Pat didn’t care as the moments ticked on. She sat silently all wrapped up in her aching upset. It was the end of her world, of her life. She was traumatised. She felt dead inside.
Suddenly, the driver was talking to someone. There was a clunk and a pull at the front passenger door. A short, wiry young man with a flowing flop of black hair climbed in beside the driver.
He twisted, whirled around, and stared at Pat with a naughty grin: ‘Ciao, bella! Ciao, tesora.’ [‘Hi, lovely! Hi, beautiful!]
His name was Emilio. Emilio Di Giovine.
CHAPTER TWO
WONDERLAND
‘To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
HAMLET
Luca, the driver, invited Pat to a nightclub and she agreed. She wanted to forget Alessandro. She put on a yellow dress to brighten her spirits and went out intending to have some harmless fun.
That evening Luca’s best pal Emilio Di Giovine once again magically materialised in his tight shirt and tighter pants. He arrived late at the noisy, smoke-filled nightclub, explaining that he’d crashed a borrowed car and the owner was not amused. Emilio was not bothered. As his friends jabbered questions about the accident, he shrugged: ‘It happens.’
His eyes were watching Pat dancing and he was soon making his way across the crowded dance floor to talk to her. It was as if Luca didn’t exist.
‘Do you want me to take you home? Why don’t you go out with me?’ He said he would take her out the following night.
‘You’d better not take me home,’ she said. ‘I came here with Luca.’
But Emilio came round the next night and the two of them went to a funfair. From then on, he kept coming to pick her up, each time driving a different car. They were all spanking new and when she queried this he told her: ‘My dad has a garage.’
After stealing a kiss on an early date he said, ‘Pat, you’re the kind of girl I want to marry.’
Mum was twenty-three years old and she’d heard plenty of chat-up lines so she laughingly brushed this off as nonsense. It was silly, Italian Romeo talk from a boy who was only nineteen years old. Her instinct was to tell him to hop it. Yet it was nice to hear the passionate patter after the heartbreak of Alessandro. It was good for her self-esteem to feel wanted.
And so was his lifestyle. She couldn’t get her head round the new cars: a Porsche on Tuesday, a Mercedes on Thursday and a nippy Alfa Romeo for Saturday and Sunday. There was always something new for the weekend.
‘Emilio, what do you do?’
With a charismatic smile and not a hint of shame, he replied, ‘I race cars and work as a mechanic at my father’s garage.’
As far as Pat was concerned, he might have said he was going to the Moon along with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin who’d just become the first men to take a stroll up there. It didn’t make sense to her. It was curiouser and curiouser. Their trips around town only confused her more. The flash cars weren’t the attraction. He was like a magnet for people, who hurried over to talk to him as if they just wanted to be seen near him.
Everywhere he went his language was cash but in many bars and restaurants his money was foreign to them; the owners wouldn’t take it, saying their meals and drinks were on the house. He wore bespoke suits, his shirts and ties from the Via Montenapoleone designer shops, his shoes imported, English and cap-toed. He was groomed to perfection, having a wet shave and his moustache trimmed every day at the barber’s. There, his double espresso and his toasted cheese panini were always waiting as he took the central chair, like a celebrity. It was fascinating. She seemed to have stepped into some extraordinary wonderland.
And Emilio was a get-things-done kind of guy. Certainly, when Pat had problems with the family she was working for he was quick to sort things out.
One night after she put the kids to bed, the father tried to get it on with her. Pat realised he was horribly drunk and told him to get lost. She went off to bed in the room where she slept next to his daughter. She woke up with the guy trying to feel her up under the duvet and that was that. She ran out of the house and called Emilio.
‘Pack your stuff,’ he told her. ‘You’re not staying there. What’s he going to do next?’
She went back to get her things but the family wouldn’t open the door to her. When Emilio arrived Pat was a wreck, sobbing outside the apartment building. He took one look and told her to wait in his car. She tried to say he shouldn’t do anything but he took off in a rush of virility.
