The Good Mothers

by Alex Perry

  Denise jumped on the man and started punching and kicking him. She saw his face: it wasn’t Carlo. Still, the man seemed to recognise Denise. He looked at her with shock, threw the two women off and ran for the door. Denise chased him and grabbed him by the throat. ‘Who sent you?!’ she shouted. ‘Who sent you?!’

  ‘Let me go!’ the man yelled, and ran out.

  Denise went to help Lea, who was bleeding. The two of them examined the tool box that Lea’s attacker had left behind. Inside were no plumbing tools but, instead, duct tape, wire, rope, scissors, a saw and latex gloves. Lea called the carabinieri, who interviewed her and Denise and took fingerprints. Once they left, Lea told Denise that though it was important to have an official record of the attack, they couldn’t count on the carabinieri to keep them safe. They packed, ran down to Lea’s car and drove to a B&B, taking care to park on a different street. After staying in their room all day and all night, they left early the next morning without paying and drove to the main piazza where Lea pitched a tent opposite the town hall. They were safer where everyone could see them, she said.

  Lea and Denise were convinced Carlo had sent an assassin to kill Lea. Still, when Carlo called, Denise arranged to meet her father in town. ‘I had no choice,’ she said. ‘If a person wants to hurt you or kill you, either you let them or you pretend to be their friend.’

  When Denise saw Carlo, however, she couldn’t control herself. She flew at him. She accused him of trying to kill her mother. Carlo shouted back that the attack had had nothing to do with him.

  ‘But you were the only one to know about the broken washing machine!’ said Denise.

  ‘Your phones are tapped!’ shouted Carlo. ‘You were in the protection programme! Anyone could have known about the washing machine! Anyone could have sent that guy!’

  Denise was caught off guard for a second. Then she said: ‘I never want to see you again. I’m going with my mum.’

  Lea wished that the two of them could have ridden off into the sunset as Denise wanted. But with no money, no state protection and no lawyer, their only option was to follow their original plan, move back to Calabria and try again to secure a truce from Carlo. They packed up their tent, caught the train to Calabria and moved into Lea’s mother’s house in Petilia, all three women sharing a kitchen, a single bedroom and a tiny bathroom. Lea replaced the old wooden front door with a new metal one. Aside from walking a few metres to buy cigarettes, she stayed indoors.

  For Lea, life in Petilia and Pagliarelle was more claustrophobic than ever. She had to assume that most of the village might be trying to kill her. She quarrelled with the few people she did see.

  Denise quickly couldn’t stand to be in the apartment with her mother. Almost without realising it, she found herself falling into the routine of clan life, taking drives into the country with her father when he was down from Milan, eating lunch with him and his friends. In Pagliarelle, there was no way to behave differently. But when she returned to the house with new jeans, new trainers or a new jacket, Lea, who had raised her daughter to despise materialism, would throw a fit.

  What surprised Denise was that Carlo seemed to find the situation just as hard. One day he asked his daughter to go on holiday with him. When Denise asked Lea, and her mother initially agreed only to change her mind at the last minute, Carlo erupted. ‘On that occasion, I really understood how deeply my father loathed my mother,’ said Denise. ‘He insulted her in front of me and said that for my entire life, my mother had made all the decisions for me and that she still did. He couldn’t stand that. It was intolerable. He couldn’t allow my mother to decide whether or not I spent time with him.’ Marisa, who overheard, took Denise aside after Carlo left. ‘He really wants her dead,’ said Marisa. ‘He truly hates her.’

  Towards the end of summer, however, Lea began to think that Carlo might be softening. In September 2009, she asked to meet him and Carlo came to the house. Denise was there. ‘They were talking for more than an hour, just the two of them,’ said Denise. ‘At one point, I couldn’t see them anywhere and I got scared. But when I looked out from the balcony, they were in the garden under a tree, just talking. They waved at me.’ Lea announced that she and Carlo were going for a drive to Botricello, a small holiday town built around a medieval castle on the coast where they used to go as teenagers. It was already 11 p.m. and she and Carlo didn’t return until 4 a.m. When Denise asked Lea the next morning what her parents had been talking about for so long, Lea smiled coyly and said: ‘You know, old times. Mind your own business.’

