What concerned me most was a knock on the door from the Italian authorities. Would what happened to Valeria happen to me? Would they ever extradite me? And if so, what would happen to Frank and Lara?
Nan was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2007, a life sentence that ended the one imposed by the state. She was freed under a supervision programme and now lives back on the Piazza Prealpi. Life has come full circle for her. But Grandpa Rosario is no longer around. He became so ill during the trials that he had to stop attending and he died in 1999.
As she was throughout their marriage, Nan remained the more powerful figure. Even she can’t beat cancer but she’s stared it in the eye and slowed it down, delayed the inevitable. She’s still finding ways around the system – any system they throw at her.
Uncle Guglielmo is out of jail and has a new life in Spain with his new wife and their two sons. Auntie Angela is married and has a son, and she also looks after Nan in Milan.
Dad was also released in 2007 but into even stricter supervision. Again he’s one of the most wanted men in the world – by the Mafia this time. He’s in the Italian witness protection programme. He testified at a number of trials, giving evidence for the prosecution against families just like the Di Giovine–Serraino clans. It was high risk and there has been flak from the families, especially the Calabrian clan.
When Dad got arrested, none of the family in the South helped him. They were all out making their own money and not one of them said anything to him. I believe that’s why Dad did what he did. He got so fed up with them that he made a deal to get himself an element of freedom in the witness protection system. He was helped in this by Dottore Macri Vincenzo, who is a major player in the anti-Mafia brigade in Rome.
No one in the world knows where Dad is now. I speak to him on the phone but the sources of calls are shielded to keep him safe. He is very estranged from everything and everyone from the past. He knows so much: he’s been in the Mafia for more than half a century and dealt with underworld figures, arms dealers and major drug traffickers on a global scale. Now, he says, at last there’s a decent price on his head.
I don’t know if Nan’s release was anything to do with Dad’s arrangements with the Italian government but she still keeps in touch with the family in the South. It’s taken time but she seems to understand why Dad did what he did. But in 2009 it got a little crazy because he had to testify in a trial involving the next generation of Nan’s Calabrian family. They are still cousins and quite close. Dad’s evidence was bad for the family and they went mad. Nan was really angry with Dad and wouldn’t speak to him for a couple of months. Later, she told him: ‘I know what you’re doing, but you don’t have to get so personal.’
He didn’t want to go against the family but he had no choice. They were as much embarrassed as angered by it. It wasn’t good for their status. They’re still doing what they are doing. They’re still the Mafia. They’re still in business.
Dad has shocked a lot of people. I asked him about it towards the end of 2009 and he told me: ‘I cannot live with myself in thinking that I was part of that scum. They are all scum. They’ve got no respect. They’ve got no sense of honour. They are no longer men of honour. I don’t remember going out and hurting old people. I don’t remember, because I never did it. Now there is just too much dirt. It’s like the lowest of the low. It’s not like old school, it’s not like it used to be.’
I know what he means. It’s these jumped-up young ones who think they can do whatever they want. It doesn’t matter what reputation anybody else has, they think they’re better. They think they know more.
And Europe is now a melting pot of gangsters, with the influx of Albanians and other nationalities, especially on the streets of Milan. They don’t have rules and they don’t have respect, as my family in Milan is constantly finding out.
Dad has done wrong in his life but things were never as bad as they are now in the 21st century when young kids are being shot in the street. We live in a world of what I call ‘plastic gangsters’. They’re not real and they don’t know what is.
Dad met many underworld figures in Europe and America. Lots of them met violent ends, including his Italian-American connection Paul Castellano, whose murder was ordered by ‘Dapper Don’ Gotti on 16 December 1985.
Dad and I have talked about a lot of things, but obviously it’s on the phone so it’s different. I can never look into his eyes and judge what he’s saying. Yet I have more of an understanding of him now, and he has of me. He’s got a lot of regrets. He used to think he could buy my affection but that always got on my nerves. All I ever wanted was his time – but he spent his time gallivanting with women and that was his priority. Work and women. He was chasing dreams and ideas. The time he spent with me wasn’t proper time. He took me for granted. He used to spend more time with Anna Marie, the child he had with Fanny in New York when he was posing as Count Marco Carraciolo. In a strange twist of fate, in 2009 she had a DNA test and it turns out she wasn’t Dad’s daughter after all. How ironic that Dad spent more day-to-day time with her than he’d ever done with me.
He says now: ‘I regret not being with you more. I can’t go back in time, I wish I could. My biggest dream was always to make a palace for us all, to have all the family together. I just kept going to get more money to set it all up.’
There never was one big, last job. That’s all academic now.
Maybe I’ll never be able to sit down and talk to him face to face again. I never know when he might call and I have no way of contacting him. He’s very much a secret weapon.
Auntie Rita’s evidence was the fatal flick that brought down the house of cards. She left the witness protection programme in 2008. I still feel uncomfortable with it; to me what she did was the ultimate betrayal of her immediate family. I could never understand that. That was part of the life she was born into.
