Mafia Princess

by Merico, Marisa

  My Uncle Domenico was one of the key survivors in our ’ndrina. He ran a pizzeria – it was quite funky for old-world Calabria, with a disco bar – but also our war. He was an expert with guns, he loved them. He appealed to my dad for help because the enemy were killing off our main men, so Dad went to Theodor Cranendonk and got the weapons and Bruno and I were ordered to take them down.

  It was a ten-hour drive with me, a distraction in a tight dress, sitting almost on Bruno’s knee because the weapons took up so much space in the car. At dawn we stopped at a Motta café, an Italian Costa Coffee. We were looking for a parking space when Bruno turned to me: ‘Look at that!’

  There were five carabinieri cars at this service stop. Now these are the big boys – when these cops are involved it’s bad news; they are like the military police. What should we do? Drive on? No, that would attract attention. Instead we parked up right next to them and went in the cafe. The carabinieri were at the other end of the bar. Most ordinary people keep well away from them so by doing just that we weren’t looking conspicuous.

  We had coffee to wake us up a bit and a munch of brioche. By the time we were finishing the carabinieri were going out. They stood right by our Citroën, which was a few years old and looked like a car we youngsters could just about afford; nothing exceptional.

  Except for the concealed bazookas, machine guns and the rest.

  Four of them were standing by the car smoking and talking when we walked over. Nobody spoke. Nobody smiled. We got in, cool as you like, and took off like Bonnie and bloody Clyde.

  We didn’t stop again except for the bathroom, and by the evening we were at the pizzeria.

  ‘Marisa, Marisa!’

  Uncle Domenico hugged me and clapped Bruno on his shoulder. He was so happy to see us. He smelled of cigars and garlic, his teeth a sinister display as always.

  ‘I’m proud of you for doing this, you should be proud. This is all in the family, for the family.’

  The enemy had hit key targets, and it was bad. Their family and friends had been getting killed for months and months. If it was all in the family, with no outsiders, nothing could come back to haunt them: Uncle Domenico fervently believed blood does not betray.

  Now he had his new guns. He wanted to celebrate after dinner. He said to Bruno: ‘Do you want to go out and shoot in the mountains?’

  Of course, Bruno, like a little kid, went: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’

  They went off at midnight to shoot at signposts in the mountains. I suppose Bruno couldn’t refuse, it was a testosterone thing, but I thought: ‘Stupid bastard.’ We had risked so much to get there with all that stuff. We’d made it safely and the idiot went out in the dead of night and could either get killed or caught. I was so upset, I burst into tears.

  I wasn’t upset carrying the hardware and guns all the way down there, but I was about him going out shooting. For target practice? For the sake of it! It’s what they did to show fellowship, shoot bullets into the sky.

  Men! Bruno? Stupid, stupid. But I loved him and that’s why I was crying as he was shooting. Men, guns and love…I didn’t want to lose him. I might have been too young to understand the complexity of everything that was happening but I knew Bruno would be shot outright if the other side knew who he was. I was also aware that as my father’s daughter I would be assassinated without a thought. That’s why we only stayed for a couple of days as Uncle Domenico made his preparations and then he sent us off, safely back north to Milan, with kind words and lots and lots of cold pizza.

  That’s when the war intensified. The military weaponry we had brought down took things to a whole new level, where bullet-proof cars couldn’t help, and the De Stefanos literally didn’t know what had hit them when bazookas and anti-tank grenades came into play. Domenico Libri only just survived a bazooka attack organised by Uncle Domenico.

  It wasn’t all one way, though. Uncle Domenico drove around in a bullet-proof car with bodyguards, often disguised in dark glasses, a false beard and a wig. But patience paid off for his killers. They waited, played the clock, and then, in a break with his routine, Uncle Domenico showed himself. He strolled onto his bedroom balcony to smoke a cigar.

  Suddenly, instantly, the assassins were ten metres away.

