Mafia Princess

by Merico, Marisa

  I ran off to tell Sue. I’d got my knickers in a twist. The friendship started in 1996 and turned into more and more and more.

  We would write A4, both sides, sheets and sheets, and send photographs. Every day, maybe twice or three times a day. We used to record our voices for each other. The guards listened to it, of course. Everything was vetted. Nothing went through without them hearing or seeing.

  Then we started having little code words about stuff. Not anything bad. More on a personal level. I’d write a few Italian words and he would say, ‘What does that mean?’ I’d tell him what it was and he would write back with it. He asked me how to say ‘I love you’ in Italian and I told him and he began to say ‘Ti amo’.

  I replied: ‘You know, I think I love you too.’

  It was intense. Everything was going into those letters. I do feel that I got to know him better through those letters than I would have in real life. It’s easier to tell someone how you feel in a letter. At first I was cynical about the women who fell for men inside, but now it was happening to me.

  Frank had a lot of money in there. He still had people on the outside doing stuff for him. His family looked after him. I never asked for anything but he sent me a box of books and gym gear and got his brother to send £1,000 in cash to me. I knew he’d be offended if I sent it back again. I knew men like him, like my dad, and I knew how their minds worked.

  I wrote: ‘I really appreciate this, but it’s too much. I don’t know when I can repay you.’

  By return I got: ‘Marisa, please do whatever you want with it. That is yours. I don’t want it back. You’re in there. You’ve had a hard time. You’ve had everything taken from you. If I can help, I will do that for you.’

  I sent most of the money to Mum to help with looking after Lara, and he was happy about that. He was a genuinely loving man.

  Which was in complete contrast to his prison record. He couldn’t take the system and he protested in whatever jail he was in. He was involved in shit protests, when they smeared it all over the walls. He was hosed off in a roof protest at Preston. There was a segregation unit in Durham and he was always in that because he got pretty naughty there. In segregation they get locked up 24/7. You’re not allowed out to socialise with other inmates. You can only go outside on your own.

  Frank was in with the real tough guys. He was in the cage next to Charlie Bronson who, although he lives in his own little world, gets a lot of attention. But that’ll happen if you kidnap prison governors. To him, these officers did wrong. Whatever they did, he didn’t like them.

  Frank had a tough life. His mum died when he was sixteen. His dad had been a Category A prisoner himself, a right villain, and Frank had followed in his footsteps. After the raid on the Blackpool jeweller’s he ran off and the police cornered him. He went into a house and held a seventy-six-year-old woman and her daughter hostage in a nine-hour siege before being arrested. He wanted me not to dislike him for that and told me: ‘It could have been a rugby team in there. I didn’t know. I wasn’t nasty to her.’

  He wasn’t. He made them cups of tea and looked after them. The women said he was a nice lad and the papers called him the ‘Gentleman Robber’.

  Frank did nine and a half years hard prison. A few times the screws beat him up badly. A rival prison gang ambushed him and scarred him. He had been through the wars.

  In April 1996 my tariff in Durham was over. I was being released, set free, but Trevor Colebourne got wind that I might be re-arrested because Italy had a warrant for my arrest. The Italian authorities wanted me to face charges. At the Mani Pulite trials Mafia associates were being jailed for twenty years at a time. What would I get as a Di Giovine family member if was extradited to Milan? I might never see my daughter again. It was 50:50 that day.

  Being released as a Cat A was unheard of; normally you are downgraded through the system before you go. Susan May and the other girls were excited for me. The chief prison officer took me down to the gates after I’d gone through the release formalities. I was free for two steps.

  I heard a helicopter as I was going out the gates of H Wing and thought, ‘Oh shit. They’re waiting for me. They’re not going to let me go.’

  The girls were at the windows shouting ‘Bastards!’

  There were snipers on the roof of the prison. There were gusts of wind from the copter blades as we walked out. Police cars were parked right by the gates.

  A copper grabbed me and snarled, ‘Are you Marisa Merico?

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked at the prison officer and asked, ‘Is this her stuff?’

