, who controlled the growing fields of Morocco. He operated from the perfect climate of Cabo Negro on the Mediterranean coast in northern Morocco. And he was totally ruthless.

Dad went to Cabo Negro for a secret meeting and said: ‘Deal with me and you will make more money. No payoffs, no middlemen. Only more for you.’

In return, he demanded the best hashish resin, thousands of kilos of it, five or six times purer than the normal consignments. When it was agreed and the profits soared, he got another nickname – The Kingpin.

And as his princess, I spent much time on the Costa de la Luz, the Coast of Light, across the Straits of Gibraltar from northern Morocco, playing evasive tactics with the high-spec surveillance copters and boats of the Guardia Civil and UK and Spanish customs authorities.

Yet the biggest concern was our competitors, particularly the French. They’d burst in and violently interrupt drug exchanges, killing who they had to and stealing the cargoes. Which is why people around me were very careful. They took precautions. They carried AK-47S. Some of them had Uzis as well.

‘Those who’ll play with cats must expect to be scratched.’

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
,

DON QUIXOTE
, 1605

It was a deadly game that was played on the beaches and in the coves from Tarifa to Estepona, half an hour away from Puerto Banus. Along that south-east corner of Spain around the smuggling hat-trick of Morocco, Gibraltar and Algeciras, Dad’s crews would wait for the drug drops. There would be shooters on guard but payoffs all but guaranteed nothing but the most unexpected interruptions. Yet it was nervy for everyone involved along the Cádiz corridor.

Incredible amounts of hash, tons and tons, and money, millions and millions of
lire,
were involved. In the moonlight the crews collected the hash like packs of flotsam from the beach, and put it onto the transport for Milan.

It was hard work psychologically and physically, with the waiting and waiting and then the loading. Often the hash would be hidden among catches of fish and these Spanish and Italian lads had to go in and get it out. They stank so badly they had to get rid of all their clothes afterwards. The dope packages reeked of fish. I’d smell it for days, like a bubblegum pop song that wouldn’t go away.

Through a contact of his, Dad used holiday coaches. There would be real holidaymakers, Saga-type customers,
on the buses. Their suitcases were stacked high on the false compartments hiding the drugs. It had to be spread around different modes of transport, because one coach could never carry it all; each delivery would be at least four tons, 4,000 kilos of hash. Some consignments would go by truck, smaller loads by vans and cars. The coaches proved the safest.

Dad was responsible for it all. If there were any mishaps and drugs were lost, he had to fork out. He was earning so much that a kilo here or a kilo there didn’t bother him. The turnover was around one hundred billion
lire
a year. Every week Dad dispatched tons of Moroccan hash as well as cocaine to our beach collection points. There was a huge storage centre in Turin where the consignments would get divided. Whoever bought, even just a kilo, bought it with money up front. Family had first dibs.

Everybody talked in drug code. They had conversations that would mean little to snoopers, even experts from
Sisde,
the colourful Italian secret security service. Nan used to use the word ‘clothes’ for hash and cocaine: ‘Go and get me those clothes from there. Just get me about three.’ That would mean thirty kilos. ‘Pasta’ meant heroin. And Nan always spoke with her difficult dialect, which was a bonus.

Within two weeks the contraband would do a quick-change act and turn into cash. The operation generated so much money we had to have counting machines like Nan’s, lots of them. It was the perfect business plan, a super-efficient corporate organisation. Dad was a multimillionaire and
in the early 1990s he was at the top of the chain. But everyone had to play their part.

Hash was now the family speciality rather than heroin, but there were tragic echoes of that trafficking. Auntie Mima – daft, crazy Auntie Mima who’d had her way with Luis Miguel – died. She’d been abusing heroin so much her whole body gave in. She was only thirty years old.

Nine days later Uncle Alessandro, Dad’s youngest brother, died from a collapsed lung brought on by heroin. He was twenty-nine. In the space of days my nan had lost two children through heroin. She dressed in mourning and carried on grieving for many, many months.

But so did the business. Including heroin. Dad had a Lebanese associate, who had connections in heroin trafficking in Syria. This associate was a major player, and one of his markets was Australia. He was astute and able to work with different Mafia clans, including the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta. He would get heroin shipments of up to twenty-five tons to Australia through Gioia Tauro.

Collaborations like this were only part of the ’Ndrangheta network, which stretched way beyond Calabria with
’ndrina
active in northern Italy and across the world in the UK, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Eastern Europe, America, Canada, Japan and Australia.
Mafiosa
from all over appear every year in San Luca for the annual ’Ndrangheta summit at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi. Nan gave a lot of money to the Sanctuary and each August we’d join the devotions and processions.

