Mafia Princess

by Merico, Marisa

  But I had Lara! I told them I’d take her to my mum’s. They said that wouldn’t work because they’d already arrested Mum. She was at Blackpool Central Police Station.

  I asked them to take me and Lara to my friend Naima’s house but when we got there other Customs and Excise officers were searching it. I muttered ‘I’m so sorry’ to her and James. I was mortified that I had brought that trouble to their doorstep. They were straight people.

  With Lara listening, the officer barked at me: ‘Right, we’re going to take you.’

  I put Lara down. She held out her arms, sobbing ‘Mummy!’ It broke my heart, looking at her so upset. I just walked out of the room with the sound of her screaming for me ringing in my ears. That upset me far more than the arrest.

  After the problem of what to do with Lara was sorted, I didn’t say another word. In the newspapers it was reported I’d said ‘I’m saying nowt’ – but I didn’t. I knew better than that. I wasn’t going to say anything at all until I knew exactly what it was all about. They put me in an interview room at Blackpool Central and the duty solicitor was called in. With my good luck it was a brilliant solicitor called Trevor Colebourne, a man who understood the seriousness of it all better than me. I was distraught. I was being asked about ‘offences regarding drug trafficking, benefiting from the proceeds of drug trafficking and money laundering’. When Trevor arrived for the formal interview to begin at 1.40 p.m. I still hadn’t been charged. I’d decided I was going to try to blag my way out of it but he instantly talked me out of that, saying I shouldn’t comment because whatever I did say might be twisted and used against me.

  Along the corridor they’d started questioning Mum forty minutes earlier. She loves a good chat and her conversation with them ran for about 100 foolscap pages of transcript.

  What I said didn’t fill two pages: a couple of ‘yes’ answers to formal questions, my date and place of birth. It took exactly two minutes. The customs guy Roger Wilson was quite abrupt.

  He had trouble opening one of the audio tapes for the recorder and I giggled.

  Trevor tried to cushion this by saying, ‘I think Marisa finds it quite amusing.’

  I wasn’t being spiteful or taking the mickey. It just came out because it was genuinely funny. By the time Roger Wilson got the tape open he was bright red. He got going and was about to ask me about my house when Trevor said it was going to be ‘no comment’ from then on and he was furious about that.

  Mum was along the way entertaining his colleagues. They asked her about her marriage and the family in Italy and about the money transfers. Then, and later, I believe they got quite exasperated with her. When Roger Wilson interviewed her it was to do with a ‘missing’ quarter of a million dollars.

  Wilson: ‘There’s still about 250,000 unaccounted for.’

  Mum: ‘Yeah, I mean…she went on holiday.’

  Wilson: ‘But hang on, Patricia.’

  Mum: ‘She wasn’t working.’

  Wilson: ‘Quarter of a million we’re talking here, it’s not chicken feed.’

  In turn, Mum got annoyed when they quizzed her about picking up the cash from the Nat West in Cleveleys.

  Roger Wilson was the laborious quiz-master again: ‘I mean, let’s face it, not everyone walks through the streets of Poulton-le-Fylde or Cleveleys or anywhere for that matter with the equivalent of about £65,000 on them at a time in cash, that being roughly the equivalent of $100,000 US. It just doesn’t make sense.’

  Mum: ‘I was on the moped anyway.’

  Wilson: ‘Was it an armoured plating [sic] moped?’

  Mum: ‘No, just on the moped and that was it.’

  Wilson: ‘Anyway, let’s go on.’

  Mum: ‘I couldn’t get a taxi ’cos I couldn’t afford a bloody taxi!’

  They charged me, fingerprinted me and shipped me off to Risley Remand Centre in Warrington, Cheshire. At ‘grisly Risley’ they gave me my jailhouse number, RG0991, and I became a statistic in the prison system. But a high-profile statistic, a big number.

  When I got to the reception at Risley there were a group of others being processed. One girl said she’d been accused of harming her child and another girl started beating her up. Guards came and broke them up and I was thinking: ‘Holy shit!’ I’d only just got there. They took them off to the hospital. They said they thought I was vulnerable, did I want to go to hospital too? I reckoned it was better to be in the mainstream than with them.