  The officer nodded and he balled it all into the boot and bunged me in a police car and drove off with two escort bikes on the front, a car behind and the helicopter above us.

  They took me to Durham police station and booked me in: ‘You’re arrested for extradition to Italy to answer charges of being involved in organised crime.’

  It was all planned: two Scotland Yard extradition squad officers met me at Newcastle airport. I flew to Stansted airport and they took me into London to Charing Cross police station where I stayed overnight. I’d never felt freaked out in Durham and supposedly there are ghosts there. But in this cell I definitely felt there was somebody with me.

  In the morning I woke up feeling a bit eerie but then ‘Ordinary Day’ by Duran Duran came on the radio. It had sad echoes for me. Michael, who’d been my first lover, had a brother called Chris who was my age. Chris took his own life when I was in Italy. He loved Duran Duran and they played ‘Ordinary Day’ at his funeral. I felt an overwhelming calmness when the song came on. I felt as if he was looking after me in some way. I know it sounds mad but I believe there must be something out there. I’m not sure if it is a God. I like to believe that there is something out there and once we go, our spirit doesn’t.

  I was remanded for three weeks at Bow Street Magistrates and taken to Holloway prison, where I became a new statistic, prison number TG0416. They couldn’t cope at Holloway, they had no Cat A facilities. I kicked up about it, told them so. I should have shut up.

  I got shunted back to Durham but not to my top-floor view of Durham Cathedral. I had a new cell. The security had tightened up so much that every month I had to go into a different cell. Each time I went in a cell, I had to clean it. It was an obsession, a touch of OCD, and I told them: ‘You’re moving me because you want me to scrub every cell in this place!’

  The guards were terrified that the Mafia would break me out and fly me to freedom in a missile-equipped helicopter. We’d tried to do that with Dad in Portugal but I knew there was no possibility of it now because, apart from anything else, all my relatives were in jail – yet they acted on instructions that I was one of the most dangerous people in Britain.

  I was back and forward to London, every time in an armoured vehicle, cuffed and shackled to my escort officer. Before I went out into the van I was strip-searched, following strict procedures so that I was never totally naked. Every time I went for a pee I had three guards outside the door. My every move was watched, and the claustrophobia was horrible.

  I’d often be sick in the stuffy armed vans on the trips south but ‘orders are orders’ and they wouldn’t open the cuffs to allow me to clean up. If I complained about anything I always got the same answer: it was being done, or couldn’t be done ‘for security reasons’. They seemed to think I was some comic-book super-villain, able to appear and vanish at will. The daughter of Arsène Lupin, indeed.

  They’d stop for a break halfway through the five-hour journey. Often we stopped at Leicester prison, which is the local men’s jail in the Southfields area. But once, for ‘security reasons’, we stopped at Leeds prison. At reception where they process the prisoners they told me there was a special toilet I could use exclusively. It had been built for a visit by Princess Anne. It was pink and frilly, very smart for a prison toilet. I got to use the royal facilities because I was a woman. The guards shackled me to a long chain and played it down the stair
s to the toilet so I could just push the door to but I was still chained to them. I couldn’t go anywhere else anyway. It was ridiculous.

  They’d guard me in a cell as the escort guys took their tea break. I was an escape risk – no stopping at service stations. They wouldn’t stop anywhere but other prisons for, of course, security.

  They told me they believed Dad was going to free me but Dad couldn’t help himself at that time. My solicitor told me that somewhere in Whitehall it had been decided that I was to be treated as a Home Office prisoner, like an IRA terrorist. It was political. And everything to do with me was handled at high political level. The amount of money spent on me! They didn’t have that sort of security with Rose West and Myra Hindley. God knows what they thought was going to happen. I wasn’t going to leave my daughter anyway, no matter what, even if the cavalry came to get me.

