by Alex Perry
Pasquale came to visit for a couple of nights. Staff and guests would later recall how Concetta seemed just as happy striking up conversations with perfect strangers, arriving promptly at meal times in the hope of meeting someone new. She picked up several lone men over the two months she was there. ‘In this new environment, she got to know a lot of men,’ said Giuseppe Creazzo, the prosecutor who would later investigate her case. ‘She made love with a lot of them. It was a way for her to be alive. It was the best way she knew to communicate.’
On 16 June, Alessandra drove up to Sibari and Concetta gave her as much detail as she could on the bunkers. Two days later, Giovanni arrived for a third interview to go over Concetta’s earlier evidence. Concetta identified various ’Ndranghetisti from mugshots that Giovanni brought with him and added details of the murders and protection rackets she had described. When Giovanni asked, Concetta reconfirmed in a written statement that she was willing to leave her three children with their grandmother. ‘I believe they’re in no danger,’ she wrote. ‘I believe my children don’t need the state to protect them.’
Concetta struck Giovanni as ‘more serene and at peace’ than when he had last seen her. Importantly, ‘she was also still determined.’ Unprompted, Concetta went into fine detail about how the Bellocco clan ran their loan-sharking operation. Two brothers of a friend of hers, Rita Stefania Secolo, had borrowed €600,000 from the Belloccos. Two years later, their debt was a million euros. ‘Stefania told me that the Belloccos had threatened to kill her brothers if the money was not repaid,’ said Concetta. ‘They told her they would take an apartment building owned by her family as part payment. They even shot up a shop on the ground floor and told Stefania they would have killed somebody if the gun hadn’t jammed.’ Stefania ended up living on the top floor of the building, above her old apartment, paying rent to the Bellocco extortionists who had moved in below.
Every day Concetta stayed at Colle degli Ulivi was another small adventure. When the formal approval for her witness protection came through in late July, she was moved to Bolzano in the Alps. But when a new man she brought back to her hotel room turned out to be a former convict, her protection officers moved her again, this time to Genoa on Italy’s north-west coast.
If leaving gave Concetta a new sense of peace, it created uproar in Rosarno. ‘Your escape sparked off hell,’ her friend Emanuela Gentile told her, in a call tapped by the carabinieri. ‘Your father really freaked out. Your mother went around yelling “They ruined us,” and was crying and tearing her hair out. Your brother grew a long beard and locked himself far away in a house by the sea out of shame. He never leaves. Now he is the prisoner.’
Alessandra and Giovanni couldn’t help enjoying the ruckus. ‘It was the fact that she was a woman called Cacciola,’ said Giovanni. ‘That was really unacceptable to them. The ’Ndrangheta’s reaction to Giuseppina and Concetta was not proportional to the information they gave us – most of it was hearsay, not a murder confession or anything – but to the ’Ndrangheta it wasn’t about the information. It was the symbolic value of them turning state’s evidence.’
Alessandra took particular pleasure in reading the transcripts from the Cacciola family. The carabinieri had tapped their phones and planted a bug in the family car. You could almost hear the ’Ndrangheta shattering. In one recording, Anna Rosalba Lazzaro, Concetta’s mother, railed about the female carabiniere in Rosarno with whom Concetta had spoken. ‘That officer slut!’ shouted Lazzaro. ‘She has a thing going with the judges! She’s a whore!’ Another time, Alessandra listened as Concetta’s mother tried to wrap her mind around her daughter’s actions. ‘She saw nothing in her life,’ said Lazzaro. ‘But she never saw the whole truth. She’s always been like that. She eloped at thirteen! She’s never seen anything in her life, poor devil. And they took advantage of that, those unworthy bastards! Bastards! It’s so easy just to talk. You just say your brother told you this, your father told you that, your mother’s cunt told you something else.’ Lazzaro suspected that one day Concetta would send for her children. She found the thought unbearable. ‘She wants to tear them away from their roots and take them where? How is she going to provide for them? She can’t even sweep the floor! No! She must come back home. The carabinieri don’t have any actual evidence. In a week nobody in Rosarno will ever speak about these things again.’