  With 12-gauge shotguns the hooded shooters blasted him all over the front upper deck of his house. When I heard the news, I was in shock. That was horrid. He was a lovely, lovely man. He was one of my favourites; there are some you really like, some you don’t, but he was wonderful, and within a few months of us taking the weapons he was assassinated.

  The revenge attempt was swift. Giovanni Firca was a jeweller, known as The Goldsmith, and a money man for the other side. He was comfortable in his Nissan SUV, which was double, double armour-plated with extra layers of steel. Which is why the first bazooka round didn’t smash it into pieces at Christmas in 1990. The second bazooka shot took out the front and the SUV burst into flames. Firca survived, God knows how, but many others didn’t, hosed down with bullets, in the ambushes and battles that followed. It was a war zone, the carabinieri terrified of going in.

  Every night in Milan I would overhear excited phone calls about the news from the South. The local police, understandably not too motivated, were always at the scenes after the events but found few clues. They did know one thing – the rounds used in some attacks were from a consignment of bazookas ‘lost’ in Yugoslavia.

  Mum would get me going on the phone from England. I tried not to let her know about the deaths but she had her own information network within the family. I’d try and brush it off as all happening down south while I was in Milan. But every phone call was tense and we couldn’t seem to talk properly. One of us always said the wrong thing that got the other going.

  Once I dismissed her concerns by saying, ‘It’s just a vendetta, Mum.’

  Just a vendetta! That’s how everyday this life was becoming. The tragic and the violent was normal, something that happened every day of the family’s lives.

  Mum had witnessed it too. She knew in her heart. We’d have been better off not talking but neither of us wanted that. Mum always put my mind into overdrive. She never had to spell out her concerns. They were there from the moment she said my name.

  My fears were always that I was going to be shot and die. I had so many people around me getting shot and killed. Everything was going so fast, the gun-running, the drug-running, the money-running. I was on a Mafia marathon.

  I escaped back to Milan where Nan was sort of central control. She never lost track of anything. She stayed mostly in the North. She had to be careful, for even as a woman she’d be a big target, a killing prize for the other side. Instead, she sent the money – millions of dollars went into the feud – and arms. We bazookered our way to victory; it was the military hardware and cash that my father had sent to his troops that won this particular territorial war, that was over before my twenty-first birthday.

  Meanwhile Dad was keeping Mr Fixit and, particularly, his daughter happy. We’d visit them and the bank accounts in Switzerland regularly.

  On one visit I noticed that Cranendonk’s daughter had a big rock, a Cartier Panther ring, on her finger, and I said, ‘Your ring is nice.’

  ‘Oh, your dad bought it for me.’

  ‘Oh, oh, right.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll buy you one.’

  I was fine about it. It was his girlfriend, wasn’t it? But she went on about how he would buy me one and that pissed me off. I thought, ‘Shut up. Why are you trying to justify it?’

  ‘Just be nice to her,’ said Dad.

  ‘Nice! She’s horrible.’

  I tolerated her but I was so rebellious that Dad would get mad. And Nan would tell me: ‘If you were a bit nicer to your dad, you’d get loads of things from him.’

  I was getting older and more sophisticated in what I wore – and what I liked. I had Cartier sunglasses. I bought myself a £1,200 padded Chanel bag. I had to have that. It was a tiny distraction for we had
another battle on our hands – but closer to home, on the streets of Milan.

  When I was a little kid playing around the Piazza Prealpi we used to mix with some kids along the street called the Pellegrinos. Auntie Angela and I and some of the others would play with them. The eldest lad really liked my Auntie Angela, and his brother fancied me. Everybody knew everyone else.

  As they grew up they’d done well for themselves. They had a few quid, but money doesn’t make respect. They got involved with a gangster called Victorio and made war with a gypsy group down from us on Via Aurelio Bianchi, which was rough. The gypsies had a lot of respect for my family. There were also Slav squads around, everyone trying to niggle into our family business. But Victorio was the man making all the moves.

  In the middle of this, a gypsy lad known as Muto was killed. We never found out who was responsible or why. He was a bit loud and mad and he was tortured, run over by a car a few times and set alight. His brother wanted revenge but he got shot and all hell broke loose.

