The Good Mothers

by Alex Perry

  Carmine said he and Rosario watched Lea’s body smoulder for an hour. ‘It didn’t burn well,’ he said. ‘At one point, Rosario said that maybe it wasn’t working because there wasn’t enough air getting in. So I took an axe and knocked several holes in the bottom of the trunk. But even with the new holes, the body burned very slowly.’ Carmine left Rosario and went to find Vito to ask him for advice. Unsuccessful, he returned to find that Rosario had moved the body out of the trunk with a section of scaffolding and dropped it on top of some wooden pallets, placed more wood on top, then, after adding more petrol, set light to everything again. ‘The body was much more destroyed now,’ said Carmine. ‘The head was almost gone. There was a lot of smoke and a strong smell of burned meat. Next door, there were some gypsies burning leaves and at some point one of them, a woman, came up to the fence and asked if we could give her a pallet for their fire. I passed them one through a hole in the fence. She couldn’t have failed to notice the smell of cooking meat. She didn’t ask any questions.’

  Neither Carmine nor Rosario had slept more than a few minutes the night before and by 1 p.m. exhaustion was setting in. ‘Before leaving, we put what was left of the corpse in a small pit that had already been dug in the warehouse grounds. Only a part of her chest and her legs were left. But there were many bone fragments, which we collected with a shovel and dumped in the trunk. Finally, I chopped up what was left of the body into small pieces with the axe. It was all blackened bones and flesh. Then we covered it with earth and a metal sheet.’

  Carmine and Rosario left to sleep for a few hours. They returned that afternoon with Vito, who sent Carmine to buy five more litres of petrol. The three men then shovelled what remained of Lea’s body back into the metal trunk, loaded some extra wood on it, doused it in petrol once more and set light to it a final time. They watched it burn down to the embers, broke what remained into shards by beating it with the back of the shovel, and left.

  That night, Carmine caught up with Carlo in the Green Dragon. He was with Denise. Carmine told Carlo Lea’s body was nearly gone. Carlo told Carmine about Denise’s five-hour interview with the carabinieri. That was another headache they would have to deal with, he said.

  The next morning, Carmine and Vito returned to the warehouse one last time. They scooped the ash and burnt embers into a wheelbarrow, washed and scrubbed the metal trunk and threw all the remains they could find into a nearby manhole. The following day, 27 November, Carmine met the friend who owned the warehouse to return the keys to him. ‘Finished?’ asked the friend. ‘All done,’ confirmed Carmine.

  Carmine never spoke again to Carlo or any of the other men about those three days. The only time Carlo brought up the matter was in March 2010 when he heard that Denise had spoken to the carabinieri and accused him of murdering Lea. If that was true, said Carlo, ‘then we all know what we have to do.’

  Carmine offered to show the warehouse to Tatangelo and the carabinieri forensics team. It was October 2012, almost three years since Lea had died. The forensics officers took fragments of dust from the warehouse and, using a bulldozer, dug into the soil and excavated the manhole. Over several days, they were able to gather more than three kilos of material, which they transported to their laboratory in Milan. Processing the samples took several more days. But by early November, they were able to confirm the presence of 2,812 bone fragments, as well as a dental screw with which Lea had been fitted in 2007, and microscopic parts of the necklace and braided white and yellow gold bracelet that Carlo had given Lea when they first met.

  Denise had initially been distraught at the knowledge that she had fallen in love with the man who had disposed of her mother’s body. Now she found comfort in his contrition. When Tatangelo brought Carmine and the other defendants back to court in April 2013, Denise listened to his testimony throughout. Carmine didn’t spare her feelings with his descriptions of what he had done to her mother’s body. But it was clear he felt compelled by devotion to her. ‘I want to say that this is a very difficult day for me,’ he said. Carmine said that in prison he had learned that family was nothing without love, and that love conquered any other allegiance. ‘I am not accusing ordinary people or strangers but people with whom I shared three years of my life, some of them from the same family. I made this choice out of love for Denise. Her father does not love her. Her family does not love her. But she owns my heart. It sickens me to think that I am contributing to her pain but it is also thanks to her example that I am here today.’ Carmine said he was aware he was signing his own death warrant by speaking. ‘I know I’m cannon fodder now,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later, Carlo will kill me.’ Still, he added, he had no choice. ‘I am really in love,’ he said.

