Mafia Princess

by Merico, Marisa

  Bruno wanted money and weed. On a visit they’d strip-search me; they’d look around in my bra and I had to take my knickers off but they didn’t search me internally so I used to put the dope for Bruno in a condom and insert it in a tampon. He’d put it in his pants, between his balls, or in a cut-out in his trainers with the inner sole covering it. With the money he’d pay the guards and get them to buy cigarettes for him. Anything else he wanted, the Colombians could get.

  Bruno’s parents looked after Lara during my weekends away. They were kind and comfortably off people and were in shock because of what had happened to their son. They didn’t know what had gone on, although they might have had suspicions because we obviously had a lot of money. For young people to have so much didn’t seem possible. Unless there was something illegal going on. Which, of course, was the answer.

  And I was now in charge of it. On my visits Dad would give me instructions. My voice was my dad’s voice. I was running the organisation through him. I had the help of a lad called Mauritso, a friend of Bruno’s. Dad trusted him and had a lot of respect for him. Mauritso was like a capo running a crew of other trusted guys.

  Dad would tell me: ‘Get them sorted. Get that done.’

  I could easily have made up my own instructions and they would have followed them to the letter.

  With Dad inside, my uncles were doing their own thing. And so was Nan. I was walking around giving orders. My Uncle Antonio had prospered but never had as much respect in the family as his brother. Now, with Dad out of the way, he wanted to muscle in. I had to watch my back with my own uncle.

  There’s a recording in which he threatens me: ‘Tell her to do what I say or I’ll pull her fucking head off. I’ll pull her by her own…I’ll kick her up the arse…’

  My response to this was simple: ‘Who does he think he is? I’m not doing anything he says. I’m speaking for Dad – you’ll all do what I say.’

  These grown men, who in their ruthless world would think nothing of pulling out a gun and shooting you, had to agree: ‘Yes, Marisa.’ They had respect. Whatever I said, went. They would have killed for me. That’s the sort of people that I had around me. They cushioned and protected me.

  Nan was very much a wheeler-dealer and tried to take advantage of the situation: if she could make another buck out of Dad she would have. In a complete turnaround, I was now lending money to her because too many of her deals were going wrong and she had overstretched herself.

  In their minds they thought I was just a young girl but I wasn’t having any of it and the people around me weren’t either. They were loyal to my dad. They had a lot of respect for my nan but ultimately it was what I said that went. Not what my nan said. And certainly not what my uncle said. Nan started calling me pazzesco criminale [crazy criminal].

  My most important jobs were retaining my dad’s authority and making the right moves with our money, especially the investments in Switzerland. With that, I had the help of a very smooth operator called Fabio. He was a refined guy who didn’t raise suspicion. He wasn’t family, he was business, but he was trusted with collecting money. He escorted me to the bank accounts.

  He was especially good at Coutts, the Queen’s bankers, on Quai de l’Ile in Geneva. I placed an astonishing amount of cash there in hard currency – US dollars, sterling, lire – in specific currency accounts Dad had set up with the help of the two Seville middlemen. This was one way in which he laundered money from his drug-trafficking profits. There were also some safe-deposit boxes for emergencies.

  Every time I went through the Swiss border I was taking money in or out of the country. I went through Lugano by car as the Italian–Swiss border was minimal risk and flew on to Geneva. When I first went after Dad’s arrest it was to make a huge withdrawal: a quarter of a million pounds sterling alone was going to Valeria. I took Lara with me. The cash was in US dollars and the bundles were bigger than I expected. Remembering the photos of me as a baby lying on packs of Marlboro, I lifted the cloth on the bottom of Lara’s carrycot and beneath it was perfect to fit these seven sealed Coutts packs of cash. In this way I carried Lara and a hell of a lot of money out of the bank.

  I used to try and make a point of staying over, because it was gorgeous in Geneva, but sometimes I had to get in and out in a day.

  On my next visit to Dad, he said: ‘You’d best go to the deposit boxes in Zurich. Valeria’s mum has a couple. See what’s happening with them.’

