by Alex Perry
There were times when I thought my choice had been hasty and not properly thought through. I have been fragile. The courage that I had back on 14 October 2010 deserted me. The bond between my children and their family also bewildered me. I began to think I had no right to deprive them of their father. I told myself neither I nor they could escape that life. It all weighed heavily on me. And after discussing with my partner, who disagreed, I decided I would arrange for [my children] to go back to Calabria. I would have my own battle in court, with a good lawyer to defend me. In my mind, giving back their freedom to my children was the fairer solution. But I was dying inside. It wasn’t what I wanted. It was just what I imagined was right for them.
And, of course, there were the newspapers. What was written, day after day, made me look like a victim instead of someone in command of their own decisions. The letter I had to send to the judge … that made me feel even worse: all those lies, this impression of me that was created which was not me. I had to swallow that as well, not because anyone was forcing me to but because I felt that, like in the movies, there was a story I had to maintain – and that if I wasn’t going to be a collaborator any more but was one day going to be returning to Calabria, then maybe [those stories] would be a shield protecting my children and myself from the prejudices of my family and my people.
Driving back from Lucca with Domenico, I realised the importance of my motivation to cooperate. My children’s future. My love of a man who loves me for who I am and not for my last name. Today, while I may have lost credibility as a collaborator, all these experiences have strengthened me as a woman. Even more important, they have restored my confidence in myself. I feel now that maybe I wasn’t so selfish, after all. Perhaps if I had been more courageous, today I would already be at the beach with Domenico and my children. I gave them the freedom to choose. It is true that I have always prioritised my love for my children, their health and peace. And my children and Domenico chose me. They are the ones who really love me. However many times I change my mind, they are there for me, thank God.
That’s why I believe my collaboration will make a real change, for many people. I wish to tell you that I’m not crazy, like they said. I tell you all these things so you can really see the person in whom you placed your trust. I never told any lies. I just had a moment of confusion. I patiently await your reply, aware of my mistakes.2
As her staff and colleagues read the letter, Alessandra was pleased to note that they lingered, silently reading every line. Man or woman, they were moved. Though she’d never show it, Alessandra was too. In a world of deception, here was clarity. Instead of hate, here was love. Gone was fear. Here was strength.
After Giuseppina’s letter, events moved fast. In early September, she gave Alessandra a comprehensive account of how her former lawyer, Giuseppe Madia, and the editor of Calabria Ora, Piero Sansonetti, had coordinated the drafting and release of her retraction letter. (Madia told Giuseppina he had had to approach Sansonetti because the editor of Calabria’s small, local daily ‘was the only one willing to publish it and adopt our cause’.)
On 15 September, Giuseppina received another letter from her husband Rocco. At first, he admonished her. ‘I know you’ve started making coccòdeo,’ he said, using the Italian for ‘cock-a-doodle-do’. ‘I do wonder why you’ve ruined all our lives, including your own, just to be with the children?’ Perhaps sensing Giuseppina’s renewed determination, however, he soon switched to a plaintive tone. ‘Please, don’t make me look bad,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t think I’m asking for the moon. There is no morning that I don’t wake up and think of you. Sadly, this is how things have turned out. My family is broken. But I leave you with an embrace, and the hope that God will enlighten you.’3 A year earlier, Rocco’s meekness might have swayed Giuseppina. Now it merely confirmed that she had emerged from their marriage the steelier of the two, and further hardened her purpose.
She was unmoved, too, five days later on 20 September when the first trial to result from Operation All Inside concluded in the sentencing of eleven members of the Pesce ’ndrina. Giuseppina’s uncle Vincenzo and her cousin Francesco Pesce, who had been found hiding in a bunker on 9 August, received the heaviest sentences: twenty years each for mafia association and other crimes; and a total fine of €70 million, of which €50 million was to compensate the citizens of Rosarno for decades of murderous oppression and €10 million each was to go to the Ministry of Interior and Calabria’s regional authority.4
The sentencing began a bewildering few days of public humiliation for the Pesces. The next day, 21 September, the carabinieri took Angela, now sixteen, Gaetano, nine, and Elisea, five, from their grandparents’ home and delivered them to the protective custody of the juvenile court.5 On 22 September, Alessandra formally announced in court that Giuseppina was once more cooperating with the authorities.6 On 23 September, at her own request, Giuseppina appeared in court in Palmi by video link to hear charges put to clan head Antonino, her husband Rocco, her mother Angela Ferraro and her sister Marina.7 On 27 September, Giuseppa Bonarrigo, the family grandmother, chained herself to the gates of Rosarno town hall, where she was photographed by journalists protesting the innocence of her sons.
