Mafia Princess

by Merico, Marisa

  He was. He was on the run, a fugitive in America. In the months since we left Italy, the drug business in Milan had escalated and so had the battle for power and profit. My family was at the centre of it and deals were being conjured all the time.

  Francesco Mafoda, one of the leaders of Kidnaps Inc, the man who had unsuccessfully tried to recruit Dad, had a lean, elegant style. He didn’t look like a thick-necked Iron Curtain hoodlum but that was always his approach. His organisation had realised drugs were more profitable and less risky a game than kidnapping, and that they didn’t provoke so many headlines. The Di Giovine family and especially Emilio Di Giovine were a huge obstacle to Mafoda’s mob creating one drug empire. The word around the city was that Mafoda had put out a contract on Dad, which Dad found really offensive. Not that Mafoda had tendered for his death. But he’d only put a small amount on his head. He boasted: ‘I’m worth a million at least!’

  Yet he knew he couldn’t be protected 24/7 and some smacked-out junkie with a gun could take him out. And would for a lot less money. There were also the young mob guns who would take a chance as much for the prestige – making their name, their cojones – as the money. Whatever the bravado, his life was on the line.

  And Mafoda pissed Dad off even more. He tried to negotiate, got cheeky. He said he’d stop the contract if the Di Giovines gave him a giant share of the action in Piazza Prealpi. And allowed him majority control of all drugs operations.

  ‘Kill the bastard,’ was Nan’s view when she and Dad talked about the threat from the Slav gangster. Nan had no second thoughts about how to resolve it. She wanted to protect the family business – but also her son.

  She didn’t rush things. Like some wily spycatcher, she deliberated and weighed up what would resolve the problem and prompt more profit in the future. Certainly, arrangements had to be made to get Mafoda out of the way, to defuse or eliminate him. There was a lot on top of Dad, a great deal of pressure from the police and the Slavs. Mafoda was sneaking around, stirring things up between different groups. He created bad blood between Dad and a big gangster family from Puglia, the stiletto heel of Italy. The Puglia crew were dealing in huge amounts of drugs and Mafoda was telling them one thing and Dad another. The gang leaders both realised how dangerous the Slav was: not just to them but to their worldwide operations. Mafoda was a crazy guy, capable of doing anything, and mad enough to believe he was untouchable.

  He did not consider Nan a threat, though. Nan? This matriarchal lady who looked like an ageing housewife? What threat was she? She didn’t want trouble, did she?

  Nan got word to Mafoda spelling out something like that. The family didn’t want any bloodshed, there was enough business to go round and Mafoda must consider himself a friend of the Di Giovine family for life. His friends were the Di Giovine’s friends, his enemies the Di Giovine’s enemies. It was the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

  It was classic malavita-speak yet Mafoda didn’t see it, his vision tinted by his arrogance. He regarded his play as a triumph, a result. He had what he wanted without fear of reprisals from the family or the police if he hit Dad. He should celebrate. He would celebrate. What about the bar on the far corner of the Piazza, headquarters of the empire he would be involved in running? Ennobled by his self-belief and a celebratory bottle of red wine, Mafoda wandered towards the Piazza Prealpi.

  Nan wanted Dad out of the way before anything terminal happened, to get to America and boost the ‘Di Giovine Connection’ in New York where there were many family friends. Dad was keen to get there for altogether different reasons. There was business and there was Fanny, a statuesque Moroccan–Italian who provided him with exotic evening entertainments. He had broken off his affair with Effie, Miss Paraguay, but she was always tracking him down, telling him in her ladylike way that she was heartbroken and they must always be together.

  Fanny was far more fun in every possible way. Gorgeous, she had the added attraction of liking money rather than questions. She was Dad’s perfect woman. But she’d taken off for New York and set herself up in a Manhattan apartment. Dad was missing her tricks.

  Nan, who despaired of Dad’s love life and thought he was still under the spell of Miss Paraguay, had started her plan to get him to America a couple of weeks earlier. Connections. As long as I’ve known them, the family could always get paperwork, false documents for any purpose. At a price. There wasn’t anyone with influence, an official or an intermediary, a shopkeeper or a wine merchant, they hadn’t corrupted. It didn’t matter whether it was dodgy passports or prime Dolcelatte, they got the best.

