The Good Mothers

by Alex Perry

  Alessandra and Giuseppina were discovering they had more in common than they initially thought. They were two women with a common enemy, living difficult, isolated and sometimes terrifying lives. That made them natural allies. More than that, it ensured that both were starved of friendship. Giuseppina, in particular, had broken faith with her entire family and her whole life. ‘I am alone,’ she would often tell the prosecutors. Alessandra sensed that Giuseppina needed someone new to rely on. A state that kept its promises. A prosecutor whose word she could believe. A new life, not just security and survival but a full and meaningful existence, even a hope of joy and love.

  Perhaps more than Giuseppina knew, Alessandra understood. Almost for the first time in her career, Alessandra began to allow herself to feel something too. This was not just another case, Alessandra told herself. Departing from a creed she had held on to since law school, she began to see Giuseppina not just as a tool for getting the job done but as an individual with discrete strengths, flaws and needs. Alessandra saw to it that Giuseppina was never alone and was always able to phone her or her lawyer, day or night. She began visiting Giuseppina even when they had nothing professional to discuss. She was aware she was breaking her own rules. Her relationship with Giuseppina was evolving into something beyond the technical or the objective. At times, Alessandra saw herself as a gondolier, ferrying Giuseppina from her old life to the new. In other moments, she spoke about how she and this young girl were establishing ‘an umbilical cord’.

  At the age of forty, in the most unlikely of circumstances, Alessandra was becoming a mother.

  XIII

  In Pagliarelle, Denise was unaware of the prosecutors’ progress in the hunt for her mother’s killers.1 She had no idea that her father, Carlo Cosco, had ordered her own death, nor that Carmine was refusing to obey him. Still, pretending to live as a good ’Ndrangheta girl while secretly seeing Carmine and keeping contact with Libera, Enza Rando and the carabinieri was an impossible balancing act. On 28 September 2010, she visited Carlo in jail. The conversation was awkward and stilted. Denise could sense her charade was wearing thin. ‘I had no wish to see my father,’ she said later. ‘I didn’t feel sincere about seeing him.’

  A few weeks later, on the morning of 18 October 2010, the Milan prosecutor leading the investigation into Lea’s disappearance, Giuseppe Gennari, finally released a public indictment for murder against Carlo. Describing Lea’s death as an ‘execution’ planned and ordered by Carlo, Gennari said Carlo had organised a van to transport Lea out of the city, secured a warehouse where she would be interrogated and tortured, procured a gun to kill her and supplied fifty litres of sulphuric acid in which to dissolve her body. Erasing any trace of Lea would allow the conspirators to claim she had run off to Australia, he said. The motive for the killing, Gennari told reporters, was ‘the statements Lea made to the prosecutors, none of which, for unexplained reasons, were ever used in a trial’. Specifically, said Gennari, Lea was killed for her testimony about the murder of Antonio Comberiati. Though Carlo never knew what Lea had told prosecutors, Gennari said he had not wanted to take any chances. In any case, he continued, Carlo believed Lea had to be punished for her disloyalty and the shame she had brought on him. From the moment Lea left witness protection in April 2009, Carlo had been working towards the chance to abduct, torture and kill her. Gennari added that Carlo had had five accomplices, whom he named as Massimo Sabatino, Carlo’s two brothers Vito and Giuseppe, Rosario Curcio and Carmine Venturino.

  The morning of 18 October in Calabria was warm, one of the last days of summer. Denise and Carmine had driven to Crotone to buy supplies for the Cosco family pizzeria, where both of them still worked. Afterwards, they took a ride along the coast to Botricello beach. Their plan was to swim, sunbathe and perhaps grab a bite for lunch. Around midday, as prosecutor Gennari was speaking to reporters in Milan, the couple watched a line of carabinieri cars drive up along the seafront and pull to a stop. Several officers got out. They started walking across the sand. Denise and Carmine watched them come. Then Carmine sighed, tugged on his T-shirt and stood with his head bowed, his arms by his side.