  Carmine’s confession was striking as much for the reasons why he had spoken out as what he said. The code stressed discipline and the suffocation of feeling. Hardening their hearts was how ’Ndranghetisti won. By out-killing and out-terrorising, they could outlast their rivals. And yet here was Carmine, a drug dealer working for one of the ’Ndrangheta’s hardest men, speaking out because he couldn’t contain his tenderness. Even in the ’Ndrangheta’s darkest depths, a faint light still shone.

  When Lea’s former lawyer Annalisa Pisano read about Carmine’s testimony in the newspapers, she found herself reeling for different reasons. For three years, she had dreamed about Lea calling out her name, surrounded by flames in a warehouse. ‘I thought I had to be wrong,’ she said. ‘I’m not the kind of person who believes in that sort of thing. But when I heard this was how it ended for her, in the worst possible way, of course I remembered my dream right away.’

  Initially, Annalisa was horrified by what her nightmare might mean. Had she deserted Lea? Had Lea died calling for her help? In time, however, she came to think of it differently. According to Carmine’s evidence, Lea had died long before the flames consumed her. If there was any truth to her dream, Annalisa began to think it was as a testament to the bond between her and her client. ‘I began thinking that, in a way, this was some sort of consolation,’ she said. ‘If her last moments really were spent thinking about me, then maybe she knew that I loved her.’

  XXV

  Giuseppina’s evidence had led to the arrest and trial of sixty-four members of the Pesce ’ndrina. So detailed was it, and so numerous the charges to which it led, that the trial lasted for a further year after she testified. But shortly after 6 p.m. on 3 May 2013, after seventeen days of deliberation, the three judges filed back into court in Palmi to deliver their verdict.

  Twenty-two of the accused were acquitted. Forty-two were convicted. Three-quarters of the sentences were for more than ten years. The most severe went to Giuseppina’s immediate family. Her uncle, clan head Antonino Pesce, was sentenced to twenty-eight years. Giuseppina’s father Salvatore received twenty-seven years and seven months. Her husband Rocco Palaia was given twenty-one years and two months; her mother Angela Ferraro thirteen years and five months; her sister Marina Pesce twelve years and ten months; and her brother Francesco twenty-five years and eight months. Ten more Pesces, two more Ferraros and one other Palaia were convicted. Even Giuseppina’s eighty-year-old grandmother, Giuseppa Bonarrigo, was sentenced to a year and eight months for receiving stolen goods. The only clemency shown was to Giuseppina, sentenced to four years and four months for mafia association, most of which she had already served.1 ‘The Pesces were destroyed,’ said Giovanni Musarò. ‘There was barely a single one left walking around Rosarno.’2

  While most of the family absorbed their ruin in silence, a few Pesces found the humiliation too much. Giuseppina’s younger sister Marina, whom Alessandra described as blessed with ‘the face of an angel’, began howling and screaming and tearing her hair when the sentences were read out. ‘She completely freaked out,’ said Alessandra. Outside court, grandmother Bonarrigo – one of the few Pesces allowed bail – growled to reporters that real Pesce women went with their men to the grave. Not long afterwards, Alessandra arrived at work at the Palace of Justic
e in Reggio to find a group of ’Ndrangheta wives from Rosarno staging a protest outside. ‘It was surreal,’ she said. ‘They had signs which read “Shame on you”, “The sentences are unjust” and “The innocent are in jail”. Some had even chained themselves to the gates.’ In all seriousness, apparently, Europe’s biggest mafia was presenting itself as a victim of the state. Alessandra assumed the demonstration was also designed to send a message. ‘The idea was to show that real Calabrian women were still with the ’Ndrangheta. But I saw it as a sign of desperation, of weakness. You really need to prove something that you shouldn’t need to? You really need to demonstrate something that, a few years ago, everyone would have taken for granted?’

  The Pesces were broken and their rule of Rosarno was over. Two weeks after the verdicts, Giuseppe Pesce, the last ’ndrina boss still on the run, turned himself in to begin his sentence of twelve years and six months. ‘Enough,’ he said as he walked into the Rosarno carabinieri station. ‘I’m sick of running. Let’s finish it here and now.’

