by Alex Perry
Denise had testified against a father who had murdered her mother and ordered her own death. By staying true to Lea, she had broken not just with omertà but with her upbringing, her family and all Calabria. What her mother had started, she had finished. She was only twenty years old. She deserved the widest possible admiration.
When Alessandra considered it over the next few months, however, Carlo’s conviction felt anticlimactic. Going to jail, even for life, was something an ’Ndrangheta boss like Carlo Cosco accepted as the price of power. Even if the state had punished him, he had punished Lea for her disloyalty. The journalists writing about the case might focus on his sentence but their stories couldn’t help send the message that if you crossed the ’Ndrangheta or Carlo Cosco, you died.
And, of course, the way the ’Ndrangheta worked, Carlo might be in prison, but his stature inside the organisation had risen. In the ’Ndrangheta’s view, he had done the righteous and honourable thing by killing his unfaithful turncoat wife. He and his ’ndrina had shown discipline in court. They hadn’t talked. They’d barely recognised the court’s authority. They even managed to torture Denise further by refusing to say how and where Lea had died or what they had done with her body. Carlo had been tested over and again and he had remained steadfast. In the ’Ndrangheta’s eyes, he was already a santista, literally sanctified. Now he would be recognised as one of the biggest bosses in Italy, free to expand his empire from prison and plan for the day when he settled his score with Denise, just as he had done with her mother. Carlo was unshaken. The ’Ndrangheta endured.
Barely three months after Carlo’s conviction, however, came news that his organisation had been smashed. At 9 a.m. on 21 June 2012, seventy policemen in riot gear descended on il fortino delle cosche at No. 6 Viale Montello. Breaking down doors, they evicted two hundred residents, including several ’Ndrangheta families and more than fifty Chinese and African immigrant families. In two hours, the mafia’s forty-year occupation of one of Milan’s most historic buildings was over. Carlo’s base of operations was destroyed.3
Behind closed doors, other cracks were appearing in Carlo’s empire. During their investigation of Lea’s death, the carabinieri had discovered a secret diary that Lea had kept throughout her early years with Carlo. ‘I didn’t know it existed,’ said Denise. ‘She kept it when she was pregnant with me. Reading it, I learned she was very much in love with my father.’ Her mother’s words gave Denise a new perspective. ‘Our family’s is a story about courage,’ she said, ‘but more than that it’s about love. Everything began with the love my mother had for my father.’ To Denise, the way her mother wrote about her father, Carlo must have returned that love. ‘He had other motives for marrying her,’ she said. ‘But I think he did love her.’4
Facing up to life in prison, Carlo’s ’ndrina was experiencing similarly mixed emotions. In July 2012, the prosecutor in the case, Marcello Tatangelo, received a letter from Carmine Venturino. ‘I want to confess what I know about the murder of Lea Garofalo,’ wrote Carmine. He went on to state that he had assisted in Lea’s murder and lied about it afterwards. He added that while under Carlo’s command, he had had to obey ‘the law that exists in Calabria, which is different to the one that governs the rest of the world’. His lawyers had assured him he would be acquitted since without a body, there could be no murder.
That had turned out to be incorrect. As a result, Carmine was now following his own counsel. The trial had taught him, he wrote, that ‘I am not a mobster. I am not a monster.’ He wasn’t immune to suffering, like Carlo and the other men. Rather, ‘the pain of losing Denise leaves me no choice,’ he wrote. ‘It’s a very delicate thing. But I think everyone would like to know the facts of Lea’s disappearance, especially Denise. I do this out of love for Denise. She was brave. She is an example to me. I have to tell you the facts of what really happened.’5
Carmine Venturino was thirty-three when he was sentenced to life. He had been born in November 1978 in Crotone, on the plain below Pagliarelle. He told Tatangelo in a series of interviews over the summer and autumn of 2012 that one of his earliest memories was of how his family’s attention, and love, was focused on his brother, who was born disabled.6 Carmine didn’t blame them. He described his family as ‘poor but honest’. Like most Calabrians, however, he said his parents would never have thought of crossing the ’Ndrangheta.
