He was nearing the end of his time inside and was on day release at the bakery. He wanted to see us. Nan told me he still wasn’t happy about Bruno and me but smiled: ‘Don’t worry about it. I told him, “They’re in love. You can’t do anything about it. They’re together. What are you going to do?” I’ve sorted it out but you still need to see him. If you don’t, there’s nothing more I can do to help you.’
She’d done enough. Dad couldn’t have been nicer to us. He hugged me. He embraced Bruno, but there was a warning in his eye as he told him, ‘Be good to her.’
Nan was the star of this show. She’d made everything wonderful for me. I had Dad on my side and Bruno beside me. It was what I’d been waiting for. In England it had been difficult; I was missing my Nan and my family. I missed the culture, the lifestyle. And now I had it.
Nan was always giving me money for nice clothes, and I stood out. I was English and the Italian guys were interested in that. I attracted a lot of attention everywhere I went. But Bruno was my man – during the day at least. I would go to his house and spend a few hours with him, then I would have tea with his parents Giordano and Dina, who loved me. I got on brilliantly with them and his younger brother Dario and his sister Silvia. After tea I would go back home to my nan’s.
At night Bruno would vanish to illegal gambling clubs and we girls would stay in and watch videos and get stoned. There was plenty of puff going around. We used to smoke the whole panetto [block of hashish], then we’d go in the kitchen and eat ice cream and, half an hour later, go and make pasta. There was me, Auntie Mima, Auntie Angela and her boyfriend Ricardo, who was allowed to sleep over but not in the same bed. We’d make a right mess in the kitchen and not clear up and Nan would go absolutely ape in the morning. She had a woman who used to come in and clean. We were just being lazy.
But Nan made us work too. She taught me, just as she had my mum, how to make hot tripe – which I hated – homemade meatballs with fresh tomato sauce, stuffed artichokes, risotto and fresh bread and cakes. She bought crates and crates of cactus figs and sat for hours picking the needles from them, sucking and shaking her fingers every time one cut her. This was La Signora. A contradiction.
She would get in the face of people who upset her and ask: ‘What’s wrong with you? Do you want to get killed?’
And for hours on end she would dutifully prepare fruit on the chance that her sons might want some when they came to dinner. And no matter how many turned up – twenty, twenty-five or thirty – it was Angela or me who had to clear up. The washing-up we had to do! We used to go mad because my uncles brought their girlfriends, and we’d be cleaning up after all of them. It was like a restaurant.
Lunches I didn’t mind because Bruno was around. He’d become an operator for Nan, who used him the way she had Dad when he was younger. Bruno was put in charge of deals all over the city; he would ‘mind’ shipments and look after any dealer who didn’t deliver or pay up. Once he and I were a couple, Nan trusted him more and more.
I was car mad but had never learned to drive. Bruno taught me in a new Lancia Delta Dad bought me. Bruno and my uncles sped around the city in Maseratis, Mercedes and Porsche sports cars as if they were in glossy motoring adverts. I just accepted that this was the life, which was going as fast as the cars. There was always something happening.
We used to go to clubs and be first in the queue. It was VIP treatment everywhere we went in Milan. At a mention of my surname, doors opened instantly. They’d know about me, and they’d know not to mess. Sometimes it was ridiculous, with Bruno or my uncles beating people up just because they dared to look at us across the roped arenas.
Even the police were wary. But they couldn’t ignore us. Nan’s early warning system was brilliant, and before raids anything incriminating would be circulated around the ‘safe’ neighbourhood apartments. Except for the money. Nan never let that go. The cash was hidden in the freezer inside plastic containers of frozen pasta sauces.
She was rarely caught off guard, but one morning I was still in my dressing gown, sitting in the kitchen sipping coffee, when she came bundling down the stairs from her bedroom.
‘Take this! Hide it!’ She handed me an envelope bulging with money.
‘Where?’
‘There.’
She was pointing between my legs.
I shoved it in my knickers and tied up my gown. I was stuffed with money.
She looked at me. ‘Keep your mouth shut. And put your foot on that tile.’