  As Denise watched the officers surround her boyfriend, cuff him, slap their hands on his shoulders and start to lead him off across the beach, she felt the blood drain from her face. Her relationship with Carmine was still a secret. Something in their manner told Denise the officers knew all about it. But she had a sudden intuition about something else, too. She followed the officers as they walked Carmine to a waiting squad car. One man put his arm around her and led her to a different car, where he opened the door for her. ‘This is one of the men who killed your mother,’ said the officer. ‘This is the guy who dissolved your mother’s body in acid.’2

  XIV

  Giuseppina Pesce and her children were reunited at a safe house near Aprilia on 5 November 2010. Days later, her eldest daughter, Angela, received a package from Rosarno. The carabinieri had spirited away Angela and her brother and sister, Gaetano and Elisea, with such haste that the children had left with just the clothes they were wearing. Now the Palaias, Guiseppina’s in-laws, were forwarding their belongings. The children were delighted. Unpacking her sweatshirts and favourite jeans, Angela found her mobile carefully wrapped up in her clothes. She didn’t tell her mother.1

  The calls from Rosarno started almost immediately. Angela’s uncles and grandparents would ask her whether she was eating OK. How was she coping without her family? Was she keeping away from those others? For most of the seven months their mother had been in jail, the children had been living with their aunt, Angela Palaia, with whom Angela shared her first and last name. Aunt Angela called almost every day. She would tell her niece that her family missed her. She would promise Angela to buy her this jacket or those trainers once she returned to Rosarno. Sometimes she would say that Giuseppina had made her own decision for her own reasons but hadn’t stopped to consider the consequences for her children, who were being ripped away from their family and friends. It was unfair, said Aunt Angela. Unfair, and bad parenting. Witness protection was no life for a teenage girl. Think of everything Angela was missing out on. The Palaias had everything she wanted. What could the state give her that her family could not? ‘Tell your mother you want to be with us,’ Aunt Angela would say. ‘If she wants to go on, she should go on alone. But you come back to us.’

  Angela was torn. She loved her mother. But she had also become close to her aunt in the time they had lived together. And while Giuseppina had promised her a better life once they were reunited, Angela found it was nothing like that, nor like any life she’d ever known. She was soon arguing with Giuseppina, calling her mother selfish for taking her, her brother and sister away from their school, friends and family. Angela stopped eating. She refused to get out of bed. Her aunt would tell her that it was her mother who was making her ill. And it was all so unnecessary, said Aunt Angela. She promised the family would forgive Giuseppina. Everyone loved her. Everyone loved Angela, Gaetano and Elisea too. They were family, after all. The men had a lawyer standing by who would deal with whatever statements Giuseppina had made. Life could go back to normal. It would be as if nothing had happened. Why didn’t they all come home? ‘My daughter started calling me her enemy,’ said Giuseppina. ‘She would tell me how good Aunt Angela was to her, how Aunt Angela loved her.’

  The Palaias’ aim was true. Realising that Giuseppina had started collaborating for the sake of her children, they guessed correctly that she would stop for them, too. At the time, Alessandra had no idea of the secret phone discussions taking place inside the safe house. When she found out later, she conceded that, with its keen understanding of family, the ’Ndrangheta had found Giuseppina’s weak spot. ‘Angela was only sixteen and didn’t understand her mother’s choice,’ she said. ‘And everyone knew that without her daughter, Giuseppina would not proceed.’

  For the ’Ndrangheta, forcing an end to Giuseppina’s cooperation was becoming critical. On 23 November 2010, Al
essandra staged Operation All Inside II, a series of further raids aimed at dismantling the Pesce empire, this time guided largely by Giuseppina’s information. Twenty-four more Pesce clan members were arrested. They included two policemen, a prison guard and two more women: the twenty-eight-year-old wife of a low-level ’Ndranghetista said to be passing messages between bosses; and Carmelina Capria, forty-seven, wife of clan head Antonino Pesce and, allegedly, the family accountant.

  In response, the clan stepped up the pressure on Giuseppina. As 2011 began, the calls to Angela became more frequent. In early March, a second mobile somehow found its way to Giuseppina. She, too, was soon speaking to Aunt Angela. Aunt Angela told Giuseppina that her husband, Rocco Palaia, still loved her, as did the whole family. She tried to reassure her, saying she shouldn’t worry about retribution. Everyone made a mistake once in a while. Rocco was prepared to forgive her. What was most important was her children’s health. For a sixteen-year-old girl to be apart from her family wasn’t natural. It was clearly distressing her. For her daughter’s sake, said Aunt Angela, Giuseppina had to stop collaborating, renounce the statements she had made and come back to Rosarno.