When Carmine fell in with a crowd from Pagliarelle and began smoking hash, heroin and cocaine, his family let it happen. They made no objection either when in September 2006, aged twenty-seven, he moved to Viale Montello in Milan. At first, Carmine was a user. Soon he was dealing for one of Carlo’s cousins. Within a year, he was working for Carlo, who had moved back into Viale Montello on his release from prison. With the money he was earning, Carmine rented his own apartment. One day in 2008 Carlo showed up at his door with a blanket and a pillow, asking if he could stay. ‘He never left,’ said Carmine. His rapid promotion from drug user to lieutenant in Europe’s biggest drug mafia was, said Carmine, ‘sweetness, followed by bitterness’.
Carmine had heard about Lea Garofalo in Pagliarelle. ‘Everyone was talking about it,’ he said. ‘We all knew that Carlo had had to go away because of her and that that was why he wanted to kill her.’ In their apartment, Carlo told Carmine that Lea was trying to take Denise away from him. He was frustrated that Denise didn’t try to fight her mother more. He didn’t articulate, yet, what his plans were for Lea. Then again, said Carmine, he didn’t have to.
Carlo’s chances of exacting his revenge increased significantly in spring 2009 when Lea left witness protection for the second time. She sent a message via her sister Marisa, asking Carlo if she and Denise could return to Calabria. Carlo had every reason to agree. Lea was playing into his hands. One day in April, said Carmine, ‘Vito Cosco came to me in Milan and told me that Carlo wanted to buy four sets of camouflage military gear, four balaclavas and four sets of boots and gave me a note with a set of measurements on it. I asked what they were for and Vito replied we would need the stuff to kidnap and kill Lea.’ Carmine added that he already knew where to buy the gear because he had bought ski masks there for another murder.
Carlo told his ’ndrina that since he was already suspected of trying to kill his wife, he couldn’t risk direct involvement in this new attempt. Instead, he wanted Vito, Carmine and Rosario Curcio to murder Lea. Carmine duly bought the clothes with cash and loaded them into a stolen red Fiat van, together with an Uzi sub-machine gun equipped with a silencer and two magazines that he picked up from Viale Montello, all ready for the drive down to Calabria. But the plan was foiled when Carlo, having arrived in Pagliarelle to scout the attack, found that Lea had installed a new steel door on the house where she was staying, and that the police had stationed a car outside.
Carlo returned to Milan with a new plan. He’d spoken to Denise, and she’d told him she wanted to finish school in Campobasso. Carlo had rented her and Lea an apartment there. ‘That was where we were going to kill Lea,’ said Carmine. Carlo set 5 May as the date for Lea’s murder. He recruited another ’Ndranghetista, Massimo Sabatino, to pretend to be a washing-machine repair man and gain access to the flat. Sabatino was to kidnap Lea. The other men, waiting outside, would then drive her to an isolated spot in Bari in the south, where they would kill her and get rid of her body. But on 3 May, Carmine had a car accident. ‘I was drunk and high,’ he said. ‘I was so scared.’ With two stitches in his head, Carmine told Carlo he wasn’t well enough to take part. Rosario Curcio, too, pulled out at the last minute, saying he couldn’t leave his business unattended. ‘Stay well out of this,’ he advised Carmine. When Carmine told Vito he couldn’t come, Vito slapped him across the face, knocking him to the ground. In the end, Carlo dispatched Giuseppe, Vito and Massimo, only for Massimo to screw up the kidnapping. Carlo was incandescent. ‘You’re all useless!’ he shouted at Vito. ‘Do I have to do everything myself?!’
Evidently, Carlo decided he did. When Lea and Denise moved
back to Pagliarelle for the summer holidays, staying with Lea’s grandmother, he and Carmine drove down from Milan. Carlo began seeing Denise regularly. One night, he and Carmine took Denise out to a nightclub. They stayed out until 5 a.m. Denise’s phone had run out of charge and she couldn’t call her mother to tell her she would be home late. ‘When we dropped Denise back at her grandmother’s house, Lea slapped Denise because she’d been so worried,’ said Carmine. ‘When we left, Carlo turned to me and said: “That was totally uncalled for. That bitch has to die.”’
The next day, Carlo called Vito, Carmine and Rosario Curcio together. He said they were going to kill Lea right away, as soon as possible, and he had a new plan for how to do it. Carmine would watch Lea’s grandmother’s apartment. As soon as Lea left to fetch water from the square, Carmine would call Carlo on a new burner phone that Vito had given him. Carlo would then arrive on the back of a motorcycle driven by Rosario and shoot Lea dead as they drove past; then he and Rosario would head immediately for the coast, dump the gun and wash off any powder residue in the sea. In the event, Carmine did as he was told but Lea turned out to be buying cigarettes from the village shop. She was back in her apartment before Carlo and Rosario arrived.
