Mafia Princess

by Merico, Marisa

  There was a daily restaurant reservation for thirty of us for lunch on the beach, and the lobster and wine were waiting to nibble and sip as the orders were taken. I wondered where Dad was, but if I asked the answer was always: ‘Your papa is taking care of business.’

  I felt as though I was in limbo. What was I? Italian? English? I didn’t really understand who I was, never mind what to think. But I knew in Italy that I was different.

  A few of my English friends knew that my family was a bit dodgy but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I didn’t say: ‘My family will cut your legs off if you don’t…’ I never threatened people like that.

  But my life was chalk and cheese. And Dad remained a phantom figure. When he did call in October 1980, over a year since I’d last heard from him, it was with a shock. Fanny had given birth to their daughter. I had a half-sister, Anna Marie. He gently told me how much he loved me and said he would call me in another couple of days

  When he called next, nearly a year later, it was to tell me I had a half-brother, Emilio. Because he was known as Count Marco, Dad made out in the paperwork that Fanny’s kids were my grandpa’s children so they could have the Di Giovine name. Just like me.

  He told me he thought of me every day and said, ‘I promise I will see you as soon as I can.’

  Understandably, Mum would fly into a rage after the phone calls. I was upset. I didn’t even know where he was calling from and she’d quell her own fears by expressing them.

  ‘You don’t need to see him. Forget about him. He’s upsetting you and he’s not even here! He’s not part of our life. Don’t let him inside your head.’

  Of course, Dad was well and truly there, superglued in. I so wanted to see him and be with him. Yet my body was sending my thoughts in all sorts of directions. In February 1983 a new and welcome complication came into my life when I found my first love, my puppy love. A lovely lad. Michael Mason looked right out of Duran Duran. He was gorgeous. He was John Taylor’s double, tall and a couple of years older than me. I really loved him. His sister was only five years old and we used to babysit for her together, so I got to know his family.

  He’d been going out with one of my friends but he finished with her. I went to the amusement arcade his dad owned in Thornton-Cleveleys in Lancashire and he was there and asked me out. I knew my friend was still madly in love with him, so I decided I couldn’t accept. It wouldn’t be fair. I went to her and told her what had happened, because I knew she’d be hurt if she found out from someone else, but I assured her I wouldn’t go out with him even though I liked him a lot.

  She reacted with fury, insisting, ‘You’re not going out with him,’ even though I’d told her I wouldn’t, and calling me names. She was a big girl, quite forceful, and she’d just got done for grievous bodily harm. You wouldn’t mess with her. But I was cross because I’d been honest with her and she still kicked off, so I thought, ‘I’m not having that. I’m not having her tell me what to do.’

  Michael asked me out again, and this time I said ‘Yes’. She found out and it was all hell let loose. She stopped me in the playground at breaktime and accused me: ‘You’re going out with him.’

  I just looked at her and said, ‘Oh, fuck off.’

  I turned, and she grabbed me by the back of my head and pulled me backwards. I stood my ground and gave as good as I got, but she was a tough girl. A teacher came, a little short man – we were taller than him – and broke us up.

  What I’d done was bad, because she loved him and she had gone out with him first. You don’t really do that to your friends. But I was stubborn and I didn’t like the way she was behaving. She was a bully. A lot of the girls were scared of her so they all fell out with me. I became an outcast. They wouldn’t dare come up to me and say to my face, ‘Oh you bitch, you shouldn’t have done that,’ because they knew that I wouldn’t stand for that. But they wouldn’t speak to me.

  One girl who did speak to me was Dawn, who was nice-looking and quite shy. I called her ‘my shadow’. I was always the leader. It was just Dawn and me for a long time. At school we did our own thing but we had friends from other schools and from the area. I’ve never, ever found it hard to make friends.

  Outside school it was Michael and me. I thought it was amazing going out with a boy whose father owned an arcade on the Blackpool seafront. We didn’t have to wait in queues or pay to go on the machines. When we babysat at weekends his mum and dad would let me stay in the spare room. We’d worked up to some heavy petting and just under a year after we first went out he sneaked into that room one night. It was exciting and didn’t seem wrong to be doing it and I lost my virginity at the age of thirteen. It was painful and awkward but I didn’t worry about that. It was first love. Young love.

