by Alex Perry
The next day, 25 June, Giuseppina wrote again:
I urgently renew my invitation to be heard by you. I want to resume the collaboration that was underway and that I interrupted for the reasons you know. I am willing to finish what I started. I beg you to make it happen before my transfer hearing on 12 July – for obvious reasons concerning my personal safety and the safety of those closest to me. I repeat my apologies for my hesitancy. I am keenly aware that I caused great difficulties and wasted so much time.
The turnaround was amazing, thought Alessandra. The prosecutors had done nothing but let the ’Ndrangheta’s internal dynamics play out. The clan’s threats alone had been enough to propel Giuseppina back to the state. Alessandra’s instinct was to give it longer. But Giuseppina was right to be afraid of the 12 July hearing. After it, she would likely be returned to the general prison population, and that would be all the opportunity the Pesces needed. Alessandra waited a few more days, then sent word that she and Prestipino would see Giuseppina again on 7 July.
At the meeting Alessandra was intially defensive. She adopted the same manner she had affected when she first met Giuseppina nine months before: cold and analytical, betraying little empathy or warmth. After all she had done for Giuseppina, she demanded to know how Giuseppina could accuse her of threatening her children. And how could she say that Alessandra had forced her to collaborate?
Giuseppina explained that her ‘retraction’, published in Calabria Ora, had been written for her by the Palaias’ lawyer. ‘I was opposed to this letter,’ she said. ‘But they said this thing had to come out, had to be made public. Everyone had to know that I was not an informant. This would be proof that I wasn’t collaborating any more. They pressured me again and again to write this letter.’
It sounded convincing, but Alessandra wasn’t done. How could the state trust Giuseppina again, she asked. How could it know if she was genuine this time? The interview went on for hours, with Alessandra demanding Giuseppina explain herself and Giuseppina begging for Alessandra to trust her again. In addition to repairing her credibility as a witness, it seemed just as important to Giuseppina that she mend her friendship with Alessandra. ‘You have to trust me again,’ said Giuseppina.
‘You have to earn it,’ replied Alessandra.
After several hours of talking, however, Alessandra was satisfied. She’d had to make sure but she was now certain that Giuseppina’s intention to collaborate once more was authentic. Trust between pentita and prosecutor was restored.
Giuseppe Madia, the Palaias’ lawyer, passed word of his dismissal back to Rosarno. To the family, that could only mean one thing: Giuseppina was planning to testify again. Even when the clan had tried to appear gentle and understanding, Alessandra had always felt it straining to contain its crueller instincts. Now it unleashed them. Leading the campaign against Giuseppina was her own mother, Angela Ferraro.
Reading transcripts of bugs placed in the jail where Giuseppina’s mother and sister were being held, Alessandra realised Ferraro had stopped referring to her daughter by name. Now Giuseppina was simply ‘the collaborator’ or ‘the traitor’ or ‘that whore’. Like Concetta’s father, Ferraro seemed most infuriated by her loss of prestige among other inmates. She set about revenging herself by trying to turn Giuseppina’s children against her. On 13 July, the day after Giuseppina’s resumption of cooperation was confirmed in open court, Ferraro and Marina were visited together in jail by Sara, the third daughter in the family, who was mentally disabled, and Giuseppina’s two daughters, Angela and Elisea.
Ferraro quickly told them all to cut all ties with Giuseppina. ‘She’s dead to the family,’ she said. ‘If she calls, you don’t answer. If you happen to pick up the phone, you have to tell her: “You’re dead to me. You don’t exist any more. For not doing your time in prison, you are the most contemptible, the most despicable.”’ Ferraro was working herself into a fury, taking out all her frustration and rage on her grandchildren. ‘Tell her!’ she shouted. ‘Tell her that her mother told you to pretend that she had died! She doesn’t give a fuck about who’s now in jail! She doesn’t care about anything! When the phone rings, you tell her that her mother told you to forget you even have a mother! Your mother is gone!’
