Mafia Princess

by Merico, Marisa

  It was hard enough for me. Especially with Mum. Every time I mentioned visiting again she would go into a wobbly: ‘Why do you want to go back? Your school is here, your friends are here, I’m here. Why do you want to give up everything? Don’t any of us count any more?’

  After all she had gone through, all she had done for me, she felt betrayed. She’d brought me up to show respect for life and everyone around me. Now I wanted to go and visit a man in jail. But her own maternal instincts would not allow her to hurt me by bursting my bubble of beliefs about Dad. She said he was no good but didn’t tell the thirteen-year-old me that he was in jail for killing a man and he was a drug smuggler. A major Mafiosi. I don’t even know if that would have made a difference to how I felt. So I kept saving the money I was making working a Saturday job at a café. I kept it in a shoebox on the top of my wardrobe, where Mum found it. She knew what I was doing. It helped pay for our Italian summers. Well, it helped us to get there. If we thought we were the poor relations before, we were the poverty-stricken ones now.

  The family was rolling in cash. Nan had gone into the real-estate business. She’d bought a bigger apartment in Via Christina Belgioso, close to Quarto Oggiaro. One auntie had another place, and another and another. The Di Giovine family dominated the square, spreading their domestic lives over ten apartments.

  Nan, of course, held onto the original Piazza Prealpi apartment for old time’s sake. Or bloody-mindedness. It was a council flat and she paid rent on it. It shouldn’t have been allowed as she owned other property but the council wouldn’t dare give it to someone else even if they knew it was vacant. It would just get burned down. Or the lives of the family who moved in would be made hell.

  The family wealth didn’t change their attitude or the general feelings towards them. It never stopped the fear of the family, which Nan promoted in her utter belief that it brought respect. The family had to get violent at times because of the reputation they’d built. People knew if you messed with one, you messed with all of them, so few ever tried. Those that did never came back to do it again.

  It did change things for me and Mum: no more day-long train trips to Italy because in 1984 Nan started booking flights for us and arranging the car to meet us. When the morning came for the taxi to take us to Manchester airport I was packed and waiting at the front door before Mum’s alarm clock jangled.

  In Milan, Mum was open-eyed, astonished, at how well the family was doing. Uncle Franco collected us in a brand new BMW to take us to Nan’s. The first thing Nan did was take us both shopping. We had so much stuff, dresses and shoes and the rest, we had to buy extra luggage to carry it all home. I was given money and clothes. A lot of them were my Auntie Angela’s. She used to hate me coming because Nan would give me all her clothes. She and I were like sisters: we’d fight and scream at each other but we always looked out for each other as well.

  Nan wanted me looking my best for my second prison visit to Dad. It was like Sunday best for church. The night before, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking it was a dream. Mum was beside me and she was also wide awake. My dream was her nightmare.

  We were on parade early, and it was like a military operation. Nan, of course, was the General. We set off at 6 a.m. for the 75-minute drive from Milan to Parma prison. Nan used an old guy, a trusted family friend, as our taxi driver. She paid his petrol, liked his company. He smiled a lot at me. And carried two pistols, one strapped to his ankle.

  Nan used to stop off at every single speciality shop and go direct to the top-end farms to pick up the best for Dad. He would create menus from the delivered produce, telling the prison chef what to cook for him each week. He ate better than the politicians in Rome.

  Nan took him clean sheets, clean clothes, new clothes. He was living like a Roman emperor, his every wish a command. Every weekend he was invited to go and have a slap-up meal at a politician’s house. At the first dinner the politician’s wife asked who their guest was and Dad was described as the politician’s new ‘executive assistant’.

  The five-star hotel treatment suited him. He felt stronger when he pulled me up in arms. He seemed to have put on weight but his grey designer suit still hung sleekly on him. The guards had cordoned off an area of the visiting room and we walked around. When we sat he gave me a silver bracelet. While the other visitors were hustled out, we were left alone.