  Sleeping with Michael diverted my thoughts from Italy. Mum was always busy working, or nesting in the first home she had ever had to herself, the council house in Poulton-le-Fylde. It looked to her as if she’d escaped. She’d built a wall between us and much of the past and prayed it wouldn’t be breached. She didn’t have a clue Michael and I were having sex and was just happy I wasn’t nagging her about going to see Nan or asking if Dad was going to turn up. She was more tranquil. I could see it in her face. It was more calm. But it was always aware.

  We received the phone call that changed everything in June 1983. Dad had just been arrested in New York. Count Marco Carraciolo had jumped a red light in Manhattan. A patrol car stopped him and he was arrested. At the precinct he was processed and fingerprinted and told if he paid $500 he’d be bailed.

  He made his phone call to Fanny and told her to get the money there fast. She sent her brother. But Emo took his time, didn’t concern himself about it – a traffic violation, no big deal – allowing more chance for Count Marco’s details to be scrutinised. Because of recent diplomatic incidents the New York cops were being wary about any arrested foreigners and paying a lot of attention to them. Count Marco was certainly Italian but the fingerprint records revealed his real name was Emilio Di Giovine and he’d committed a murder in Milan. All politeness towards Count Marco ended then and there.

  Instead of paying bail and going home, Dad was sent to the correctional facility in New Jersey while, quickly, all the necessary extradition procedures were rubber-stamped. It was no contest. As he waited in jail, Dad could only hope that in the three years he’d been Count Marco Nan had fixed as many people as possible over the Mafoda killing.

  Even so, his circumstances did not seem as complicated or threatening as those of another prisoner being held by the Americans: a mystery man who had been implicated in the death of Roberto Calvi. Calvi, who was dubbed ‘God’s banker’ because of his close Vatican links, was found hanging under London’s Blackfriars Bridge on 17 June 1982. The prisoner who talked to Dad about Calvi’s supposed suicide was ‘in transit’. He told Dad the inside story of that mysterious incident involving the man who used to be chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, which had collapsed in 1982 in a huge political scandal involving billions of illegally exported lire. It turned out Calvi was involved in laundering drug money. There were assorted stories about his involvement with the Vatican Bank and several other influential organisations. It was widely believed that he had not killed himself but had been what the Italians call ‘suicided’. They even have a word for it: suicidoto.

  Dad has wisely stayed silent about what he knows about the ongoing murder mystery of God’s banker, and the man he’d talked to remained in custody when Dad was put on a plane back to Italy, where he was to face the consequences of shooting down Mafoda. He was surprisingly relaxed about it.

  It was going to be more of an ordeal for Mum.

  And me.

  It was going to change our lives.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE GOOD LIFE

  ‘We are a small country, but dig two metres and you are among the Romans.’

  ITALIAN ROCK STAR VINICIO CAPOSSELA, 2009

  Count Marco Carraciolo was fast-tracked out of
America. They moved Dad quicker than any extradition treaty had ever intended. When he arrived in Rome only a couple of weeks after being handcuffed in Manhattan the lawyers joked that the ink wasn’t dry on the paperwork: ‘His feet didn’t touch the ground. Emilio Di Giovine was a most unwanted man.’ But that was only in America.

  The Italian authorities desperately wanted him. They had tall filing cabinets stacked with folders of crimes he was suspected of. But they had no doubt that he had shot dead Mafoda and that’s what they went after him for: murder. America had extradited him, Rome wanted to eliminate him, lock him up and throw away the key.