Sara, crying once more, started hitting her hand on the table between them. ‘She is my sister,’ she said. ‘You’re bad, and I don’t care [what you say]. She is still my sister. She is still my sister.’
Angela said she too had received a letter from her mother, asking for her forgiveness and saying that she wanted her children to join her but that they should ‘do what their heart tells them’. Ferraro looked at her granddaughter. Five-year-old Elisea was crying too. ‘From now on, it’s you, me and the family. Don’t think that I’m not suffering in here. But I’m in here because of my love of family. You know what that means, love of family? It means loving you, loving my grandchildren, loving my children. My other daughter does not want to be in my heart. But that was her choice, not mine. I could never do what she did. Such a disappointment. But you should all go to the beach. Have fun. Mama is just fine here. It’s just that I miss you. I miss you all. I miss my home. Let’s all hug. We are a nice family. We love each other, no?’
Sara, by now crying as well, started hitting the table between them with her hand. ‘I don’t care about any of this,’ she said. ‘She’s still my sister. She’s still my sister.’
Marina interrupted angrily. ‘You have to think of the rest of the family,’ she told Sara. ‘We’ve all cut her off. You have to turn your back on her. You have to be strong. Show me that strength in you that I love so much. Turn away from her.’
Reading the transcripts, Alessandra was astonished by the two women’s will. ‘They were ferocious. Brutal. The way they gave orders to the others. “You must separate from your mother, your sister. You must forget her. She has betrayed the family.”’ Among the adults, she said, only Giuseppina’s disabled sister seemed to have a soul.
Back in Rosarno, the clan began tormenting Giuseppina’s children in earnest. Angela, Gaetano and Elisea were forced to break all contact with their mother. Their Aunt Angela threw them out. Forced to live with Giuseppina’s father-in-law, Gaetano Palaia, they found that the family that had once offered their mother thousands of euros for lawyers and rent now claimed there was no money to feed them. They often went without. Elisea began to lose weight and developed leg cramps and insomnia. Gaetano regularly beat the grandson named after him with a belt. One day an uncle took the boy to a games arcade where he was hustled into a back room and set upon by four other older kids, including a seventeen-year-old cousin, as his uncle watched.
Angela was forced to play a part in torturing her mother. On 18 July, a bundle of letters arrived for Giuseppina. In them her father-in-law accused her of being too cowardly for prison. Her husband Rocco told her, ‘the road you’re taking will not be as easy as you think …’ Aunt Angela wrote that ‘after everything we talked about, you were just lying. How happy we would all be if you’d only known your place.’ Finally, there was a letter from her eldest daughter:
Hello, dear mother. How are you? I hope you’re fine, though I believe you’re not … Don’t think that I’m not angry with you. You’re wrong. I’ve got it in for you, Mama. I am mad at you for what you’re doing. I know you’re missing us and we’re missing you, but does it make any sense to make the same mistake twice? … And now you can’t change back again. This is your choice, and I respect it, but you need to know that you are doing this only for you, not for us. You are just hurting us by taking us away from everyone else, as well you know … You know that I will not come [to live with you]. You gave me the chance to choose and I did. I don’t want to live that life again. I would have liked to be with you because I love you, and because you are my mum, yet I cannot do this. Making this choice twice … you’re spitting in the pot you eat from. I’m not telling this to be mean. I’m telling you this so you understand this is wrong. I don’t know what the
y promised you and honestly I don’t care. I wish to ask you a question, and for you to think it through. Is what they promised you more important? Or is your family, and our happiness, more important to you? If it is our happiness, and your family, then don’t take this step. If you are more interested in what they promised, then it means that you are thinking only of yourself. I can’t take it any more, believe me. You ruined my life and I am only fifteen. Instead of having fun, I have to have this shitty life, only because of you, and you know it, Mama … Just leave me alone, please. I’m leaving you mum. Sorry for these words but this is what I think and what I want. I love you mum, but you should know that what you are doing is wrong.
