On the front pages were photographs of her blood-soaked body splayed across the ground, a pregnant, teenage victim of mobster gunplay in central Milan, and it made provocative and controversial news. It sparked heavyweight political pressure from Rome. This was a national scandal. Something had to be done, lessons learned, the usual useless political claptrap.
Still, with Rome on their backs, the authorities in Milan were determined to prevent open warfare between the Yugoslavs and the Di Giovines. They wanted no more bodies on the streets, no further voter-upsetting mob mayhem in the newspapers.
They’d arrested Dad in the aftermath of the killings and now they charged him with a string of old robberies and burglaries. They dug up anything they could from the unsolved files to convict him, to stop revenge shootings by getting ‘Lupin’ off the street. They had him bang to rights on the robbery of furs and artwork worth several hundred thousand pounds from Countess Marzotto Trissino’s villa near Verona. He wasn’t happy about that. Unknown to Dad, his brother Francesco had photographed the proceeds of their burglary and sent the snaps to the Countess demanding a ransom. That wasn’t smart, and the enraged Countess immediately blew the whistle. Dad and Francesco were identified as thieves, so there was one genuine problem in the long but generally token charge list waiting when he was carried into court on a stretcher and laid out next to the dock.
I was seven years old, but that moment is a locked memory card. It was scary for me at the back of the courtroom where I sat with Nan. I kept grabbing her hand. She kept telling me quietly not to worry, not to fuss.
Dad had a beard and long hair and was on a stretcher wearing a white gown covering his bullet-punctured body. It was the first time I had seen him since the shooting.
He looked like Jesus. Appropriately, for the plan was to crucify him.
He was so red-eyed and pale and lost-looking, I wanted to jump over the wooden railings and get to him. I just wanted to hold on to my dad. I never wanted to lose him. It was then, at that moment, when I was seven years old, that a lifetime love, a precious bond, was forged. There was a strange, psychic thing. He hadn’t made eye contact with me up to that point, but then, as my emotions were boiling over, he looked straight at me. While the judge was sentencing him to return to San Vittore prison for a year, Dad smiled and blew me a kiss.
As he was stretchered from the courtroom by two armed guards, he craned his neck and gave me another smile, blew a second kiss and mouthed: ‘Spiacente [sorry].’
I was no longer just his little princess. I was his Mafia Princess. I would do anything for him.
Nan murmured to me: ‘Don’t worry.’
She could afford to be relaxed. She knew there wasn’t going to be too much hardship. She had made arrangements for Dad to have his favourite foods in jail and any wine he wanted. He’d also have drugs and cigarettes, but not for his own use – he never touched them. The cigarettes were the pennies and pounds of prison, dope of any kind the top currency, to barter and bribe.
Of course, I did worry. Mum was not there with the rest of the family for the court case. She’d already decided she’d had enough of our life in Milan. While Dad was locked up in San Vittore we travelled to Blackpool and stayed with her mum and dad and my auntie Jill. We hung on longer than our usual trips because Mum wanted to see how I would take to life in the UK, but I got physically ill because I was so desperately homesick for Italy, for the family.
When Dad got out of jail in November 1978, it wasn’t a game of Happy Families. I hardly saw him and never knew when I would again. He was totally single-minded about business. And ruthless. Adele’s killing had hardened him even more. He ploughed everything into narcotics smuggling, operating with the Turks to bring in even more heroin. The deals were running into multiple multiples of tens of thousands of pounds. Sometimes a week, always a month.
It didn’t take long for the clock to turn to High Noon. There were other just as determined people as the Di Giovine family. There were gun battles over territory, beatings and killings, and one death led to another and, of course, there was the vendetta. The Yugoslavs were the big threat and Adele’s death still had to be avenged. All I knew of it was that Dad seemed distant most of the time. He didn’t seem to have as much time for me, for anyone.
The family concluded what they called ‘the negotiations’ in a territorial battle that ended with five of the Slav gang dead in a week.
