by Alex Perry
The fight continued inside the courtyard of Viale Montello. Eventually, Gina and several other women intervened. Lea ran back up to her apartment. Carlo was waiting. He had heard everything. ‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured Lea. ‘One day Comberiati will pay.’
In the event, it was Comberiati who made the first move. In simultaneous assassinations on the night of 30 November 1994, Thomas Ceraudo was gunned down in Cuarto Oggiaro and Silvano Toscano was abducted from his mother-in-law’s house in Petilia and killed, his body dumped in a field outside town. Comberiati barely bothered to deny he was to blame. The surveillance teams at Viale Montello reported that he immediately installed himself as the new king of Milan.
But with Carlo’s backers dead and Floriano looking weak, Comberiati was daring Carlo to respond. Six months after the double murders, just after midnight on 17 May 1995, Lea was sleeping in bed with Denise when she heard several shots ring out in the courtyard below. When she opened the door, she could see Comberiati’s body lying prone on the concrete. It was raining. Gina was screaming for an ambulance and shouting that the killer was still in the building. She started smashing the windows of a Chinese shop in which she was convinced the gunman was hiding. Lea observed her. Then she watched the ambulance and carabinieri arrive. After twenty minutes, Carlo’s brother Giuseppe appeared at her door, exhilarated.
‘He’s dead,’ said Giuseppe.
‘You sure?’ asked Lea.
Giuseppe giggled. ‘The bastard just wouldn’t fucking die,’ he said. ‘It was like he had the devil in him or something. But, yeah, he’s dead now, for sure.’
Giuseppe left for his apartment. Carlo arrived seconds later.
‘Where were you?’ asked Lea.
‘Karaoke,’ replied Carlo.
‘Liar,’ Lea shot back.
Carlo laughed. ‘Well, then, I’ve been over at the shop getting a sandwich.’
Lea later told the carabinieri that she had surmised that Carlo had stood watch for Giuseppe while his brother shot Comberiati, then the two men had dumped the gun in the street. It made sense for Giuseppe to pull the trigger, said Lea, because he ‘needed the points’. ‘Carlo doesn’t need them,’ she explained to the prosecutors. ‘He’s already Floriano’s brother-in-law. But Giuseppe’s no one. A killing like this gives him position. He becomes somebody.’
With his rival dead, Carlo’s accession, and the elevation of the Cosco family, was complete. Previous generations of Coscos had been goat herders and fruit farmers. Now, through luck and ruthlessness, they were players in an exploding international criminal empire. Carlo himself was right hand and brother by marriage to Floriano Garofalo, one of the most powerful ’ndrina bosses in all Calabria.
For Lea, however, something died with Comberiati. Her husband had brought violence into the home where she lived with their daughter. Years earlier, she had tried to escape and it hadn’t worked. For Denise’s sake, she had to try again. Looking at her daughter was like looking at herself in the third person, thought Lea. She could see everything clearly: all the troubles around the two of them and what they needed to do to move past them. ‘She wanted Denise to have other possibilities in her life,’ said Enza. ‘The chance to be part of the cult of life and friendship and respect and to be part of another kind of family.’
Lea tried one more time to convince Carlo to leave the ’Ndrangheta. The three of them could begin again somewhere new and raise their baby to be anything she wanted to be, she said. Carlo’s response was to beat her. That was the last straw for Lea. ‘So she decided to go to the carabinieri and tell them all about the drug trafficking,’ said Enza.
In May 1996, Carlo, Floriano, Giuseppe and several others were arrested at No. 6 Viale Montello. The operation to detain them – using four hundred men to seal off the street and storm the building – confirmed the Coscos’ new status in the European drug trafficking elite. Carlo was transferred to San Vittore prison, on the other side of town.
Though she had played a key role in his arrest, Lea decided she would give Carlo one last chance. In September 1996, Lea, now twenty-two, took Denise, five, to see him in prison. ‘I want to stay with you,’ she told him, ‘but on one condition: you collaborate with the carabinieri and denounce the ’Ndrangheta. When you come out of jail, we can start a new life. Or you continue this life and you will never see me or Denise again.’
