Mafia Princess (14 page)

As I dreamily reran events in my head, everyone in the family who’d ever looked the wrong way was getting arrested in the police’s Operation Belgio, named for my nan’s street, Via Christina Belgioso. The manhunter was Maurizio Romanelli, a sort of Eliot Ness-style ‘Untouchable’ prosecutor, who dealt exclusively with the Mafia. He’d worked hard: wiretaps, seized consignments and documents combined with testimonies from people who turned state’s evidence.

The star turn was Santa Margherita Di Giovine, my Auntie Rita, the woman who’d opened up her home to me and my romance with Bruno. She’d recently nicked 1,000 tabs of ecstasy from me to sell on to pay off her brother, my Uncle Antonio, who was cutting up rough with her over a drug debt. She’d lost him a lot of money and she was, quite rightly, scared of him. She was also on speed and schizophrenic. She was wheeling and dealing. He was ruthless.

Rita was fragile and not just from her amphetamine addiction. From childhood she’d been treated badly by my nan. She didn’t have her own character. She bowed down. She was very jealous. Mum never got on with her. Out of all Nan’s children, Rita was the one who always had to interfere, push herself to the forefront and get all the attention. She got all she could ever want after she was arrested in Verona for possession of the ecstasy tabs. She was caught, and couldn’t face my uncle, couldn’t face prison. Her son Massimo was an expert heroin merchant, and also a teenage addict. She would only have done a couple of years in prison, maybe more as a member of an organised crime family, but instead she started blabbing. She’d been inside before, and she couldn’t face it.

It was the jackpot for Prosecutor Romanelli because Auntie Rita had seen it all. She was a living diary of the years going right back to when Nan moved the family from Calabria. She may have been strung out on drugs but Auntie Rita’s memory of events, of dates and details, was sensational. She went back a long way: as a twelve-year-old she
was packing heroin for transport, and her later jobs included bribing cops for protection and information. She’d kept the heroin accounts for Dad, she’d slaved for her brothers and Nan – the grass did not grow any greener than Auntie Rita.

Others grassed as well. Fabio, the charming gentleman, was picked up and became another
pentiti,
a state witness. He was pressured and he collaborated and as a right-hand man he knew a lot. Several in-laws gave in to pressure and felt obliged to talk.

One of them was an auntie’s husband. He was a nasty piece of work anyway. She decided to go along with him, because they had three children together. I know that if she had had a choice she wouldn’t have gone along with him. Everybody was arrested and she had nothing left. She would have been left to bring up her kids on her own. I understood in a way why she did that. He was her husband and she loved him, although it wasn’t right what he did.

And Valeria’s former husband Mario the Sicilian took his revenge on her and Dad. As soon as he was picked up he turned informer, which was no surprise to me. I was always suspicious of him. But he also somersaulted the cops and escaped to Brazil before some arms-smuggling warrants caught up with him.

But the biggest and by far the most important talker was Auntie Rita. All over Italy, Spain, Holland, Portugal, the UK and America, leads and contacts she grassed about were being followed up. Arrests were constant. All in all more than 100
Mafiosi
officers and soldiers were picked up.

When I phoned Bruno’s sister Silvia in Milan, she was able to tell me that there were forty-one family names, but not exactly who was on the wanted list. I might be next. What would happen to Lara?

By the morning after I rescued Lara from Italy, I knew I wasn’t on the warrant for the mass arrests there, but what about in Spain or Portugal? I didn’t know. I couldn’t go to Dad, couldn’t go to Bruno. Or my nan. I didn’t move. I didn’t know what was going on.

I sat in the hotel in Nice for a day, thinking.

The web was so complex and tangled.

I slipped through it.

I called on the one person who always gave me unconditional help and love – my mum.

She said she would open the windows and freshen up the rooms at 7 Sheringham Way, Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire.

Tinemu d’occhiu u scurpiuni e u sirpenti, ma nunni vardamu du millipedi.

[We keep an eye on the scorpion and the serpent, but we do not watch the millipede.]