The public dishonouring of the Pesces was far from over. On 4 October, Giuseppina’s in-laws, Gaetano, Gianluca and Giovanni Palaia, were arrested, quickly followed by Aunt Angela Palaia and Angela Ietto. On 13 October, Alessandra seized another eight Rosarno companies worth a further €18 million, bringing the total value of confiscations from the Pesce empire to €228 million.8 A week later, on 21 October, Alessandra announced that besides Giuseppina, she had a second ’Ndrangheta woman ready to testify: Rosa Ferraro, a cousin from Genoa taken in by the Pesces as a domestic helper after she was thrown out by her husband.9 The following day, 110 ’Ndranghetisti who had been arrested during the mass raids of July 2010 were sentenced to terms of between two and sixteen years.10
The climactic disgrace came on 25 November, the day the Pesce clan maxi-trial formally opened. Sixty-three ’ndrina members were accused. More than fifty were present in court, including several Pesces, Palaias and Ferraros, along with fifty defence lawyers. Those already serving sentences in jail, like clan head Antonino and Giuseppina’s husband Rocco, attended by video link. A handful of Pesces remained on the run. They would be tried in their absence.
Procedure demanded that Alessandra read out the charges to the accused and submit the evidence gathered from years of investigation, including Operations All Inside, All Inside II, All Clean and Crimine. The evidence ran to 65,000 words, the length of a book. Running through it all would take several weeks, and a full trial was not expected to start until May 2012.
That first day did not go as expected, however. The defendants already knew they were being tried by a woman prosecutor on a woman’s evidence. The news that Giuseppina would be joined by a second woman from the Pesce household had come as a shock. As they were led in, the men were surprised to see that, in addition, an unusually large proportion of the court officials, carabinieri and even lawyers and reporters on duty that day were also women. When the judges entered, one president and two assistants, the ’Ndranghetisti were astonished to see three more women: Maria Laura Ciollaro, Antonella Create and, taking the President’s seat, Concettina Epifanio.
To the ’Ndrangheta men, it must have felt like a conspiracy. ‘No! no!’ they shouted. Pointing at Alessandra and taking the name of another male prosecutor in the case, they yelled: ‘We want di Palma! We want di Palma! Not that! Not that!’
State and court officials would later insist there was no plot to unsettle the Pesces. The selection of staff and judges was a matter of neutral procedure. In particular, the three women judges had presided over the case since its inception. Nor was there any question that Alessandra had to lead the prosecution in court since she had led the investigation that preceded it. That didn’t mean that the officials couldn’t enjoy the defendants’ discomfort. ‘When they saw us all in the
court, they began screaming and shouting at me and my colleagues,’ smiled Alessandra. ‘They were humiliated to be in front of so many women – to be judged by women, to them something less than a man.’ To Alessandra and Giuseppina, listening by video link, there was something in the men’s outraged reaction that suggested they knew, perhaps for the first time, that the tables were being turned. Alessandra described their shouts of indignation as something close to music. ‘A symphony of women’s liberation!’ she laughed. ‘Divine justice for these men!’ Prestipino, who also denied any hand in the unusual number of women in court, was similarly jubilant. ‘Think of how many women in Calabria live the same lives as Giuseppina Pesce and Maria Concetta Cacciola,’ he said. ‘Now they have something, an example, some symbolism, to hold on to.’ Alessandra noted how across court Giuseppina’s mother and sister, Angela Ferraro and Marina Pesce, remained seated and silent throughout. There was perhaps no better representation of the injustice in their own lives than watching their men howl at the sight of an assembly of modern, professional women sitting in judgement over them.11
XXI
Giuseppina Pesce wasn’t the only one spurred to action by the death of Maria Concetta Cacciola.1
In Reggio Calabria, the youth courts had long been the poor cousin of their adult equivalents. The juvenile justice chief, Roberto di Bella, felt that was short-sighted. Like Alessandra, di Bella reasoned that the ’Ndrangheta was, above all, a family operation. ‘Since World War II, the same families have controlled the territory,’ he said. ‘Whether it’s smuggling heroin or cocaine or business or politics, this culture, this phenomenon, is born of family and goes from father to son. It’s hereditary. It’s dynastic.’ Somehow, the Italian judiciary had contrived to focus on the fathers but forget their wives – and their children. This was despite di Bella’s own experience in Calabria. In two decades in Reggio, he had dealt with more than a hundred serious crimes committed by ’Ndrangheta children. ‘We had extortion, robbery, kidnapping and more than fifty cases of homicide or assisted homicide!’ he said. ‘Kids who used Kalashnikovs. Kids who took part in clan feuds. Kids who were assassins. Kids who killed carabinieri.’