Carlo leapt over the screen between them and grabbed Lea. He had his hands around her throat by the time the prison guards pulled him off. He expected his wife to stand by him. After all the work and all the blood, Carlo’s manoeuvring had paid off. He was king of Milan. Now Lea was betraying him and taking it all away: his link to the boss in the old country, his standing in the brotherhood, even his self-respect as a man. Lea had broken the code. There was only one remedy. From that day, said Enza, Lea knew she was living under ‘a death sentence’.
Lea returned to Viale Montello for a final time. She packed a suitcase, then called a friend to drive her and Denise to a convent in Bergamo where they would be safe. Renata, Giuseppe Cosco’s wife, saw Lea leave. ‘I remember the day Lea left Milan well,’ she said in court fifteen years later. ‘Lea looked at me with anger. She spat on the ground. She swore she would never again set foot in that shitty place. She yelled that she wanted a different future for herself. A different future for her daughter.’ And just like that, Lea and Denise were gone.
The next six years were the happiest of Lea’s and Denise’s lives. Initially, the pair stayed in an Ursuline convent in Bergamo, dedicated to the education of women and girls. In Mother Grata, who ran the convent, Lea seemed to discover the parent she’d never had. She began reading for the first time in years, learning about Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino and Giuseppe Impastato, a Palermo anti-mafia activist who had been born into a Cosa Nostra family and was assassinated by them at thirty. After a few months, Lea and Denise moved into a small apartment on Via Alfieri, a quiet street of bungalows and two-storey houses painted yellow and pink, not far from Lake Iseo. Later they moved into town to another small place on Via Mose del Brolo, a dead-end street full of pensioners and students. Lea found work in factories and bars. She met a man. She and Denise adopted a dog. Lea even went skydiving.
Every June, Lea and Denise would go down to Pagliarelle to spend the summer holidays with Marisa and their relatives. Perhaps it was those breaks in Calabria, unmolested by Carlo’s men, that lulled Lea into thinking her escape was real. When they were back home, Lea even allowed Denise to visit Carlo in Catanzaro jail, to which he had been transferred from Milan.
But Carlo never had Lea out of his sights. When the officers investigating Lea’s disappearance tracked down Salvatore Cortese, an ’Ndrangheta killer who had shared a cell with Carlo in Catanzaro from 2001 to 2003 and had since turned pentito, Cortese told them Carlo never forgave Lea. Carlo, he said, was always talking about how Lea had betrayed him and betrayed the ’Ndrangheta. Carlo was especially incensed that she still stayed with her family in Pagliarelle and walked around the village alone and in front of everyone. She was flaunting her freedom, said Carlo. He knew about her affair in Bergamo and suspected, since Lea never came to visit, that the other inmates in Catanzaro had deduced the same thing. Worst of all, her brother Floriano was doing nothing about any of it. Carlo had been wronged and wronged again. It was intolerable. ‘And,’ said Cortese, ‘according to the ’Ndrangheta’s rules, Floriano’s silence allowed Carlo to appeal to other men of honour for permission to kill Lea.’
Nonetheless, killing the sister of a boss was a tricky business. Carlo told Cortese that Lea had to be dispatched in such a way that Floriano would believe she had run off with her new lover. ‘The plan to physically eliminate Lea Garofalo and get rid of her body by dissolving it in acid grew in Carlo’s mind since at least the early 2000s,’ said Cortese. How did Cortese know that, asked the carabinieri? Because, Cortese replied, he was among those Carlo asked to help him.
Carlo knew he might fool Floriano but not th
e entire ’Ndrangheta. If he was to pull off such an audacious killing, he would need approval from higher up. Approaching two bosses in the prison yard, he explained how his honour and that of the wider ’Ndrangheta had been so impugned that it could only be restored by washing it in blood. The two bosses knew Carlo was right. But they had their own clan feuds to pursue. Calculating that Carlo’s vendetta would anyway have to wait until he was released from jail, they stalled.
Carlo still held out hope that Floriano would choose his duty over love for his sister. Getting his brothers to set Lea’s car alight in Bergamo in 2000 was Carlo’s way of reminding Floriano of his obligation. It had some effect. One summer’s day two years later, when Lea and Denise were back in Pagliarelle, Lea took Denise to buy a gelato from the shop off the main piazza. Vito Cosco drove up in his car. He was agitated. He told Lea he was tired of taking Denise to see Carlo. Carlo was sick of it too. It wasn’t right, said Vito. Lea had to get in line.