  Dad’s VIP treatment, the big-screen telly in his cell, the showers when he wanted them, were all in return for Nan’s payoffs. The prison guards’ families received regular goodies, all manner of stolen gear, and it was always apparent who wanted drugs. Dad made sure there was no trouble in the prison. Everybody was happy. Especially me.

  On the Italian visits we would always go down to Calabria, so there was sun and the seaside too. It was a ten-hour drive but it was fun because Auntie Angela was with me as well as various other family teenagers, cousins, aunts and uncles, and my Uncle Filippo’s girlfriend Alessandra.

  Mum was sort of in charge of us, along with Auntie Milina, but Auntie Milina never let us out. We’d have to be escorted, we couldn’t go out on our own. Because we came from Milan, from the North, we were a novelty and all the lads there were desperate to be around us. I was tall and blonde and they were like flies buzzing round. We loved it. But when we gave our surname they’d run a mile. Or most of them would.

  It was the brave ones who stayed. And they got slapped for talking to us. We didn’t think it was fair. We wanted to go for a walk, to meet some of the local lads, but it didn’t happen. We were housebound except when we were being chaperoned to the beach and back. We got fed up with Auntie Milina.

  One day when she wouldn’t let us out, Alessandra held a séance with a wooden ouija board. We all sat with our fingers on the glass and suddenly it started going really fast.

  Alessandra said, ‘Do something to Milina. Who is it? Who is it? Do something to Milina.’

  Next thing, the glass spelled ‘death’.

  ‘No. No. No. Don’t do that.’ We were just young girls and we were terrified by this.

  That same night there was an almighty thunderstorm. When we got up the next day and went down, Milina’s arm was in a bandage. We all wanted to know what had happened to her and she told us: ‘The windows and shutters flew open with the storm. I went to close them and I don’t know what happened, but I stumbled out of the window onto the balcony.’

  We were astonished. The balcony had just been built. A few weeks before it hadn’t been there and she would have stumbled not onto the balcony but to her death. She was lucky, but it felt like an omen.

  It was a scare but it didn’t spoil the fun, and Mum was enjoying herself. Being a camera freak she took lots of photographs and in a fit of defiance we all posed topless. It was a huge joke and all of us are laughing in the pictures. It was a prank, a delight for us giggly girls, because all the relatives were so old-fashioned in Calabria compared to Milan. You couldn’t even go out on a date alone. You had to take a chaperone. You weren’t allowed to have a boyfriend.

  One day I went to visit an old grandma while I was wearing a sun top. It was a very dry heat and in the summer it can get up to 40 degrees Celsius.

  She said: ‘You’re not going out like that, are you?’

  I said: ‘I’m going to the beach!’

  She said: ‘You should cover your shoulders.’

  I went off to the beach smiling. I was witnessing two different worlds, yesterday and today, in Italy. Mum and I spent six weeks there every summer and I absolutely loved it. I really wished I could live there. I hated coming back to a windy, cold, rainy Blackpool coast. I hated it. Of course, we always came back in September and straight into the cold and the gloom. That made it worse.

  Yet I was young enough to get on with my life. I was well over first love Michael – we didn’t split up, but before my fifteenth birthday we had drifted apart and gone our separate ways. I had a laugh, I had a lot of friends. But all the same…

  Mum had
the history to support her constant argument: ‘It’s no good for you over there. I know that better than anyone. Forget about it.’

  I couldn’t.

  In the summer of 1985, when I was fifteen, my school friend Dawn came along with Mum and me. We stayed at Nan’s, and Dawn saw that life was fast and furious and she loved it. She saw the luxury and the money. Uncle Antonio, who had created his own empire, had an absolutely sensational penthouse in Nan’s block. He’d bought two apartments and knocked them through, and he also had a villa by the Lakes where we used to go.

  One day he decided to take Dawn and me to Rimini. It was the usual summer nightmare on the roads with massive queues. Uncle Antonio steered his Maserati onto the hard shoulder and drove almost all the way to Rimini speeding past the blocked lines of cars. It was like an oven outside, but we had the radio and the air-conditioning full on, speeding along in this Maserati. Dawn and I felt like royalty – especially when we took a suite at the Grand Hotel in Rimini.