  A passport was created in the name of Nan’s brother Lorenzo Serraino. It was Dad’s face that looked out from the photograph page. An associate took it to Palermo in Sicily where it was ‘approved’ and a visa issued for America. Unlike most things in Palermo, that passport and visa were incorruptible, the real thing. Well, almost.

  With the passport in Milan, his money belt loaded with dollars and Pan Am tickets booked for the night flight to New York, all Dad had to do on 12 June 1980 was get on the plane. He was delayed. He couldn’t find the new passport.

  While others searched and finally found it he was hanging around at Nan’s. He’d walked across the square to visit and say goodbye to his brother Antonio, whose wife, Livia De Martino, was expecting a baby. He was outside their apartment when his minder Carlo – with all the threats, Dad was armed and wanted an extra pair of eyes constantly checking around him – saw Mafoda across the street. Mafoda’s red face seemed even brighter against his beige, rather rumpled linen suit.

  ‘Oh, compadre!’ Carlo shouted loudly to the Slav so Dad would look out and see who it was.

  Mafoda always carried a gun, always, always had one on him. When he turned around he pulled something out of his jacket and my dad whipped his pistol from its holster and shot him. Across the road from Nan’s house, he killed him with a single bullet.

  That’s when they found it was a bunch of car keys Mafoda had pulled from his pocket. He was armed, he had a gun. But he’d pulled out the key chain.

  Not a gun.

  Dad didn’t like what happened but at the same time he knew Mafoda was a very dangerous guy who wasn’t all there. Anything could have gone down. He thought Mafoda was drawing his pistol to assassinate him. The cops do it all the time – shooting people who aren’t carrying guns or bombs but who they think are. It wasn’t much different for my dad. I know that this guy had tooled himself up and gone to the area to kill my dad. My dad knew and he was ready.

  Dad and Carlo didn’t have time to analyse what had happened. Dad had to make that flight. They whisked him away. He grabbed his travel stuff from Nan’s – no time for more farewells – and was in the car with Carlo putting his foot hard to the pedal and heading to Malpensa Airport.

  And Dad’s flight on to New York.

  Where the most powerful Mafia family in America were going to help him start an astonishing, if dangerous, new life.

  CHAPTER SIX

  COUNT MARCO AND THE DAPPER DON

  ‘When it’s three o’clock in New York it’s still 1938 in London.’

  BETTE MIDLER

  Mum knew Dad was on the run but, like the police and Interpol, thought he was hiding out in Morocco or Portugal. He’d always escaped into Europe or North Africa in the past. She thought he’d just appear, as he always had, and dismissed my questions about him coming to see me with the usual: ‘He’s busy, Marisa, don’t worry about him.’

  It wasn’t just me who was thinking about Dad. After Mafoda’s death the international alarm bells were ringing for him. He’d vanished, like Lupin, as if by magic. Other than Nan and Grandpa and a couple of his brothers, no one knew where Dad was. The cops had issued a warrant for his arrest on murder charges. Yes, he’d pulled the trigger, but it hadn’t gone down the way they were telling it. He needed to become a new man to keep his freedom and take control of the American arm of the spiralling family drug empire.

  When he arrived at JFK
Airport the first thing he thought of was a safe haven and exotic home comforts. He phoned Fanny and she was glad to hear his voice. She also had a surprise – she was pregnant by him. He was delighted with the news. An instant family was wonderful cover for the soon-to-be-ennobled man on the run. Dad was about to live out the later chapters of The Count of Monte Cristo. And they would be equally exciting, involving murder, kidnapping and death, greed, corruption and the politics of powerful families.

  He placed his passport in a bank safety deposit box, temporarily burying Lorenzo Serraino. When he emerged from CitiBank on 2nd Avenue, he hailed a taxi as Count Marco Carraciolo, an Italian émigré, a glamorous aristocrat. He then arranged for Count Marco to have his own, personalised face. The Park Avenue plastic surgeon who worked on and around Dad’s eyes and cheekbones changed his appearance to the casual glance but not for too much scrutiny. But $20,000 paid for enough work that he’d never be recognised from the old wanted posters circulated by the Italian cops through Interpol. Count Marco appeared brighter-faced, a little fresher than Emilio Di Giovine, with a couple of years trimmed from his age.