  Still, the people of Rosarno took longer to digest their new reality. The Pesces had ruled the town for decades, and most of the bosses were still alive and still sending their boys to collect pizzo from shopkeepers and restaurant owners. But people noticed that the price of extortion was falling. A violent reaction from the Pesces was inevitable but when it came, it was pitiful: a grenade which slightly injured the brother of Giuseppina’s boyfriend, Domenico Costantino, when he opened a farm gate to which it was strapped. Maybe the Pesces were finished. It was hard to believe. But then so was the sight, little more than a year after the end of the maxi-trial, of a bulldozer driving through the front door of Giuseppina’s grandmother’s old house, the family’s former meeting place. The authorities had confiscated the house in 2011 but had struggled for years to find a contractor willing to do the work. Now Gaetano Saffioti, a builder from Palmi, told reporters he was delighted to raze the Pesces’ palace to the ground. So happy, in fact, he had done it for free. ‘The fight for legality is won with deeds, not words,’ he said.3

  Watching as one of Europe’s most powerful crime syndicates was pulled apart brick by brick, Alessandra found herself wondering whether it was the Pesces’ obsession with honour that had ultimately doomed them. It was almost as if the family had died of shame. ‘If a woman betrays her family, it has a huge resonance,’ she said. ‘It means the family is unable to control its women.’ To an ’Ndrangheta crime family, it seemed there was nothing worse.

  Less than a month after the Pesce convictions came new verdicts in the Lea Garofalo case. Carmine’s confession had exposed Carlo’s lie that Lea was still alive. When proceedings reopened in Milan on 9 April 2013, Carlo made a desperate attempt to regain the initiative, announcing from the dock at the end of the first day: ‘President, I wish to speak!’

  His lawyer, Daniel Sussman Steinberg, appeared stunned. Carlo had been clutching a piece of paper all day. Now it was clear why: he, Carlo Cosco, was breaking omertà. After a brief consultation between Carlo and Steinberg, the lawyer announced that Carlo would like to make a ‘spontaneous statement’ and Carlo was escorted to the witness box.

  Speaking in halting Italian, he read: ‘Madam President, and gentlemen of the court, I accept full responsibility for the murder of Lea Garofalo.’

  In the courtroom, nothing moved.

  ‘I wanted to do so during the original trial but circumstances prevented me,’ Carlo continued. ‘My daughter hates me and deservedly so, because I killed her mother. But I cannot endure the shame of the accusation that I want to kill her. For me, it is inconceivable that my daughter is under anyone else’s protection. From whom? I would give my life for her. Woe betide anyone who touches my daughter!’

  It was an astonishing outburst. There was, after all, no reason for it. Carlo had already been convicted of Lea’s murder. Legally, his confession changed nothing. But psychologically, it changed everything. Carlo, it seemed, had cracked. The hardest of the ’Ndrangheta’s hard men had let his feelings show. He was an ’Ndranghetista, a capo, a santista. He was a drug smuggler, an extortionist and a murderer. But first and foremost, it now appeared, he was a father. ‘I hope one day that my daughter will forgive me,’ said Carlo. ‘I live in hope of her pardon.’

  Others, however, perceived an altogether different message. When Carlo began reading his letter, he had scratched his ear. Then he scratched his eye. A little while later, he touched his finger to his lips. To those able to read the signals, Carlo was sending another message to the ’Ndrangheta. ‘Listen to me,’ he was saying. ‘Watch me. You’ll hear and see that I will say nothing.’ Carlo wasn’t confessing. He was offering reassurance and proposing a bargain. I am responsible for all this, he was saying. Whatever the price, I will pay it. But I will not collaborate. And in return, nobody touches my daughter.4

  Now that Carlo had finally opened his mouth, however, he seemed to find it difficult to close. Over the next few weeks, he spoke expansively about his early married life with Lea. He explained the attack in Campobasso by saying he had asked Sabatino to beat Lea to ‘teach her a lesson’ after she threatened his mother. He described meeting his daughter again after seven years. ‘This became my obsession,’ he said. ‘To be with my daughter, to know where she was. Not to kill her mother. I never intended that.’