  It was then that Nan’s years of behind-the-scenes work paid off: the depths of her corruption were limitless. Dad’s trial was quick and he was convicted of murder. The appeal by Nan’s legal team was instant. They reduced the charge to manslaughter and his case was considered again. It was all done with money. By the time he appeared on the manslaughter charge a lot of people had received a lot of Nan’s money. And it was only because Dad was such a high-profile criminal that he got any jail time at all. He had to be seen to be being punished and was sentenced to seven years in Parma prison. There’s no parole system as such in Italy but you get three months off for every year of sentence. A year in jail is nine months. It wasn’t going to be hard labour. Inside the court it was like a carnival, with Dad hugging Nan and his brothers and sisters. Well he might – he’d got away with murder. Especially when the sentence was reduced on appeal to three years.

  That outcome sent a message to all the other Mafiosi and through the rest of the international underworld that the Di Giovine family could do pretty much as they wanted. They were untouchable, three years in Parma nothing but a fleabite to Dad. It wasn’t even as much of an irritation as that. It was like a health retreat where he had silk sheets and exotic specialised ‘nursing care’ from an extremely attentive nurse.

  Mum’s face was a freeze-frame of anxiety when she took the phone call from Nan to tell her Dad was in prison in Italy. She couldn’t have cared less where he was as long as he was out of our lives or, more importantly, my life. But this was the phone call Mum had never wanted, had been dreading. Dad wanted to see ‘his little princess’.

  It had never been possible before, for in America he had been someone else. It would have been too risky. Now there was nothing to stop him seeing me. Mum’s face as she took the call was a mixture of fear and resignation. She was in the middle. She’d made a new life for us, built that wall around a castle for just the two of us. Not for a family of three.

  Yet Dad wanted to see me. And I was desperate to see him.

  I knew it was Nan on the phone and thought something bad had happened. Mum sat me down and told me he was in jail for some petty thieving and he wanted me to go over to Milan and see him but, she said, ‘Marisa, you don’t have to go. No one can force you if you say you don’t want to. If you say you are too frightened to go into a prison I will tell Nan so that she can tell your father.’

  I could tell she was longing for me to invent an excuse, but we both knew there was no way of disobeying Nan. It was like a royal command. And I wanted to go. Oh, so very, very badly. I was missing my nan, missing my family. I missed the culture, the lifestyle. Also, I could get away with stuff there as she wasn’t nearly as strict as my mum.

  Mum resigned herself to it. She had to. She put on a brave face but she wasn’t taking any nonsense. She wanted to get over, see Dad and get back to Lancashire where she felt safe and secure. It didn’t take long. We went in August 1983, not many weeks after Dad drove through that red Manhattan traffic light.

  ‘Marisa! Get a move on!’ Mum was nervous about the trip. She was hurrying me up and her accent became more and more Blackpool as the kitchen clock ticked on. ‘Marisa! For the last time…’ On school mornings her voice used to sound like Kellogg’s Rice Krispies – it would snap, crackle and then finally pop with frustration as she tried to get me out the house in time for my first class.

  Today she was even more agitated. I was running late, listening to Duran Duran, doing my hair, worrying if I’d put on the right top. Did the shoes match? I wanted to look good. I was thirteen years old.

  The taxi was waiting. From the bedroom window I could see the driver having a cigarette and reading the local weekly paper. He didn’t know about my big news, that I was going to see my dad.

  ‘Marisa!’

  Mum was way over the top; the car was thirty minutes early, so there was no panic. Yet she was a bag of nerves. She’d been packed for a week. I couldn’t be upset with her. It was a big day for her too. One she had feared. She’d been expecting it for a long time but that didn’t make it any better.

  After a twenty-four-hour train trip from Manchester, Uncle Franco was there to meet us at Milan Central Station and take us to Nan’s. It was all hugs and kisses and shouting and chaos in the apartment, just like old times. Out rolled the familiar Fiat 500 cigarette-run car: Nan had enlisted a confidante to drive us to Parma prison.

  I’d tossed around in bed all night and couldn’t get my eyes to stay closed, but when it was time to get up I just wanted to sleep. I was bewildered by everything that was happening. It was like being in a dream, a hallucination. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to wake up from it.