Within minutes he’d returned with her bags all neatly packed. He’d ‘sorted’ the problem. The sex pest would never bother her again. She never found out what he had said – or done. Emilio had no difficulty finding a girlfriend who would let Pat stay until she found another job. By then they had become very much a couple and Pat found out she was pregnant with me.
They’d been lovers for just sixteen days.
Emilio was delighted and his parents were even more so at the prospect of their first grandchild. Emilio was the adored eldest son and Nan opened the doors of her home to him and Pat.
At that time, Nan’s had two bedrooms, a huge front room, kitchen and bathroom, and eleven kids, aged from nineteen downwards, with Auntie Angela only a few weeks more than a twinkle in Grandpa’s eye. Mum and Dad were given their own bedroom. Nan and Grandpa had the other. The rest had to lump it where they could. It was pandemonium. There were kids everywhere, crying, shouting, screaming, laughing, and they all seemed to be fighting. It was like a coven of hysterical little demons.
‘They’re all mad here,’ thought Pat with a grim grin to herself.
It was all falling into place, as if her destiny was mapped out for her. She had no choice. She wasn’t really in love with Emilio. She was still in love with Alessandro and Emilio was her boyfriend on the rebound. He helped her.
When she was a few weeks’ pregnant she went to Blackpool and told her parents, who were distraught. Where was the man who’d got their girl pregnant? Where was this Emilio? They were horrified, in their quiet, behind-the-curtains English way, at how things had turned out. They had hoped Pat would return quickly after her Italian adventure but she had arrived home to announce she was pregnant and was going back for good to raise their first grandchild. Their big, repeated question was: ‘Who is this Emilio?’
Pat didn’t tell them because she still wasn’t sure herself. Instead she offered: ‘He’s a good man. He’s looking after me. I’m happy.’
And deep down Pat really hoped she would be.
When she returned to Piazza Prealpi, she started getting affectionate with his parents, with all the brothers and sisters, learning much if not all about the family’s history. Her emotions were all over the place, but she wanted to belong, to make it work with the young Emilio and the baby that was on the way. She’d never met a man quite like him before.
‘Better,’ he’d always say, ‘to live like a lion for one day than live like a sheep for one hundred years.’
Yet even in the Mafia, there were questions of propriety. Nan put pressure on Emilio to ‘do the right thing’.
Only eighteen days after I was born, on 9 March 1970, they became man and wife at a registry office close to Piazza Prealpi, with Emilio in a dark suit and Pat in an understated brown dress she’d bought at C&A in Blackpool. Grandpa Rosario, who was a witness, looked as if he was at a funeral. Pat’s parents weren’t there. The wedding reception was pasta at Nan’s.
There, Pat overheard her husband and father-in-law talking in the kitchen.
‘Emilio, I’m worried about this girl. She’s going to ask too many questions. She’s English – she won’t understand how things work. She could really fuck things up for us.’
Grandpa was told there was no problem. No one was going to stand in the family’s way, certainly not Pat. It was business as usual.
As if to prove it, Emilio celebrated his wedding night by going out drinking and gambling with his sm
uggling crews. His bride spent the night alone, looking after the new baby – me – and worrying about our future.
Emilio was nimble-witted, nerveless and remarkably fluent in violence and villainy. He was an heir to that audacity. Just like his mother.
Nan was born on 14 November 1931 in San Sperato, right by the tip of Calabria, on the Strait of Messina across from Mount Etna in Sicily, as deep in the wilds as you can go. Her family were partisans in the mountains during the Second World War, and ‘partisan’ in their world meant they were fighting for each other, for themselves.
They were infamous. They fought fiercely against the Germans, against Mussolini. They were against anybody and everybody. They quite liked the American soldiers for the black market in chocolate. In their own interests, they dealt in protection, extortion and contraband. It was more ruthless than sophisticated.