  Valeria couldn’t risk leaving Slovakia in case she was arrested so I met up with Aurelia, her mother, again. When we got there, the bank manager said the boxes had been cleared out by the police. I was as wild as shit. What if that had happened to the ‘trust fund’? We stayed at the Mövenpick Hotel and we were having a coffee in the hotel café when I realised we were being spied on. I was in a compromising position and the police could have arrested me then and there but for some reason they didn’t make a move. I got a flight direct to Milan.

  That experience changed me. I woke up to more things, became a bit more devious, more streetwise. I had to learn to judge people, to see through them to their real motives and intentions. I started to listen to my instincts if I didn’t get a good vibe from someone. I learned to judge people straight away – but I didn’t always control my power.

  Lara and I were living in my apartment in Milan and we used to drive to Bruno’s mum’s every day for lunch or dinner. One night I got back about 11 p.m. and was about to park when a young girl stole my spot.

  I jumped out the car. ‘What are you doing? I’ve got the baby in the car. I was going to park there.’

  She snarled and gave me the finger.

  I was furious and I called a lad who worked for me: ‘Get round here and puncture all her tyres. Do them all. Don’t ruin the car but ruin her tyres.’

  He came round an hour or two later and did it. It was no problem. I didn’t go too far and get her car burned out, which I could easily have done. At least I stopped there. I know I shouldn’t have done anything at all but when someone does something like that or talks to you like dirt, you can suffer a bout of road rage.

  In March 1993 I was on one of my weekly visits to Dad. On the way back I checked my bag in at Lisbon for the Milan flight and while I was in the departure lounge I called Bruno’s mum to check up on Lara.

  ‘Marisa, don’t come back,’ she said. ‘They’ve arrested your nan, your auntie, your other auntie…they’re arresting everyone in the family.’

  I looked up at the constantly flicking departure board and a London flight was listed. I feigned a medical emergency and got my bag off the Milan plane, then I flew back to England, to Mum.

  But Lara was in Italy.

  I couldn’t go back to Milan but neither could I stay in England without my daughter. There was no way. It would be better getting arrested than being kept from my daughter, me in one country and her in another. I had to risk it. They was no way I was going to be without her. She was just a baby.

  I booked a flight to Nice. I told Bruno’s parents to bring Lara to a spot that’s just over the French–Italian border and said I’d meet them there. I bought a dark wig in Blackpool, telling the saleswoman at the seafront dressing-up shop that I was following my husband as I thought he was having an affair. They’d be on the lookout for blonde-haired Marisa Di Giovine. In Italy when you get married, you keep your maiden name. I was Di Giovine on my Italian ID papers, Marisa Merico on my English passport.

  I wore the wig at Manchester Airport but at passport control the official said, ‘You look so different in your picture,’ so I gave up on that idea. I was drawing attention to myself. I left the wig in the toilet and put my hair in a French plait. From Nice I caught a train across the border into Italy. We met up, I had Lara in my arms and within half an hour I was back on the train.

  It was nervy at Italian–French customs on the way back. Lara was on my British passport. The border guard took forever looking at us and at the passport because it was Marisa Merico and Lar
a Merico. He thought I was a single parent; in Italy a mother wouldn’t have her child’s surname. If the passport had said Marisa Di Giovine I’d never have got Lara out. He would have asked: ‘Does her father know she’s leaving?’

  It was the longest few minutes of my life. I prayed Lara wouldn’t say anything in Italian. She did say something but it was just toddler talk.

  The guard said: ‘English, yes? Daughter?’

  ‘Oh yes, daughter.’

  ‘OK. OK.’ Much, much more than OK.

  I’d felt physically sick standing there but I acted cool as a cucumber. I’ve got a split personality. I can be a bit devious in that way; I’ve had to be to survive.

  In the carriage, two lads were smoking away and I resented that around Lara but I didn’t want to move. I just wanted to stay in that spot and get to Nice.