  The inmates all watch you walking onto the wing. It was spooky and intimidating. The first night I was bunked up with a black Brummie girl who was really nice and reassuring: ‘It’s all right. You’ll be fine.’ To my great relief, I heard that Mum had been released after the day of questioning and was back at home looking after Lara.

  When they unlocked the cell, we had twenty minutes to get dressed and fold everything at the top of the bed as if we were in boot camp. I queued for breakfast with a plastic plate, knife and fork, which weren’t very clean, and this bloody big girl and her friend were eyeing me up. I’d never been in prison. It was a huge shock and I kept thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m on my own here.’

  I stayed out of everybody’s way. On remand you don’t have to work; you can just stay locked in your cell, and that’s what I did most of the time. I got paranoid when I had to go out for a shower because I always had the big girl eyeing me up.

  One girl tried to ridicule me: ‘What are you in for? Didn’t you pay your poll tax?’

  But I got friendly with a prostitute who knew how to handle things. Everybody knew her. My solicitor gave me fags on visits and I gave them to her.

  She said, ‘See them walls? That is the worst it will get for you. The walls.’

  I already knew what she meant.

  I spent two weeks in Risley before I appeared in court in Blackpool. Trevor Colebourne was there and afterwards he told me: ‘Marisa, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.’

  I can’t recall the good news. The bad news was that I had been designated a Category A prisoner – that’s top of the line, number one villain, baddest of the bad. And I was going to Durham jail on remand to await my trial for laundering drug trafficking profits.

  It was all guns then.

  Everywhere I went the police were armed.

  They took me to Durham as a Cat A, handcuffed to an officer and sitting on a metal seat in a blacked-out, armoured minibus with a sick bucket in front of me. It was a sweat box. You’d get done for taking a dog in it. There were police on motorbikes and a helicopter monitoring us sweeping across the Pennines through Scotch Corner to Durham. The escorts switched with the police jurisdictions. No vehicles were allowed on the motorway anywhere around the van.

  We pulled right into the women’s wing, ‘H’ block, through about five doors. They were all locked manually apart from the big steel outside one. It was a prison within a prison, home to Britain’s most high-risk women, and they called it Hell Block.

  Not all women were Cat A prisoners but it was the high-security area with lifers, child killers, paedophiles, any longterm prisoner doing ten years or more. I knew life was going to be like that Pink Floyd song ‘Living in a Fish Bowl’.

  Every fifteen minutes they’d shout my name and wanted to see me on the landing so they could check me off in the book. I was on suicide watch too. They had male guards, which I thought was weird – men with women!

  The head bloke got a couple of girls to show me around: ‘They’re Cat A, like yourself.’ They were two IRA bombers and they took me everywhere, like head prefects.

  I know it sounds daft but it took ten days in that single first-floor cell for me to understand where I was and how serious it was. And then I thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m never going to get out.’ I broke down and sobbed my heart out. I’d stayed so strong in Risley, but in Durham I was on the floor, on my knees, in terrible floods of tears. The reality of everything hit me, especially of not being with Lara. I missed her so badly. I could cope with being contained but not b
eing without my daughter. That’s what made me break down – but what kept me going as well.

  After an hour or so I got up and swore to myself that for the sake of Lara I’d simply get on with it. I was wallowing in my own self-pity. The trial was still to come and I was pleading not guilty. Maybe I’d be back home soon.

  But meanwhile I was stuck in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Durham. Yet the roof was all glass and a lot of daylight came through. Obviously the higher you were, the more daylight there was, so most people yearned for the penthouse suite. I was lucky enough to get a top-floor cell, with a view of Durham Cathedral, one of the most wonderful buildings in the world.