  It might seem strange to others, said Denise, but she believed her parents had loved each other once. Now she began to imagine that they would again. A lot of their conversation that night had been about where Denise should go to university. Lea favoured Catanzaro while Carlo was pushing for Milan. Lea was hurt that Denise might want to leave her. ‘After all she had been through, after everything she had done for me, she said I was being ungrateful,’ said Denise. Still, it was everyday parent chat. Meanwhile, Denise and Carlo were getting used to each other’s company again. ‘We spoke on the phone, we went to the beach, we ate dinner together,’ said Denise.

  On 19 November 2009, Lea and Denise travelled to Florence. Lea was due in court accused of a minor assault from years earlier when she had slapped a teenage girl in the street after the girl accused Denise of trying to steal her boyfriend. The case was to be heard on 20 November. Enza had agreed to represent Lea. The day before, Denise and Lea went window-shopping in the city. Denise spotted a sweatshirt she liked, but she knew Lea wouldn’t have the money for it and worried she would sell the gold necklace and bracelet Carlo had given her to buy it. So Denise called her father. Carlo said new clothes were no problem and suggested that after the case, she and Lea come to Milan and they all go shopping together.

  When Enza heard about the plan, she told Lea, ‘It’s a bad idea. Carlo’s trying to kill you.’ But, said Enza, ‘Lea was a strong woman and she had decided.’ Lea told her lawyer, ‘It’s Milan, not Calabria. A big city. People everywhere. I’ll never be alone and Denise will be with me. Nothing’s going to happen. He wouldn’t be able to organise anything in time.’

  On the day of the court case, Enza managed to negotiate an official reprimand for her client. Hours later, Lea and Denise caught the evening train to Milan. Watching them leave, Enza decided she would try to stop them one last time. ‘Turn around,’ she texted her client. ‘Get off at Piacenza. Libera has a place for you where you can be safe.’

  As they neared Milan, Lea sent her reply. ‘Thank you, my lawyer, thank you. But Denise and I have to try to make a life for ourselves. God bless you. God bless us all.’2

  ‘And that was the last I heard from her,’ said Enza.

  ACT TWO

  REBELLION IN ROSARNO

  IX

  Two hours before dawn on the first Sunday of 2010, the rattle of a scooter could be heard curling up through the empty streets of Reggio Calabria. Two figures leaned into the windscreen to protect themselves from the January cold. In front was a slim man in a dark jacket and tight jeans, a dark helmet pushed down over his long hair. Behind him sat a plumper man in jeans and a dark jacket. Despite the speed at which the pair were racing across the icy cobbles, the second man declined to hold on to his companion. Instead in his arms he cradled a bulky canvas bag, almost as though it were a baby.

  After following the shoreline for a few minutes, the pair turned away from the sea and climbed up steeply towards the centre of the old town. They passed the floodlit walls of the Castello Aragonese, built by the Normans and expanded by the Spanish in the fifteenth century. When the pair reached the castle gardens, the driver executed a wide about-turn, eased off the throttle and allowed the bike to coast gently over the cobbles back down the hill. After a few yards, he pulled up in front of an imposing metal gate, holding the bike on the slope with his legs and keeping his hand on the accelerator. Behind him the man bent over his bag and pulled his jacket around him as thoug
h he were lighting a cigarette. Suddenly there was a spark. Flames licked up out of the bag. The man jumped off the bike and ran towards the gate, swinging the burning bag high and wide like a lasso to avoid the flames. The driver revved the engine and let the bike roll slowly down the hill. The man dropped the bag, ran back to the moving bike, jumped on and the pair roared off. Seconds later, the bag exploded.1

  In the pre-dawn calm, the noise of the blast rolled out across the Straits of Messina like thunder. The noise woke the carabinieri barracks where Alessandra had her apartment. A few hours later at a press conference, a carabinieri commander described the bomb as the kind of crude device – a stick of dynamite attached to a ten-kilo gas cylinder – familiar to anyone with experience of southern Italy’s protection rackets. Aside from some damage to a gate and a railing, there was little physical harm done.