  When we arrived it was too late for a flight to England that night. Money was no object and I got our cab to stop at the first great-looking hotel on the Promenade des Anglais, the Hôtel Negresco. I sat on the bed half the night staring at Lara as she slept and thinking, ‘I’ve got my little girl. Thank God!’

  As I dreamily reran events in my head, everyone in the family who’d ever looked the wrong way was getting arrested in the police’s Operation Belgio, named for my nan’s street, Via Christina Belgioso. The manhunter was Maurizio Romanelli, a sort of Eliot Ness-style ‘Untouchable’ prosecutor, who dealt exclusively with the Mafia. He’d worked hard: wiretaps, seized consignments and documents combined with testimonies from people who turned state’s evidence.

  The star turn was Santa Margherita Di Giovine, my Auntie Rita, the woman who’d opened up her home to me and my romance with Bruno. She’d recently nicked 1,000 tabs of ecstasy from me to sell on to pay off her brother, my Uncle Antonio, who was cutting up rough with her over a drug debt. She’d lost him a lot of money and she was, quite rightly, scared of him. She was also on speed and schizophrenic. She was wheeling and dealing. He was ruthless.

  Rita was fragile and not just from her amphetamine addiction. From childhood she’d been treated badly by my nan. She didn’t have her own character. She bowed down. She was very jealous. Mum never got on with her. Out of all Nan’s children, Rita was the one who always had to interfere, push herself to the forefront and get all the attention. She got all she could ever want after she was arrested in Verona for possession of the ecstasy tabs. She was caught, and couldn’t face my uncle, couldn’t face prison. Her son Massimo was an expert heroin merchant, and also a teenage addict. She would only have done a couple of years in prison, maybe more as a member of an organised crime family, but instead she started blabbing. She’d been inside before, and she couldn’t face it.

  It was the jackpot for Prosecutor Romanelli because Auntie Rita had seen it all. She was a living diary of the years going right back to when Nan moved the family from Calabria. She may have been strung out on drugs but Auntie Rita’s memory of events, of dates and details, was sensational. She went back a long way: as a twelve-year-old she was packing heroin for transport, and her later jobs included bribing cops for protection and information. She’d kept the heroin accounts for Dad, she’d slaved for her brothers and Nan – the grass did not grow any greener than Auntie Rita.

  Others grassed as well. Fabio, the charming gentleman, was picked up and became another pentiti, a state witness. He was pressured and he collaborated and as a right-hand man he knew a lot. Several in-laws gave in to pressure and felt obliged to talk.

  One of them was an auntie’s husband. He was a nasty piece of work anyway. She decided to go along with him, because they had three children together. I know that if she had had a choice she wouldn’t have gone along with him. Everybody was arrested and she had nothing left. She would have been left to bring up her kids on her own. I understood in a way why she did that. He was her husband and she loved him, although it wasn’t right what he did.

  And Valeria’s former husband Mario the Sicilian took his revenge on her and Dad. As soon as he was picked up he turned informer, which was no surprise to me. I was always suspicious of him. But he also somersaulted the cops and escaped to Brazil before some arms-smuggling warrants caught up with him.

  But the biggest and by far the most important talker was Auntie Rita. All over Italy, Spain, Holland, Portugal, the UK and America, leads and contacts she grassed about were being followed up. Arrests were constant. All in all more than 100 Mafiosi officers and soldiers were picked up.

  When I phoned Bruno’s sister Silvia in Milan, she was able to tell me that there were forty-one family names, but not exactly who was on the wanted list. I might be next. What would happen to Lara?

  By the morning after I rescued Lara from Italy, I knew I wasn’t on the warrant for the mass arrests there, but what about in Spain or Portugal? I didn’t know. I couldn’t go to Dad, couldn’t go to Bruno. Or my nan. I didn’t move. I didn’t know what was going on.

  I sat in the hotel in Nice for a day, thinking.

  The web was so complex and tangled.

  I slipped through it.

  I called on the one person who always gave me unconditional help and love – my mum.