  We only got an hour a day outside. That’s if we were lucky. If it was raining, the officers refused to go out. We used to go mad. By law you’re supposed to have an hour a day of fresh air. We’d say: ‘We’ll go out in all weathers – get some huts out there for the officers to shelter in.’ But we didn’t make the rules. That hour to us was everything. We would have gone out in rain or shine or snow. At Christmas 1994, it was gorgeous. The flakes were enormous. It was dead still, and in that yard it felt like heaven. We were walking all over and making prints in the soft snow. It was cold, but it was nice and still. I remember it clearly in my mind. It was eerie, and it was also emotional because we all missed our families, who were outside.

  Sometimes I used to look up and use my hands to shield my eyes so I couldn’t see the wall. I’d pretend I was looking at the open sky. I used to dream of going out at night and standing there in the dark to feel the night air.

  I was given £1 a day and I saved it all up to buy phone cards, which were £3 a time. Every night without fail I phoned Mum and had a word with Lara, but as a Cat A prisoner I could only use one particular phone with a recording device on it and I had to tell the screws when I was ringing so they could listen in. That was tough. And Mum and Lara were only allowed to visit twice a month, which wasn’t nearly enough.

  I wrote to Bruno and poured my heart out. I’d had enough. Basically I said, ‘I’m fed up with you. I don’t want to be with you any more.’ Being arrested, being in jail, made me free to tell him what I genuinely felt. He was part of my life but I couldn’t see us being together forever. The depth of feeling, that special closeness, had gone. Outside, I would never have left him. I would always have been there to support him. I would have been obligated to. I always had as a wife. I couldn’t have abandoned him while he was in jail and I was outside, but now I was in the same boat.

  Our love relationship was over. It hadn’t been working before he was arrested, for all the old reasons. He took a lot of coke. I didn’t see him for long periods of time. He’d be out until four in the morning. He just wasn’t a family man. He was devastated when I told him how I felt but we agreed to keep writing to each other. His mum came over to Durham and went to see Lara so there was still a lot of connection there. But it made me feel even more lonely, having cut off that link to my husband, one of the men who was supposed to look after me.

  I got letters from Dad as well, but because I was Category A they were thoroughly scrutinised and I had to be very careful about what was said.

  I got my head down and tried to get on with the practicalities of life in jail. We had bank accounts people outside could put money in so we could buy our own food. The auxiliary officers would go to Sainsbury’s for us. I’d make a shopping list and off they’d go once a week. There was a fridge and you stuck your name on your stuff. It was better to make your own because the servery food came from the men’s side of the prison and you never knew what they’d done to it before it arrived.

  I began spending about three hours a day in the gym, where I met Linda Calvey, who was one of the longest-serving prisoners in the system. She was known as the ‘The Black Widow’ because every man she got involved with was soon either dead or in prison. I thought she was nice enough. She had a cloth with white lilies she used at the dinner table and she made a point of telling me that Reggie Kray had sent it to her.

  I also got to know a girl called Beba who was in for terrorist offences and was still running a business on the outside. Then I met a Maori girl, a hit woman from New Zealand, who got nabbed on one of her first jobs. Before that, she told me she’d worked as a nanny and spent the winter of 1991–92 as a resident on-call nanny at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St Moritz; she was there when I was and could have ended up looking after Lara, which was a big freak-out for me.

  And there was Zoora, an Indian girl who was in for poisoning her husband: she got twenty years. She made me my first curry. In Italy we didn’t have curry so my first-ever curry was made by Zoora who’d poisoned her husband. It was so spicy I’d never have known if she’d mixed arsenic instead of chilli powder into the chicken madras. She claimed she hadn’t killed her husband but they all say that in there. The only one I did believe didn’t do it was Sue, Susan May. She was convicted of battering her eighty-nine-year-old aunt to death. She became like my mum in there. Susan would help anyone.

  Durham was the last stop before Rampton, where all the true misfits were sent. But we had some all the same. One who was only about my age looked like a Honey Monster because she used to scrub her face with a Brillo pad until it was raw. Lots of them would find stuff with which to selfharm; a snapped-off plastic spoon would do it.

