Mafia Princess (16 page)

There was a police escort for the trip to and from court. Station wagons at the front and rear of the van. The police in the cars had automatic weapons trained on the van. Sirens were blaring and helicopters were trailing us, like noisy vultures in the sky. At court, officers were armed with wicked Heckler & Koch MP5 single-shot, three-burst carbines. They said it was unprecedented. Apparently, they thought the Mafia might swoop in with armed helicopters and free me.

The week I went to court in Newcastle, Rose West went on trial at Winchester Crown Court. The Geordies got their geography wrong and, thinking I was her, chucked eggs at the armoured van that took me to court. I could understand that.

On the Wednesday, 22 November, Rose West got ten life terms for murdering ten women and girls, including her sixteen-year-old daughter, her eight-year-old stepdaughter and her husband’s pregnant lover. She and her husband Fred West were charged with killing a dozen people altogether
but he escaped the trial because he’d killed himself in jail in January that year. They sent her to Durham’s Special Secure Unit, the official name for Hell Block.

I’d pleaded not guilty to laundering £1.6 million, carrying the cash across Europe in Lara’s carrycot, but I wobbled on that plea when I was standing alone in the dock at Newcastle. Mum was only a few feet from me looking hurt, lost and terribly, terribly vulnerable. She was not yet fifty years old but she looked like a little old lady, all hunched up by her fears and confusion.

The prosecutor Anton Lodge QC liked his own voice. For him, Dad was ‘The Godfather’, the great Mafia Don. He started on about how Adele was shot aged seventeen and three months pregnant. The jury went ‘Ooh.’ I burst out crying and asked, ‘What’s that got to do with me?’ I couldn’t stop crying.

Mum was looking at eighteen months in prison for helping me with the bank accounts. That wasn’t right. I couldn’t risk her doing a day. The prosecution gave me a choice: plead guilty and the charges against Mum would be dropped. If I didn’t, what would happen to Lara? Who would bring her up? They said the two words that convinced me to change my plea: Social Services.

I’d said nothing about anything or anyone in England or Italy.
Omertà.
If I had, I could have got a better deal. They had loads of paperwork evidence but it was just bank account details. If I’d shut the Geneva account and gone off with the cash, there wouldn’t have been a paper trail. I didn’t
see myself as money laundering. Even though it was wrong, I didn’t see anything I did as wrong at the time. When you’re young it’s exciting, you’re on a power trip.

Now I faced the consequences.

If Mum stayed out of jail she could look after Lara. I had to plead guilty, and that’s what I did on 23 November 1995. I don’t remember leaving the dock when I was sentenced. There was only the echo: ‘Marisa Merico, I sentence you to three years and nine months in prison. Take her down.’

The next I knew the sirens were wailing and we were racing across the Pennines. I was off to rejoin Myra and Rose and the rest of Britain’s most dangerous women.

And to find love in different variations.

‘Love is stronger than justice’

STING
,

TEN SUMMONERS’ TALES
, 1993

My court ordeal was over but prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli was still recounting the life and crimes of the Di Giovine and Serraino dynasties to magistrates in Milan. It was part of the Government’s
Mani Pulite
[Clean Hands] legal showcase to trumpet the fact that they were acting against the Mafia. Dozens and dozens of trials went on for months and months. Some were held in a secure bunker courtroom, some televised, and all involved murder, drug trafficking, money laundering, gun-running and the one they could get everybody on – Mafia association. Almost all my family were up on one or more of those charges.

Auntie Rita was the star witness but at times the prosecutor had to deal with interruptions from the courtroom.

‘Ugly whore!’ Nan yelled out.

She was warned to keep quiet.

‘But it’s my daughter, your honour!’

Mum kept me in touch with the trials when she visited with Lara. Absolutely everybody who saw me had to get police security clearance. I learned the ways of Durham during my remand, but it was different being sentenced there. It was so final. When Mum and Lara left after the
visits the pain was real. I could feel it and my whole body would shake. Heartbreak does hurt.

The things Mum had said all those years ago tumbled around in my head. What if I’d listened to her? What if? They were just words now. I had to do what I’d always done – accept my circumstances and deal with it. I’d be remorseful, I’d be sad and I’d be angry, but who was I going to shout at, who was I going to blame? The world? I got on with it.

Some days the atmosphere inside was thick with tension. My favourite fellow inmate Susan May helped ease it. She wrote formal letters for us prisoners, to MPs, lawyers and legal aid organisations, and everyone went to her, including Myra.

I asked, ‘How can you sit in her cell and take notes?’

I think Sue’s innocence meant she could see good in anybody. But I didn’t understand it. She was from Oldham so she grew up with the horror of Myra Hindley. She could even have been one of her victims.

A lot of the reason I kept my head down in prison was because of Sue. I could have lost it but she held me back and spoke with the voice of reason.

Still, I couldn’t have a bath because of Rose West. I saw her getting into it and no matter how much I scrubbed that bath I couldn’t use it. She came over and sat down when I was having lunch with Sue once and I had to excuse myself. I said to Sue afterwards: ‘If you know she’s going to come, tell me because I don’t want to sit with her. I’m not going to be horrible to her, but I’m not going to be nice to her.’