Di Bella’s experience also taught him that sending ’Ndrangheta children to detention mostly confirmed them on a path to more crime and incarceration. Once inside, they were fated to become killers and bosses, and before long wind up back in jail or dead. ‘These children start to breathe this ’Ndrangheta culture from the moment they are born,’ he said. The brainwashing was constant, and effective. By the age of twelve, an ’Ndrangheta child would spit whenever they saw a policeman. As teenagers, they would learn to exercise power ‘not just over children but over adults, too’. By eighteen, they were beyond rescue. Sometimes hatred for the state was literally ingrained in them. Di Bella had found some children with tattoos of individual carabinieri officers on their feet ‘so they can tread on them twenty-four hours a day’.
Di Bella had a gentle manner and his neatly parted dark hair and gold-framed glasses suggested a small-town doctor or provincial academic or even a priest. And his work, it was clear, was a calling. One case in particular had stayed with him. In 2002, a sixteen-year-old scion of a Calabrian clan had been detained for possessing a gun and resisting arrest. ‘The serial numbers had been filed off the gun and there was a bullet in it,’ said di Bella. He surmised that the boy was preparing for his first murder. He knew the family well. The boy’s father had been murdered when he was eleven. Di Bella had already sent three of his older brothers to jail. They were, he said, ‘one of the most violent and bloody ’Ndrangheta clans’.
Throughout his trial, the boy made a show of appearing tough, said di Bella. ‘His eyes were like steel. He did not betray his emotions.’ In the end, di Bella felt he had no option but to send him to join his brothers for several years in juvenile detention. Several months into the boy’s sentence, however, di Bella received a phone call from the director of the youth prison. The boy was unwell. ‘He was suffering from sleeplessness,’ said di Bella. ‘He had stomach disorders that were stress related. He needed to speak to a male role model but he had none.’
Di Bella had the boy brought back to court for reassessment. He found him a shadow of his former self. ‘He no longer had eyes like ice,’ he said. ‘He was bewildered. He had a lot of fear. He was distressed – strongly distressed – because of the murders and the mafia wars and the people he had lost, including his father.’ Di Bella realised the boy’s defences were down and he could talk to him directly. ‘So I told him clearly that he had to leave his ’Ndrangheta family. I said he would be murdered or be put in prison, like his father and brothers. And this boy said to me, for the first time: “I want to leave.” He did not hide that his family was ’Ndrangheta. He asked me to help him leave them at the end of his sentence.’
Di Bella promised that he would do what he could. A few months later, however, he was transferred away from Calabria. Several years after that, the court registrar in Reggio got in touch to tell him that the boy, now out of prison, had come looking for him at the court in Reggio. ‘He had been waiting for me for over a year until someone told him I was no longer there,’ said di Bella. The magistrate was consumed by guilt. There was no question that he and the state had failed this boy, a child after all, with the simple misfortune to be born into circumstances beyond his control but who, from the depths of his turmoil, had reached out for their help.
When di Bella returned to Calabria in 2011, he discovered the boy, now a man, was back in prison, convicted of mafia association. ‘He sent me a greeting from the psychological clinic where he was being treated,’ he said. ‘A few months later, I heard his elder brother had been arrested once again. This all sat with me.’