Michele Cacciola, Concetta’s father, was just as disturbed. At home, he would unleash tirades that could last an hour. ‘This unworthy piece of shit!’ he shouted in one episode recorded on 11 July 2011. ‘I worked twenty years for her!’ Michele seemed most upset at his loss of standing. ‘I had [such] a family that they [the people of Rosarno] were all jealous of me,’ he yelled. ‘I enjoyed watching my grandchildren grow. Nobody was happier than me!’ Michele saw Concetta’s departure not as her bid for a new life but an attack on him by the state. ‘These contemptible people, these unworthy bastards, to take a daughter from her father! How is this the law to come at me and take my daughter? Did I start a fight with them? Do they even know who I am? If they have something on me, then arrest me! They are taking daughters away from their fathers!’ Not that talking to a mere woman would serve the state’s purpose, said Michele. ‘They wait for her to disgrace me. But what can she know about me? She knows nothing. What can a woman know in my house? You think I told my daughter about my fucking business? She knows nothing!’
These ’Ndrangheta men, thought Alessandra. Treat their women like dirt. But one walks away from them, and they fall all to pieces.
XVI
As soon as Alessandra was sure Concetta was safe, she switched her focus back to Giuseppina. Since she had stopped cooperating with the judiciary, Giuseppina’s options had steadily narrowed. The ’Ndrangheta plan to return her to Rosarno was well under way. Her family had rented her an apartment in Vibo Marina, a small seaside town north of Rosarno, and a judicial order transferring Giuseppina’s house arrest there was being drawn up. Alessandra suspected the clan would kill her almost as soon as she arrived. In May, the witness protection service ordered Giuseppina’s ejection from the programme as an uncooperative witness. There would be a delay before the command was implemented. But as May turned to June, Alessandra reckoned she had days to save her witness.
The order for Giuseppina’s transfer to Vibo Marina was issued in early June. On the morning it was due to be executed, 10 June, Alessandra received a call from the protection officers at Giuseppina’s safe house outside Aprilia. Giuseppina, her boyfriend Domenico Costantino and her daughter Angela had gone for a day in Lucca in Tuscany, four hours to the north, leaving her younger children, Gaetano and Elisea, with a babysitter. The officers added that Angela had been threatening for a while to sneak out of the house to go and see a friend in Lucca. When Domenico had driven up from Rosarno a few days earlier, Giuseppina had seized the chance to make her daughter happy one final time. ‘I was living those days as if they were the last I would ever spend with my children,’ she said later.
It was the opportunity Alessandra needed. As a collaborator, even one who had stopped talking, Giuseppina enjoyed a measure of freedom. But she still needed permission to travel long distance. By the letter of the law, a trip to Lucca violated the conditions of her house arrest. Alessandra raced to the carabinieri surveillance office in Reggio. En route, she called the Lazio carabinieri’s mafia surveillance team. Alessandra told the officer on duty that she needed the carabinieri to intercept Giuseppina on the highway from Lucca back to Aprilia. If Giuseppina could be caught in the act of flouting the conditions of her detention, then Alessandra could have her summarily sent back to prison. A jail cell, explained Alessandra, was now the only place Giuseppina could be sure of staying alive. But they had to catch her first.
No problem, the carabinieri officer replied. What car were they looking for?
Alessandra said that she didn’t know the make of the car, its colour or its licence plate, or the route it was taking.
That wasn’t much to go
on, replied the officer.
Alessandra said that was precisely why she was asking for a hundred carabinieri to set up as many checkpoints as possible along the various routes from Lucca. Somewhere in the four hundred kilometres between Lucca and Aprilia would be a car of some description in which would be three people – Giuseppina, her boyfriend and her fifteen-year-old daughter.
The officer said he would call her back. Minutes later the duty officer in charge of all Lazio’s carabinieri, a captain, was on the line. ‘We wouldn’t use a hundred men even for Osama bin Laden,’ he said.
Alessandra insisted. This one pentita could take down the entire Rosarno ’Ndrangheta, she said. ‘And unless we arrest her right now,’ Alessandra said, ‘Giuseppina’s going to be murdered.’ Alessandra told the captain she had something that would help: Giuseppina’s mobile, whose GPS signal the carabinieri could use to track her. According to the screen Alessandra was watching at that moment in Reggio, Giuseppina had just left Lucca and was now heading to Florence. That meant she would likely be taking the main toll road all the way to Aprilia. The journey would take three and a half hours. That was how long the captain had to save the most important witness ever to testify against the ’Ndrangheta.
