by Alex Perry
Despite the state’s efforts, Lea also felt a constant threat around the corner. One day in August 2003, she read in the newspaper how Vito Cosco, then thirty-four, had shot and killed two small-time drug dealers who had insulted him. One of Vito’s shots had also killed a two-year-old girl. A fourth victim, a sixty-year-old man who witnessed the shooting, had collapsed and died on the spot. Vito holed up at No. 6 Viale Montello for three days before phoning the carabinieri and telling them to come and arrest him. The newspapers called the killings ‘the massacre of Rozzano’ after the small town outside Milan where they took place.
The Garofalo–Mirabelli faida raged on as well. In September 2003, Lea’s cousin, Mario Garofalo, was shot in his car at a junction outside Pagliarelle. In June 2005 Floriano, by then forty, was walking to his front door in Pagliarelle when a man stepped out of the shadows carrying a shotgun. Floriano ran. Sprinting through a vegetable plot, he tore across the main road and up a side street. The gunman ran after him and shot him in the back. Floriano fell against a fence. The gunman reloaded, walked up to Floriano and shot him several times in the face, blowing his head back to a stump.
Though Lea had often lived in fear of Floriano when he was alive, now she was convinced her brother had died because he had refused to kill her. Carlo had been released from prison in December 2003. Floriano’s murder eighteen months later couldn’t be a coincidence. ‘It’s my fault they killed him,’ she told Marisa. The guilt destroyed her. Just as bad, in her safe-house her protection officers would grin at her and tell her that the threat to her life was gone. They didn’t understand anything. Not that it had probably been Carlo who had killed Floriano. And not that with Floriano dead, Carlo now not only ruled the Pagliarelle ’Ndrangheta but had also inherited the task of restoring its honour by killing Lea. The threat to Lea had soared. She took to staying awake through the night and sleeping during the day while Denise was at school. Even then, she kept a knife under her pillow.
Lea was right to be scared. Carlo began his search for her the day he left jail. He dropped by the convent in Bergamo, explaining he was a relative and asking the nuns if they had any contact with his cousin. In November 2004, Gennaro Garofalo, a member of Carlo’s ’ndrina who had once worked as a police auxiliary, showed up at his old station in Monza, asked his old colleagues out for pizza, then casually logged onto the witness protection system to search for Denise’s address, which came up as No. 9 Via Giovanni Ruggia, Perugia. Later in court Gennaro would claim he saw nothing sinister in a father’s desire to know his daughter’s whereabouts. ‘Carlo always treated Denise well,’ he explained. ‘In Pagliarelle, he made sure Denise ate and dressed well. She always had earrings.’
Early in 2005, Carlo sent two of his men, Rosario Curcio and Giovanni Peci, to find Lea in Perugia. The address in Via Giovanni Ruggia turned out to be a police station. When the men returned to Carlo empty-handed, he sent them back in a fury. By then, however, word had circulated in Pagliarelle that Carlo was closing in on Lea and a cousin had travelled to Perugia to warn her. Lea and Denise were quickly moved to Florence. But Carlo was relentless. In 2006, he sent another cousin, Genevieve Garofalo, to meet Lea with a message that Carlo wanted to see her and had set aside €200,000 for Denise. ‘It’s a trap,’ Lea told Denise. ‘He’s trying to get us back to Calabria.’ Lea was right, no doubt. Still, Carlo’s persistence was having an effect. Lea could feel herself increasingly enclosed in a prison of paranoia.
Alessandra had enough experience of witness protection not to be surprised by Lea’s experience of it. The system wasn’t perfect. The mafia had always had its men inside the judiciary, passing it information on the whereabouts of pentiti. There was also an inherent contradiction between trying to protect someone and simultaneously giving them their freedom. Sometimes that need for personal liberation led witnesses to put themselves in harm’s way. Lea’s motivation was always to give Denise a different life. But she also longed to free herself – and she had hardly achieved that. She couldn’t go out unaccompanied. She couldn’t talk to strangers. She was to live meekly and quietly, dependent on meagre handouts. It was eerily similar to ’Ndrangheta life. Some of the officers guarding her seemed to regard her as little more than a lowlife Calabrian hick who’d conned the state and struck it lucky. The truth was that the sacrifices she had made in her fight against the mafia – risking her life, abandoning her family and friends – were far greater than any nine-to-five provincial cop would ever make.