  That didn’t mean the attack wasn’t serious. The mayor of Reggio, the chamber of commerce, the president and vice-president of the Italian parliament, even Italy’s head of state, President Giorgio Napolitano, sent the Reggio authorities messages of solidarity. Italy had declared war on the world’s most powerful mafia. The mafiosi had started the New Year by signalling their intention to strike back.

  The stakes in this new fight had escalated radically over the previous few months. Thanks to years of surveillance, for the first time the Italian state now had a comprehensive picture of the ’Ndrangheta’s structure and its cocaine business. The prosecutors were now confronting the full scale of the mission they had undertaken. Their priority was also clear: Calabria’s west coast, the heart of the cocaine business. That explained the bomb’s target, detonated outside Reggio’s courthouse, the seat of justice in Calabria for as long as the ’Ndrangheta had existed and, in 2010, the offices of Calabria’s attorney general, who oversaw the confiscation of mafia assets. If the ’Ndrangheta liked to send messages, this was the group at its most unequivocal: Calabria’s prosecutors should end their campaign or face violent consequences. But as Alessandra and her colleagues absorbed the implications of the warning, they drew a second conclusion, too. To provoke this kind of reaction, their crackdown must be having an effect.

  There followed other signs that the west coast ’Ndrangheta was feeling the pressure. A week after the bomb, Rosarno erupted in three days of riots. The violence began when a group of ’Ndrangheta teenagers, apparently bored and looking for kicks, fired an airgun into the tented camp behind Gioia Tauro port where more than a thousand West African migrants lived. Hundreds of Africans marched into Rosarno, protesting, burning several cars and fighting with the police. Rosarno hoodlums armed with iron bars set up roadblocks. At least two Rosarno men tried to run over migrants in the street. More than twenty Africans were injured, many of them beaten and three shot. Eventually, riot police descended. On the orders of the interior minister, they expelled every last African – a total of 1,200 people – from the town. Rosarno and its people, said Minister Roberto Maroni, were the unfortunate victims of ‘too much tolerance’.

  But if the Rosarno picciotti considered such unashamed racism a victory, they were mistaken. Led by Pope Benedict XVI, the violence drew condemnation and outrage from across Italy. One opposition leader, Luigi Manconi, said that by expelling the Africans, the authorities had been complicit in creating ‘the whitest town in the world’. The media attention also exposed the wretched hypocrisy of the ’Ndrangheta – who, it turned out, were attacking the very people they had brought to Rosarno to work as fruit pickers for as little as €3 a day. The spotlight on Rosarno also gave Alessandra’s office an opportunity to score a very public victory. A day after the violence died down, with the eyes of Italy still on Rosarno, her office arrested seventeen suspected members of the Bellocco clan, the Pesces’ main rival in the city, and seized assets of several million euros.2

  Almost straight away, the ’Ndrangheta tripped up again. Nine days later in Reggio, hours before President Napolitano arrived to reinforce his support of Calabria’s authorities in their new war, a telephone tip-off led carabinieri to a stolen car parked close to his route. The vehicle contained two bombs and two pistols. But what was intended to intimidate quickly managed to do precisely the opposite. The tipster was arrested almost immediately and charged with mafia association. Napolitano’s visit went ahead, though now he was able to strike a courageous profile by defying the mafia’s threat to his life and, on ’Ndrangheta turf, hailing a ‘turning point’ in the fight against them. As a final insult, by the end of the month Reggio Calabria had been selected as the location for a new Italian agency tasked with seizing mafia businesses and transforming them into Libera shops or offices for policemen, magistrates or the tax department. As fightbacks went, it felt uncomfortably like humiliation.3

  But even if the ’Ndrangheta had lost the opening exchanges in its war with the state, the fight was far from over. Alessandra, in particular, was convinced that a crucial weakness in the state’s strategy meant it could never win. Pignatone and Prestipino were free thinkers who had no trouble imagining a woman ’Ndranghetista could be as much use as a woman prosecutor. But among the rank-and-file, ‘Italian prosecutors were still not investigating women,’ said Alessandra. Many rejected outright the idea that women could serve justice in any way at all. (‘I mean, really, women do have eyes and ears,’ said Alessandra.) They also refused to see as anything other than exceptional what Alessandra was observing in Rosarno: that by early 2010, ’Ndrangheta men had realised their women were being left alone by the authorities and were starting to give them power. Cerreti described joining their team as finally finding ‘fertile territory’ for her ideas. Across the province, at least two women had become clan bosses. Nevertheless, said Alessandra, ‘it was still very hard for us to make our colleagues believe that women had a role.’