The letter nearly broke Giuseppina’s heart. It might have shattered it entirely but for one phrase: ‘spitting in the pot you eat from’. That didn’t sound like Angela or any fifteen-year-old Giuseppina knew. It was too old-fashioned. Too ’Ndrangheta.
The following week, a second letter came from Aunt Angela, urging Giuseppina to acknowledge that her son, Gaetano, was lost to her. From now on, he would be brought up by her in-laws. ‘He’s terrified,’ she said. ‘I asked him about visiting you and he says he doesn’t want to. He wants to stay here. I think moving him away again would just be more trauma. He would suffer even more. Try to think of your boy’s happiness.’
Four days later, on 27 July 2011, there was a second, short note from Angela. She was writing in secret, she said. Her mother should forget her earlier letter. The words had been dictated by her uncles.
It was not my doing. It wasn’t what was in my heart.
Mum, I want to be with you.
I do not want to live with anyone else.
You’re my mum, and without you, I am nothing.
Whatever choice you make, I will follow.
It was what Giuseppina desperately needed to hear. It was all she needed, too.4
XVII
Mafia prosecutors are realists, not optimists.1 Still, there was no doubt that the spring and summer of 2011 were a heady few months for Calabria’s Anti-Mafia Directorate. Giuseppina Pesce’s testimony had dealt the ’Ndrangheta a devastating blow and, though the clan had fought back, Alessandra’s intervention had saved both Giuseppina’s life and the case. Hundreds of ’Ndranghetisti were in jail. Hundreds of millions of euros in assets had been confiscated. Giuseppina’s example had then inspired a second ’Ndrangheta mother, Maria Concetta Cacciola. The panicked reaction in Rosarno seemed to indicate that the clans feared being undone by an avalanche of feminine assertion.
Moreover, any west coast ’Ndranghetista tempted to dismiss Giuseppina and Concetta as anomalies only had to look over the mountains to the east to see how women were humbling the ’Ndrangheta there as well. After Carmine’s arrest, Denise Cosco had left Pagliarelle, moved to a safe house in Turin run by Libera, reunited with Libera lawyer Enza Rando and formally re-entered state witness protection. Initially, said Enza, Denise was ‘destroyed’ by the knowledge that she had fallen in love with one of her mother’s killers. But in protection, Denise slowly began to remake herself. She held on to the memory of what Carmine and she once shared. ‘Fake love can still be true love,’ she insisted. But a memory was all it would ever be. ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she said. ‘The arrest brought things to an end.’
Denise found new purpose helping prosecutors prepare the case against the Pagliarelle clan. ‘I have no pity,’ she said of Lea’s accused killers in a statement released by Enza on the eve of Carlo Cosco’s trial. ‘I don’t care who is my father or who is my boyfriend. I don’t even know what I feel more: hatred or anger. These people should get life. Or maybe just killed in the street. Until I hear in court that these people will pay for what they did, I have no life.’2 Denise elaborated on her state of mind in an interview with Libera’s information service. ‘I want to live like any other normal twenty-year-old in the town where I was born, with my friends. I am a young woman and I want to be free to study and get a degree in Oriental languages. I don’t want to hide. Only the men and women of the ’Ndrangheta should have to hide away, not justice witnesses. We did our duty. I want to live. I want to love. I want to be free to be happy, for my mother’s sake if nothing else.’3
Denise’s defiance, continuing her mother’s fight even after Lea had been murdered by her father, and giving hours of sworn testimony against the man she loved, attracted the attention of the national press. The city of Milan decided to join Denise in a parallel civil action against her father’s ’ndrina, symbolically uniting Italy’s most progressive city with Italy’s women against Italy’s mafia. When Carlo, his brothers Giuseppe and Vito, and Massimo Sabatino, Rosario Curcio and Carmine Venturino went on trial in Milan on 6 July 2011, the hearing was attended by hundreds of students. They filled the public gallery and held vigils for Lea in the street outside. In opening remarks that resonated with almost every woman in Italy, Enza described Denise as a ‘proud witness’, once forced by the men of her family to live in silence, now reclaiming her ‘freedom to choose her own life’. The case against her father and the other men of the ’Ndrangheta, said Enza, was the ‘start of new hope, and a new life’.