SICILIAN SAYING

Although she was just used as a drugs dogsbody – albeit a well-paid one, banking the equivalent of £40,000 twice a week – Auntie Rita’s confessions brought the roof in. She knew the secrets, the devils in the detail. She told how all the kids had learned the code of silence,
omertà,
at Nan’s knee. The lesson was not to tell the truth but to say nothing. Certain attitudes infiltrate throughout the Mafia lifestyle: honour must always be respected, family revenged.

I remember Rita talking about a Calabrian boy who died during one of our summer holidays in the South. She’d grown up with the boy and ‘cried for a week’ at the news of his death. But our male cousins did not. All they wanted to determine was who was responsible because they, in turn, were going to die. Three days later the killers ‘weren’t around any more’.

This story is like a perfect précis of a life that I was part of but I’d been able to rise above by timing and circumstances. Rita’s brothers were their own deity, gods, while she and her sisters were regarded as no more than sex machines who did the domestic chores. She pointed out that if my dad went to Nan and said ‘I need a million
lire
’ he would get it, but Nan
wouldn’t buy her a new pair of shoes no matter how much she begged. That was the mentality, she said, passed down from generation to generation.

As Auntie Rita talked into spinning tape recorders, and some of the family plotted her assassination, I was setting up home in the north-west of England.

Sitting with Lara in Nice that night, watching her sleep so peacefully, I’d realised fully my responsibility for this separate human being. Without me, what would she do? When it all kicked off it was clear the safest move for her and me was going back to Blackpool. I had to balance my loyalties to Dad and Bruno, and naturally, as any mother would understand, it was no contest.

It wasn’t returning to an old life; it was starting a brand new one as a single mum. In Italy, the slow arm of the law was working against the family and the evidence was considerable. The prosecution was painstakingly building their case on the pages and pages of confessions, a Mafia manifesto.

In the early 1990s there was a credit crunch in England. Everybody was skint. I had the cushion of hidden money, but I was careful. I was more Yorkshire than Lancashire about the cash, for I’d seen how fast it can vanish. I was really calm and settled because I didn’t have to travel. My life was all before me. I had my house. Lara was becoming more a person than a baby, a real personality. It was mother and daughter time.

Bruno and my dad telephoned collect every week and that was my greatest expense – £500 phone bills. Otherwise
I didn’t live an extravagant life. I just got my shopping. Mum and I would potter around with Lara. She was still working at the Imperial Hotel.

James, the friend in whose garage I’d invested money, helped me get our car from Italy, where I still had lots of stuff. A couple of motors had been impounded but there was still a sports Clio in Milan. I got Bruno’s mum to fill up the Clio and his cousin drove it to the French side of Geneva, where he lived. I paid James to fly to Geneva, pick up the car and drive it across to the UK. I gave him all sorts of documents but no one asked for them; he drove it straight through.

So we had transport. I went about my own business every day. I paid my taxes. I paid my poll tax, my property tax. I didn’t know when or if I’d see Dad or Bruno again. I couldn’t dwell on any of that, because it was creating a future for Lara that mattered.

In March 1994 I got a job as a barmaid at The Golden Ball pub in Poulton-le-Fylde. It was a couple of nights a week, seven hours at £3.05 an hour, which they paid in cash. After handling millions in cash I wanted to get a sense of money in the real world. And I enjoyed it. The landlord was a nice bloke and the customers were mostly fun. It got me out of the house and I had cash to buy treats for Lara.

On 1 June 1994, a nice Wednesday morning, there was a knock on my front door at 7 a.m. It was the start of what they grandly called Operation Matterhorn. Customs and Excise were there to arrest me: ‘We have a search warrant, you are under caution now…’

But I had Lara! I told them I’d take her to my mum’s. They said that wouldn’t work because they’d already arrested Mum. She was at Blackpool Central Police Station.

I asked them to take me and Lara to my friend Naima’s house but when we got there other Customs and Excise officers were searching it. I muttered ‘I’m so sorry’ to her and James. I was mortified that I had brought that trouble to their doorstep. They were straight people.

With Lara listening, the officer barked at me: ‘Right, we’re going to take you.’

I put Lara down. She held out her arms, sobbing ‘Mummy!’ It broke my heart, looking at her so upset. I just walked out of the room with the sound of her screaming for me ringing in my ears. That upset me far more than the arrest.