The Di Giovine enterprise, like the drug supply, was endless, and there were always new customers, always the search for more outlets. Patricia Di Giovine, my mum, on the other hand, was searching for an escape. In the August of 1979 we went on holiday to another world, to Calabria, and stayed with my nan’s family. She had relatives, brothers and sisters and their families, throughout the area. My godfather, Uncle Demitri Serraino, was our main host, the patriach. He was lovely, a nice, very particular, elegant man and a bit of a lad. His wife Lidia couldn’t have kids and they’d fed her with hormones that made her really hairy; she looked like a man and had a smell like a man as well. Mum and I had to stay at her house. She was lovely to talk to, but she had bushy hairs under her chin and she used to get Mum to pluck them out.
I sat there worrying: ‘Oh my God, please don’t let me have to pull out the hairs.’ I dreaded the thought of it.
Uncle Demitri and the Calabrian family were set in their old-world ways, their attitudes as ingrown as Lidia’s chin hairs. Nan had bought land, and her brother and his wife, Uncle Giuseppe and Auntie Milina, kept rabbits on some of her acres, which were near their farm. Auntie Milina was unpleasant to everybody and I couldn’t stand her. They told me she could kill people with her bare hands; she was a generale in gonnella, a general in a skirt.
One day I went across to the farm where they kept the pigs and these gorgeous rabbits. Just as she was killing a rabbit for our tea, I pleaded, ‘Please don’t kill that white one!’
But she killed it right in front of me. Just battered his head, and skinned it. It was awful. I’ll never forget it.
I cried and asked: ‘What are you going to do with the skin?’
Auntie Milina held it out to me and said, ‘You can make a pair of knickers if you want.’
It was horrible. I was miserable, fed up with that. Nan tried to cheer me up as we sat by the olive groves, fanned by the gusts of zagarna, orange blossom breeze. She said Dad might visit on Thursday. That brought a smile to my face. It seemed so long since I’d seen him. I didn’t want to get too excited in case he didn’t turn up but I couldn’t help myself. I counted to one hundred and then one hundred again to make the time go faster.
He appeared in the early evening, and as I ran into his arms he said he had come specially to see me. He hadn’t brought any presents or luggage – no change of clothes, no toothbrush. All he was carrying was a Benelli 12-gauge shotgun.
The next morning after breakfast he took me out to learn how to use that big gun, with its worn stock and oiled barrels. He carried the weapon slung over his shoulder on a loose, tan leather strap. The red shells he gave me to load the shotgun were warm from his pocket. He stopped me with a gentle smile when I tried to put in more than five cartridges. It was a nice grin, but faraway, not familiar.
We were out near the olive groves, close to orchards of lemon and lime. My face was flushed with the heat and excitement, cooled only a little by the breeze with the orange bouquet from the bergamot trees.
I had to concentrate on the lesson. When I’d loaded the gun he explained that each shell was packed not with pellets but with a single, rifled slug of lead.
‘What’s the difference?’ I asked.
He explained that pellets can catch game birds from the sky, while one spinning slug would bring down a charging wild boar. Stop it in its tracks.
The shotgun was difficult, too heavy for me to handle properly. He smiled and I could see the squinty white lines around his eyes where the sun hadn’t reached. He shouldered it. With a soft click, he slid the safety catch off, pull
ed me out of his line of fire, and blasted several times into the distance, at targets of his imagination. Acrid cordite masked the orange blossom, as I clapped applause at my baptism of gunfire.
My father put his strong, tanned arm around me and I could feel his breath in my right ear as he whispered: ‘Amo la mia piccola principessa.’ [‘I love my little princess.’]
My heart swelled. I adored him. I would do anything for him, anything he wanted. He only had to ask. And then later that day he was gone. Just like that.
There were no explanations from Nan, and Mum avoided talking about him. That was typical now. She always spoke about ‘the two of us’ and finding a nice place to stay. I wanted us all to be together as a family. I loved my dad. I wanted us to stay with him, or near him at least.