Lea refused. As the argument grew more heated, Floriano, by then out of prison and back in Pagliarelle, arrived. Vito was right, Floriano shouted at Lea. What kind of woman let her husband rot in jail alone? What kind of sister was she to him, Floriano, an ’ndrina boss? Then, in the middle of the square, Floriano held Lea by her shoulders and slapped her across the face for everyone to see. He leaned over his sister, looking as though he was about to strike her again. As he did so, however, he whispered in her ear: ‘Lea! You have to escape! Because, really, I have to kill you!’
Twice Lea had run from the ’Ndrangheta. Twice it had clawed her back in. For choosing freedom over murderous criminality, her husband wanted her dead, the ’Ndrangheta required it and her brother had told her he would be the one to do it. Lea felt like the world was closing in on her. On 29 July 2002, a few days after the argument with Vito and Floriano, the door of Lea’s grandmother’s house was set alight while Lea and Denise were inside. It was an especially blunt ’Ndrangheta message. There was no way out.
Perhaps because it was so unthinkable, the ’Ndrangheta had overlooked one exit, however. On the morning of 29 July 2002, Prosecutor Sandro Dolce in the nearby city of Catanzaro received a call from the chief of the carabinieri in Petilia Policastro. ‘He told me that in front of him stood the sister of Floriano Garofalo. She had a ten-year-old girl with her. She wanted to give evidence about a number of facts and events concerning her family. She wanted to break with her past and the environment in which she had been living.’
Dolce immediately understood the significance of what he was hearing. In 2002, the authorities knew very little about the ’Ndrangheta. Despite prosecuting several ’Ndranghetisti for their roles in the Pagliarelle feud, their knowledge of what had happened barely extended beyond the body count. Though they had successfully prosecuted Carlo and Floriano for drug trafficking, they also knew little about the structures and hierarchy of the wider ’Ndrangheta. ‘Up until that time, we had very poor knowledge of the workings of the ’Ndrangheta,’ said Dolce. ‘State witnesses are our main source of knowledge for any mafia and we just hadn’t got that many from the ’Ndrangheta. The ’Ndrangheta was known, of course – its existence was no big secret – but its internal dynamics were not known.’
Dolce knew immediately what he had to do. ‘I did not go to Petilia,’ he said. ‘It’s a small town. The fact she had gone to the carabinieri would have already alarmed people there. So I could not go personally to listen to her statement there. Instead, I had the carabinieri move her urgently to a hotel 100 kilometres away and I went to see her there. And I did nothing but listen to her talk for two days.’
What particularly impressed Dolce was how different Lea was to the stereotype of an ’Ndrangheta woman. Most were submissive, ignorant and poorly educated. Lea was assertive, knowledgeable and articulate. ‘She had a different outlook,’ said Dolce. ‘She was open-minded. She wanted her own life. She did not want to depend on a man or to stay at home. She wanted her independence. She wanted to be the protagonist and the subject in her own life. Lea had grit.’ Just as impressive, said Dolce, ‘she was very honest. If she hadn’t told us she had been involved in the drugs, we’d never have known.’
Lea’s testimony began from her father’s death when she was eight months old and ran through everything that had happened in the past twenty-eight years. She spoke about the Pagliarelle feud. She gave an account of all the murders and named all the killers. She detailed how her brother Floriano had shot and knifed his way to the top, and how that had enabled him to take over the protection and cocaine rackets in Milan, especially Cuarto Oggiaro. She talked about packaging and distributing cocaine inside No. 6 Viale Montello. She described Antonio Comberiati’s murder and how Carlo and Giuseppe had spoken about killing him. Finally, she said she had decided to turn state’s evidence because she felt time was running out. Her greatest fear was that someone would break into her house and shoot Denise.