They were traditionalists, keeping the faiths of the ’Ndrangheta, whose bad business goes back to Italian unification in 1861. The ’Ndrangheta didn’t need secret codes because the Calabrian dialect is impenetrable. In the early days the poor but proud and angry Calabrians banded together against the rich squires who’d taken over what they saw as their land. There were about 400 people in San Sperato and most families managed to grab a chunk of land.
It hadn’t changed much when Nan was growing up with eleven brothers and sisters, a family bred to war in the Calabrian hills. All of them were crushed into a half-built two-bedroom stone house. The Serraino family, like the others, grew olives and lemons, but they also dealt in contraband cigarettes and liquor, mostly cognac stolen from Calabria’s huge Gioia Tauro port – Italy’s ‘passport to the world’ – which was under ’Ndrangheta control. In the shade of melon stalls on the dirt roads all around the countryside, the illicit booze and tobacco were bought and sold. The police collected their payoffs in kind, bottles of brandy and wine, a couple of cartons of smokes, towards the end of Friday afternoons.
‘Have a nice weekend,’ they were told.
It was the family legacy, the family economics, venal but effective: control the trade, supply the demand, and fear no one. Indeed, keep the authorities close to you, pay them off, corrupt or kill them. The Mafia code: keep your friends close, your enemies closer. Perfection would be everybody on the payroll.
It didn’t always work. Some of the police, not many, were straight, or under some sort of regional government control and obliged to make the occasional arrest. That meant that many of those around San Sperato – for everyone had some connection with the ‘black’ economy – spent at least a short time in jail.
That included my great-grandfather Domenico ‘Mico’ Serraino, who was given six months in Calabria Prison for a robbery in the summer of 1947. They didn’t take into consideration any of his other fifty or so offences – that year – as somehow they were never registered in the paperwork.
Domenico Serraino was known as ‘The Fox’, and was cunning in the extreme. His wife, my great-grandma Margherita Medora, was from a similar family. They were peasants who hadn’t had any schooling. He lived in a narrow world: sons of sons were on pedestals, sons of daughters were undeserving of his attention. The sons of sons were gods but grandchildren with a different surname were not allowed to eat with him. If they came close he would chase them away with the back of his hand. Nan was a blessed Serraino.
It was her job to visit her father Mico in prison, to take provisions, cigarettes and wine. The prison guards would receive their ‘allowance’ during the visit. She was very much a sweet sixteen-year-old in appearance but already wily in the way of a born Calabrian, truly The Fox’s daughter. That gave her the confidence to take a chance on romance with the fresh-faced twenty-year-old prison guard who chatted her up during her visits. There was a real sparkle between them. Rosario Di Giovine was new to the prison, new to the area, but linked by bloodline to the South. His dad worked in Rome in the prison service. It was just after the war and work was hard to find so his dad got him this state job. It most certainly wasn’t a vocation.
Still, he didn’t realise that getting involved with Maria Serraino could get him killed. Just for spinning her a line.
There was no way Nan could take a prison guard home to meet the family. It would be like bringing home the cops. She’d have been disowned and Grandpa would certainly have fallen off a cliff.
Nan found a way. She offered to do the washing for the prison guards in return for a little money. It was an excuse to keep visiting the prison after her father was freed. And Rosario Di Giovine was a quick learner in the ways of Calabria. They kept their affair secret and later my grandpa quietly left the prison service and avoided the cafés and bars the other officers went to. His time there didn’t even stay on his CV. It was as if it had never been. Instead, he became a truck driver, a very useful skill in the Serraino family.
Rosario had a way with him but his charm was tested as Nan’s father and brothers watched closely. In those days you weren’t ever left alone with a man. You had to have an escort. If you went out for an ice cream you had to have a chaperone. That’s how it worked. And it worked double for newcomers like Grandpa. He could feel the eyes on him. But true love always…
As a young couple time dragged for them, so before long they’d run off together to another village in the mountains. The family realised what had been going on and, sure enough, Nan was pregnant.