The captain said he would try. Within minutes, his men were setting up roadblocks and checkpoints. ‘We were following her mobile in real time on the screen,’ said Alessandra, ‘and I was in constant contact with the carabinieri captain and his officers on the ground.’ But as Alessandra watched, the dot on the screen approached the first roadblock, then sailed through. Half an hour later, it approached a second, then kept on going as before. Alessandra phoned the captain. ‘What the fuck is going on?!’ she yelled. ‘How come they’re getting through?’
The captain, unaccustomed to being shouted at by a southerner, and a woman, told Alessandra that his men were doing their best. She had given them almost nothing to go on. But his men would do what they could.
By now Alessandra was also phoning officers at individual checkpoints, asking them to keep the line open so she could listen to what was happening. One by one, they all reported seeing nothing. The dot on the screen kept moving south. As Giuseppina floated through roadblock after roadblock, the carabinieri captain’s attitude changed from defensiveness to despair. When the screen showed Giuseppina approaching Aprilia, the captain told Alessandra it was over. ‘We’ve lost her,’ he said. ‘We’ve lost her.’
‘You have to block ALL the traffic on the highway!’ shouted Alessandra. ‘All of it! Do it right now!’
The captain protested. The screen had Giuseppina at three kilometres away. Only one checkpoint lay between her and the safe house. Alessandra was suggesting that he block one of the main arterial roads in all of Italy when it was already too late. ‘She’s gone, she’s gone,’ he said.
‘You do NOT give up, Captain!’ shouted Alessandra. ‘You block the entire highway, you do it right now and you keep this line open! Do it, Captain!’
The officer reluctantly agreed. Alessandra went back to checking the screen. There was a few moments of silence. Then the captain’s voice came back on the line.
‘HOLD ON!’ he shouted.
‘Hold on …’
‘There’s a car …’
‘With a WOMAN!’
Alessandra heard a commotion. She guessed several squad cars had encircled the suspect vehicle and brought it to a stop.
There was a moment of silence.
Then a woman’s voice shouted: ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! My name is Giuseppina Pesce!’1
Regulations required Giuseppina be kept in isolation for three weeks. Alessandra wasn’t unhappy that Giuseppina would have to stew for a while. She had been desperate to save Giuseppina but that didn’t mean she was pleased with her. She had put her faith in this ’Ndranghetista and the ’Ndranghetista had reverted to type: shutting down, submitting to The Family, resuming omertà. Giuseppina had ground to make up with Alessandra. She needed to know it.
Of course, it was also possible that Giuseppina wouldn’t see her rescue as anything of the sort. There was the manner of her capture: men with guns drawn, screaming at her to lie face down on the ground. And since Giuseppina was back in jail, the authorities had had no choice but to separate her from her children once more and send them back to the Palaias in Rosarno. After all the risks she had taken and the torment she had endured, precisely nothing had changed for Giuseppina. She could be forgiven for questioning the point of it all.
Alessandra was counting on the transformation she thought she had discerned in Giuseppina. When she had first arrested Giuseppina in Rosarno a year earlier, the ’Ndranghetista had been defined by the men in her life: daughter to a criminal father, wife to a violent husband, obedient servant to violent and criminal men of honour. Even Giuseppina’s identity as a mother had been defined by the men. Though she loved Angela, Gaetano and Elisea, she had also accepted that her role, however repugnant, was to prepare them for the ’Ndrangheta.
But in the last year, Giuseppina had broken with all of that. She had become the director of her own life. She had reclaimed her freedom. She had retrieved her children. She had even chosen her own lover. Above all, she had recovered herself – and there was no giving herself away again. She had not, as the Pesce men told reporters, acted as a sick, weak woman. She had not been used by Alessandra. Just the opposite. The first time she went to prison, she had been cowed and terrified and had tried to kill herself within days. Now, back in a cell and away from her children once more, she was calm and in control. A jail cell had a way of stripping everything away. Being reunited with her children was the only thing that mattered, and Giuseppina knew what she had to do to achieve that.