Lea began to push back. She demanded to see her boyfriend from Bergamo. She asked not to be placed in towns with Calabrian populations. She wandered off into town without telling anyone. She refused to accept her protection officers’ complaints about her behaviour. ‘Why do I have to defend myself against the state that is supposed to be defending me and my daughter?’ she asked. Denise, as a growing girl, was also becoming difficult. ‘Lea would explain to her daughter why they were moving and why they had to change their names,’ said Sandro Dolce, the prosecutor, ‘then the daughter would talk about it at school, and they would have to move again.’
As months turned to years, the state began to have doubts about Lea and Denise for other reasons, too. The procedure for mafia turncoats was to keep them closely guarded while their evidence was evaluated, corroborated and any trials conducted. Only after that would the government give them a permanent new identity, home and job. But not only was Lea proving tiresome to handle, without other pentiti to confirm her evidence, the investigators were having trouble building a solid case against Carlo. Lea’s statements, mostly describing what she had heard but not seen, weren’t enough on their own to make arrests or secure convictions. ‘We investigated for a long time but we never found enough confirmation,’ said Dolce. ‘Then a colleague replaced me and was very severe in his assessment: how what we had was not enough for arrests, and the silly things Lea did. So in February 2006 Lea and Denise were ejected from the programme.’
Annalisa immediately won Lea and Denise a temporary reprieve while she appealed the decision to throw them out of witness protection. But Lea was shattered. The state had reneged. It had promised her and her daughter a new life. Then it had betrayed them. She had expected the state to prosecute every crime she had revealed. It hadn’t prosecuted any. Worse, by taking her testimony, the state had needlessly exposed Lea and Denise to even more danger than before. The Italian state, Lea decided, was little better than the ’Ndrangheta. The irony was that if Lea had been an actual ’Ndranghetista – if she had taken part in the dealing and the thieving and the killing – she would have been more use to the authorities. It felt like they were punishing her for being honest.
That July, she phoned Annalisa. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said. ‘I’m getting out of the programme.’ Denise said later, ‘My mother decided to give up on the state. She had lost all confidence in them. Our life was exhausting and for what? Her statements turned out to be useless.’
Annalisa, aware that Lea was now suffering increasingly dramatic mood swings, managed to talk her client around. ‘More and more, she was finding herself lost in a reality that was bigger than her,’ said Annalisa. ‘You have to remember she was just a girl, only thirty-two years old. She thought her world and all her plans were collapsing around her.’ But Lea had already submitted a formal request to leave the programme and, until Annalisa could get her readmitted once again, she and Denise were on their own. It was terrifying, said Annalisa. The state had washed its hands of Lea and Denise. Her mafioso husband was trying to kill her. Lea had no one. ‘And so,’ said Annalisa, ‘it fell to me.’
Annalisa did her best. In November 2006, she moved close to where Lea and Denise were living. She became, as she said, ‘less a lawyer than a mother’. But Lea remained volatile and mistrustful. Denise, who turned fifteen in December 2006, was also no longer a girl playing a game of hide-and-seek with her mother but, increasingly, a teenager with her own opinions. Lea had shielded her daughter from much of the truth about Carlo. T
he price of Denise’s innocence was that she didn’t understand why, now she and Lea were out of witness protection, she couldn’t see her father. ‘Denise kept asking,’ said Annalisa. ‘She would insist, pressing and pressing. Lea would call me every day because she couldn’t manage Denise – you know how teenagers are.’ Annalisa tried to mediate between mother and daughter. Denise responded by demanding that the lawyer find a way for her to meet her father. Annalisa refused point blank. ‘I told Denise it was completely unacceptable for her to meet her father. I only had to see the terror in Lea’s eyes when the name of “Cosco” came up. But I think Denise started hating me after that.’
Looking for help wherever she might find it, Lea briefly moved with Denise back to Bergamo, where Lea sought the advice of Mother Grata and found a job in a bar. Then they moved to Fabriano, where they had also lived before and Lea had an old boyfriend. At the end of 2007, Lea went to a café in Rome run by the anti-mafia group Libera. She met Libera’s president, Father Luigi Ciotti, who put her in touch with a lawyer who volunteered for the organisation.