  Uncle Antonio was a huge cocaine fiend and he travelled with suitcases of cocaine. We went out to long lunches and lived the high life. My Auntie Domenica, known to all as ‘Mima’, who’d joined us for the trip, was ten years older and more sophisticated than us. She’d looked like a bloke – a strong face, if I’m being kind – before the nose operation that she had while Dad was in New York. Now she was quite startling-looking, and she took a liking to some of the younger men. Though not quite as much as the liking she had taken to heroin.

  She wasn’t the only junkie I knew, not by any means. Sadly, Uncle Filippo’s girlfriend Alessandra had a problem with that as well. Tallish for an Italian girl, beautiful and vibrant, she was only a couple of years older than me, and I was deeply shocked by what happened to her. It was a warning bell, if any of us had cared to listen.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ROMEO

  ‘Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.’

  MARCUS AURELIUS, AD 172

  It was as if the ouija board was sending another message, for the family fortunes suffered a severe knocking in 1986.

  It kicked off with Nan’s arrest. It made sense to the police not on the payroll. Milan was turning into a suburb of Colombia, there was so much drug traffic. The cops believed Dad was no longer a problem as he was in jail. So they took Nan off the streets on a drug handling and stolen goods list of charges. They couldn’t prove much but she was sent to San Vittore prison for two years.

  I was heartbroken. Nan had been my guardian angel, had organised everything, and now she was in jail. I thought I would never see Dad or the rest of the family again.

  Then I heard that Alessandra had died, and I felt everything around me was crumbling. She’d taken a drug consignment to America for the family. She was a mule; all she had to do was deliver the package. It’s still a mystery exactly what happened to her. What we know is that she overdosed on heroin and whoever she was with bundled her out of a speeding car and into a Manhattan side street. She was thrown into the trash and left to die. We don’t know who she was with, what she was doing or why it happened. But that’s what the cops said she died of.

  Of course, she was seen as a minor casualty in a billion-dollar business. Uncle Filippo was devastated, as were her family. My uncle tried to find out what actually happened but there wasn’t much of a result. If it had been a family member it would have been different. I know that sounds awful but because it was his girlfriend, not family, the odds of business against vendetta came down on the side of business. It’s brutal, but that was the way of it. When I heard the news I was horribly sad, and it felt freaky thinking about the strange night with the ouija board when she’d sent Auntie Milina the death message. Had it backfired?

  Drugs were taking their toll on the family. Dad’s lesbian sister Mariella, who’d had the affair with his girlfriend, had become a serious heroin user and became infected by a dirty needle. She contracted HIV and died from full-blown AIDS. But it didn’t stop business.

  With Nan imprisoned, Dad quickly got on with the job of setting up new operational headquarters. He was open all hours inside the all-mod-cons Parma Hospital. He reinvented his scam from Barcelona with a series of clever twists: instead of working in the prison hospital to case it out, he was living in the nearby regular hospital in grand style. A doctor had ordered Dad to have twenty-four-hour care as he claimed he risked dying of an infection from lead left in the gunshot wounds he suffered in the café attack when Adele was killed. There were no guards, only the consultant, chain-smoking tax-free cigarettes, who’d been enriched in return for the dodgy paperwork to get Dad into hospital. When the prison authorities asked how long it might take for him to get better, the consultant said he could give no time limit.

  Dad ran everything from there, organising the family’s affairs – and his own – like a free man. Sometimes contacts and my uncles would visit four or five times a day with meetings going until late in the evening. Information was received and orders given about the international drug shipments. Every night someone from the family, usually Auntie Rita, would drive out to Parma and make deliveries to Dad and hand out any necessary payoffs. They’d go over the accounts, the drugs sold and money made. Given the enormity of the deals, maybe it was appropriate that Dad wore a blue business suit for his hospital board meetings. But it was crazy. He was in hospital because he was meant to be near death from lead poisoning and he wasn’t even in pyjamas.