  Alessandra understood that if many prosecutors and carabinieri were barely able to conceive of a woman ’Ndranghetista, then they would dismiss out of hand the idea of an ’Ndrangheta woman with the strength to rebel against her men. ‘This was another form of the same prejudice,’ she said. ‘The belief that no one, and certainly not a woman, is going to talk about their own family, let alone testify and accuse their own family.’ She conceded that it would take unusual bravery. But to write it off as impossible was to guarantee it never happened. ‘When justice shows to people that it is strong and that the state is present and can help you if you want to collaborate,’ she said, ‘then you find collaborators appear.’

  At heart, thought Alessandra, this was a failure of perception. Whenever many of her male colleagues saw women and children, they saw family and nothing else. Most seemed incapable of identifying what a family might represent in a place like Rosarno or Pagliarelle: a living, breathing criminal organism. ‘The entire structure, the family nature of it, makes it hard for many people even to recognise it as a problem,’ she said. Once again, Alessandra was confronting the ’Ndrangheta’s astute understanding of family. ‘The part played by family, and by women, makes them so difficult to track.’ Sometimes she felt that she, Pignatone and Prestipino were the only ones who could see what was right in front of them: women who were simultaneously mothers, mafiosi and potential state witnesses. That had been the problem with Lea Garofalo. The state had seen her too simplistically, as a battered wife, a troubled witness, a victim. Only one prosecutor, Sandro Dolce, had grasped everything that Lea was and everything that she offered the state. What Alessandra needed was another ’Ndrangheta mother to change her colleagues’ minds.

  As it happened, she would have two.

  According to the precepts of clan rivalry, Giuseppina Pesce, thirty-one, and Maria Concetta Cacciola, thirty, were unlikely friends.4 The Pesces led the most powerful clan in Rosarno, which had ruled the town since the 1920s. The Cacciolas were muscle for their rivals, the Belloccos. The Pesces and the Belloccos sometimes cooperated in business and on occasion their children even married each other. But as the Pesces climbed ever higher up the ’Ndrangheta’s new v
ertical hierarchy, the Bellocco name meant ever less – and the Belloccos hated the Pesces for that.

  Giuseppina and Concetta also weren’t alike. Giuseppina was tough, an ’Ndrangheta wife who had pushed the men in her family to let her become an ’Ndranghetista in her own right. There were limits on what a woman could do in the organisation. Murder and violence were out, and any involvement in extortion, corruption or drug smuggling was confined to bookkeeping and passing messages between the men. But Giuseppina was dismissive of any man who imagined her to be less than him and communicated her adamant equality in a tomboyish appearance. She wore bulky woollen V-necks over cheap and baggy worker’s shirts. She had no time for make-up. Her dirt-brown hair was cut in a scruffy parting at whatever length kept it out of the way, and from under it her brown eyes would stare out at the world with a blankness that conveyed an intimidating intimacy with brutality.

  Concetta could not have been more different. She took no part in the men’s business, and her knowledge of it extended little beyond gossip about where the bunkers were and who had killed who. Unlike the Pesces, the Cacciola men didn’t accept even a hint of independence or assertion in their women, and they kept Concetta confined to the house for weeks at a time. On the rare occasions she was allowed out, Concetta’s own private rebellion was to emerge immaculately dressed, as though she were a busy socialite. She favoured tight jeans with unbuttoned blouses that hung loosely across her perfumed chest. Her jet-black hair was styled in a long undulating curl that swept across her forehead, nestled over her ears and executed a jaunty ski-jump on her shoulders. She plucked her eyebrows, waxed her legs, painted her fingernails and toes and matched dark shades of plum and scarlet on her lips with heavy mascara and a brush of mauve over her eyes. If Giuseppina’s appearance implied equivalence to any man, Concetta presented herself as nothing like them.