Just as I was.
I know terrible things have been done. I regret the fact that I have ever hurt people indirectly: the people who took the drugs and died; the guns that I sat on that may have gone on to kill. I regret that with all my heart and I’m still paying for it now.
I don’t regret having had a certain lifestyle where I saw a lot of things and got to do a lot of things. I wouldn’t have that otherwise. I was being treated as a Mafia Princess, having money, going to buy what I wanted, when I wanted. I don’t regret that. I’ve paid for that.
I hated every minute I was in prison, even though I met some great people in there and had some experiences that made me a lot stronger. Because of that, I am the person that I am today. It’s made me more humble, more compassionate, more understanding of others. I don’t judge on first sight any more. There’s always something behind a face. You can’t tell by looking if someone’s a saint or a monster. Often, they don’t know themselves. And that’s terrifying.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FAMILY VALUES
‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.’
MARLON BRANDO AS DON CORLEONE,
THE GODFATHER, 1972
We held my beloved daughter Lara’s eighteenth birthday party at a social club near our home in Blackpool on 11 September 2009. She’s her own woman now. Reaching the age of maturity gives her the freedom to make her own choices, and her own opportunities. I believe turning eighteen is the transition to being an adult. In charge of your own life. It was for me and for my mum. We made our decisions, took our journeys.
I don’t worry about Lara falling in love with an Italian and going out to live there, as we did, because she could just as easily meet someone bad round the corner in Lancashire. You can’t think like that. She’s a strong-minded girl but she knows how life can go wrong and I think she’s smart enough not to make the mistakes I did.
Lara has been to visit her dad every year that he’s been in jail but always with my mum or Bruno’s mum. And always in prison. In August 2009 she thought she’d see her dad on the outside for the first time. Bruno was released af
ter serving seventeen years on the arms and drugs charges. He was out, pending an appeal against that very release.
I made arrangements for Lara to go and see him and, now that he was free, to take her little brother Frank to visit too. It was all set, the flights were booked, when Bruno was re-arrested. We got the news while my sister Giselle was over visiting us from Slovakia. She’s half my age and hasn’t seen her mum since she was arrested. At least Lara saw Bruno regularly even if it was during prison visits. Sadly, they were not together on their shared birthday. They never have been.
Lara speaks and understands Italian very well but I’m only told that, for she never uses it in front of me. She’s got that silly teenage shyness about speaking a foreign language in front of me or her mates. Her dad says she chatters away perfectly well to him.
She’s got a boyfriend – he’s English. A nice lad, who’s handy at helping to put up shelves in my kitchen. He was at her party along with some other friends her age but I wanted as many family members there as possible. Frank’s folks from Leeds came over and there were my English aunties and mum, of course, chatting away. She worries more about the plot of Coronation Street on the telly now than the Mafia. Most of the Italian family were unable to attend Lara’s eighteenth, unavoidably detained.
Since Frank’s death I’ve only had one serious love affair and that had its complications. I bring a lot of history with me but also, for the right person, my passionate love and loyalty. Now I would have to be in a full partnership; I could no longer act to order or to please. I want to act with a man as a unit, move together with a purpose towards a future.
I legally separated from and then divorced Bruno; the paperwork was finally completed in 2000 when I got back to England, because there was no future for us. Life changed for me in many ways when I came to England; I knew I couldn’t have a gun under the tiles, or hide money any more. In Italy you could, and you could behave in a certain way. That’s how it was. I think in Italian when I speak the language, and it’s the same with English.
I have never said I was innocent because I’m not. I’m not an angel. I’m not a devil. I’m in between. I’ve done wrong, and I sat in prison for more than four years. I’ve paid for it. I didn’t in any shape or form try to get out of it, even though I was very young and very naïve when I became a Mafia Princess. It’s different now; I’m more aware of what’s going on in my surroundings.
I am loyal literally to the death. I’m like that with my friends. People don’t stick to their values or their principles. Or to their loyalty. I do. This is what has got me into trouble – the loyalty I have felt towards my own blood. People that I cared about and loved. It’s got me into trouble because it’s in my blood, part of what and who I am.
I want a life of stability and happiness now. There will always be stress – you can’t eradicate the past – but let’s hope it will continue to be about who’s taking the cat to the vet for his shots. Or if Lara will catch the last bus. Or is the new Terminator movie going to spook little Frank, who is not quite nine years old? He likes all these films and video war games. I watch him blasting away and think of his dad.
After one games session he asked me, ‘How do you get killed with one bullet?’
His dad was. Killed with one bullet. Which is something else I am going to have to go into with him. My son is growing up and one day he will want to know what happened. I wouldn’t want him to take it into his own hands to get revenge, maybe bring on a vendetta. I’m worried that when he’s eighteen or nineteen years old, more full of more testosterone than thought, he might go looking for his dad’s killer. And because of that horror scenario, I have always quietly kept in touch with people who might know the answers. One man whom I have respect for told me not to be concerned.