  But he was not the front of Dad’s Manhattan restaurant, Palio, on 57th and 2nd Avenue. It was licensed to Fanny’s brother Emo but Dad bankrolled the popular eating establishment he named after the Palio of Siena bareback horse races. He had an uncanny ability in the hospitality trade and was as successful as a Manhattan restaurateur as he had been as a hotelier in England. The huge difference was that in Manhattan it was the Mob and not Fortnum & Mason who were his main suppliers.

  New York knew Dad as Count Marco but he was respected for himself by the Gambino family, who were still enjoying the legacy of the man who had been the most powerful don in the United States. Carlo Gambino, the ‘boss of bosses’ of the American Mafia, had died from a heart attack four years earlier in 1976. The author Mario Puzo modelled his ‘Godfather’ on Gambino, whose mild-mannered, often decrepit appearance was deceiving and generally deadly. He never raised his voice but his soft-spoken words were Mafia law in America.

  His son, Joey Gambino, was a superb connection for my family. He and Grandpa Rosario had used the same Puerto Rican crews in drug-trafficking operations. Joey leaned more towards the business than the brutality side of the Gambino rackets.

  The rising star of the Gambino organisation was John Gotti, the ‘Dapper Don’, who favoured handmade suits and fine wine, and threatened anyone he suspected of disloyalty: ‘I’ll blow your house up.’ He was old-style Mafia, quite prepared to ‘take off the velvet glove’ at what he believed were important corporate moments. That was another connection with Dad. They’d both had to carve out their prestige within their mobs.

  In 1979 Gotti had been made a capo in return for ‘good works’ – basically, the execution of rival gangster James McBratney who, with a group of other mobsters, had kidnapped and murdered the Don’s nephew Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Gambino. McBratney was the only one to escape the cops, and the Don ordered him dead. He was shot three times at point-blank range in Snoope’s Bar & Grill on Staten Island on 22 May 1973. Gotti was convicted of the killing but when he got out of Green Haven maximum security in Storm-ville, New York, he was rewarded with promotion.

  Dad was friendly with Gambino underboss Aniello Dellacroce and would also eat out with the main man, the caporegime, Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, to whom he became close. He looked up to him for his organisational abilities, and Castellano returned that respect to Dad. He’d see them and Gotti at the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Gotti ran a meat supply company and also controlled food warehouses. He and Dad became partners in crime and cuisine: Palio was supplied by Mob shops and butchers at a special price.

  There was much behind-the-scenes Gambino politics going on but, as Dad saw it, that was not his concern at the time. He liked their attitude: business was business. Personalities only played a part if they got in the way of business. When Dad arrived in the long, hot summer of 1980 the Mafiosi influence was overwhelming and touched almost every business, from high fashion to Wall Street, gambling and the movies, from hotels to the docks. It was all about investment: steal the money any way you can, clean it up, launder it, and bank it where the interest was high and the tax consequences zero. I don’t know how they did it but it was sometimes less than zero – they got a ‘bonus’ just for being the bank’s customers.

  The old favourites included car-thieving rings, construction and the garment industries, but at the start of the 1980s there was no question from anyone that the huge money then and in the future was in drugs. The legit operations were a veneer over where they were making their real money. Like all tiers of the Gambino Family, Gotti had his placement in the New York Police Department. The NYPD acted as an early warning system about any interest shown from Europe in the fugitive Emilio Di Giovine, which gave Dad lots of room and he took full advantage of his freedom to operate. It was the start of the 1980s, the consumerism heyday decade, and the Mob’s drug trade thinking mirrored Wall Street’s motto: ‘Greed is Good’.

  Whatever they wanted, my family has always gone to the source. Initially they dealt with the middlemen, but they always stepped over them. Those guys couldn’t do much about it. They weren’t earning money, so it was tough. It was dog eat dog. But that’s how it was.

