by Alex Perry
Giovanni and Alessandra knew only too well the effect Concetta’s story would have on the small towns and hill villages of Calabria. ‘It was what had to happen,’ said Concetta’s father, Michele, in an aside recorded by the carabinieri two days later – and the prosecutors knew every Calabrian would be thinking the same. Lea Garofalo was dead. Giuseppina Pesce had been forced to retract in public. Now Maria Concetta Cacciola was gone too. This was what happened to women who betrayed the ’Ndrangheta. There was no escaping fate. The ’Ndrangheta was invincible. ‘If this phenomenon of women testifying had gathered momentum with Giuseppina, it was going to come to a sudden stop with Maria Concetta Cacciola’s death,’ said Alessandra. ‘By contrast with Giuseppina, Concetta was a symbol that the ’Ndrangheta could get to you.’
The evening Concetta died, the carabinieri sealed off the basement at 26 Via Don Gregorio Varrà in Rosarno where she was found. They seized mobile phones, a computer, Concetta’s diary and several letters addressed to her husband, Salvatore. When they questioned Michele, he told them he had returned home after 5.30 p.m. and had called for Concetta but couldn’t find her. He eventually discovered her lying on the floor of a bathroom in the basement. Next to her body was a plastic bottle. Asked why his daughter might have killed herself, Michele exploded and refused to answer. Concetta’s mother, Anna Rosalba Lazzaro, was more forthcoming. Concetta, she said, had taken her own life out of shame. ‘She felt bad. She said things that she had no knowledge of. She couldn’t face those she had accused.’ Concetta’s family had ‘fully supported her’ after she returned home, added Lazzaro. They knew she had been unwell. After all, she had a history of it. She had pined for her absent husband for many years. She had also taken diet drugs obsessively. These things had affected her mind.
Giovanni dismissed Lazzaro’s interview out of hand. ‘It was clear that something had happened that we didn’t know about,’ he said. The prosecutors knew Concetta was at long-term risk from her family. Like Concetta, they had calculated the family wouldn’t harm her so quickly after her return since suspicion would immediately fall on them. On the other hand, they also knew Concetta had told her mother that she would shortly be returning to the protection programme. Maybe the family decided they had kill her while they could.
Because there was no doubt that Concetta had been murdered. Every gastroenterologist said drinking a litre of hydrochloric acid was impossible to do voluntarily. The human reflex was to choke and vomit after just a sip. The pain was unbearable. The acid would eat through the stomach wall. Unconsciousness would be swift. The coroner would later report that Concetta had died of a heart attack and respiratory failure but only after the acid had burned her throat, stomach, pancreas and lungs. ‘It’s simply not something you can do by yourself,’ said Giovanni.
The method of Concetta’s death also had the ’Ndrangheta written all over it. Acid was a favourite ’Ndrangheta tool for traitors. They used it on the dead, to erase every shameful trace of a collaborator’s body, and they used it on the living. In December 2010, Reggio council’s budget manager, Orsola Fallara, had given a press conference in a downtown restaurant at which she admitted making suspicious payments and keeping irregular accounts – and, hours later, was found dying in her car after drinking acid.4 In March 2011, another ’Ndrangheta wife, thirty-eight-year-old Tita Buccafusca, had run into a police station near Rosarno clutching her young son and offering to testify – and a month later her husband, an ’Ndrangheta boss called Pantaleone Mancuso, reported that she had committed suicide by drinking acid.5 Mouths which spoke out of turn were rubbed out. Concetta’s death was part of a pattern.
For the prosecutors, there was one anomaly in the case, however. Concetta had told them that her family never left her alone, especially since her return to Rosarno. But on the day she died, her father, mother and brother had all been out of the house. ‘That seemed quite strange,’ said Giovanni. It suggested not just careful planning but also the involvement of a third party.
On 23 August, three days after Concetta died, the Cacciola family delivered a formal written complaint to the prosecutor’s office in Palmi. Following the script established by the Pesces, Concetta’s parents accused Alessandra and Giovanni of taking advantage of a woman in a frail mental state. Concetta had walked into the carabinieri station in May 2010 ‘depressed’ and in ‘pathological distress’, they said. The carabinieri had seen her weakness as an opportunity. They had promised her a new life ‘which turned out to be a living hell, taking her away from her family’.