We returned to Milan at the end of the month but I didn’t go back to class. I was going to another school. Our bags were packed, our whole life in Italy in six cases. Mum was more than ready to leave Milan, leave Dad and Nan and all the Serraino–Di Giovine family and connections, to leave their underworld, the malavita. Dad was mad about it but there was nothing he could do. Mum had made up her mind and deep down I think he knew it would be better for me to get away as there was so much violence going on.
When Nan hugged and kissed me goodbye, it didn’t feel right. I knew she didn’t want me to leave her and, inside myself, I never did. I was upset and I didn’t want to go, but Mum made much of the novelty of living in England. And there’d be a nice new school. It would be fun, like another holiday. She was trying to convince herself that it was not just the only plan but also the best plan.
It was a sunny morning in early September 1979 when we left Milan. A day later our train rolled through the rain at Fishergate Hill and along platform five at Preston Station. My mum’s older sister Auntie Jill met us and I remember she had brought a spare Marks and Sparks umbrella to keep us dry in our scamper with our stuff to the car park. We moved into Auntie Jill and Uncle Adrian’s detached house on a very posh new estate in Carlton, Lancashire. Mum had already written to the local authority from Milan and got us on the council house list but Auntie Jill would have let us stay forever. Despite trying, she and my uncle didn’t have any children of their own so they were happy to spoil me rotten. I loved the attention but also the space and the constant hot water. Baths – hot baths! – were part of the day, not a dream. I was given my own bedroom but for more than six months I still slept in Mum’s bed because at only nine years old I was scared of my new world.
I kept wondering about Dad, where he was, and when, if, he was going to come and see me. I would dream about him and look at pictures and photographs and wonder if that’s where he was. I would see a photo of a building and wonder if he’d walked past it. I was constantly searching for something to give me a connection to him.
As a little girl you need reassurance. I wanted my dad to tell me he loved me. I adored him. I loved him. I would tell him. Why wouldn’t he speak to me, tell me he loved me? But for this little girl there was no point in tantrums. I knew stamping my foot would get me nowhere: L’albero vecchio non si drizza piu [An old tree cannot be made straight].
But time played its part and I began to settle. Auntie Jill had a budgie called Joey, which used to sit in its cage saying, ‘Hello, I’m Joey Sheppard.’
My uncle and I liked to play a game where we waited until Mum and Auntie Jill were talking thirteen to the dozen and we’d open Joey’s cage and he’d zing out. Joey’s flight plan was always directly to Auntie Jill’s head. She used so much spray her hair was like a helmet and Joey would land without her even noticing. He’d sit there, perched on her head, and she’d be talking and talking. It was only when Mum collapsed in a fit of laughter that she realised and chased me around the house.
We’d go to Blackpool for the day and walk along the beach and throw stones into the sea. Dinner-time specials were fish and chips and caramel puddings. It was all so simple, normal, a different life.
But also a different language. I didn’t speak more than a few words of English. When I was first given Smarties I thought they were counters, not sweets. I couldn’t write English or count in English or understand lessons in English, which means that the staff at Carlton Green Primary School must have been fantastic because I flourished there. The teachers gave me plenty of attention, one-to-one classes, and so a couple of years later when I went to Hodgson High School, where Mum had gone to school, I’d caught up with the others. In fact, I was better at English than most kids my age.
I cherished the school uniform Mum laid out on my bed every morning. Wearing the grey skirt, bright blue sweater and blue and grey tie made me feel important. I’d never worn a tie before and I felt smarter and grown up.
I just had to get stuck into finding my English self. Up until then I’d talked and thought in Italian, but now I had to operate in a different language and culture, be a Lancashire lass. At that age I was like a sponge with all the new information. What made me work harder was wanting not to be different, wanting to fit in, to be a little girl like the other little girls, and not just to talk like the other girls but to sound like them; to belong.
Of course, all the kids were interested in me for the very fact I was different. They’d ask me to teach them swear words in Italian and then parrot them around the playground. I could now swear in two languages. And fight. I was popular and I could hold my own. I had a couple of scraps at primary school but nothing too serious.