After the problem of what to do with Lara was sorted, I didn’t say another word. In the newspapers it was reported I’d said ‘I’m saying nowt’ – but I didn’t. I knew better than that. I wasn’t going to say anything at all until I knew exactly what it was all about. They put me in an interview room at Blackpool Central and the duty solicitor was called in. With my good luck it was a brilliant solicitor called Trevor Colebourne, a man who understood the seriousness of it all better than me. I was distraught. I was being asked about ‘offences regarding drug trafficking, benefiting from the proceeds of drug trafficking and money laundering’. When Trevor arrived for the formal interview to begin at 1.40 p.m. I still hadn’t been charged. I’d decided I was going to try to blag
my way out of it but he instantly talked me out of that, saying I shouldn’t comment because whatever I did say might be twisted and used against me.

Along the corridor they’d started questioning Mum forty minutes earlier. She loves a good chat and her conversation with them ran for about 100 foolscap pages of transcript.

What I said didn’t fill two pages: a couple of ‘yes’ answers to formal questions, my date and place of birth. It took exactly two minutes. The customs guy Roger Wilson was quite abrupt.

He had trouble opening one of the audio tapes for the recorder and I giggled.

Trevor tried to cushion this by saying, ‘I think Marisa finds it quite amusing.’

I wasn’t being spiteful or taking the mickey. It just came out because it was genuinely funny. By the time Roger Wilson got the tape open he was bright red. He got going and was about to ask me about my house when Trevor said it was going to be ‘no comment’ from then on and he was furious about that.

Mum was along the way entertaining his colleagues. They asked her about her marriage and the family in Italy and about the money transfers. Then, and later, I believe they got quite exasperated with her. When Roger Wilson interviewed her it was to do with a ‘missing’ quarter of a million dollars.

Wilson: ‘There’s still about 250,000 unaccounted for.’

Mum: ‘Yeah, I mean…she went on holiday.’

Wilson: ‘But hang on, Patricia.’

Mum: ‘She wasn’t working.’

Wilson: ‘Quarter of a million we’re talking here, it’s not chicken feed.’

In turn, Mum got annoyed when they quizzed her about picking up the cash from the Nat West in Cleveleys.

Roger Wilson was the laborious quiz-master again: ‘I mean, let’s face it, not everyone walks through the streets of Poulton-le-Fylde or Cleveleys or anywhere for that matter with the equivalent of about £65,000 on them at a time in cash, that being roughly the equivalent of $100,000 US. It just doesn’t make sense.’

Mum: ‘I was on the moped anyway.’

Wilson: ‘Was it an armoured plating
[sic]
moped?’

Mum: ‘No, just on the moped and that was it.’

Wilson: ‘Anyway, let’s go on.’

Mum: ‘I couldn’t get a taxi ’cos I couldn’t afford a bloody taxi!’

They charged me, fingerprinted me and shipped me off to Risley Remand Centre in Warrington, Cheshire. At ‘grisly Risley’ they gave me my jailhouse number, RG0991, and I became a statistic in the prison system. But a high-profile statistic, a big number.

When I got to the reception at Risley there were a group of others being processed. One girl said she’d been accused of harming her child and another girl started beating her up. Guards came and broke them up and I was thinking: ‘Holy shit!’ I’d only just got there. They took them off to the hospital. They said they thought I was vulnerable, did I
want to go to hospital too? I reckoned it was better to be in the mainstream than with them.

The inmates all watch you walking onto the wing. It was spooky and intimidating. The first night I was bunked up with a black Brummie girl who was really nice and reassuring: ‘It’s all right. You’ll be fine.’ To my great relief, I heard that Mum had been released after the day of questioning and was back at home looking after Lara.

When they unlocked the cell, we had twenty minutes to get dressed and fold everything at the top of the bed as if we were in boot camp. I queued for breakfast with a plastic plate, knife and fork, which weren’t very clean, and this bloody big girl and her friend were eyeing me up. I’d never been in prison. It was a huge shock and I kept thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m on my own here.’