By this view, Concetta, like her friend Giuseppina before her, was a pathetic creature. The complaint claimed that none of what she had done was by conscious choice. She had not elected to create a new life for herself and her children. She had not rejected her family and the ’Ndrangheta. She had not, above all, asserted her free will and reclaimed her independence from her parents and her husband. Rather, according to the Cacciolas, she had been pitiably weak and easily led. This daughter, this woman, had been dazzled by the state’s perfidious offers of a better life. In return, her feeble mind had conjured up the kinds of stories about her family’s criminality that she imagined the prosecutors wanted to hear. Concetta had soon come to her senses, realised her mistake, made contact with her family again and eventually succeeded in escaping the authorities’ clutches. Once back in the bosom of her ‘loving and attentive’ family, she had confessed to everything, especially the ‘invented allegations’ she had made against her kin to ‘ingratiate herself with the prosecutors’. Happily, she had finally found the peace of mind that she had sought in her family’s loving forgiveness and acceptance. Understandably, however, the shame had proved too much. The whole sorry saga could be heard in Concetta’s own words by listening to the attached tape cassette or reading the attached transcript. The Cacciolas expected a reply forthwith from the prosecutors and the carabinieri, explaining their disgraceful conduct.
Even then, the Cacciolas weren’t done. The same day they filed their complaint, Anna Rosalba Lazzaro wrote a letter to the Gazzetta del Sud, the main southern Italian newspaper, complaining that in their report on Concetta’s death, the Gazzetta journalists had described her as having grown up in ‘an environment pregnant with the negative values of the ’Ndrangheta’. ‘That’s simply not true,’ wrote Lazzaro. ‘On this particular issue, I challenge anyone to show that my house has ever held discussions about criminal matters that have affected or involved the members of my family. I want to add that my husband and I dedicated our lives to giving our children the best civic education possible.’6 The next day, Calabria Ora splashed on an exclusive interview with Lazzaro, which it headlined: ‘You drove my daughter to suicide!’7 On its inside pages, Calabria Ora hammered home the message that Concetta’s death was inevitable. ‘Chronicle of a suicide foretold’ was the paper’s banner headline.
It was unbelievable, thought Alessandra. The Cacciolas had blackmailed their daughter into returning to them, then stood by as she was executed. Now they were painting her killing as a tragedy for which the state was to blame, while using her death to mend their criminal reputation. At no point had they expressed sorrow or love or any feeling other than outrage at the wrongs done to them. They hadn’t even buried Concetta. Had there ever been a family so unspeakable as the Cacciolas of Rosarno?
XIX
The ’Ndrangheta had reasserted itself in spectacular fashion.1 Once more their challengers were dead or in disgrace. Just as Alessandra and Giovanni had been required to answer questions about the Giuseppina Pesce case, now they had to account for their handling of Maria Concetta Cacciola. The editor of Calabria Ora, Piero Sansonetti, celebrated the state’s humiliation in a series of editorials. ‘The season of cooperation is over,’ he wrote.
In Milan, the six defendants on trial for the murder of Lea Garofalo seemed emboldened by events to the south. Their lawyers argued that the case against their clients should be dismissed outright. No body, no murder. Lea, they said, was actually li
ving by the beach in Australia. ‘I hope she gets tired of Australia and does us the honour of appearing in this court,’ said one.2 Their clients were innocent not just of killing Lea, they claimed, but of any criminality. Carlo’s brother Giuseppe said he was a shoemaker. Vito said he was a builder. Rosario Curcio said he ran a solarium. Carmine Venturino asked to be excused answering questions in court because he only spoke Grecanico, not Italian. Carlo had somehow managed to convince the legal aid authorities that his income was a mere €10,000 a year, thereby qualifying for state assistance. He said he was mystified by the entire process. ‘It’s not fair that I’m sitting here,’ he said. ‘I’m an honest person. My mother taught me to respect and love the family. My daughter wrote me letters in prison saying she loved me and missed me and wanted to be with me again. I had nothing to do with Lea’s disappearance. I, too, want to know the truth about what happened.’3
The defence paraded a succession of villagers from Pagliarelle through court to testify to Carlo’s decency. Most claimed to have barely known Lea. When one prosecution witness, a friend of Carlo’s and resident at Viale Montello, repeatedly failed to show up at court, the defendants laughed and whooped. ‘Maybe he’s in the attic,’ came one shouted suggestion. A lawyer for Giuseppe further muddied the waters by declaring that his client had not spoken to his brother Vito in years, making a nonsense of any conspiracy between them.