She was pointing at the kitchen floor by my chair. I moved my left foot over the loose tile just as the cops waltzed in the front door. I was alert and just had to do it. I prayed they wouldn’t force me to get up because the cash would’ve spilled out and the cops would have taken it; they wouldn’t have reported it. But they didn’t bother with me, a teenage girl.
And there was nothing to find elsewhere. They left after only fifteen minutes; it was as if they were going through the motions. After they’d gone, curiosity made me lift the tile and reach in. I pulled out a pistol. I’ve no idea what type it was but it was big, heavy and ominous.
It was the start of the most tumultuous times of my life. Shortly after the raid I found out about an arrangement to murder someone. Dad was finally out of prison and was back at the family table for the daily business meetings. I wasn’t part of it but I was around, in and out of the kitchen as they talked, and that’s how I heard.
The family had a friend, a guy who’d worked with the Camorra, the Mafia organisation which has infiltrated almost all of Naples and beyond, as powerful and effective as the Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta. An influential Mafiosi from the Camorra flew to Milan to see my dad and asked permission to murder this guy. He had to ask consent because it was my dad’s turf. Dad couldn’t have gone to Naples and just shot somebody. He’d have to ask and explain: ‘This person has done something wrong to me. This is what he’s done. He’s taken it to the extreme. I have to show that he can’t get away with it. If not, everyone else will do the same.’
I knew the man they wanted to kill. When Mum and I moved out of the Mussolini flats in 1979 my family – not the council – put this family in our place. They’d come from Calabria. So it was a bit more personal. It wasn’t a guy I didn’t know. What made it worse was that I knew he had a wife and kids. He’d wronged the Naples Mafiosi and Dad couldn’t condone it. He couldn’t save him. To be honest, Dad wasn’t that bothered about it. If it had been a family member it wouldn’t have happened. If it were someone he cared a lot about, it wouldn’t have happened. But Dad and Nan gave the go-ahead. If they’d turned the request down it could have caused a war between them and us. That’s how it was.
I don’t know what was said, but I did know in advance it was going to happen. I was nineteen years old. I’ve had to carry that. I couldn’t go to the police, and I couldn’t stop my dad. What could I do?
A lot of the time I would bury my head anyway. I was quite happy living in my own little world. I was just a young girl. I didn’t see into the future. I didn’t see the seriousness. I know right from wrong, I can’t deny that. It was my dad. It was my family. That’s the difference. I can’t explain it.
I was being pulled in, groomed in their ways. Unless you’re put in a situation like that, you don’t know how you’d react. I was a young girl. What was I supposed to do?
There was a lot of agonising about death. And the heroin trade. Uncle Filippo’s girlfriend Alessandra and Auntie Mariella had died, and Auntie Mima and Dad’s youngest brother Alessandro were heavy users. A heroin addict with AIDS, called Rosolino, lived in Uncle Antonio’s house and did housework for smack.
Nan would give them all heroin. She didn’t want them getting it from anywhere else, stuff that might not be right. As a mother, she was stuck between wondering, ‘Do I give it or do I let them go on the streets for it?’ She was whispered about as Mamma eroina, Mummy Heroin. She purposely looked older than her age and others called her Nonna eroina, Grandma Hero
in. She was killing them herself and she was probably killing other kids. It’s a puzzle. She was so generous on one side yet this was her way of life, of living. She did not know what else to do.
When my dad got back from jail he said: ‘This isn’t life. We can’t carry on, we can’t carry on. People have died.’ He also argued the commercial point. ‘And there’s not as much money in heroin.’ He’d recognised a gap in the market and wanted to start dealing hashish. ‘There’s not much of it around – and nobody dies from it. This is the money now.’
There was soon a great deal of hash worldwide as Dad created a super-efficient smuggling empire. He was a very, very good businessman, the articulate one. He’d never had any schooling yet he’d made millions, and wanted more.
I knew what was going off. I can’t hide that. Dad was flying around here, there and everywhere. And so was I.