The atmosphere was difficult, with tension and violent arguments between Grandpa and Nan’s brothers, but circumstances dominated everything. They married and my dad, Emilio, was born twenty days before Christmas in 1949. The Serraino–Di Giovine dynasty had begun and so had the baby production line. While Grandpa became a trusted lieutenant and started driving contraband for the family, Nan began giving birth.
In those tough post-war years, even with all the ducking and diving, the thieving and smuggling, it was an almighty struggle to stay ahead. The ways of Calabria were always respected. My nan was the one who kept everything together and she was always taking in strays, both kids and dogs. She was a lovely, genuinely giving woman, but she had a ruthless streak in her. If you did something bad to her family or disrespected them, she wouldn’t think twice about getting you beaten to a pulp. Just like that she would kick off. That was the world she had always lived in.
When her son Emilio was four years old his grandfather made him watch a pig being slaughtered. The pig’s throat was slit in front of him and the blood dripped into a bucket. This little boy had to immerse his arm up to the elbow in the blood and stir it so it wouldn’t coagulate. There wasn’t room for waste because they wanted to make a batch of blood sausage. Emilio had to keep stirring the blood. That was the side of the family that made him a man. That’s how all the children, the masculine children, as they put it, were brought up.
Kindness to strays and buckets of blood? One extreme to the other.
By 1963, Emilio had six brothers and four sisters and they were all living like chickens, constantly scratching for space and food. It was then Nan decided life would be better in Milan. It was like moving abroad, going to Australia. It was faraway and foreign to them. But Nan packed her bags and her kids and moved north. She had some money saved, and she had guile and single-minded determination. It was enough to get them an apartment on the Piazza Prealpi, which is where La Signora launched her criminal organisation (which was worthy of that title from the start).
She made associations within the Milanese underworld but most important was the established Calabrian connection: from there, at first, came the cigarettes and booze, the currency of her start-up operation. Her gang were a young, wild bunch. Over time all her kids were in the act: Emilio and his tough-guy brothers Domenico, Antonio, Franco, Alessandro, Filippo and Guglielmo. And his sisters, Rita, Mariella, Domenica and Natalina had walk-on parts too. And the ‘strays’ were thankful to help by running errands.
Nan was ever-purposeful; nothing was done by chance. She spoke with a distinct and difficult dialect. It’s
very hard to understand – she really needs subtitles – unless you’ve grown up with it. However, her meaning was always crystal clear.
The Piazza Prealpi, fifteen minutes from central Milan on a slow traffic day, was pivotal to her empire. The square housed an assortment of market stalls with flapping awnings and flaking paint where you could buy the fresh basics for breakfast, lunch and dinner. On other smaller but busier open-air stalls there were younger, louder guys selling newspapers, magazines, booze and cigarettes. It was a downbeat neighbourhood of city life and lives. But families didn’t have to go any further for their needs. The cafés, bars and restaurants were open from dawn until the small hours. There were always people about, happier to sit outside than in the squashed, dull blocks of council flats which comprise the Piazza. There was an eager, waiting market for anyone with commercial enterprise, a bit of get up and go.
Nan instantly realised the potential to sell cheap cigarettes and hooky alcohol in the square and make a fortune. She knew that contraband bought in volume and without duty could be sourced and sold much cheaper than it was at present, but still at immense profit.
She didn’t rush at it. She began slowly by selling to the shopkeepers at knockdown prices which became lower and lower, so low that people came from all over the city to buy. She met the demand.
Nan held ‘board’ meetings every morning in her kitchen. Once her children reached a useful age they were told what to steal, how to steal it and who to move it to. Go here. Get this. Do that. Speak to him. Come back to me. If one child ratted on another, told their mother that one of the others had stolen something, the telltale was beaten. Mercilessly. The rule was you said nothing, you kept quiet or the punishment was harsh. The code of silence, omertà, trumped blood bonds. Nan’s law was: ‘You have to shut up.’
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