Carlo just couldn’t seem to kill Lea. He had tried and failed three times in five months. By now, his obsession was all-consuming. Enough people inside the ’Ndrangheta knew what he was planning that if he didn’t pull it off, he risked losing status. But as August turned to September, Carmine was surprised to observe a new calmness in Carlo. The reason, Carlo confided to him one day, was that he had finally figured out how to murder his wife.
Lea was beginning to trust him again, Carlo said. She was calling him and texting him all the time. ‘Carlo showed me text messages from Lea in which she had written that Nini – her nickname for Denise – wanted a little brother,’ said Carmine. ‘They were messages of love. I was amazed. Later they even went out for gelato together.’ Carlo calculated that if he could take his wife on a late-night date to Botricello, he could take all the time he wanted. The longer he waited, the more comfortable Lea felt, the easier it would be. ‘Carlo was very happy with himself,’ said Carmine. ‘He said now it would be so simple to kill her. He told me Lea was trapped.’
In November 2009, Lea and Denise left for Florence to attend court. Initially Carlo thought he would try to kill Lea there. Then he told Carmine he had a better idea. He had convinced Lea and Denise to spend a few days with him in Milan. Carlo said they would kill Lea in the city where she had first betrayed him. There was a symmetry to the plan that pleased Carlo. He wanted all his men in on it.
Once Lea and Denise arrived in Milan, said Carmine, ‘we followed Lea day and night, all the time.’ The plan, as in Campobasso, was to wait for the right moment, then kidnap Lea, try to find out what she had told the carabinieri in 1996 and 2002, then kill her and dispose of the body to make out that she had disappeared to Australia.
For four days, the gang played cat and mouse with Lea around Milan’s streets. On one occasion, Carmine watched Lea enter a laundry and pulled over ready to snatch her when she emerged before deciding there were too many security cameras and the street was too busy. Another time, Carlo took Lea out to dinner and told his men to take her when she stepped outside for a cigarette, but it was a cold night and Lea stayed put. The following night, Carlo took Lea to dinner again and told Carmine, Vito and Rosario to wait for the two of them in a quiet street near an underpass, ready to intercept the two of them and kill her on the spot when Carlo drove past. On the way over, however, Carlo ran a red light and was stopped by a carabiniere so Carlo called it off. That was also the night that Carmine met Lea for the first time. A few hours after he was meant to have killed her, he found himself driving over to Lea’s hotel at Carlo’s request and giving her a small block of hash.
Carmine and Rosario began to think Carlo was about to be thwarted one more time. Rosario, for one, still believed that Lea was Carlo’s private concern and not something with which the ’ndrina should be involved. Maybe Carlo would kill her this time. Maybe not. Right now it looked like he was dating her. Every ’Ndranghetista knew the clan had its hot and impetuous side, its machismo. But its activities were also based on cold calculation, especially when it came to matters like the murder of a clan daughter. Carlo’s planning was all over the place. He affected calmness but you could tell he was in turmoil. This was the kind of thing that could sink them all, said Rosario. He and Carmine should play no part in it.
But Carlo was insistent. The gang would have their last chance on 24 November. Lea and Denise were due to take the 11.30 p.m. train back to Calabria. Carlo told his men he had come up with yet another plan. He had asked his friend Massimiliano Floreale if he could borrow the keys to Floreale’s grandmother’s apartment on Via San Vittore, on the edge of Milan’s historic centre. He had also arranged for Denise to have dinner with her cousins so that Lea and he would be alone again. Shortly after 6 p.m., Carlo picked up Denise at the Arch of Peace, near Sempione Park, and dropped her off at her cousins’. Then he set off to fetch Lea.
Around the same time, Carmine drove Vito to the apartment on San Vittore in a Volkswagen Passat he had stolen that day. When the pair arrived, Vito entered the apartment. Carmine’s job was to stay outside. If anything was wrong, he was to signal by turning on his hazard lights. While waiting, Carmine called Rosario to arrange a time and a place to pick him up. But when Rosario answered, he said he couldn’t come. He was with his girlfriend and she was in one of her moods. Rosario said he couldn’t shake her. It was clear he was lying. ‘You should stay out of it too,’ he told Carmine.