On Dad’s first hash operation in the summer of 1988 he sent me, Bruno, another girl Annie, and three strong-arm lads to Marbella with an expensive, big 7 Series BMW. The car was to be exchanged for merchandise. He forked out for all of us to stay in a smart hotel near the beach. I can’t emphasise enough how to me it felt so normal; I didn’t even stop and think about it.
Annie was there because she had a false document to say she was aristocracy. On your documents in Italy they put what your employment status is, then you can also have bene stanti – wealthy. Annie’s ID had bene stanti. She was to take this ringer car over to Morocco when the time was right. But there were delays by the supplier.
One of my uncles had a bar in Marbella and we took over the town. I spent a full month there just waiting. I’d go to bed at 4 p.m., get up by midnight, have something to eat, go out until 8 a.m. clubbing and then go on the beach. That’s how I lived. We slept on the beach and then went back late afternoon and we did that for a whole month.
We got to know the locals. The sister of one of Bruno’s friends brought her lad along, who had recently arrived from Milan. I had very long hair and that day I’d had it all scraped back at the hairdressers’, where they’d twiddled it around into a bun. It looked really sophisticated and I was wearing smart clothes as well. This lad, who was about our age, said, ‘Who’s she? Has she just come out of college?’ He didn’t quite call me a ‘snotty cow’ but he tried to take the piss, almost but not quite to the point where I’d be offended. I sat there amused by what he was doing. Then the sister must have said something to him about why I was there and who I was with. He hadn’t realised who I was. When he was told he absolutely shat himself: ‘Oh my God, they’re going to kill me.’ He couldn’t stop saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’
Finally, it was time for Annie to go across. She took the car as planned but they wouldn’t let her into Morocco. She didn’t look wealthy enough. She didn’t have a delicate look about her. She just got turned back. It was all an expensive mess.
Naturally, Dad wasn’t happy but he had already made a connection with two highly dangerous and well-connected dealers in Seville. They paid the way for the ringer cars, and the Morocco shipments began. He had teams working out of Marbella. Spain became home from home.
Dad never wanted anybody to know these guys in Seville. He was very protective over things like that. He watched out. They, the shadowy international competitors, wouldn’t dare, but you never know…Dad thought like the fictional ‘Lupin’ he was often nicknamed after by the Press, and was just as devious.
The Seville collaboration was golden, a bonanza, and the British market was one of the most profitable. Dad had a connection with a London gangland family we knew as ‘Santos’, who would fly over to Spain with payoff money, sometimes as much as £750,000 – and that was a down payment. There would be two further instalments of the same or more as required. And it was, as elsewhere, repeat business.
The Seville partners had to be paid too. I was recruited into the financial side of the operations. Bruno and I were to take the money and hand it over to the actual guys, the Mr Bigs.
Dad didn’t tell me what to do. He just asked, ‘Marisa, will you go and take that money to Seville? Are you okay with that?’
And I said yes. I wasn’t nervous about the trip. I was too young to get scared at such things. Besides, I’m very adaptable; I’ve had to adapt wherever I’ve been. Some people find it hard but I had to deal with it. Once I’d made deliveries a couple of times, I was trusted enough but never completely. No one ever was. I had the ability to get from A to B, and I had my head screwed on enough to be responsible for the money. I always had an air of ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ and Dad saw that in me, that I wouldn’t raise suspicion. I was quite mature for my age. I always wore nice clothes. I didn’t look posh, but I looked like someone who was well-off, middle class and spoke well. Dad would always going on about me being rispettabile [respectable]. I knew where I was going, and I knew what I was doing. I take after him in that way, thinking on my feet, getting myself out of anything that might be a problem and cause trouble.
It was like him taking Mum on the cigarette runs while she was pregnant, and while I was a baby. Women in the ’Ndrangheta are part of the game, always active, especially during vendettas and wars. When the men are under threat the women have to organise everything. Women are never war targets. During war times the men would often crossdress to escape attack. Some of them tried to get away with long wigs but without shaving off their moustaches.