As Alessandra bided her time, she monitored Giuseppina’s correspondence. Dispatches arrived every day from Aunt Angela, Giuseppina’s mother Angela Ferraro, her sister Marina, her father Salvatore, even her husband Rocco Palaia. Mostly her family congratulated her on ending her cooperation and described the new life that they had prepared for her in Calabria. But by now, Alessandra thought she knew Giuseppina well enough to hope that she wouldn’t believe a word. Not that her husband forgave her, not that the Palaias would take good care of her son, not that anything could ever go back to how it was. The likelihood was that the ’Ndrangheta would try to turn her children against her and probably even persuade her son to kill her. Alessandra felt that by insisting on the pretence, the clan was overplaying its hand. Moreover, as Alessandra saw it, by attempting to give Giuseppina no choice, they were offering her no alternative but to reject them. The only way for Giuseppina to save her children was to stay alive and look after them – and the only way to do that was to re-enter witness protection and take her children with her. There was every chance, thought Alessandra, that her family’s letters would have the opposite effect to what was intended.
The letters Giuseppina received from Rocco, laced with sarcasm and suppressed fury, were especially useful. ‘My dear tourist,’ he began in a letter dated 15 June:
I hope you are in as good health as I. I thought you were allergic to jail but I see I was wrong. I told you many times to stay in your own place, in your own shoes. But you walked off alone for a holiday in Lucca. Who are these relatives in Lucca that I do not know? I’m not angry with you so much, but with that bastard Mimmo [Costantino], who took you there. What was he doing there? Tell me.
Rocco wrote that he feared his children were suffering. He couldn’t understand why she was in Lucca when she was meant to be in Vibo Marina. So much of what had happened was confusing to him, he wrote. ‘If [only] you were in your place at this time. But you are out.’ Still, he had advice for Giuseppina on how to set things right:
The first thing you need to do is to write to your father and explain the situation. How come you were with Mimmo? I want to know as well. After that, if you leave protection, good. If not, I’ll see you on July 12th. We can still return to being a normal family, as we were before. I hug you and
urgently await your news and explanations. I have forgiven you many times. I hope this is the last.
On 24 June, Rocco wrote again. ‘My dearest love (if I can call you that),’ he began. He then described a prison visit from his brother, Gianluca Palaia, and their daughters Angela (‘my princess who fell from the clouds’) and Elisea. He assured Giuseppina that, as a responsible parent, he would make sure the children had money for clothes. ‘It doesn’t matter that you abandoned me like you did. Let’s leave our arguments until we’re both out. Even then, we can pretend it never happened.’
He added that he had to tell her about her friend Maria Concetta Cacciola:
Do you remember ’Cetta? Who lives near the mini-market? Her husband is also in prison and she had an affair, possibly with a cop – something she should rightly be killed for. Anyway, when she realised her family had found out, what did she do? She called the police and entered witness protection – and in the family car she left a note saying she was ‘going with her friend, Giusy’. They say she’s making statements to the authorities now. She really did it all.
Your situation, of course, is very different. Everyone’s forgiven you for what you did. Me most of all. But, still, I wondered if this put you in mind of anyone?
‘It was typical mafia style, disguising a threat,’ said Alessandra after she read the letter. ‘“Don’t worry. You didn’t do what Maria Concetta Cacciola did, so nothing can happen to you.” Which is exactly the opposite of what he meant.’2 Alessandra sent the letter on its way. When she received a letter from Giuseppina dated the same day, she knew Rocco’s letter had hit its mark.
I am writing to tell you a few things that I feel I have to tell you, and I really hope from the bottom of my heart that you can hear me. After the last time we met, a lot has happened. All that publicity in the media, and all the accusations, and everything that came after. I would love to have the opportunity to explain what happened to you, especially to you, but also to the entire prosecutors’ office. This morning I fired the lawyer, Giuseppe Madia, and am currently represented by the lawyer Valeria Maffei. It is my intention, if you are still interested, to resume the path of collaboration. I hope I can regain your trust. Sorry, again, for what happened. I hope I have a chance to apologise in person.3