  After the stop at the royal loo, I was taken to Belmarsh prison, the Cat A men’s jail in Greenwich where they bang up terrorists. I asked about Holloway but was told, ‘They can’t hold you there because they haven’t got enough security.’ They locked down the hospital wing and put me in a solitary cell. The woman officer told me, ‘We’ve put a sheet over your window; don’t go near it because if the men find out that you’re a woman they’ll keep you up all night.’

  I was stripped-searched again but this time I had to strip off completely. They gave me a dressing gown and said: ‘You need to squat.’ I wasn’t comfortable with that at all. It was horrible, demeaning. When I squatted, they put a metal detector underneath me.

  I asked, ‘What am I going to have in there. A gun?’

  They just said they needed to do it.

  When they left, I felt violated and very shocked. I shouldn’t have been but I was. It upset me. I didn’t feel very human or feminine. I knew I was just a name and number to them, but it didn’t feel right. Of all the indignities I went through in the prison system that was the greatest. It made me wonder how on earth I had got to that moment, question every decision I had made. Was family loyalty, wanting to do what my dad wanted, to make him pleased with me, worth this humiliation? Just thinking about it makes me hurt with a deep, emotional damage. I was made to feel like a wild animal.

  But the next time I appeared at Bow Street things were better. When I got back to Durham I told Susan May about the indignities of that first experience of Belmarsh. She wrote a letter, and my MP complained. The authorities admitted that what had happened to me was wrong. I’d made history as the first female to be held in a male prison. The next time I went I had the governor, the Samaritans and the priest at the door.

  I’d got all that sorted, but by June 1996 I’d stopped going to Bow Street. Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, signed off on my extradition. I wouldn’t see Lara. I wouldn’t see Mum. What about my letters with Frank?

  We kept writing because it took nearly eight months for the Italians to come and get me. A Scotland Yard extradition squad collected me to get on a plane on my twenty-seventh birthday, 19 February 1997. One of them was a big, tall bloke and nasty with it. His partner was quiet, but the tall bloke couldn’t stop making snide comments, such as, ‘They’ve put you in first class and I can’t imagine why.’ When they’d frog-marched me with armed police all around to the top of the stairs up to the plane he said: ‘See you in fifteen years.’

  His prediction might have been accurate but there was no need for that. I wasn’t cheeky. I didn’t swear at them. I just did as I was told. I didn’t demand things. I was devastated because I’d left Lara, and I knew that I wouldn’t see my little girl for ages. I’d already missed nearly three years of her life. She’d started school without me being there to take her to the school gates. She had new friends and her own interests. She was growing up without me.

  When I was handed over to Italian Interpol my treatment all changed. The man and woman escort didn’t worry about handcuffs on the plane. When the food came the woman asked: ‘Would you like some wine?’ I nearly fell off the seat. I hadn’t had any wine for two and a half years. She was very kind. It was a different attitude altogether.

  Especially when we landed in Rome. Two plainclothes cops took over and said they had to process me at Rome Central. One was quite flirty: ‘Have you ever been to Rome before? We’ll take you for a tour on the way.’

  I saw the Coliseum on a beautiful sunny day in February. It was a real birthday treat after being lucky to get an hour a day in the open air at Durham. Later, they pointed out more sights as we drove to the north-east edge of the city, to Rebibbia, the location of Italy’s major mixed penitentiary. We drove into Rebibbia prison through the Via Tiburtina entrance and I saw the churches of the Via Casal de’ Pazzi and Piazza Ferriani. I wondered when I might ever see such beauty again.

  In Rome the prison conditions were as convivial as the cops and the view, but it was only a couple of weeks until I was taken to Vigevano women’s prison near Milan to await my trial.

  My dad and Uncle Guglielmo had been extradited from Portugal, Bruno had been extradited from Spain. Nan and scores of others were already involved in the long trials in the special anti-terrorist, concrete-built courtrooms in Milan.

  It was going to be a family reunion in court.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LA DOLCE VITA

  In vino veritas

  [In wine there is truth]

  Nan and Auntie Angela had both been held at Vigevano and the inmates were very much aware of the Di Giovine name. I had a cell in the high-security wing; it had a sink, a toilet and a bidet but there was never hot water. I soaked my washing in the bidet and was getting ready to sleep one night when I thought I heard Bruno’s sister Silvia’s voice. It was, it was Lara’s auntie.