  Giuseppina said little in these conversations but neither did she hang up. And as March 2011 passed into April and Aunt Angela continued her emotional blackmail, Giuseppina’s brother-in-law, Gianluca Palaia, began relaying precise instructions as to how Giuseppina should end her collaboration. Once she left witness protection, Gianluca told her, the family would find her a lawyer, cover her legal fees and rent her a new apartment. He arranged for her to receive €3,000, which he described as a gift from ‘a good man’. Like Aunt Angela, Gianluca tried to be reassuring. Don’t worry, he said. No one was going to do anything to her. Even Giuseppina’s daughter, Angela, tried to persuade her. ‘You see? You see?’ she would say. ‘Now it’s up to you.’

  Towards the end of March, Giuseppina was granted permission to leave her safe house for a few hours to meet a lawyer. At a carabinieri station in Aprilia, she met Giuseppe Madia, a defence lawyer from Rome who had represented mafiosi before and had now been retained by the Palaias. Madia asked Giuseppina to read a letter to the prosecutor’s office that he had drafted on her behalf. It stated that Giuseppina’s health had suffered from her time in prison; that the authorities had taken advantage of her fragile state of mind by forcing her to cooperate; and that her evidence was false and she was withdrawing it. Giuseppina objected to several claims but eventually agreed to sign. She also accepted Madia’s proposal that she refuse to sign off on the witness statements she had given Alessandra and exercise her right to silence in any further interviews.

  Giuseppina copied into her own handwriting the typewritten letter drafted by Madia, then signed it and dated it 2 April. On 4 April, she consented to a carabinieri interview during which she freely answered all questions. She was, she said later, ‘caught between two fires’. When Madia told the Palaias that Giuseppina was still cooperating, Aunt Angela, Giuseppina’s brother-in-law Gianluca Palaia and a third clan member, Angelo Ietto, simply turned up at her safe house, saying that they were there to give their cousin ‘emotional support’ at this difficult time. Giuseppina realised that, once again, her destiny was being decided for her. ‘I had made the choice to make my daughter’s life better, but collaborating had ended up hurting my daughter,’ she said. Now she had to do what her daughter wanted. The ’Ndrangheta were inside her house, sitting with her children. If she refused to cooperate, they would take them away for ever. ‘I couldn’t betray my children,’ said Giuseppina. ‘I couldn’t say no.’

  On 11 April, Alessandra flew up from Reggio to Rome, then drove down to Aprilia to see Giuseppina. Months of interviews had been leading to this moment. It was 179 days since Giuseppina had begun cooperating and one day before the legal deadline by which Italian prosecutors in any investigation must present their evidence to court. Alessandra was bringing with her close to two thousand printed pages, transcripts of all Giuseppina’s interviews over the past six months. Within those pages was the most detailed portrait of the ’Ndrangheta that had ever existed. It was enough to bring down one of Europe’s most powerful crime families and blow open a secret, murderous cocaine-smuggling cabal that had terrorised Italy for 150 years. It was also the fullest possible vindication of Alessandra’s intuition about ’Ndrangheta women. She found it hard not to feel a moment of triumph as she set the stack of files down on the table in front of her star witness.

  Alessandra explained to Giuseppina that her signature was just a legal formality. All she had to do was sign a covering letter, declaring that the statements that followed were her own words and a true representation of the facts as she knew them to be.

  Giuseppina looked at the papers. She told Alessandra she couldn’t sign.

  ‘Are you refusing to sign because everything you’ve told us is lies?’ asked Alessandra.2

  Giuseppina, trying not to look Alessandra in the eye, started to cry. Sobbing, she invoked her right to silence. Stunned, Alessandra packed up her files and said she would leave Giuseppina with her lawyer for a few minutes to consider her options. She returned half an hour later.

  ‘Is this really what you want?’ she asked.

  Giuseppina began to cry again. ‘It’s not what I want,’ she said. ‘It’s what I must do for my children.’ She refused to say any more.