San Luca might be the spiritual home of the ’Ndrangheta but there was always secular business discussed in the shadows. It’s the village leaders who recognise and approve foreign crime clans as officially belonging to the ’Ndrangheta. They’re seriously powerful.

When Nan took the family to Milan it was these village aristocrats of Italy’s ever-growing richest and deadliest organisation who gave their blessing and ongoing help. Family allegiance was everything. Which was why Dad, although furtively managing the hash trade, also got a heroin deal together with his Lebanese associate. They had history. Dad had to get the drugs to the Lebanese man, a huge guy who wore a kaftan and was always grinning. He looked like a genie in a cartoon movie.

When Dad told me the heroin was going to Rome and Bruno was going to drive it, I kicked off and said I didn’t want him to do it. I worried that he would get caught. Dad said it had to be done. He’d made the deal. I was in love and devoted to Bruno so I said I would go with him. With two of us, a couple, it wouldn’t look so suspicious. Dad agreed to that. Bruno said nothing.

We were in a smart, rented Audi, a family car, and we had my little black Yorkie, Jessie, and three kilos of heroin. The smack was purer than Jessie, whose mum was a white poodle.

After we had driven about half a mile towards the
autostrada
out of Milan, Bruno turned to me and said: ‘We’re not going to Rome. We’re going to Madrid.’

I caught my breath: ‘My God, we’re going through customs.’

Dad had duped me into this trip by telling me it was to Rome rather than Madrid, but I never saw not going as an option. He knew a young couple had a better chance of getting through, and by then I had another advantage – a UK passport. I’d spent hours at the British Consulate in Milan to get it. It was a complete rigmarole, even though Mum was from Blackpool. I knew it would make life easier at borders and airports than my Italian passport.

It was late at night when Bruno and I got to the Italian border and the customs officer waved us over. He had a big, sniffing-in-the-air Alsatian with him. The doorway of the customs building was about a dozen yards from us when he shouted, ‘Documents!’

I jumped out and handed them to him. For whatever reason, he didn’t come right over to the car with the dog. My Jessie was squealing and jumping about. I could see him looking at the car, looking at us, and I asked: ‘Do you know where we can change some money?’

‘You can park over there, then come and change it here.’

Bruno parked and said: ‘He’s got a dog.’

I barked like one at him: ‘I
know
!’

That dog was really agitated because it could whiff the heroin but the customs guard thought it was my Jessie he was interested in: ‘He wants to play but he’s working.’

The customs guy was easygoing, friendly, and told me again where to change the money. Bruno went in, sorted the
money and we were off. It was a blur by then, just a relief to get away without the car being searched. Someone was definitely looking out for us that night.

Going to Rome from Milan is a three- to four-hour journey. You’re in your own country and it’s less likely you’ll be bothered. Going across borders with dogs is altogether different. But things went smoothly at the French-Spanish border and we made it.

It was boiling hot when we got to the Lebanese man’s office in Madrid, which was full of antique jewellery stashed in glass cabinets. He had lots of Egyptian bracelets and necklaces and said, ‘Pick something you like.’

I chose a beautiful bracelet, which I’ve kept safe ever since. Maybe it’s got a curse on it like something from
The Mummy’s Tomb.
I’ve never been lucky with jewellery.

The cash turnover was running into millions and millions. We opened numbered current accounts in Switzerland, in Zurich and Geneva. To avoid footsteps in the money trail, couriers – often me – physically deposited the notes in safe-deposit boxes. I’d deposit around a million pounds sterling at a drop. The money would then be laundered through investments in Italian local government and real-estate companies – Dad had villas in Spain and Portugal – or used upfront to buy drugs and weapons.

Dad was on an Iberia flight from Madrid on his way to visit one of the Geneva accounts (and a lovely bank employee) when he met another gorgeous girl. She was three years older than me, tall and dark. She looked stunningly
familiar, because she was a model and her face was all over glossy magazines at the time. Dad worked his magic. So successfully that she took him to meet her parents, a Dutch couple. Her father, Theodor Cranendonk, was a wheeler-dealer with businesses in Holland and Switzerland. He was known as a Mr Fixit. He and Dad had much to talk about. Dad went into bullshit overdrive and told some extravagant tales and he so intrigued Cranendonk that he was invited to their holiday home.

He said to me, ‘Right, we’re going to Klosters. You’ve got to pretend you’ve been to this smart school in England.’

He’d spun them a story about being a big businessman in Italy and that his daughter was a graduate of the UK public school system and could speak English really well.