  I’d no idea what to expect. We left early for Nan had some stops to make on the way from her apartment. As we went, she did a gourmet shop – lobster, fillet steak, fresh eggs and bread, soft and hard cheeses, a couple of hams, coffee beans, bottles of red and white wine, San Pellegrino water. She packed the car with expensive delicacies, chunks of cake and amaretti biscuits. It looked as though we were going to have a feast of a picnic.

  I felt intimidated when I saw the prison with its huge grey walls, iron gates and tiny, barred windows. And I assumed there would be a long wait before I saw Dad because there was a line of people waiting for their visit. But Nan brushed breezily past them all as guards stopped searching other visitors to acknowledge her. She never dropped her pace till the last moment, when she smiled at someone and slipped a thick bundle into his pocket. He indicated the way to the visitors’ room, which had a central marble table with benches on either side. Families were on one side and then the inmates began to file in. They all wore blue dungarees and white trainers, prison clones.

  ‘How will I know my dad?’ I asked Mum.

  Nan laughed. ‘Marisa, you’ll see your papa in a minute, don’t worry.’

  And I did. He strode into the room, chatting casually to one of the guards. He was immaculate in a bespoke blue suit, white shirt and black shoes with a shine you could see your face in. His hair was salon neat, styled and gelled. He looked as though he’d stepped from a movie screen.

  As he approached our table, he ignored Nan and Mum and lifted me high into his arms then pulled me close. I put my arms around his neck and held on tight. I saw tears appear in the corner of his eyes as he whispered in my ear: ‘Spiacente [sorry].’

  He put me down and I held his hand across the table, unable to take my eyes off him.

  ‘Marisa, I love you so much. I have missed you more than anyone else. I will be out soon and I dearly want to see you. Things will be different in the future. I will see to it.’

  All the disappointments I’d suffered vanished as he spoke quietly to me. I was in heaven again.

  He took the food and wine from Nan, part of his supplies, then they talked business and I knew not to listen. I’d already learned discretion; there are some things you are born with.

  Mum clearly wasn’t happy about the situation. She was happy for me but not for what this meeting would mean for the future. I could hardly look at her because I was so happy and I knew she wasn’t. It didn’t seem fair. I wanted all of us to be smiling and happy and hugging. Mum did her best but I could tell she was broken-hearted. In contrast, Dad seemed so pleased to see me, to compensate for all the years we’d missed together. He saw some spark in me that delighted him. He held onto me when the guards ca
me to end the visit. Everyone else left and I was still holding his hand. Finally, he let go of me and leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, then he was off, talking to the guard who was helping him carry his gourmet packages.

  It was a quiet journey back to Nan’s. I wanted to make plans for the next visit but was clever enough to keep quiet. Mum didn’t know what to say. Nan, as always, knew what was going to happen but kept it to herself.

  In Milan, Nan took me to the markets. It was a little bit of blackmail for she bought me anything and everything. Mum just watched; she wasn’t in a shopping mood. She protested when Nan gave her gifts but Nan waved a finger at her: ‘Patti! You never, ever refuse a gift from the family.’

  Mum’s face looked strange. It seemed to roll up, as if it was giving a shrug. What could she say to that?

  We didn’t talk much about what was on both our minds as we travelled back to – was it home? – Blackpool. At times on the trip Mum would grab me by the hand and pull me along a little bit as if, maybe, she was trying to shake sense into me. Her sense of the situation.

  Later, back in England and on the train to Preston, she looked at me and said quietly: ‘He’s no good, Marisa. You don’t need him. I know it’s hard but don’t be drawn in by this. Your life is in Blackpool with me, with your family, with your friends. Never, ever forget that.’

  I already had when Dad picked me up in his arms in an Italian prison where he was serving time for shooting a man dead (although I still didn’t know that’s why he was there).

  When we got back to Poulton all I wanted to do was return to Italy, to Parma to see my dad. Instead, it was back to school where everyone was talking about their school holidays, hiking in the Lake District, beaches in Spain, Bacardi and boys, suntans and sunburns. When I talked thirteen to the dozen to my best mates about visiting Dad in jail they looked confused. And how could they have understood?