  Alessandra tried to carry on as before. On 16 April, she arrested Giuseppina’s mother, Angela Ferraro, and her sister, Marina, on charges of extortion and mafia association. The two had been detained a year earlier and released on bail but with the new evidence from Giuseppina, their offences were now serious enough for custody. Their detention brought to seventy-four the number of Pesce clan members that Alessandra had arrested in the year since she launched All Inside.

  The next day, however, the Pesces hit back. A report appeared in the Gazetta del Sud, the main southern daily, quoting Giuseppe Madia saying Giuseppina had recanted. Alessandra shrugged off the story as typical mafia lies. They just couldn’t admit weakness, she thought. The state was winning this war.

  On 21 April, Alessandra struck again. Once more acting on Giuseppina’s evidence, she launched Operation All Clean, this time aimed at the Pesces’ finances. Forty-one companies were seized, most of them based in and around Rosarno, including trucking firms, orange and lemon traders, service stations, a sports complex, a sports fishing operation, a plastics firm and a pizzeria. In addition, the prosecutors confiscated fifty properties – villas, apartments, houses and garages – fifty-four plots of land, fifty-one cars and motorcycles and 102 trucks. The total value was estimated at €190 million. ‘Today we can say with satisfaction that Rosarno is truly free,’ said Pignatone.

  But barely had Alessandra had time to savour her new victory when, on 26 April 2011, she was handed a copy of the Reggio newspaper, Calabria Ora. On its front page, the paper had printed what it said was a letter from Giuseppina Pesce to Calabria’s attorney general.3

  Dear Mr Judge,

  With this letter I want to withdraw all the allegations I made in my previous statements. I resolved to do this not out of fear but out of conscience because I said things that do not correspond to reality. I made those assertions at a time when I was seriously ill and suffering a great deal from being separated from my children.

  The doctors who came to visit me when I was detained witnessed the seriousness of my illness and how severely I was depressed in jail where, out of desperation, I put my own life in danger. I was hoping to see my three children, one of whom has serious health problems. But my hopes did not last long … I was sent on to Milan. That was the moment I realised I would die if I did not make the statements I was expected to make.

  I will explain in court how my answers were born of questions loaded with accusations. The more you accuse, the more you are believed. The more you accuse your family, you will be believed even more. I was so sick that I slandered my closest family members with untruth. Fear and illness
made me make those statements which now make me feel nothing but shame in my heart. I feel stripped naked, exposed to everyone, with no thought for my dignity or my loved ones. I feel like I have been used. Now that I feel better, I have found the courage to retract my allegations, even as I fear the monstrous process that I know awaits me. I ask everyone, even those whom I have hurt unjustly, spare me a little understanding and respect for the situation in which I am living.

  Sincerely,

  Giuseppina Pesce

  Calabria Ora added to its scoop with an interview with Madia, the lawyer, under the headline: ‘Forced to Repent: Pesce said whatever the prosecutors wanted’. The article began with a quote from Madia: ‘Do you know how many times I have spoken with my client? Once, in a carabinieri station, then nothing. Can you imagine? Today I don’t even know where she is.’

  Madia alleged that Alessandra had ‘extracted’ Giuseppina’s testimony by using the ‘threat’ that unless she cooperated, she would never see her children again. ‘Read this medical report, read what it says about Mrs Pesce,’ he told the Calabria Ora journalist, handing him a file which he said was signed by Nicola Pangallo, a psychiatrist who interviewed Giuseppina in prison. ‘The prisoner has particularly serious conditions that do not allow her custody in prison … The service agent reports that the prisoner had attempted suicide by hanging. The patient is completely detached from current reality and obsessed by the idea of leaving prison and seeing her children again. When she spoke to her daughter, her daughter replied: “Is that my mum?” [The patient said]: “I’m afraid my children no longer recognise me.”’

  Dr Pangallo went on to recommend that Giuseppina receive specialist care in a prison located close to her children, in order to allow more frequent contact. ‘And where do the prosecutors think the nearest prison to Reggio is located?’ Madia asked the journalist. ‘Why, Milan, of course, a thousand kilometres away.’ It was after her transfer that Giuseppina had collapsed and begun collaborating, he added. ‘It’s obvious Mrs Pesce has not told the truth. She only said what the judges wanted her to say. That’s why she made these statements.’