  The Pellegrinos wouldn’t mess with us and we wouldn’t mess with them, but this Victorio got very ambitious. He just thought he could become ‘The Guy’, like the jumped-up idiots you see in movies; to imagine you can come from nowhere and get respect was fantasy. Yet we were in his way and he put a bounty on Dad’s head.

  It wasn’t the first time, and Dad joked about his bargain death price of £100,000: ‘Is that all I’m worth? I’d give him double that just to get lost.’

  I didn’t find it funny.

  The war had returned to the streets of Milan.

  It was only weeks before my twenty-first birthday. I was pregnant. I was getting married.

  And rival gangsters wanted to kill us.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BETTER OR WORSE

  ‘The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

  Yes, it was like the wedding in The Godfather movie. It was tradition and tuxedoes. There was dancing and champagne toasts, the kissing of hands, the making of promises, the devotions to the family. Even a hit squad turned up. I could have been killed on my wedding day.

  I was so in love with Bruno. We had our rows but basically he was good to me. He certainly wouldn’t have dared to play around or he’d have had Dad to answer to. I was four months pregnant when we got married but I wasn’t showing too much. I could have got away with a beautiful white dress in a church but I didn’t want to take the mickey. I wore an expensive, specially made heavy silk and lace dress. It was lovely, the beige lace over a light brown dress for the ceremony at the registry office on 8 April 1991. Mum was there and Grandpa Rosario gave me away.

  Dad couldn’t do it: there was a price on his head and the police were still hunting him on a dusty arrest warrant. A cousin, Francesco, had died from a heroin overdose at my 21st birthday party in the February, and that had made Nan even more distraught. She was still in black and mourning Mima and Alessandro’s deaths six months earlier. She was in no mood to celebrate. I could understand her not being there.

  We took lots of photographs at Auntie Livia’s house before driving to the ceremony in a Rolls-Royce, a gift to us for the day from good friends of the family. They also gave every woman an orchid.

  It was a very straightforward ceremony but we had a big reception after in a fancy restaurant outside Milan, with around 200 guests. We had the Italian chef of the moment and, with Dad paying the bill, the best of everything to eat and drink. Dad had really wanted to come and I was devastated that he couldn’t.

  It was the correct decision. As Bruno and I were getting out of the bridal car at the restaurant, three killers on motorbikes waited in ambush. Two on one bike, one on the other, in a classic attack-squad set-up. The gunmen were stalking Dad and thought he was in the Roller with us. They were there to take a hit on him.

  But the cops were there too. They saw each other. It was a stand-off.

  The cops told us later: ‘The gunmen realised we were there. As we saw them, they saw us.’

  They thought they might have killed me if they had been given the chance. That would have hurt Dad and made him take risks.

  It was tense, dangerous, and I started to become more aware of what was going on around me. I had to be careful in the car. There was a lot more security. I had bodyguards with Magnums.

  And I had a home to make. Bruno and I had moved into an apartment Dad had bought for us down the road from Nan’s. It was smart and modern, with marble floors and mirrored walls. We had bulging bank accounts and new cars every other week.

  At first, although I’d been with Bruno for four years, Dad was grumpy about the pregnancy and acted like an Old World father: ‘Why haven’t you done it right? Why haven’t you got married first?’

  I said that I hadn’t intended on getting pregnant, and I hadn’t. He didn’t speak to me for a month. Then he came round to it and did everything he could for us.

  Dad was also in Milan, living in an apartment near La Scala opera house under an assumed name. I didn’t know where he lived and neither did anyone else. With him was Valeria Vrba, who was now his number one woman. Like Cranendonk, Valeria’s husband, who at this time went by the name Mario, was an arms dealer. He was a Sicilian living in a huge villa in Zurich and could get batches of Kalashnikovs – but not the military stuff, which was the speciality of Theodor Cranendonk. Dad was pleased to get what he could, where he could.