  Huge consignments of heroin and cocaine were coming into Milan from Morocco as well as Turkey. The Turkish connection set up by Dad was lavish: our family used to steal cars, set them up with false documents as ‘ringers’ and send them back to Istanbul as part-payment. The Turks’ love of high-powered vehicles heightened our profit margin. Simultaneously, the Moroccans were sending as many if not more kilos again as the Turks. The deal was so good there was a traffic snarl-up when Italian dealers became overwhelmed by the supply.

  It worked for the family: America was screaming for the stuff and the market there commanded much better prices, sometimes double the European tariff. Nan as capa – the Lady Boss – and Grandpa and the family organised the cutting and shipping of the drugs. Operational HQ was, as always, Piazza Prealpi. Count Marco was the distribution kingpin in New York.

  The smuggling operation had an elaborate beginning at the Piazza Prealpi. There and in surrounding garages, cello-phane-wrapped individual kilos of heroin would be subdivided into packets of double-sided tape and plastic, which would fit in empty bottles of shampoo, hair conditioner and body lotion – the kind of toiletries you’d find in an airline passenger’s luggage. The pack was Sellotaped to the inside of the container and the shampoo or conditioner or body lotion would be poured back in. They used any beauty products. A woman would carry five or six at a time. It was very straightforward. And successful. And kept in the family, for at the start the budget was tight. Relatives would get no money but a free flight to America carrying maybe £100,000 worth of drugs in their bags. That value was before Dad got it, cut it and, driving up the price to benefit from the demand, sold it to suppliers across the United States.

  There were scores of ‘drug tourists’. They were almost always women, mums with babies, grandmas off to visit family and single girls off to America to find or make their fortune. What they all shared, along with their prepared stories, was their extra-strong perfume to confuse drug-sniffing dogs at customs. Often they’d wear body belts that were custom-made to take half-kilo and three-quarter-kilo bags of heroin on the way out and packs of US dollars on the way back. The smack was inside the thinnest of plastic film. The belt was made out of cloth to absorb body sweat so it wouldn’t slip down at a wrong moment. No one wanted a belt stuffed with heroin around their ankles at American customs. One courier was very unlucky. By the time she landed in Italy, her flesh and the money belt tape’s superglue had somehow melted together. Her body, her flesh was stuck to the cash. Olive oil and lotions did no good. She was flayed alive under a scalding shower to separate her from the money. For the Mafiosi, it was needs must.

  Dad was running America, Nan was controlling
Italy and Uncle Antonio was in charge of the Spanish Connection. But it was in New York where everything was absolutely dandy, with such an ever-upward-moving market and the Gambino family protection. An incredible amount of cash was being generated. So much money Nan was running out of places to stash it. She had heroin in her neighbours’ washing powder packets and cash in their bedroom drawers. She had ‘mules’ moving money as well as drugs, and accounts were being opened around the world. Yet Nan remained Nan, cooking lunch and shouting at the ones she loved.

  Mum and I saw the incredible change in the family’s circumstances on our annual visits every August: they were living like millionaires. We were the poor English relations. Flights to Italy were expensive so we had to go by train, down to London, on to Calais and beyond to Italy. We’d go overnight. We couldn’t afford a sleeper. We sat in the carriage – one of those four-each-side, facing-each-other jobs – with everyone else. You could get out into the corridor for a stretch. It was a long night. In Milan we’d meet up with everyone and after a couple of days take off for Calabria and visit the usual suspects – of whom there were more than ever. Everyone seemed to be involved.

  Nan now owned most of the village of San Sperato, and Mum and I stayed in a two-storey house she had there. Her brothers still looked after the family-owned farmland but were also dealing with the heroin shipments arriving from Morocco by container ship into the port of Gioia Tauro.

  San Sperato was Nan’s summer headquarters. Her deckchair was in the same place every day, higher than the rest by the edge of the sand, and she sat there in a modest black swimsuit, wrapping a sarong round her legs whenever she stood up. She was under a parasol to shade her from the hot sun while we tried to cool off in the 40-degree heat by splashing about in the sea. People walking on the beach would stop by Nan’s chair, stoop down and kiss her hand. Wherever she went in Reggio Calabria – the market, the shops, the doctor’s – she was received with enormous respect. Doors were constantly opened, hands were always shaken and hats tipped.