I softened the situation. I was good cover. We stayed with them in their luxury apartment in Switzerland for a couple of nights and they were a lovely-looking family. The mother was particularly pleasant; the father reminded me of Robert Kilroy-Silk, the one-time MP and TV host. He was tall, in his early sixties and a very attractive man for his age. But not as nice as he looked.

He dealt in weapons, in armaments of all kinds, from pistols to tanks, rifles to rocket-armed helicopters. He was involved in scores of other international deals including the illegal dumping of radioactive waste. The Dutchman’s endeavours had paid off. The turnover of his company based in Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, was upwards of £3 billion a year.

The coincidence that this striking-looking model’s father was one of the most important, and dangerous, arms dealers in the world was quite extraordinary. What made it more astonishing was that our relatives in Calabria had just recently pleaded with Dad to help get them more weapons because of a war that had broken out down there. Fate had presented another connection.

Yugoslavia was in a mess, with the separatists and nationalists as well as a string of other factions plotting and counter-plotting. Theodor Cranendonk was arming all sides. It was straightforward for him to divert weapons to Dad for the Calabrian war.

Initially, it was easily transported stuff – explosives, bazookas, Kalashnikovs. But there were ongoing pre-orders for even heavier action hardware, including lethally equipped helicopters. Cranendonk’s going rate for an attack chopper was $1 million a pop.

One of the Dutchman’s connections was a UK arms company, which was transporting weapons on to Kenya. That’s what the false invoices said. They were enough to get the war weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and rifles and pistols of all types and brands, over borders and into Italy and nowhere else.

Hundred of millions of
lire
changed hands but there was also a ‘goodwill deal’ that Dad negotiated with the arms merchants. In return for free equipment he would grant them favours. Dad disproved to me in many ways the belief that you can’t get blood from a stone.

Arms couriers mostly used cars with secret compartments, but some would simply store the weapons in bags in the car or in the trunk. ‘Official’ shipments with clever paperwork would allow access to most of Europe. The UK–Holland route was one of the most effective, with weapons coming by sea.

Drugs were always good money. The profit margin on arms was boosted by weapons shipments being mixed in with stolen antiques, classic cars and even rare jukeboxes. One shipment came with stolen motorcycles, Harley-Davidsons from America.

I didn’t know much about the Calabrian war at first, until one day when Bruno and I were asked to drive a shipment down south to Uncle Domenico. It seems the fighting was, as ever, all about power. Bruno told me about it on our trip.

The De Stefano brothers, Paolo and Giorgio, had appeared in the 1970s, when they got started in a small way. No one had heard of them until they killed a man in Modena for a fraud involving four oxen. The De Stefanos quickly graduated. One of their most important henchmen was their underboss Pasquale Condello, one of the killers in 1974 of Antonio ‘Uncle Tony’ Macri. It was a controversial shooting. Macri not only organised the Mafia in Calabria but worked with legendary American Mafia figures, such as Frank Costello, to help recruit Calabrians into the American and Canadian Mafia. His death was trouble. More than 300 people died during a two-year battle, known as the first
‘Ndrangheta war, and the De Stefanos emerged as one of the strongest factions in Reggio Calabria.

Nine years later, in 1983, the second ’Ndrangheta war began when Pasquale Condello’s sister Giuseppina married Antonio Imerti, a local
’ndrina
leader. The Imerti–Condello union worried Godfather Paolo De Stefano, who thought his empire was under threat. He took preventive measures. He tried to have Antonio Imerti murdered.

The car bomb didn’t finish Imerti. The revenge hit was more successful, and Paolo’s life was over after he was criss-crossed with high-velocity bullets. Nan’s Serraino family lined up with the Imerti–Condello clans. All the
’ndrine,
all the crime families in Reggio Calabria, were on one side or the other. Every corner, every shadow, could hide a hit man. Every time a driver started a car it could trigger a bomb. No matter how many precautions were taken and how many bodyguards hired, it didn’t stop the killings.

My uncle Domenico linked up with Pasquale Condello, and the De Stefanos were backed by the powerful Tegano family. It was a long conflict of wills – and weapons. Our partner Condello was a ruthless adversary (four life sentences for murder, Mafia association, extortion, money laundering and drug trafficking) but was often on the run. The charges against him included the 1987 killing of Lodovico Ligato, a former head of the Italian state railways. So Uncle Domenico was often a hands-on commander. His opposite number was Domenico Libri. The families got into a round of tit-for-tat killings that took their toll on both sides from 1987 through to 1991.