Lea met Enza Rando at her townhouse offices in the centre of Modena. The two women were very different. Lea, now thirty-three, was free-spirited and passionate, and the knowledge that she might die any day had given her a determination to live each one as her last. Enza was in her fifties, small, neat and conservative. But at their first meeting, Lea brought pastries, then sat down and poured out her life story. Almost immediately, Enza loved her. ‘Lea was beautiful,’ she said. ‘Very intelligent and very courageous.’
Annalisa had often been hard on Lea, especially when it came to Denise. Though Enza couldn’t offer Lea much more than Annalisa, to Lea, after six years in isolation, she was a fresh face ready to listen. And from the moment Enza appeared, Annalisa sensed a new distance between herself and Lea. ‘There was a change,’ said Annalisa. ‘I could tell another lawyer was giving her advice. Something was wrong. I felt I was losing Lea. And I thought it was best to stop right then. Overlaps like that – inconsistencies, conflicting advice – could be very dangerous for Lea.’
Heartbroken, Annalisa wrote a letter to Lea, offering her resignation. ‘In my mind, I was hoping this would shake Lea up and she would change her mind,’ she said. ‘We’d had ups and downs but six years is a long time.’ Instead, in June 2008, Lea accepted Annalisa’s notice.
In September 2008, largely as a result of Annalisa’s years of appeals and applications, Lea and Denise were readmitted to the witness protection programme. They were moved to Boiano, a small town near Campobasso in central Italy. Denise settled in well at her new school, and soon had a new group of friends. But by now Lea’s state of mind had graduated from paranoid to disturbed. She was still staying awake all night, sleeping through the day and keeping a knife under her pillow. Now she bought a guard dog and began taking lessons in martial arts. Nothing could soften the loneliness, however. She had no friends in Boiano and, with Annalisa gone, no one to talk to. Without government papers giving her a new identity, she also couldn’t risk working, lest her name on an employee record identify her whereabouts. ‘It’s all been a pile of crap,’ she would tell Denise. ‘Just a giant waste of our lives.’
‘It was so lonely for her,’ said Denise. ‘And without a job, she couldn’t be independent, she couldn’t provide for us by her own efforts and, for her, this was a real defeat.’
One day in April, Lea decided to write to the President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano:
I am a young mother at the end of my tether. Today I find myself together with my daughter isolated from everything and everyone. I lost everything. My family. My job. I lost my home. I lost countless friends. I lost any expectations of the future. I had reckoned on all of this. I knew what I was getting when I made my choice.
But her sacrifices had been for nothing, wrote Lea. Her statements had led to no arrests and no convictions. She and Denise had suffered for seven years for no reason. And then the state cast them out. Lea wrote that she was losing her faith in justice. ‘The worst thing is that I already know the fate that awaits me. After poverty comes death. Undeserved and unearned but unavoidable.’ Who else would make the choice she had? she asked.
‘Today, Mr President, you can change the course of history. I still believe that a person can live with integrity and decency in this country. Please, Mr President, give us a sign of hope. Help innocent victims of injustice.’
But when Lea went to post the letter in Boiano, she spotted a couple on a street corner who seemed to be watching her. The woman was wearing an earpiece. As Lea approached, the woman reached into her bag. Lea thought she was going for a gun. ‘I didn’t believe her,’ said Denise, when Lea told her later, ‘but I wasn’t there and I didn’t see it and my mother certainly believed there was someone who wanted to hurt her. She was very frightened. She decided not to send the letter and told me that we were leaving the protection programme once again.’
Lea’s second request to leave the state programme was the final straw for its administrators. They gave her and Denise two weeks to vacate their safe house and advised her never to reapply. Lea and Denise were on their own once more, and this time for ever.
Lea, however, had a new plan. She phoned her sister Marisa and asked her to pass on a message to Carlo. ‘She basically said: “OK, I said some things that were inconvenient for you,”’ recalled Denise. ‘“But I retracted everything and there will be no trial and no one will be shamed. So you have to leave me alone and leave my daughter alone.”’