Yet Rose West looked like any other woman queuing up at Tesco. She didn’t look evil. She wasn’t hard-faced. She looked like a midwife or a nurse. She didn’t look like a sexual monster.

That didn’t help in the showers. Most of the girls covered themselves up and dried themselves discreetly. Not Rose West. She was quite blatant. She stood there naked in front of me. She had a black bushy forest on her. She wasn’t a slim woman. She was just drying herself, patting herself off, and she looked at me and I freaked out a bit.

Myra was quite menacing. She had an aura about her. Girls would shout names at her but they could’ve saved their breath. She’d heard it all a million times. Myra was very thick-skinned. If you went past her cell it stank, a horrible overwhelming smell, a musky stale tobacco smell.

There was an IRA escape in 1995, after which security was tightened and we couldn’t get our shopping at Sainsbury’s any more, and they also segregated the Cat As on visits. It was all right for Rose West to be with everybody else, but not me. We were lepers and the screws sat at the table with us. Nothing was private. I couldn’t stand being on visits with child killers around, especially with Lara there. I could cope with everything, but I couldn’t cope with that. Yet I was in there with them. All because of money. And the money hadn’t meant that much. The amounts were so vast – how high can you pile a million dollars? Rushing around Europe with all that money had been like playing Monopoly – and I got the ‘Go to Jail’ card.

I’d been in Hell Block for about eight months when I got friendly with Lisa Corah. From the age of twelve and through her teens she’d been abused by her sister’s husband Philip and it had messed her up. Lisa found it hard to build a relationship but she started going out with a guy called Adrian. One night she told him about the abuse. He went mad. She begged him: ‘Don’t do anything. My sister has kids. She’s family.’

Philip was a milkman and had just finished his round at 6 a.m. when Lisa’s boyfriend put a pickaxe through his head, killing him sraight out. He ran off with the axe to Lisa’s house saying, ‘I’ve just killed him. What can I do with this?’

She was in shock. ‘Just throw it over the back of the shed.’

It all kicked off and the police were trying to find out who the hell would want to murder a milkman. Lisa didn’t say anything but they found the murder weapon at the back of the shed and she was implicated. She got life but on appeal it was knocked down to three years for aiding and abetting. Just for that one stupid mistake.

She was a good-looking girl, about twenty-two years old. I mentioned her on the phone to Naima and she asked, ‘She’s not a lesbian, is she?’

It had never occurred to me. ‘No. She’s not.’

Laughing, I mentioned this to Lisa later and she said, ‘Actually, I am.’

I was quite naïve. We’d become really good friends and we used to train in the gym together, then one day she tried to kiss me. I’d never thought I would be attracted to a girl;
she was very attractive, very feminine, but she had a masculinity about her as well. She didn’t wear make-up. She looked girly, but she used to wear rugby tops and shorts. I let her kiss me and I did find her attractive and things happened.

Afterwards I felt confused about my sexuality for a while but I decided, ‘I’m in here and this is now and this is how I feel.’

I looked at Lisa as a person – not as a man or a woman, but someone that I cared for. Being with her I learned about myself and my body and what I want and what I don’t want. I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t see myself as bisexual. It was a love affair with a person in prison who happened to be a girl and it was a nice, special time in my life. We got through stuff together. We didn’t go around holding hands or kissing. It was a loving, emotional uplift and cushion. I cared a lot about Lisa even though I wasn’t ‘in love’ with her.

Four months after our affair began Lisa was released. I was upset because I was losing one of my best friends, apart from anything else, but I was happy for her. She kept coming to Durham to visit me for a while but then she met someone else on the outside. Part of me was gutted, and part of me wasn’t bothered. I saw our love affair as something that happened in a set of circumstances that had now gone.

Then Frank came into my life.

Frank?

I could surely pick them. Frank Birley was one of the hardest men in the men’s wing of Durham prison. And that’s
tough. He wasn’t a saint. He was in Durham for the armed robbery of a Blackpool jeweller’s. He wrote me a lovely letter. And he got Charles Bronson – not the late actor but the notorious convict – to draw cards and cartoons for me. Frank was one of the few who could keep Charlie Bronson under control. Famous for attacking prison officers, rooftop protests and taking hostages, Charlie is often referred to as the most violent prisoner in the UK prison system.

With money laundering the ‘new’ crime and with my international connections I was a good story and the newspapers were full of it: every time a Mafia trial in Italy hit the headlines I got fan mail. I got letters offering me this and that. Do you want a stereo? One offered me a canary. Then I got a letter from Frank: ‘Hi, Marisa. I’m in the same situation as you. I’m a Category A prisoner. Hope you are all right in this country? Hope you are all right with the language. Hope you’ve got people looking after you. Wanted you to know I’m in the same boat. If you’d like to write to me…’

I was always tagged ‘Mafia’ and with my name Frank obviously thought I was pure Italian.