  Carlo’s testimony was all about love. Carlo loved his daughter. Carlo loved his mother. When Lea hurt Carlo’s mother, Carlo had only asked Sabatino to slap Lea around a little because, really, Carlo said, he loved Lea too.

  It was the same when Carlo killed her. ‘I really didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘That morning, 24 November 2009, I went to get Denise and her mother in the hotel. When I saw them, I had an idea to surprise Denise. She had told me she wanted to live in Milan. So I thought I’ll ask my friends for a key to their apartment to give to Denise as somewhere where she could come and go.’

  A few hours later, Carlo took Lea to show her the apartment on Via San Vittore where their daughter could stay. But Lea had misunderstood. ‘When she saw the apartment, she was angry,’ said Carlo. ‘She told me I was a liar because I told her I had nothing, no money, and actually I had an apartment. The truth was that it wasn’t mine. I lived with Venturino. But Lea told me that I was an asshole and that I would never see Denise again.’

  Carlo caught his breath.

  ‘I had a fit of rage, Madam President,’ he said. ‘I punched her. Twice. She fell and hit her head on the couch. I grabbed her by the shoulders and this time she fell and hit her head on the floor. Even before I saw the blood, I knew she was dead.’

  It was all just a terrible accident, Carlo was saying. One of those things that happened when a big-hearted husband and father was overcome by emotion. ‘All this happened because I loved Lea,’ said Carlo. ‘If I hadn’t loved her, nothing like this would ever have happened. But when she threatened me with never seeing my daughter again, I couldn’t see my love for her any more. Because I love Denise above all else. For me that’s the greatest torment. Denise must know that I care for her. She must know the truth.’ Trying to rationalise his client’s intervention, Steinberg, the lawyer, described Carlo as split by a ‘lacerating internal struggle’ which prompted him to lash out at Lea but acquitted him of premeditated murder.

  Prosecutor Marcello Tatangelo was unconvinced. ‘You’re only talking now because Lea Garofalo’s body has been found,’ he said. Carlo hadn’t shown remorse at the time, he added. Quite the opposite. Days after Lea’s murder, Carlo had hosted a party in Pagliarelle to toast her death under the guise of an eighteenth birthday party for Denise. But Tatangelo was curious nonetheless. ‘Why speak up now?’ he asked.

  ‘Eh,’ shrugged Carlo. ‘People said things that weren’t right. You mentioned acid. You said I hated my daughter’s mother. How could I let that go?’

  Unmoved by Carlo’s protestations of love, on 29 May 2013, appeals judge Anna Conforti, another of the most senior women in Italy’s judiciary, confirmed life
sentences against Carlo and his brother Vito, Rosario Curcio and Massimo Sabatino.5 Carmine’s sentence was reduced to twenty-five years. Giuseppe Cosco was acquitted but remained in prison since by now he was also serving an unrelated ten-year sentence for drug trafficking. Five months later, using evidence given by Lea seventeen years earlier, seventeen ’Ndranghetisti were arrested in Pagliarelle, Petilia Policastro and Crotone, charged with seven murders, possessing illegal weapons and drug dealing – charges which related to the clan feud that had raged in the Calabrian hills between 1989 and 2007.6

  Outside court on the day Carlo’s life sentence was confirmed, Enza told a crowd of supporters, ‘Denise thanks you all. That you are all here gives her strength.’ Denise could now finally bury her mother, added Enza, and the funeral would be in Milan. ‘This is the city where she was killed,’ said Enza. ‘But it’s also the place where everyone finally mobilised to fight the mafia.’

  Only Maria Concetta Cacciola’s case remained unresolved.

  Partial closure came in Palmi in early July 2013, in the same courtroom where the Pesces had been humbled. Giuseppina testified in Concetta’s case, breaking down when asked to describe her friend and recalling how ‘terrified’ Concetta was of her brother Giuseppe. ‘She told me if you knew him, then you knew he could kill her,’ she said. ‘She was forbidden to leave the house, to go out or to have friends. She never went to a party. She was never allowed to have fun.’

  On 13 July 2013, Concetta’s father, mother and brother were found guilty of provoking her suicide. Michele Cacciola was given six years, Giuseppe five and her mother, Anna Rosalba Lazzaro, two.