The Good Mothers

by Alex Perry

  So, yes, Calabria’s prosecutors would say, the life of an ’Ndrangheta woman like Lea Garofalo was tragic. And, yes, the ’Ndrangheta’s inhuman sexism was one more reason to destroy it. But that didn’t mean the women were much use in that fight. Almost from the day in April 2009 that Alessandra arrived from Milan, many of her colleagues told her the women in the mafia were just more of its victims. ‘The women don’t matter,’ they said.5 When they heard of Lea’s disappearance, they conceded the news was heartbreaking, especially for those who had known Lea and Denise in witness protection. But Lea’s death was merely a symptom of the problem, they insisted. It had no bearing on the cause.

  Alessandra disagreed. She claimed no special insight into family dynamics. Alessandra was forty-one, married without children, and her appearance – slim, meticulously dressed, with short straight hair in a sharp, boyish parting – emphasised cool professionalism. When it came to The Family, however, Alessandra argued that it was only logical that women would have a substantial role in a criminal organisation structured around kin. Family was the lifeblood of the mafia. Like an unseen, uncut umbilical cord, family was how the mafia delivered nourishing, fortifying power to itself. And at the heart of any family was a mother. Besides, argued Alessandra, if the women really didn’t matter, why would the men risk it all to kill them? The women had to be more than mere victims. As a Sicilian and a woman inside the Italian judiciary, Alessandra also knew something about patriarchies that belittled women even as they relied on them. Most judicial officials missed the importance of ’Ndrangheta women, she said, because most of them were men. ‘And Italian men underestimate all women,’ she said. ‘It’s a real problem.’

  At the time Lea Garofalo went missing, evidence to support Alessandra’s views was on display in every Italian newspaper. For two years, the press had filled its pages with the lurid allegations and distinctly conservative attitudes of a state prosecutor in Perugia called Giuliano Mignini. Mignini had accused an American student, Amanda Knox – with the assistance of two men, one of whom was Knox’s boyfriend of five days – of murdering her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher. Mignini alleged the two men were in thrall to Knox’s satanic allure. Taking his lead from Mignini, a lawyer in the case described Knox as a ‘she-devil … Lucifer-like, demonic … given over to lust’. Fifty-nine years old, a devout Catholic and father of four daughters, Mignini later told a documentary maker that though the forensic evidence against Knox was scant, her ‘uninhibited’ character and ‘lack of morals’ had convinced him. ‘She would bring boys home,’ he mused. ‘Pleasure at any cost. This is at the heart of most crime.’6

  In the end, Knox and her boyfriend were acquitted on appeal, twice, and the prosecutors castigated by Italy’s Supreme Court for presenting a case with ‘stunning flaws’. But at the time of Lea’s disappearance, Knox was days from being found guilty for the first time and Mignini’s version of events – that an unmarried American woman who had slept with seven men was just the kind of fiendish deviant to have sex slaves murder her roommate – was the accepted truth.

  Alessandra didn’t lecture her colleagues on female emancipation. In their own lives they were free to hold whatever views they wished and she wasn’t about to let any of them think she was asking for special treatment. But when it came to cracking the omertà that cloaked Europe’s biggest mafia, Alessandra argued that the state had pragmatic reasons to care about the prejudice of gangsters. The ’Ndrangheta was as near perfect a criminal organisation as any of them would ever encounter. It had been around for a century and a half, employed thousands around the world and made tens of billions a year. It was not only the single biggest obstacle standing in the way of Italy finally becoming a modern, united nation, but also a diabolical perversion of the Italian family, which was the heart and essence of the nation. And yet until a few years earlier, the Italian state had been barely aware of its existence. When she arrived in Reggio Calabria, no one at the Palace of Justice could give Alessandra more than rough estimates of how many men the ’Ndrangheta employed or where it operated or even, to the nearest $50 billion a year, how much money it made. The kind of free will and independence that Lea Garofalo represented, and the murderous chauvinism rained down on her as a result, represented one of the few times the ’Ndrangheta had ever broken cover. At a time when prosecutors where just beginning to understand ‘how big the ’Ndrangheta had become and how much we had underestimated it,’ said Cerreti, Lea’s evidence against Carlo Cosco was also one of the prosecutors’ first ever peeks inside the organisation. The ’Ndrangheta’s violent bigotry wasn’t just a tragedy, said Alessandra. It was a grand flaw. With the right kind of nurturing, it might become an existential crisis. ‘Freeing their women,’ said Alessandra, ‘is the way to bring down the ’Ndrangheta.’