I knew a couple of girls had got hooked up with relationships inside by writing to guys in the men’s wing, but I always thought it was weird. How could you fall in love with a man you’d never met? I supposed it was fine if it kept them happy but I didn’t think I could do such a thing. I’d always used Bruno as a good excuse to keep other men away. But with Frank I didn’t do that. I wrote back thanking him for his
letter: ‘You sound like a really nice older guy. Thanks for your support.’

Next thing I got a letter in which he said he was only thirty. Oh! Then he sent a picture of himself. He played tennis in there and he had his tennis gear on. He was posing with his racquet. He was very fit. He was working out. He had curly dark hair. I remember I got the mail from the office, and going up the stairs I stopped and swore: ‘My God. He’s fucking gorgeous.’

I ran off to tell Sue. I’d got my knickers in a twist. The friendship started in 1996 and turned into more and more and more.

We would write A4, both sides, sheets and sheets, and send photographs. Every day, maybe twice or three times a day. We used to record our voices for each other. The guards listened to it, of course. Everything was vetted. Nothing went through without them hearing or seeing.

Then we started having little code words about stuff. Not anything bad. More on a personal level. I’d write a few Italian words and he would say, ‘What does that mean?’ I’d tell him what it was and he would write back with it. He asked me how to say ‘I love you’ in Italian and I told him and he began to say
‘Ti amo’.

I replied: ‘You know, I think I love you too.’

It was intense. Everything was going into those letters. I do feel that I got to know him better through those letters than I would have in real life. It’s easier to tell someone how you feel in a letter. At first I was cynical about the
women who fell for men inside, but now it was happening to me.

Frank had a lot of money in there. He still had people on the outside doing stuff for him. His family looked after him. I never asked for anything but he sent me a box of books and gym gear and got his brother to send £1,000 in cash to me. I knew he’d be offended if I sent it back again. I knew men like him, like my dad, and I knew how their minds worked.

I wrote: ‘I really appreciate this, but it’s too much. I don’t know when I can repay you.’

By return I got: ‘Marisa, please do whatever you want with it. That is yours. I don’t want it back. You’re in there. You’ve had a hard time. You’ve had everything taken from you. If I can help, I will do that for you.’

I sent most of the money to Mum to help with looking after Lara, and he was happy about that. He was a genuinely loving man.

Which was in complete contrast to his prison record. He couldn’t take the system and he protested in whatever jail he was in. He was involved in shit protests, when they smeared it all over the walls. He was hosed off in a roof protest at Preston. There was a segregation unit in Durham and he was always in that because he got pretty naughty there. In segregation they get locked up 24/7. You’re not allowed out to socialise with other inmates. You can only go outside on your own.

Frank was in with the real tough guys. He was in the cage next to Charlie Bronson who, although he lives in his own
little world, gets a lot of attention. But that’ll happen if you kidnap prison governors. To him, these officers did wrong. Whatever they did, he didn’t like them.

Frank had a tough life. His mum died when he was sixteen. His dad had been a Category A prisoner himself, a right villain, and Frank had followed in his footsteps. After the raid on the Blackpool jeweller’s he ran off and the police cornered him. He went into a house and held a seventy-six-year-old woman and her daughter hostage in a nine-hour siege before being arrested. He wanted me not to dislike him for that and told me: ‘It could have been a rugby team in there. I didn’t know. I wasn’t nasty to her.’

He wasn’t. He made them cups of tea and looked after them. The women said he was a nice lad and the papers called him the ‘Gentleman Robber’.

Frank did nine and a half years hard prison. A few times the screws beat him up badly. A rival prison gang ambushed him and scarred him. He had been through the wars.

In April 1996 my tariff in Durham was over. I was being released, set free, but Trevor Colebourne got wind that I might be re-arrested because Italy had a warrant for my arrest. The Italian authorities wanted me to face charges. At the
Mani Pulite
trials Mafia associates were being jailed for twenty years at a time. What would I get as a Di Giovine family member if was extradited to Milan? I might never see my daughter again. It was 50:50 that day.

Being released as a Cat A was unheard of; normally you are downgraded through the system before you go. Susan
May and the other girls were excited for me. The chief prison officer took me down to the gates after I’d gone through the release formalities. I was free for two steps.

I heard a helicopter as I was going out the gates of H Wing and thought, ‘Oh shit. They’re waiting for me. They’re not going to let me go.’

The girls were at the windows shouting ‘Bastards!’

There were snipers on the roof of the prison. There were gusts of wind from the copter blades as we walked out. Police cars were parked right by the gates.

A copper grabbed me and snarled, ‘Are you Marisa Merico?

‘Yes.’

He looked at the prison officer and asked, ‘Is this her stuff?’

The officer nodded and he balled it all into the boot and bunged me in a police car and drove off with two escort bikes on the front, a car behind and the helicopter above us.

They took me to Durham police station and booked me in: ‘You’re arrested for extradition to Italy to answer charges of being involved in organised crime.’

It was all planned: two Scotland Yard extradition squad officers met me at Newcastle airport. I flew to Stansted airport and they took me into London to Charing Cross police station where I stayed overnight. I’d never felt freaked out in Durham and supposedly there are ghosts there. But in this cell I definitely felt there was somebody with me.