  I never liked Mario but Dad went along with him. Mario drove a Ferrari and they talked cars. The Sicilian had something else of interest – Valeria. She was a Slovakian model and absolutely gorgeous, with blonde hair, which was curly at the bottom. They were all about the same age and liked each other. They used to come down to Milan with their two-year-old girl Etienne. Valeria was sweet and after a time I could see that the Sicilian made her life a misery. She and Dad became lovers and she left her husband.

  She could only have done that for a man like Dad because Mario was one of those guys who would never let you go. He’d rather kill you. She saw a way out. Upped and left, took Etienne with her. Mario was devastated. He couldn’t believe that his wife had left him for another man. This big, hard, macho man who deals in weapons came to Milan, got on his hands and knees and begged Dad to give him his wife back; begged him on his knees. Dad was shocked at the embarrassment of it. He said he loved Valeria and couldn’t give her up: ‘She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t want you. Let her go.’ Grudgingly, he did.

  Although I was heavily pregnant I was still doing currency runs. Who’d think a pregnant girl would have a million quid in her bag? Dad was also travelling and would occasionally see Cranendonk’s daughter, who overlapped for a time with Valeria. On one trip they all met at Zurich airport.

  Valeria on Cranendonk’s daughter: ‘She’s an ugly cow!’

  Cranendonk’s daughter on Valeria: ‘She’s awful, plain.’

  Dad stayed out of it – and away from his gangster rivals and the police. He kept on the move with Valeria, in Spain and Portugal where he felt safer, one hotel and then another. He was never in one place for long. When he did return to the La Scala apartment to deal with some business in the city, about fifty cops arrested him. They had tracked him. They knew he was up to no good but had no proof. He hadn’t quite finished his manslaughter sentence; he’d just wandered off and by the time the red tape caught up it was a couple of years later. So they served their warrant and after a brief court appearance Dad was back in San Vittore.

  His old wounds began playing up again. Nan sent a consultant into the prison to examine him. It was serious and Dad had to be hospitalised. Staff weren’t told which hospital or on what day and at what time. He was taken to the renowned Fatebenefratelli Hospital in Milan. It was all high security.

  Nan had the timetable to the second through the crooked consultant. We all knew from the outset. I knew the night before. I was anxious. Bruno was involved in it and got up about six in the morning. Eight
men escorted Dad in handcuffs to the Fatebenefratelli on a Tuesday morning. It’s an old hospital with tunnels underneath with long corridors. The armed escort used a side entrance to avoid the crowds. They didn’t want contact of any sort until they got to the examination rooms.

  A guard called Marco threatened Dad: ‘If anything happens, you’ll be the first one to go down. I’ll shoot you.’

  But Dad’s escape team, who weren’t any older than me, were more co-ordinated than the police and prison service. They were dressed in surgeons’ gowns especially lifted from the hospital laundry. They knew Dad would be brought up the stairs, not by the elevator. That he wouldn’t go past the third-floor reception area but through a corridor behind the desk. They were all armed with side guns, pistols. And they had a couple of stun guns, which were the latest gangland gadget.

  In the consultant’s corridor – it was need to know and they had no idea the doctor had been got at – they pounced on the escort team. They sprayed their faces with tear gas and knocked them silly with the stun guns.

  Marco the guard got flustered. Dad ordered him: ‘Take the cuffs off now.’

  He didn’t get on with it: ‘Are you going to have a go now? You going to kill me?’

  Marco peed himself while one of dad’s ‘surgeons’ grabbed the keys and unlocked the cuffs.

  They rushed down the back stairs of the hospital and through the underground corridors to a waiting bus, a huge holiday coach from a drug-trafficking contractor. Dad climbed into the false compartment, where food and water were waiting. Twenty-one hours later when he got out he was in the south of Spain.

  The escape was a sensation. The surgeons’ gowns, the surgical precision. Afterwards when the Milanese talked about the Fatebenefratelli they’d joke: ‘Ah, there the Godfather makes the cuts.’