The most upsetting scrap was when someone I trusted, thought was a true friend, turned on me. I really didn’t know what hit me. My understanding was that nobody did that, it was against the rules. She was a big girl and said: ‘I’m the strongest of the class.’
Because she was my friend, I was soft. I asked: ‘How do you know that?’
She showed me by punching me. It was the last year of primary. The kids were running around the playground chanting: ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ Maybe she wanted to put on a show for them for she was mean. She bashed me. She hit me properly, really hard, knocked me to the ground and sat on my belly, then slapped me a couple of times. I was shocked that my friend could hurt me like that.
The next day I was doubled up in pain. She wasn’t that tough. It turned out I had to have my appendix out, but Mum always swore it was because of her attack.
Once when I was thirteen I caught a girl my age beating up an eleven-year-old girl against a wall. I grabbed the bully and got hold of her neck and pushed her up the wall and demanded, ‘How do you like this? If I ever catch you doing that again, I’ll do far more than put you up the wall.’ I couldn’t stand anything like that because I knew what it felt like.
As I got older, if someone was horrid to me I might be a bitch right back but I never went out of my way to be nasty for no reason or just for the sake of it. I was loud and a bit naughty at school but I didn’t get a lot of detentions because I seemed to get away with things. I could have done far better academically. I wasn’t lazy. I was just too busy with my life. Too busy with my make-up, getting my clothes right, being a teenage girl. I wasn’t thick but I wasn’t very academic. I was good at sports and represented the school in javelin and discus competitions, but I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. There were other things running around – boys.
Mum found work as a chambermaid; it didn’t pay well but with all the seafront hotels in Blackpool there were plenty of hours on offer. Within a year of returning we’d moved into our own rented place in Poulton-le-Fylde, and although we didn’t have a lot we had our own life. Yet I still dreamed of life in Italy and wondered about my dad. Would he call? Would he visit? I missed him, I missed life in Milan.
So I couldn’t believe it when some of that life turned up on our doorstep in England. From nowhere Grandpa Rosario arrived to see us with Auntie Rita’s husband Uncle Lino in early 1980. Their visit wasn’t expected so it was even more exciting for me. I loved seeing Grandpa for he’d always been around, the next best thing to Dad. This was a t
reat and there was plenty of cash for it. Grandpa was a changed man. Gone was the usual country look and in its place he wore a sharp suit with designer accessories. Uncle Lino, who I was wary of, was his stylish twin.
Grandpa said he was taking me to see the Queen. And we did go to Buckingham Palace but he said she wasn’t home that day. We stayed in a smart West End hotel, all the bills paid in cash, and visited other tourist spots like the Tower of London. It was five-star all the way. Grandpa had a couple of people to see but most of his attention was on us. I asked Mum how we could afford all these things but she smiled and said not to fuss.
Before he left Grandpa gave Mum hundreds of pounds: ‘Go out and get yourself and Marisa some clothes.’
When I realised Grandpa was leaving I was devastated; I was longing to visit Italy and see my family. Mum saw it in my face: ‘Don’t worry. We’ll go back to visit everyone when the holidays come around. It won’t be long.’
She missed Nan and all her friends as well, but she made it clear our life was in England now. All Mum cared about was that I settled down safely and did well at school. All her attention, time and money were devoted to me. Hers wasn’t a money-rich lifestyle but she had me and was absolutely determined I would be well brought up, an English princess. She still made a point of speaking to me in Italian, because that was very much part of my life too. For all her hurt she didn’t want me to lose that link. It worked. When I speak Italian, I think Italian, and it’s exactly the same when I speak English. The idiom changes. I change. It’s far more complex than driving on the left or driving on the right. You’re not changing sides, you’re splitting a personality.
When we went down to the beach at weekends for a wander around, I would sometimes look out to the Irish Sea and imagine Dad sailing in, taking the long way as ever. I said as much to Mum but she just frowned and said, ‘Marisa, Daddy is busy.’
Mafia Princess Page 6