Dad used women’s freedom to move around undetected for his drug trafficking and the payoffs and cash collections. People, including the police, didn’t usually think of women, never mind young girls, as gangsters. They didn’t enforce the same restrictions on us.
Tight dresses, short skirts and spilling cleavage were useful distractions when encountering border guards. Manipulation became a way of life; you go on a bit of a power trip. If I went by plane, I’d strap the money around me. I’d wear granny knickers, big Bridget Jones numbers, and lots of loose layers of clothes. The cash would be in plastic sleeves all over my body, from top to bottom. I was walking money, a cash Christmas tree.
For the amounts I used to take to Spain to pay for the hashish, security companies would use armoured vehicles. It was loads of lire, about £80,000 or £90,000 worth at a time if it was me on my own. If it were a couple of us, we would have that much each. If there was a particularly large amount of money, I went by car and it would all be put in the panelling. Bruno would do the driving because although I knew how to drive I hadn’t got my licence. We didn’t want something like that to cause a problem.
We could put up to £500,000 in a car and we’d motor gently across Italy, France, Spain – two borders, three countries.
Once we stopped in a hotel in France overnight, and I got the money out of the car and into my big cash bag. It was lire, packets of it worth up to about £250,000. The next morning before I took a shower I took it out of the bag and put it under the sheets for safety. I didn’t want anyone walking in and nicking it.
I repacked and we were off, but in Seville I found it was about £13,000 short. I panicked: ‘Oh my God!’
When I told Dad he was a bit suspicious. ‘Are you sure, daughter of mine, that you haven’t…’cos I’d rather you told me.’
It didn’t matter who you were when it came to business: ‘Dad! I swear…’
I wondered if Bruno had taken it but he hadn’t. We’d left it under the sheet. I must have missed it. I trusted Bruno. He wouldn’t have taken it. He never had. He never did. There was no point. Why lose yourself over something like that, when you’re making enough money anyway?
When I was back in Milan I phoned Mum and told her that I’d been moving some of Dad’s money for him for tax reasons and a chunk had got lost. She was working as a chambermaid at the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool and with her innate Lancashire trust in the system she said, ‘Hopefully the maid will find it. You might be lucky.’
More likely the maid would be. Of course it never did turn up.
I lost £13,000
but out of the millions I transported, that was the one thing that ever went wrong.
Often we drove straight down to Seville, a ten-, twelve-hour car journey on the dual carriageways. We’d go around the Granada region, through the mountains, and see trucks full of merchandise with the locals on their bikes hanging on the backs trying to get in to steal stuff. It was pitch black. We had far more money in our car than any of them could get in those trucks.
Bruno always said, ‘They’d better not stop us.’
But we didn’t have any weapons to defend ourselves. It was a risky business.
Bruno got badly hooked up on one Seville trip. We stopped in northern Spain, and he couldn’t sleep because he’d taken so many drugs. He was curled up in a corner looking at me and telling me I was a witch. I thought: ‘Oh my God, we’ve got all this money, about half a million pounds, and he thinks I’m a witch.’
Finally I lost it: ‘What are you doing?’ I shouted and shouted at him but he was out of it.
I’ve a rational brain. What if he’d killed me? They’d have found me dead in the room with all that money and then Dad would have killed Bruno. He never considered the possible consequences of being quite so doped up. But he slept it off.
Dad never seemed to sleep. He based himself in Spain and was always busy. The phone was either on his ear or in his hand every hour of the day. He’d doze off with it next to him. I didn’t see much of him, maybe a day here or there, as he was moving around the whole time.
He was now the CEO of a growing empire with nearly 200 people working directly for him. He had contacts in Holland, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, throughout the UK and in Colombia and America. The best routes were from Morocco to the UK and Colombia to Milan.
He was in constant touch with Nan in Milan. She was in charge of sales and distribution and was the tough negotiator. Even family members had to pay up front for their supplies. There was constant family rivalry. Dad’s brother Antonio and his wife Livia De Martino were the most enterprising of my relatives, with a turnover of hundreds of millions of lire.
Mafia Princess Page 12