  There were occasional big family visits. We’d go in the gym area, set up tables and the families would arrive. Normally, there were only eight tables, so there was only room for eight visitors at a time. If the visiting room was fully booked you’d had it. No visit, no lifeline to the outside.

  The family get-togethers were great. If I’d spoken to my mum about someone in there she’d get to meet them. We’d be at our own tables, with our families, while the kids played in the middle with some toys. Day to day I would focus on my next visit. It was the only way. We all looked forward to it.

  However, we hated the fact that the nonces were there, prisoners who were paedophiles or child killers. They stayed on one side with their visitors. Rose West was one of them and I was surprised to see that her kids came to visit her. They’d testified against her, she got life for abusing them, and yet they were still visiting her. It was spooky seeing her son because he has Fred West’s face. Unless he’s changed it or gone abroad, he’s out there somewhere with that notorious face.

  Security was high on family visiting days and once it was almost called off. One girl who’d killed three kids she was babysitting for – she set fire to an airing cupboard and when the house went up she left the children in there – set a fire in one of the education rooms. We were all excited and getting ready an hour before the doors were to be opened for our families and she torched a room in an attempt to set the prison alight. We wanted to kill her. If the fire had taken they would have cancelled visiting time completely, even though there were families coming from all over the country. They had to lock that girl in because we wanted to lynch her. We would have done. I would have battered her to the point of death, I was so mad. Then I’d have been in there for murder. Manslaughter. She was an evil, nasty piece of work. I don’t think she had anybody coming. She never had visits. She only had a volunteer prison visitor.

  We calmed down afterwards when the visit went ahead. That girl was stripped of everything. She wouldn’t look at anybody. I left it at that. She was doing her time, that’s her punishment. The prison didn’t need me to punish anybody else.

  I sometimes think back and wonder how I coped with that time. But every case is different. It’s a mistake to judge too quickly on the inside, as it is on the outside. And those in for life had, literally, to live there. I couldn’t bear to stay in the same room as child killers. I might have liked to have taken a crafts class but that’s where they went. It was open to anybody, but I knew the nonces were going and I wouldn’t go because I couldn’t sit there with them.

  You were in a prison within a prison already. You were very confined. How could they segregate you further
on top of that? The women who were there were going to be there for a long time and they tended to think, ‘Right, you know what? I’ll just pretend she’s not here. There’s no Rose West, no monsters.’

  The most notorious nonce of all, Myra Hindley, was sharing ‘H’ wing with me. I knew all about her. Mum was always reading about murderers and serial killers and, living so close to Manchester, the Moors murders had been part of our lives. There was always a story on the TV or the papers about the search for a body on the Moors. Or some hope that Myra or Ian Brady, who killed the kids with her, would pinpoint the burial spot of the little boy whose body they never found.

  Oh, I knew who she was. But not the moment I first saw her. I’d grown up with the image in my mind of the blonde hair and that horrible, dead look on her face. When I first saw her, she walked past my landing using a stick. Her skin was yellow from the Golden Virginia roll-ups she smoked all the time. She ignored everyone around her. She walked purposefully on.

  People wonder how nonces can walk around without getting kicked in by someone every five minutes. There were several like Myra in Durham, those who had killed children or burned people alive. It was hard to live with them every day. If you stopped and thought about it really deeply, your head would be mashed: you couldn’t cope with it.

  People have said to me: ‘I’d have done her in.’ It’s human nature. They killed innocents who couldn’t defend themselves, so maybe you should hurt them in return. But you can’t. In such a close environment you’d be the one who would suffer. You would be the one who wouldn’t have any visits. You’d be the one who couldn’t phone home every night. That was my priority. Whatever I felt, whatever I wanted to do, what stopped me was the fact that I knew I needed to hear my daughter’s voice every night.

  For Myra Hindley, the other inmates didn’t exist. There was an arrogance to her, as if she was regimented into pretending we weren’t there. I watched her, I couldn’t help myself. It was only a glance. She looked at me from my feet up for a split second, and then looked away. It made me shudder, hoping she wasn’t looking at me in a weird way. I was still a young girl myself, only twenty-four when I arrived in Durham.