  III

  Alessandra Cerreti was born on 29 April 1968 in the eastern Sicilian port of Messina.1 In twenty-two years away, she’d only rarely visited her home town. Now she was living in Reggio Calabria, Messina’s sister city, three miles across the water, and rarely out of sight of it. She realised she’d never noticed how Messina changed through the day. At dawn, a pink light would lift its piazzas, boulevards and palm trees out of a purple gloom. At midday, the sun painted the scene in primary colours: blue sea, red roofs, yellow hills, and the white cone of Mount Etna to the south. Sunset was a languid affair, as the wind slackened and Messina sank back into the dusk under clouds edged with orange filigree. Night ushered in a Mediterranean glamour, a fathomless black set off by a necklace of white lights strung like pearls along the coast road.

  It was a scene that had drawn artists and writers for generations. Those raised beside the Straits of Messina, however, have long understood that the truth of the place is in what lies beneath. The Straits are a narrow, plunging abyss formed when Africa and Europe collided fifty million years ago and Africa bent down towards the centre of the earth. In this underwater chasm, the rushing currents created when the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas meet make for some of the most disturbed waters in all the oceans. Boiling whirlpools and sucking vortexes trap yachts and fishing boats. Slewing tides send ferries and freighters skidding sideways towards the rocks. Those peering into the depths can see startled bug-eyed fish, and even sharks and whales, shot to the surface from the sea floor 250 metres below. The swirling winds of the Straits reflect this turmoil, inverting the normal pattern of hot air over cold to create an optical illusion called the Fata Morgana in which boats and land on the horizon appear to float upside down in the sky.

  On land, human history has mirrored this natural upheaval. Reggio and Messina were founded by Greek colonists whose king, Italos, eventually gave the country its name. But for three millennia, the Straits have been continuously conquered and appropriated, first by Syracusans in 387 BC, then by Campanians, Romans, Vandals, Lombards, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Hohenstaufen German kings, Angevins, Aragonese, Spanish Habsburgs (twice), Ottomans, Barbary pirates, reactionary French Bourbons and Bonapartists, before finally, in 1860 and 1861, Reggio and Messina were captured by Giuseppe Garibaldi in the war that unified Italy. The wealth of its occupiers had given Messina and Reggio their ancient, yellow-stone harbours, their Arabic street names and an early artistry that found exquisite expression in the Riacce Bronzes, two sculptures of naked, bearded warriors dating from 450 BC discovered by a snorkeller off the Calabrian coast in 1972. But this early globalism also had its costs. It was through the Straits’ ports that the Black Death entered Europe from Asia in 1346, going on to wipe out two-thirds of the continent’s population. In 1743, by which time humanity’s numbers had barely recovered, plague returned a second time, killing 48,000 in Messina alone. Next to those disasters, the deadly earthquakes of 1783 and 1894 were largely forgotten, though not the quake and ensuing twelve-metre tsunami of 28 December 1908 which flattened both Reggio and Messina, killing 200,000 people. Rebuilt entirely, the twin cities were levelled again by Allied bombers in 1943.

  Assailed by
tempests, consumed by catastrophe, the people of the Straits could be forgiven for thinking they were cursed. Many used magic and folk wisdom to account for their suffering. In the Odyssey, Homer had written about two sea monsters which lived on opposing sides of the Straits. Surging out from Calabria, the six-headed Scylla would snatch sailors from the decks of their ships, while from Sicily Charybdis would suck entire boats under the waves with her insatiable thirst. People explained Etna’s deadly eruptions by describing the mountain as the home of Vulcan, or sometimes of Cyclops, both of them angry, thundering types with low opinions of mortals. The tremors people felt under their feet were said to be the shifting grip of Colapesce, the son of a fisherman who took a deep dive one day, saw that Sicily was held up by a single, crumbling column and stayed in the depths to prevent its collapse. The floating islands which appeared over Reggio, meanwhile, were thought to be glimpses of Avalon, to which the fairy-witch Morgan le Fay (after whom the Fata Morgana was named) spirited a dying King Arthur. Up there too, it was said, was The Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship doomed to sail the oceans for ever.

  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 al
oof, 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.