  She said she would open the windows and freshen up the rooms at 7 Sheringham Way, Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  RAINY DAYS IN BLACKPOOL

  Tinemu d’occhiu u scurpiuni e u sirpenti, ma nunni vardamu du millipedi.

  [We keep an eye on the scorpion and the serpent, but we do not watch the millipede.]

  SICILIAN SAYING

  Although she was just used as a drugs dogsbody – albeit a well-paid one, banking the equivalent of £40,000 twice a week – Auntie Rita’s confessions brought the roof in. She knew the secrets, the devils in the detail. She told how all the kids had learned the code of silence, omertà, at Nan’s knee. The lesson was not to tell the truth but to say nothing. Certain attitudes infiltrate throughout the Mafia lifestyle: honour must always be respected, family revenged.

  I remember Rita talking about a Calabrian boy who died during one of our summer holidays in the South. She’d grown up with the boy and ‘cried for a week’ at the news of his death. But our male cousins did not. All they wanted to determine was who was responsible because they, in turn, were going to die. Three days later the killers ‘weren’t around any more’.

  This story is like a perfect précis of a life that I was part of but I’d been able to rise above by timing and circumstances. Rita’s brothers were their own deity, gods, while she and her sisters were regarded as no more than sex machines who did the domestic chores. She pointed out that if my dad went to Nan and said ‘I need a million lire’ he would get it, but Nan wouldn’t buy her a new pair of shoes no matter how much she begged. That was the mentality, she said, passed down from generation to generation.

  As Auntie Rita talked into spinning tape recorders, and some of the family plotted her assassination, I was setting up home in the north-west of England.

  Sitting with Lara in Nice that night, watching her sleep so peacefully, I’d realised fully my responsibility for this separate human being. Without me, what would she do? When it all kicked off it was clear the safest move for her and me was going back to Blackpool. I had to balance my loyalties to Dad and Bruno, and naturally, as any mother would understand, it was no contest.

  It wasn’t returning to an old life; it was starting a brand new one as a single mum. In Italy, the slow arm of the law was working against the family and the evidence was considerable. The prosecution was painstakingly building their case on the pages and pages of confessions, a Mafia manifesto.

  In the early 1990s there was a credit crunch in England. Everybody was skint. I had the cushion of hidden money, but I was careful. I was more Yorkshire than Lancashire about the cash, for I’d seen how fast it can vanish. I was really calm and settled because I didn’t have to travel. My life was all before me. I had my house. Lara was becoming more a person than a baby, a real personality. It was
mother and daughter time.

  Bruno and my dad telephoned collect every week and that was my greatest expense – £500 phone bills. Otherwise I didn’t live an extravagant life. I just got my shopping. Mum and I would potter around with Lara. She was still working at the Imperial Hotel.

  James, the friend in whose garage I’d invested money, helped me get our car from Italy, where I still had lots of stuff. A couple of motors had been impounded but there was still a sports Clio in Milan. I got Bruno’s mum to fill up the Clio and his cousin drove it to the French side of Geneva, where he lived. I paid James to fly to Geneva, pick up the car and drive it across to the UK. I gave him all sorts of documents but no one asked for them; he drove it straight through.

  So we had transport. I went about my own business every day. I paid my taxes. I paid my poll tax, my property tax. I didn’t know when or if I’d see Dad or Bruno again. I couldn’t dwell on any of that, because it was creating a future for Lara that mattered.

  In March 1994 I got a job as a barmaid at The Golden Ball pub in Poulton-le-Fylde. It was a couple of nights a week, seven hours at £3.05 an hour, which they paid in cash. After handling millions in cash I wanted to get a sense of money in the real world. And I enjoyed it. The landlord was a nice bloke and the customers were mostly fun. It got me out of the house and I had cash to buy treats for Lara.

  On 1 June 1994, a nice Wednesday morning, there was a knock on my front door at 7 a.m. It was the start of what they grandly called Operation Matterhorn. Customs and Excise were there to arrest me: ‘We have a search warrant, you are under caution now…’