On his return to Calabria, however, di Bella was heartened to discover that the fight against the ’Ndrangheta had been transformed. Pignatone, Prestipino, Alessandra and the other prosecutors had brought new energy and new ideas to the struggle. They had forged a new consensus that, in Alessandra’s words, ‘the ’Ndrangheta is a very complicated phenomenon that defies a single solution. We need to take action on several different levels at the same time.’ Alessandra, particularly, had been instrumental in refocusing minds on the internal family dynamics of the ’Ndrangheta. That, too, made sense to di Bella. The youth courts, he felt, had much to contribute to this new direction.
If di Bella had any remaining doubts about the need for change in his own court, they vanished when, one day in Reggio, he found himself judging the children of the children he had judged a generation earlier. Here was undeniable proof that the ’Ndrangheta and the justice system were locked in never-ending conflict. The ’Ndrangheta would keep thieving, maiming and killing. The carabinieri and the judges would keep throwing them in jail. It was systemic, perpetual failure. ‘We were all inheriting the ’Ndrangheta,’ said di Bella. And if targeting an ’Ndranghetista when he was young was one of the ways to end this eternal battle, and all the blood and prison and death it wrought, then di Bella felt it was his duty to seize the moment.
When he read the files on Maria Concetta Cacciola’s death in August 2011, di Bella sensed his chance had arrived. ‘Concetta’s children were used as a tool to make her come back and retract,’ he said. ‘Her parents made Concetta listen to her six-year-old crying “I miss Mummy” on the phone.’ It was an unambiguous case of child abuse in the service of criminality. A few weeks later, di Bella read the transcripts of a bugged conversation between Concetta’s sixteen-year-old son, Alfonso, and his father, Salvatore Figliuzzi. In the transcripts, Alfonso accused his grandparents – Concetta’s parents – of treating his mother so badly that ‘they practically killed her. You lost a wife. I lost a mother. Nothing would have fucking happened if it hadn’t been for Grandpa and his jealous rage.’ Here was another ’Ndrangheta boy crying out to be rescued from his family. One way or another, the state had failed Concetta. Di Bella couldn’t allow it to fail her children. ‘After Concetta’s death,
we decided to try a very different approach,’ he said.
Di Bella’s first move was to have the carabinieri remove Giuseppina’s and Concetta’s children from their grandparents. This twin seizure from two of the most prominent ’Ndrangheta families in Rosarno sparked immediate fury. Di Bella received threatening letters. The Calabrian newspapers ran interviews with fathers and mothers from Rosarno accusing him of breaking up families and stealing children out of sheer vindictiveness. Apparently in all seriousness, some accused him of trying to brainwash their children in the same way the Nazis abducted and indoctrinated their enemies’ children during World War II.
Di Bella was unmoved. He had found legal justification for the seizures in international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. ‘It says that a child’s family has to respect their freedom, their rights and their peace,’ he said. ‘None of that is respected by the mafia.’ The convention became di Bella’s basis for a new policy for handling the children of pentiti so they could no longer be used to blackmail their mothers. ‘Now, whenever there is a woman who collaborates, the officers inform the court about the children so we can intervene and get the children to the woman. This avoids the dangerous vacancy of authority over the children which the ’Ndrangheta tries to exploit.’
Di Bella realised the convention had far wider applications, too. What he had been fighting all these years was not, as his colleagues sometimes excused it, the simple bad luck of being born into a southern mafia family or even some traditional version of patria potestas, the customary power of a father. The convention was unequivocal. What was happening inside almost every ’Ndrangheta family was illegal child abuse. ‘When we are talking about a child of twelve and his father is taking him to the beach to learn how to shoot a gun, the convention says it’s our duty to intervene,’ said di Bella. ‘A father under house arrest teaching his twelve-year-old how to strip a gun or move a Kalashnikov from one house to another – we have an obligation to intervene there too. A man who is a fugitive for twenty years with his children, forcing them to miss their education – we have the same obligation. All the cases where crimes are committed by children or parents relying on children, or if we have children extorting on behalf of their parents, or when a child is taken somewhere to shoot traffickers and witness a drug fight, or when they use their children as killers during clan feuds – in all these cases, when there is tangible and concrete detriment to the child, the convention says we have an obligation.’