There were, however, signs of tension between the defendants. From the start, Massimo Sabatino sat apart from the other men in the caged dock. ‘Shame on you!’ Venturino hissed at him one day as they were being led away for the night. ‘Shame on me?!’ Sabatino yelled back. ‘It’s your fault I’m doing six years! If I get my hands on you, I’ll rip your head off, you piece of shit!’
The defendants also seemed to lose some of their initial confidence as the weeks progressed and prosecutor Marcello Tatangelo painstakingly took apart their denials. Traces from their phones showed all of them had been busy moving around Milan and its outskirts and in each other’s company for the three hours after 6.30 p.m. when Lea Garofalo was last seen alive. The carabinieri had unearthed a friend of Carlo’s who said he had lent Carlo the keys to his grandmother’s apartment. It was here, said Tatangelo, that Lea had been taken to be tortured, then shot with a bullet to the neck, before her body was disposed of outside the city. When Salvatore Cortese, Carlo’s old cellmate, testified about Carlo’s burning desire for revenge on Lea, Carlo couldn’t contain himself. ‘What are you saying?!’ he shouted. ‘What’s this about getting permission from the bosses to kill Lea? He’s making it up! I had nothing to do with anything!’ When Sabatino’s confession to his cellmate, Salvatore Sorrentino, was read out, it was Sabatino’s turn to shout. ‘I never said those things about Carlo!’ he said. ‘It’s not true that I said they were bastards and I wanted to kill them! You’re making it up! I agree with everything these men say.’
Finally, Denise was called on to testify. A screen was erected in court so her father could not see her. Denise wore a hooded top to further conceal her face. Sensing his daughter a few yards away, Carlo stood, walked to the front of his cage and placed his arms through the bars. In a clear voice and without hesitation, and in testimony that lasted two full days – 20 September and 13 October 2011 – Denise told the story of her mother’s early life and their years on the run and in the protection programme. ‘We were like sisters,’ she said. ‘It was almost like we grew up together. We swapped clothes. We liked the same music.’ For seven years, she added, she had no contact with Carlo.
‘That’s a fact,’ said Carlo audibly.
Denise frowned. ‘Can you request that person to keep quiet?’ she coolly asked the judge. ‘It’s disturbing.’
Denise went on to recount her mother’s attempts to make peace with Carlo. She described the attack in Campobasso in May 2009, prompting Sabatino to stand and pace up and down inside the cage. Only once did Denise break down. When one lawyer rebuked her for accusing the defendants of murder when there was no body and no murder weapon, she cried: ‘She can’t be allowed to say that! It’s been two years since I saw my mother!’
In the face of such raw emotion, the defence lawyers tried to conjure up some sympathy for the defendants. ‘I know in my heart that my client is innocent,’ said Maira Cacucci, Carlo’s lawyer. ‘Just one look in his eyes and you’ll understand.’ Francesco Garofalo, a Calabrian lawyer representing Carmine Venturino and Vito Cosco, fell back on a familiar defence: the unstable nature of women. ‘Why all these attempts to sanctify Lea, who was born and raised by the ’Ndrangheta?’ he asked. ‘She was a crazy woman, as her own daughter has described. Lea Garofalo wanted to go to Australia. What better time than after leaving her daughter with her father? That is what happened here!’