  I knew she’d been arrested. Guns connected to Bruno were found in her apartment. But I didn’t know where she was after her eight-year conviction on arms charges. It was such a comfort to hear a friendly voice, someone I knew so well, that it gave me a warm glow. Maybe it was a good omen. We had lots of time to talk to each other, to speak about all that happened to everybody else in the extended families. Silvia and I poured our hearts out to each other. It was wonderful to be able to talk freely and not be concerned what I said. I was already a convicted felon, so what more could they do?

  The prison had an association room where we’d cook for ourselves. They had a canteen and we’d make a list each week of things to buy. We were allowed two cartons of wine a day. It was prison paradise, the good life. Sometimes we’d save the cartons for a birthday blow-out and have a party. We’d ferment it with sugar and everybody would get smashed.

  But I also got the girls fit. I was used to three hours a day in the Durham gym so I started aerobics classes in the yard. I’d get them stretching, doing handstands and cartwheels. We played volleyball in the gym once a week. I could release some of my anger when slamming the ball into the net. I did sit-ups in my cell. I did it all to help me sleep, to get my brain to switch off. If I didn’t knock myself out with exercise, I’d just lie in bed worrying about the future, about Lara, and what would happen at my trial. Mum sent a parcel every week with Lara’s drawings and tapes of her talking as well as loads of photographs. Such mementoes made me happy but terribly tearful at the same time.

  And Frank was writing all the time. I’d thought our strange arrangement wouldn’t survive when I left England, but it did. At first he had no idea where I was and phoned my mum, but she didn’t even know I was in Rome. When it settled down we sent letters to each other every day.

  It was November 1997 before I went to court in Milan for a mini-trial. Other family members had been dealt with in the previous weeks. Nan got life. La Signora had diabetes and was on a stretcher in court to hear the verdict, which made legal history – the only woman ever found guilty of such top-level Mafia association. She was carried from court by a team of carabinieri and was joking with them all the way. I wasn’t there to see it but I bet she’d corrupted a couple before they even got her out of the courth
ouse.

  Auntie Livia got twenty-four and a half years, which reflected her skill as an entrepreneur. Uncle Antonio and Uncle Filippo, who’d been with Dad in Spain and Portugal, got thirty years each. Grandpa Rosario, who was on a respirator during the trials, was serving eighteen years. Auntie Angela, born a month before me, got fourteen years. Uncle Franco had been hit with eight years at the start of the Mani Puliti trials in 1995. With the scores and scores of other Mafia associates, cousins and second cousins, friends and family, the total tariff before I got into the dock was near to 1,500 years.

  Dad went off on a different trial. Italy had extradited him on drug trafficking charges but then charged him with murder. That broke the European extradition rules – you can’t get a person back for one thing and charge them with another. It was all legal gobbledygook because he still got life in prison.

  As did Bruno who, after spending three years in jail in Madrid, was done again in Milan on arms trafficking charges.

  Uncle Guglielmo was in court with me. The ‘Untouchable’ prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli continually played back Auntie Rita’s evidence: the details of the heroin deals, the movement of currency, the killings and control in the Piazza Prealpi. After we’d spent hours listening to this, Uncle Guglielmo turned to me and commented: ‘Rita must have really hated you to say all that about you. God, she must have really hated you!’

  I was devastated. I knew Rita was off her head with pills much of the time but she’d always been good to Bruno and me. I thought she loved me and helped me for that reason. I didn’t need to hear this bile. Guglielmo was simply astonished at what she’d told them. And so was I.

  Maurizio Romanelli told the court I was Dad’s right hand, his voice, the financial wizard behind the money movement, the architect of the business operation. I should have known better. He picked out Angela and said that, unlike her, I hadn’t grown up in the family. Angela grew up in that venal environment, and I didn’t. Angela had got fourteen years – what would they do to me?