I stayed out of everybody’s way. On remand you don’t have to work; you can just stay locked in your cell, and that’s what I did most of the time. I got paranoid when I had to go out for a shower because I always had the big girl eyeing me up.

One girl tried to ridicule me: ‘What are you in for? Didn’t you pay your poll tax?’

But I got friendly with a prostitute who knew how to handle things. Everybody knew her. My solicitor gave me fags on visits and I gave them to her.

She said, ‘See them walls? That is the worst it will get for you. The walls.’

I already knew what she meant.

I spent two weeks in Risley before I appeared in court in Blackpool. Trevor Colebourne was there and afterwards he told me: ‘Marisa, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.’

I can’t recall the good news. The bad news was that I had been designated a Category A prisoner – that’s top of the line, number one villain, baddest of the bad. And I was going to Durham jail on remand to await my trial for laundering drug trafficking profits.

It was all guns then.

Everywhere I went the police were armed.

They took me to Durham as a Cat A, handcuffed to an officer and sitting on a metal seat in a blacked-out, armoured minibus with a sick bucket in front of me. It was a sweat box. You’d get done for taking a dog in it. There were police on motorbikes and a helicopter monitoring us sweeping across the Pennines through Scotch Corner to Durham. The escorts switched with the police jurisdictions. No vehicles were allowed on the motorway anywhere around the van.

We pulled right into the women’s wing, ‘H’ block, through about five doors. They were all locked manually apart from the big steel outside one. It was a prison within a prison, home to Britain’s most high-risk women, and they called it Hell Block.

Not all women were Cat A prisoners but it was
the
high-security area with lifers, child killers, paedophiles, any longterm prisoner doing ten years or more. I knew life was going to be like that Pink Floyd song ‘Living in a Fish Bowl’.

Every fifteen minutes they’d shout my name and wanted to see me on the landing so they could check me off in the book. I was on suicide watch too. They had male guards, which I thought was weird – men with women!

The head bloke got a couple of girls to show me around: ‘They’re Cat A, like yourself.’ They were two IRA bombers and they took me everywhere, like head prefects.

I know it sounds daft but it took ten days in that single first-floor cell for me to understand where I was and how serious it was. And then I thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m never going to get out.’ I broke down and sobbed my heart out. I’d stayed so strong in Risley, but in Durham I was on the floor, on my knees, in terrible floods of tears. The reality of everything hit me, especially of not being with Lara. I missed her so badly. I could cope with being contained but not being without my daughter. That’s what made me break down – but what kept me going as well.

After an hour or so I got up and swore to myself that for the sake of Lara I’d simply get on with it. I was wallowing in my own self-pity. The trial was still to come and I was pleading not guilty. Maybe I’d be back home soon.

But meanwhile I was stuck in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Durham. Yet the roof was all glass and a lot of daylight came through. Obviously the higher you were, the more daylight there was, so most people yearned for the penthouse suite. I was lucky enough to get a top-floor cell, with a view of Durham Cathedral, one of the most wonderful buildings in the world.

We only got an hour a day outside. That’s if we were lucky. If it was raining, the officers refused to go out. We used to go mad. By law you’re supposed to have an hour a day of fresh air. We’d say: ‘We’ll go out in all weathers – get some huts out there for the officers to shelter in.’ But we didn’t make the rules. That hour to us was everything. We would have gone out in rain or shine or snow. At Christmas 1994, it was gorgeous. The flakes were enormous. It was dead still, and in that yard it felt like heaven. We were walking all over and making prints in the soft snow. It was cold, but it was nice and still. I remember it clearly in my mind. It was eerie, and it was also emotional because we all missed our families, who were outside.

Sometimes I used to look up and use my hands to shield my eyes so I couldn’t see the wall. I’d pretend I was looking at the open sky. I used to dream of going out at night and standing there in the dark to feel the night air.

I was given £1 a day and I saved it all up to buy phone cards, which were £3 a time. Every night without fail I phoned Mum and had a word with Lara, but as a Cat A prisoner I could only use one particular phone with a recording device on it and I had to tell the screws when I was ringing so they could listen in. That was tough. And Mum and Lara were only allowed to visit twice a month, which wasn’t nearly enough.