These were giddy times to be an Italian prosecutor, and even an Italian woman. Looking back years later, Alessandra could even remember thinking that they might last.
After her transfer to Bolzano on 22 July 2011, Concetta found herself in another strange town, free but alone. It was seven weeks since she had seen or spoken to her three children. Overwhelmed, suddenly, by an almost physical maternal need, Concetta emailed her twelve-year-old daughter, Tania. ‘And of course, the girl tells her grandmother,’ said Giuseppe Creazzo, the anti-mafia prosecutor who would later investigate the case. ‘And the family use the girl to re-establish contact with Concetta and try to persuade her to come home.’
The carabinieri missed the first call between Concetta and her mother, Anna Rosalba Lazzaro. By the time of the second, on 2 August, Concetta was in Genoa, and the Cacciolas’ plans were well advanced. Concetta had followed Giuseppina’s example when she walked into a carabinieri station. The Cacciolas duly decided to copy the Pesces’ methods to blackmail her into returning to them.
In that call of 2 August, her mother told Concetta that she and her father, Michele Cacciola, would be arriving in Genoa that evening to pick her up. As a witness, rather than a pentita, Concetta was not bound by any restrictions on her movements. Within hours, the carabinieri were listening to a conversation inside the family car as the Cacciolas headed south for Calabria with Concetta in the back seat. Like the Pesces, Concetta’s parents pursued two avenues of persuasion: promising their daughter everything would return to normal if she came home; and insinuating harm to her children if she did not. Unfortunately, Concetta did not have Giuseppina’s steel. Confronted by parental authority, she was soon telling her mother and father everything that she had told the prosecutors.
‘You told them about murders?!’ exclaimed Lazzaro at one point. ‘Oh, the disgrace!’
‘The sacrifices I’ve had to make for you, ’Cetta!’ shouted Michele. ‘How you have dishonoured me!’
Then Michele seemed to remember the plan. ‘Don’t worry. I forgive you,’ he said, trying to sound calm. ‘You can’t wrong family. You’re blood. You’re safe. You’ll see. You’ll say you know nothing. You’ll say everything you said is not true. And in ten days, you’ll be safe and quiet in Rosarno and no one will talk about you any more.’
After a lifetime of abuse from her father, Michele’s uncharacteristic attempt at paternal understanding spooked Concetta. Then Michele revealed he had somehow obtained her phone records. He said he knew about her calls to her boyfriend, Pasquale Improta. That was even more worrying, thought Concetta. How could he possibly forgive that?
When the Cacciolas broke the journey for the night at Lazzaro’s family home in Reggio Emilia, Concetta announced she would go no further and called the carabinieri. The following morning a pair of officers arrived to pick her up a
nd drive her back to Genoa. Michele Cacciola and Rosalba Lazzaro continued on to Calabria. But now they had found a way to reach their daughter, they weren’t about to give up. En route they kept up the pressure in a series of phone calls.
‘’Cetta, listen to me!’ said her mother. ‘You must tell the truth. You must say you knew nothing about what was going on. You have to drop everything.’
Between calls, the carabinieri could hear Concetta’s mother and father discuss a plan to deliver their daughter to an ’Ndrangheta lawyer who would hand her a prepared statement to sign, as the Pesces had done with Giuseppina. It was her mother who, in another call to Concetta, hit on her daughter’s weak spot. ‘Tomorrow morning, you call the lawyer,’ she said. ‘This is how you get what you want. This is how you get me to send you your children.’
Concetta went quiet, and the line went dead. The carabinieri were stunned. Whatever her differences with the ’Ndrangheta, Concetta had always respected family. She was a dutiful daughter and a good mother, and it was her faith in the maternal bond that had persuaded her that she could safely entrust her children to her mother. She had paid dearly for her trust over the years. Now her mother was using it against her, in all likelihood to try to send her to her death. What kind of person would do such a thing? What kind of mother?