Reading through Lea’s statements years later, prosecutors investigating her disappearance were amazed by the detail. Dolce had reacted the same way at the time. ‘I have had experience of false pentiti – men who just say a few things but not everything,’ he said. ‘They make a utilitarian choice. They decide to collaborate because they are facing life sentences.’ But Lea was different, he said. Her collaboration was ‘more genuine, and more effective. She said everything she knew. She hid nothing. You could feel how her choice had put her through suffering and pain. But she had a very dignified look. She was very determined and proud of what she had done.’
The more the new team of Calabrian prosecutors read about Lea, the more they were struck by how, seven years before, in two days of interviews and on her own initiative, Lea had single-handedly proved her theory that mothers were the key to undoing the ’Ndrangheta. Lea’s testimony amounted to an unprecedented insight into the ’Ndrangheta. Her motivation – to give Denise a better life – was untainted and unstoppable. Lea should have prompted a complete rethink inside the Italian judiciary of the value of women in the fight against the mafia. There was certainly every reason to imagine that July 2002 had been the start of a whole new chapter in the war on the mafia. That made the investigation into Lea’s disappearance even more critical. What had happened?
VIII
Lea was a beguiling mix of the carefree and the purposeful.1 She laughed easily, because life was for living, but she would erupt if she felt her freedom or Denise’s were threatened. She and Denise would have been safer, she knew, if she had been able to accept the meek, servile existence of an ’Ndrangheta mother and wife. But to Lea, that meant dying anyway. If the happiness she enjoyed as a free woman and the possibilities Denise enjoyed outside the ’Ndrangheta were often eclipsed by terror, it was a price Lea felt they had to pay.
The day Lea walked with Denise into a carabinieri station in July 2002, she was petrified. Annalisa Pisano, then thirty-four, was a public defender on call. ‘There was a list of lawyers to deal with witness cooperation,’ she said. ‘I think they picked me because I lived close by and I was a woman.’ Tall with short blonde hair and the businesslike bearing of a young criminal lawyer with her own practice, Annalisa arrived at the station, rang the bell in the waiting room and sat down, unaware that the mother with a small child sitting quietly next to her was her new client. ‘But then the carabinieri officer came and said: “This is the girl who has asked for your help. She has made the choice to talk.” And we had fifteen minutes to prepare before the procedure began.’
Annalisa remembered thinking how Lea was ‘so small, so skinny, and Denise so tiny’. She wondered how they would handle the giant step they were taking. ‘There’s almost no words to describe the choice Lea was making,’ said Annalisa. ‘I could see she was blinded by terror, in a condition of high anxiety and stress. She had an idea about her brother, that he could take some action to reconcile with Carlo and preserve the status quo. But she was trying, like all mothers, to be courageous because she had her daughter with her.’ Annalisa tried to be symp
athetic, telling Lea that she would get help and support from the state. The provincial carabinieri guarding her were no help. ‘Are you really interested in cooperating?’ asked one officer, gruffly. ‘Because if not, you’ll stay here.’
The state’s first task was to assess whether Lea and Denise were worth protecting. After two days of testimony, Lea was judged genuine, and she and her daughter were granted state protection. The process, bureaucratic and banal, was at odds with the momentous nature of what was happening. This, after all, was how a pentita gave up allegiance to family and homeland, abandoned everything and everyone they had ever known, accepted that for ever after they would be at war with one of the world’s most ruthless mafias and put their faith in a state that they had been taught to despise from birth.
Initially, Lea and Denise were moved to Ascoli Piceno, a small, quiet province east of Rome. Lea told Denise they were to pretend they were sisters. They’d even had new make-believe names: Alessandra de Rossi and her younger sister Sara. But Denise kept forgetting the rules, calling Lea ‘mama’ or ‘ma’, and after a few weeks, Lea changed their names to Maria and Denise Petalo so that anyone overhearing them could excuse ‘ma’ as Lea’s nickname.
Though safe from harm, Lea and Denise found their new life hard. They were rarely in one place long enough to put down new roots, moving six times in six years. Lea, for whom freedom meant the opportunity to be gregarious, found the isolation especially difficult. Her one connection to the outside world was a mobile given to her by the prosecutors, which she used to talk to Annalisa. ‘We spoke every day for the next six years, even on Saturdays and Sundays,’ said Annalisa. ‘For all that time, I was her only point of contact on the outside.’