  Sex was Dad’s recreational drug. He was enraptured by one of the nurses and he engaged in quite a passionate affair for a man in critical condition. Nurse Leggy – yes, she had long legs – and her husband couldn’t have children but she got pregnant by Dad. Her marriage survived, with her pretending the boy was her husband’s. Nurse Leggy thought enough of Dad to send him a photograph of the baby, who they named Alessandro, and tell him: ‘This is your son.’

  So I’ve got a half brother I’ve never seen who doesn’t know who we are. But there are probably more; one thing Dad never struggled to do was attract the eye of women. Sometimes he’d happily see double.

  I was seeing red. I was angry at I don’t know what. My situation, my circumstances – at Mum?

  I did pretty well at school despite the usual distractions, the crushes and the fashion moments, and decided on a college degree in business studies, which was as much for Mum as for me. But my mind wandered from management and economics to what was happening with Dad and Nan and the rest of the family in Milan. I’d seen the glamour and excitement, I’d been part of it. Now I wasn’t.

  My seventeen-year-old’s moods and ‘it’s not fair’ attitude didn’t help my relationship with Mum. She was doing everything she could to keep a good and happy home – in England. And I was going on about the family in Italy. I wouldn’t call them all screaming matches but we had many exchanges of opinion. Our lives were very difficult. Every seventeen-year-old knows she’s right. Every Mum knows she’s right. It’s a Mexican stand-off that neither can win.

  When the 1987 Easter break arrived I’d done six months of college and what seemed like a century of mum-and-daughter disputes. We were both at our wits’ end when I called Auntie Angela in Milan to get the latest news and gossip. Auntie Rita answered the phone and everything poured out of me – the frustration, the boring life in England, the wanting to see Dad, all of it.

  She got the message: ‘Marisa, come here! Stay with me. You can see your dad every day.’

  I had college holidays, money saved, and Mum didn’t have the energy to fight me about it. It was agreed I’d only go for a month until it was time to come back for college. Mum was fine, helping me get organised for the trip, helping me pack, but for all that her face told another story – one of resignation. Like mother, like daughter. Life was repeating itself in front of her eyes.

  I hadn’t seen my family in more than a year and never without Nan. Uncle Guglielmo, who met me at the airport, was the outside organiser for Dad, who was masterminding ever
ything from his hospital rooms. Just because Nan and Dad were in jail didn’t mean they weren’t still running one of the biggest drug rings in Europe with the USA their biggest customer.

  I was desperate to see Dad again and Uncle Guglielmo arranged for me to have a driver, a young guy called Bruno, for my trips to the hospital. I didn’t pay much attention to him at first. I saw him give me the eye, the up and down look. I was young with a good figure and long blonde hair so it wasn’t the first time I’d been ogled. Hey, I’d have been upset if he hadn’t!

  But it was Dad’s attention I really wanted. It was as if he was in a corporate office; he had his own airy, private ward with nice big windows on the second floor of the hospital. I spent the day with him and the next and the next.

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t around so much for you when you were growing up,’ he said. ‘But soon I’ll be out and things will change. Things will be better. I want you here as much as you can be. I want you around more.’

  I’d no real idea of the scope of what Dad and Nan and the family were involved in but I wasn’t stupid either. My father and grandmother were in jail, most of my uncles had been in jail, so I was aware they weren’t running Disney World. I knew their business must be dodgy but I didn’t ask questions. I was just happy to be there, to be home. For that’s how it felt. I feel Italian, I always have. When I was seventeen I just wanted to stay.

  I spent most days with Dad but there were regular interruptions with his constant stream of visitors. Whenever he spoke to people they listened to his words as if their lives depended on it. And there was no better example of that than Bruno. I could see Dad liked him and they would often spend time alone talking about business. On the first visit they finished their conversation by shaking hands and as we left Dad kissed me and shouted to Bruno: ‘Don’t fuck it up, Bruno. And make sure you look after my princess.’