‘Why’s that?’ I asked.
There had been a problem over a rejected business offer, a moneymaking proposal that had been turned down. It led to upset and I was told that the lad who was with Frank the night he died is now long gone.
I didn’t inquire further.
I learned at my nan’s knee not to ask too many questions.
CHAPTER TWENTY
DREAMLAND
“‘The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax –
Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.”’
LEWIS CARROLL,
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, 1871
The electric Warrior Wagon Frank bought that weekend when he first got out of prison is in his son’s Wendy house now. He got over the novelty of it quickly, but it needs a little care. One of the big tyres has gone. Lyon the dog chewed it. He enjoyed his weird feast but it left the car off balance, wobbly.
Which I can still be.
If I’ve talked to Mum and maybe to my dad, wherever he is in the world, and Lara and young Frank are tucked into bed, I can mostly get off to sleep easily. I’m so tired anyway, knocked out. I try to get to the gym every day and I like to clean the house from top to bottom. I like clean.
But you can’t stop the tricks of the brain, or the actions of things we don’t understand.
Sometimes in the night I feel a chill like the night Frank died but it’s probably more the breeze coming across the Irish Sea than any supernatural blarney drifting over.
We’re all the architects of our own dream houses. My dread arrives in my sleep. The dream always begins and ends in the same way.
I’m running hand in hand with Dad through a mirrored airport terminal with images of us duplicated all around me. The crowd of armed police chasing us gets bigger and bigger as we spring for a hazy horizon. The cops are shouting, screaming like sirens: ‘Stop! We will shoot you.’
I hold Dad’s hand tighter and we keep going, keep running from the men with waving guns towards a nothingness.
Dad turns his face to me. His hand slips out of mine. I stop running and cops are all over us. I’m handcuffed and shackled and I can see Dad running but now I don’t know where he’s going. There’s a big jet ahead of him. The cops are shouting ‘Shoot him’ and he’s not going to reach the plane on time. He’s a moving but easy target. I scream at him to stop and put his hands up, to surrender.
There’s no surrender. They hose him with bullets and take him down. Everything freezes. People are looking at Dad lying face down in his own blood. I break free and throw off my shackles and run to him. I bend down, take him in my arms…
And then I wake up.
To a reality from which I know there can never be unrestricted freedom.
POSTSCRIPT
GUN LAW
‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.’
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON AND FRED FOSTER,
‘ME AND BOBBY MCGEE’, 1970
It was on 21 September 2009, ten days after Lara’s coming-of-age party, that the dream turned into a nightmare. The past hammered on my front door.
The weekend had been one of tears and fears. Mum had been for medical tests and the news was not good. She had cancer in her bones and the doctors were not sure how serious it was but the prognosis was not good. It would, as always, take time and more tests to know the full story and how they and we could deal with it.
I was in total anguish. My mum? She’d always been there for me, always around to pick up the pieces, patch my life back together again. She’s suffered before when I was in prison, and now, when our lives seemed to be settling down, this happened.
I’d been on the phone to her on the Monday morning and we were planning to meet that afternoon, but then I saw two men outside the house. In a moment they were at the door. The police. Two officers from Preston. They came in and sat down on the sofa opposite me.
The Italian Ministero della Giustizia had requested my extradition. They wanted me to complete my sentence – four years, eight months and eight da
ys in jail.
My legs turned to jelly. Mum! Lara! Frank! Please God, not now.
I’d been released on a technicality but I’d been living openly and innocently for more than a decade in England and no one had bothered us. In 2007 my sentences effectively ran out. But legally, I didn’t know. I’ve got an arrest warrant against me in Italy. If I set foot in the country, could I be arrested to serve the end of my time?
Trevor Colebourne, my solicitor, and I had calculated, with everything taken into account, that I’d have six months more to serve. That’s with everything going well – but it’s never like that, never simple, in Italy. Trevor deals a lot with extradition and human rights and says it’s against the law for them, after all this time, to arrest me again: ‘It’s through their fault you were released. They knew you were a British national. You’ve not lived in hiding. You’ve got a National Insurance number, you’re on benefits. Somebody could click a button and they can find you straight away. How can they arrest you after all these years, when you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong? You’ve got three points on your licence and that’s it. How can they justify coming to re-arrest you for extradition for something you’ve already done time for? There is no judge in this land who would allow them to get away with that.’
I was wanted in my maiden name, as Marisa Di Giovine. My passport says Marisa Merico. But arresting me in England and in Italy means we’re talking in two languages again.
The Preston officers, acting on the request of the London-based Serious Organised Crime Agency, were very pleasant. They noted my circumstances, my responsibilities for Frank and Lara, and I told them about my mum’s cancer. They didn’t arrest me on the spot. I surrendered my passport and they said I’d be given a date to appear in extradition court in London as soon as possible.
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