Lea wanted out of witness protection, said Denise, because the process had been ‘absolutely pointless’. The one upside was that if the state wasn’t using her evidence, then Carlo had no reason to kill her. She just wanted to return to Pagliarelle and be left alone to quietly bring up their daughter. In return, she said Carlo would get to see Denise whenever he wanted. ‘She just didn’t want to have to worry about her life and my life any more,’ said Denise.
Carlo agreed. In a few days, Marisa came to pick up Lea and Denise from Boiano and take them back to Pagliarelle. Lea refused to see Carlo and stayed in the house with the curtains drawn. For Denise, it was the first chance she’d had to see her father in nine years. ‘He took me for drives, to restaurants, to see his friends, to eat at his house,’ she said. ‘He said we should move to Pagliarelle and that I could finish high school down there.’ Denise said she wanted to finish school in Boiano, where she had friends. She asked Carlo to rent an apartment there because she and Lea had nowhere to live. Carlo agreed to that, too. After Easter, he and Denise drove to Campobasso, a short bus ride from Boiano, and rented the first apartment they were shown near the school in the old town for one month. Carlo then installed Denise, his mother Piera and his nephew Domenico – Uncle Giuseppe’s son – in the apartment. Since he was paying for it, Carlo moved in himself for a few days.
Lea was furious at the way Carlo was insinuating himself back into their lives. She had no choice but to accept his money for her daughter’s sake. Nevertheless, while Denise, Carlo, Carlo’s mother and Carlo’s nephew slept in the apartment, Lea refused to meet Carlo and spent the nights outside in the car. ‘We’d slept in the same bed for years,’ said Denise. ‘She found it hard.’
The pressure eased slightly when Carlo returned to Milan. But the atmosphere in the apartment remained poisonous. On 24 April, Lea’s thirty-fifth birthday passed without celebration. Another day, she fought with Carlo’s mother Piera, saying she shouldn’t be there and that she, Lea, should be taking care of Denise, seeing as she’d managed for seventeen years. Shortly afterwards, Lea had to take Piera to hospital for what looked like hypertension. When Carlo heard his mother was sick, he drove back down from Milan.
The night that Piera was released from hospital, Lea, worried about her mother-in-law and unable to deny a son’s love for his mother, found herself at supper with the entire Cosco family. It was the first time Carlo and Lea had been in the same room for thirteen years. Lea was primed to explode.
When Piera yelled that Lea was making her unwell – ‘she’s killing me with her shouting’ – Lea, who was holding a bread knife, blew up. What was Piera even doing there? Why were any of them there? What the fuck was Carlo doing there? Lea and Denise had done fine by themselves all these years. She waved the knife at Carlo and shouted at him. You have to go, she said. Get the fuck out of here right now! Go now! Go now!
‘I was crying through all of it,’ said Denise. ‘But my father didn’t say anything. He just took the two suitcases he’d brought with him, kissed me on the cheek and left.’
Without money, Lea and Denise were still dependent on Carlo. They needed him even for small things like fixing the broken washing machine in the apartment. In early May, Denise and Lea went to a four-day pop festival in Rome, returning to Campobasso early on 5 May. At 9 a.m., Carlo called Denise to say a repair man was coming that day to fix the washing machine. Denise said OK and went to bed. Lea fell asleep on the couch.
A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. Lea stuffed a knife in her back pocket and answered the door to a clean-shaven man in jeans and a blue jacket with a tattoo down one side of his neck, carrying a tool box with a Winnie the Pooh sticker on the side. The man said he had come to fix the washing machine. Lea let him in and showed him to the kitchen. She watched him as he pushed a few buttons on the machine. He didn’t open his tool kit. He asked Lea how the machine worked. Lea regarded him. ‘If you have to kill me, do it now,’ she said.
The man flew at Lea and she pulled the knife from her back pocket. He stuck two fingers down her throat, trying to choke her. Lea kicked him in the crotch. The tool box fell onto the floor. Upstairs, Denise heard the crash. ‘I came down and this man and my mother were wrapped around each other,’ she said. ‘At first I thought it was my father, because he was dark-skinned and wearing the same jacket my father had.’