Nevertheless, the defence’s histrionics did little to deflect what was starting to feel increasingly certain: that all six men would eventually be found guilty of murder. But as the trial wound towards its conclusion, on 23 November, the eve of the second anniversary of Lea’s disappearance, disaster struck. Out of the blue, the presiding judge, Filippo Grisolia, was appointed chief of staff at the Ministry of Justice. The trial would have to be abandoned, then restarted. What was more, the statutory limit on detention in custody meant any new trial would have to finish by 28 July 2012, eight months away. The trial had already taken five months. It wouldn’t be hard for the defence to spin out a new trial past the deadline. At that point, Carlo and his entire ’ndrina would walk free.
XX
The ’Ndrangheta had always relied on fictions.1 One of the biggest was that it could not be challenged, and never by a woman. Lea Garofalo, Giuseppina Pesce, Maria Concetta Cacciola and now Denise Cosco had all exposed that lie. The ’Ndrangheta’s response was uncompromising. The women had to die. And their stories had to be rewritten.
Alessandra and Giovanni were now confronting the possibility that, after their early triumphs, the clans were succeeding, at least in public perception. The Lea Garofalo investigation might have revived several old cases and injected new life into the fight against the east coast ’Ndrangheta, but there was no resuscitating Lea. Likewise, despite Giuseppina’s decision to start cooperating again, the last public memory of her was that she had recanted. As for Concetta, she had died and then, in a mafia masterstroke, had retracted from beyond the grave. Now, with the very public collapse of the trial against Carlo Cosco and his men, it seemed the clans had got lucky with Denise, too. ‘The truth is that there is no more important or fundamental investigative tool than the pentiti,’ said Giovanni Musarò. The prosecutors had had four women pentiti. None had emerged unscathed. The ’Ndrangheta had used Concetta’s death, in particular, as a warning. ‘When the Cacciolas wrote their denunciation of the prosecutors, they weren’t thinking of their daughter,’ said Giovanni. ‘They were ensuring that this never happened again. It went beyond Cacciola. It was a message to all Calabria. So, yes, at that time, you can say things were not in our favour.’
On reflection, however, it was possible to view the ’Ndrangheta’s vehement crushing of any opposition as a sign of weakness. In particular, its absolutist intolerance of freedom seemed to stem from an appreciation of how, once released, it was almost impossible to contain again. Moreover, despite the clans’ efforts, Giuseppina and Denise were still breathing. Both also seemed strengthened by the resolve they had discovered in the gale of the ’Ndrangheta’s oppression. In Milan, Denise had already faced her father once in court and was telling prosecutors she could do it again. As for Giuseppina, the death of her friend appeared to have had the exact opposite effect to that intended. Giuseppina told Alessandra she had no doubt that the ’Ndrangheta had forced Concetta to drink acid. Her friend’s killing made her realise how close she had come to the same fate herself: she had been mere hours from her own return to Calabria when Alessandra arrested her. ‘You saved my life,’ she told Alessandra. ‘If you hadn’t stopped me, my children would now be taking flowers to the cemetery
, like ’Cetta’s.’
The realisation seemed to release Giuseppina of any last doubts. On 23 August, three days after Concetta’s death, a letter from Giuseppina arrived at the Palace of Justice in Reggio Calabria, addressed to Alessandra, Pignatone and Roberto di Bella, head of Reggio’s juvenile court. ‘I know you already know my story,’ Giuseppina wrote, ‘but here I wish to start from the beginning.’
After six months of imprisonment, on 14 October 2010, I expressed my desire to the prosecutor Dr Cerreti to pursue this course of action, driven by my love as a mother and my desire to lead a better life, far away from the environment where I was born and lived. I never thought about doing that to obtain reductions to my sentence. It was also never my intention to tease anyone. I only did this because I was, and remain, convinced that this is the right choice, since because of our husbands’ and relatives’ life choices, we have endured a life full of pain and, above all, cowardice and fear of consequences. In reality, each of us should have the power … to choose between right and wrong.
Maybe I should have done this earlier, before being dragged into [this situation] … My hope is that we still have time and that I can act so my children can have a better life – a life of principle and freedom of choice. I also hope that many people like me who are in situations like mine will find the courage to rebel. I have found the strength to take this important decision and defy a fearsome, powerful and unforgiving family, in the full knowledge of the risk to me and those I love. Finally, I am doing it.