Just after 6.30 p.m., Carlo picked up Lea from Sempione Park. After she climbed into the Chrysler, he told her he had to drop in briefly at an apartment a few streets away. Shortly before 7 p.m., Carmine saw Carlo and Lea pull up on San Vittore in the Chrysler. The pair parked and got out. Carlo rang the bell to the apartment. Vito buzzed him in. Lea entered, then Carlo.
Fifteen minutes later, around 7.15 p.m., Carmine saw Carlo exit the apartment, walk quickly to the Chrysler and leave. ‘He didn’t say a word,’ said Carmine. Vito left the apartment seconds later and climbed into Carmine’s Passat.
‘We did it,’ said Vito, breathing heavily.
Vito gave Carmine a mobile. It was Lea’s, he said. ‘Get rid of it right away before anyone calls,’ Vito instructed. Vito then left on foot.
Carlo and Vito now had to construct their alibis. Carlo also had to try to persuade Denise that Lea had just upped and left. That left it to Carmine and Rosario to get rid of Lea’s body.
Carmine exited the car, ripped the SIM card out of Lea’s phone and threw it into a drain, followed by the phone battery. He threw the rest of the phone in a bin. He got back into the Passat and phoned Rosario. Carlo had evidently called Rosario in the meantime. Rosario now said he would help after all, and Carmine drove over to pick him up.
Looking for somewhere to dispose of the body, the two men spent more than an hour trying to locate the keys to a warehouse owned by a friend in San Fruttuoso on the outskirts of Monza, about half an hour away by car. Unsuccessful, they drove back to San Vittore and ascended the stairs to the apartment. Carmine opened the door, turned on the light ‘and there was Lea Garofalo’s body on the ground,’ he said. ‘She had a sofa over her.’
Carmine wrenched back the sofa. He scarcely recognised Lea. ‘She had bruises all over her face. Her mouth was bloody, like it had been crushed. There was blood all over her nose and neck and a pool of blood on the floor. The clothes across her chest were ripped. There was a green cord around her neck with which she had been strangled and which had cut into her neck so deeply that it had disappeared. I knew the cord. It was from the curtains in my apartment.’
Whatever doubts Carmine and Rosario had once harboured, the ferocity of Lea’s killing erased them. They trussed the body with a sheet, just in case Lea was merely unconscious. Then they lifted it into a large cardboard box the
y had brought along. They scrubbed the floor with hot water and rags. Then they threw the rags into the box, used duct tape to seal it and heaved it downstairs to the ground floor. Carmine waited in the hallway with the box while Rosario went to fetch the Passat. Then the two men lifted the box out through the apartment block’s front door, down the street and into the back of the car.
With nowhere to dump the body, Carmine and Rosario drove to the home of Floreale’s parents. They dropped off the keys to the apartment, left the Passat locked in the street and went home to change clothes. A few hours later, by which time it was nearly midnight, Carmine called Floreale and asked to meet him at the apartment on San Vittore. Once both men had arrived, Carmine apologised to Floreale that the floor of his grandmother’s apartment might be a little dirty. Spotting a piece of the green cord on the floor, Carmine immediately burned it in an ashtray. He then noticed a spot of blood on the sofa and told Floreale that the two of them should dump the couch in the street, which they did, next to some rubbish bins. Floreale asked no questions.
Around 1.30 a.m., Carmine went to see Carlo at the Green Dragon. Carlo said Denise was asleep at Viale Montello. Carmine updated Carlo on the clean-up. Carlo said he now had the warehouse keys and that Carmine and Rosario should take Lea’s body there the next morning. Carlo and Carmine then went back to Carmine’s apartment. Before they turned in, Carlo asked if he could borrow some antiseptic cream for a cut on his finger. He showed Carmine the mark.
‘Lea,’ he smiled.
The next morning, 25 November 2009, Vito and Rosario drove Lea’s body in the Passat to the warehouse outside Monza. Carmine went in a separate van. By the time he arrived, Vito had left to clock in for work at a construction site. Rosario and Carmine took Carmine’s van to fill up a ten-litre jerry-can with petrol. Then they drove back and lifted the box containing Lea’s body out of the Passat and into the warehouse. ‘We took a large metal trunk that was in the warehouse,’ said Carmine. ‘We opened the box with the body in it and shoved the body into the metal trunk. You could just see her shoes sticking out. We shook some of the petrol on the body and lit it. We threw the cardboard box on top.’
