His mum and dad, who never knew that he had nicked it, reported it as stolen. These people grafted; every penny they earned, they worked hard for by baking during the night. Bruno was mortified and never told them he’d nicked the van.
He was reckless, and had no respect for his family and how hard they worked, but I was blind to it. I was in love with him. He could do no wrong in my eyes. I felt he was just a bit wild. The kind of guy who likes a drink, who I knew was taking drugs and who would get into fights.
Yet before long I witnessed two displays of incredible violence, both teetering on the edge of murder. And I was the reason, possibly the excuse.
Rita suggested that Bruno and I come to a seaside caravan park on the outskirts of Rimini for a couple of days, along with her and her fourteen-year-old son Massimo. I thought it would be a chance for us to spend some proper time together away from his friends and possible trouble from my family, so we agreed.
As soon as we were settled in the caravan park, we went to the local fairground. We were having a great time on the rides when some guy came up to me and asked for a light for his cigarette. I said I couldn’t help and he lost it: ‘OK, then why don’t you go and fuck off.’
Massimo stepped in, shouting, ‘Why are you talking to her like that? Say sorry.’
The guy just laughed at Massimo, who was only a little lad, and walked away.
‘I’m going to go and get Bruno,’ shouted Massimo.
‘No, please don’t do that,’ I begged. ‘Bruno will go mad and we’ll have to leave. Just don’t say anything. It’s not a big deal.’
I went to the toilets. Massimo looked like an ordinary kid but he was a tough little bugger and was already dealing drugs on the family’s piazza. He wasn’t going to let it go. He went to Bruno. When I reappeared a huge crowd had gathered by some steps. At the top was Bruno. He was bouncing this guy’s head off the metal posts fixed to each of the stairs and shouting, ‘Motherfucker. Motherfucker.’
The boy was screaming for him to stop but all he got in return was: ‘Motherfucker, fucking motherfucker!’ And his skull was bounced off another railing. Another, and another. I heard the thuds.
I thought Bruno was going to kill him.
Bruno thought he had killed him.
He was dead-eyed. I’d never seen that zoned-out look before. He’d blocked out the crowd around him and was hammering this guy again and again and again.
His victim finally blacked out and crumpled into a pool of blood.
Bruno ran out of the park, with Massimo and me chasing after him.
I screamed: ‘You might have killed that guy!’
‘I know. That’s why we have to go. Now! We have to get out of here.’
When we got back to the caravan Bruno told Rita we had to get going. Rita, at thirty years of age, was a veteran of disorder and didn’t need to ask why. We heard the screeching of the police and ambulance sirens but we drove off before we saw their flashing blue lights.
I should have been scared. I should have been terrified. I wasn’t. The guy had been rude to me, and although he didn’t deserve to get beaten up so badly I was proud Bruno wanted to defend me. I felt that with Bruno by my side no one could hurt me. I fell into his arms and went to sleep as we drove back to Milan. Where more trouble was waiting.
It was hot and humid that August and, as usual in that month, the streets were deserted. A couple of weeks later, Aunt Angela and I were on our way back from the Piazza Prealpi to Auntie Rita’s. It was after 11 p.m. and the tram wasn’t running. It’s about a twenty-minute walk, no hassle on a warm night.
We got to within a few hundred yards of Auntie Rita’s house when I was grabbed from behind. I thought it was my cousin Massimo fooling around – he was always trying to scare me.
‘Get off her! Get off her,’ I heard Angela screaming, and I turned. There was a ghostly man dressed in all white, white linen top and pants. He had this brown bag, like a satchel.
I shouted, ‘Get off, you idiot. What are you doing?’ I still didn’t think it was anything to be too worried about. I thought the guy was stupid, not a killer.
A moment later I knew he was a lunatic. He thrust a long-bladed knife between my legs and growled, ‘If you move, I’m going to cut you. I’ll put this knife inside you. And cut you.’
He wasn’t a particularly strong-looking guy but the knife was terrifying. I thought, ‘My God, if he stabs that in down there I’ll never have babies.’
But I had to keep calm. It happened in seconds, and Angela was rigid on the spot. It was all in freeze-frame.
The man in white pulled the knife to my neck. He got his cock out and started touching himself, demanding, ‘Sega, sega [Wank me off].’
I looked at him and asked, ‘Do you know who I am?’
His eyes were gone. He was on something. We were caught at a blind spot on the road, nobody could see us. He could have done anything. He started looking around him.
Again, I asked, ‘Do you know who I am?’
At that moment he let go and I yanked my arm back and ran out on to the road and legged it towards Auntie Rita’s.
But Angela had already got there and Rita was on her way to help. She ran in the opposite direction with a giant carving knife, completely off her head on speed. If she had caught the man in white she would have stabbed him to death and probably not known anything about it.
By this time I was shaking and crying. I hadn’t been like that in front of him because I knew I had to keep it together. The guy had taken off by the time Rita got to the spot.
But what did the dumb divvy do? He walked down to the Piazza Prealpi and bothered another girl on the way. There were some lads near her and the guy backed off. He got paranoid and went into the Motta Bar, across from my Nan’s. These lads started ganging up outside. Then word got to them that I’d been attacked. They heard a description of the guy and knew it was him. They were all outside and wanting to kick his head in. They didn’t go inside, though, out of respect for the bar owner, a woman who’s a friend of my family. They didn’t want to smash it up.
Uncle Filippo arrived and went straight in: ‘What’s going on, mate? What’s happening?’
The bloke said: ‘Don’t know what’s going on out there. I’ve done nothing wrong, but I daren’t go out.’
‘It’s all right. Come out, come out, I’ll help you. I’ll sort it out, don’t worry.’
Outside the bar, just as they were passing through the tables and chairs, Uncle Filippo started battering him.
‘That was my niece you pulled the knife on. You want fun, do you?’
He kept hitting, a torrent of punches. The other lads piled in with the tables and chairs, smashing them into the guy and stabbing him with broken bottles. It went on for a long time. Blood was pouring from him, his white outfit soaked with red, when Bruno arrived.
Auntie Rita, racing around with carving knife in hand, had bumped into Bruno and told him what had happened. Someone else told him where to go. He looked at this guy who was already half dead, maybe three-quarters. He was certainly in some sort of coma, out cold.
Bruno stamped on his head. Then he rested his foot on this pervert’s head and said: ‘You’re lucky. I’d have killed you.’
He spat in the guy’s face and walked off.
Nobody had called the police. My family were the police. But the crowds and the noise invited them anyway. Nobody got done for the pervert’s beating. What was the guy supposed to say? There were people in the bar but they ‘didn’t see anything’.
Horrible as it was, my attacker’s battering gave me some sort of comfort. It was like having security. I felt nobody could get to me, could harm me. I was unbreakable. I was untouchable. I was my father’s daughter and this was my family. And this is how they dealt with anyone who invaded their space or their people. They would go as far as was needed to protect you. I was part of that now, part of the Mafia.
No longer was I just thinking in Italian; I was thinking like an
Italian Mafiosi. It’s not indoctrination but day-to-day life that gives you a set of values that you soon find normal. It’s like reciting the alphabet: after a time you don’t have to think about it. You just know it.
I thought it was the pervert’s bad luck that he went to the Piazza Prealpi. He probably didn’t realise he was lucky to be alive. He was all broken apart but he was breathing. If my dad had got hold of him – my god!
Most girls would have been terrified, gone blank, not been able to say anything if they were grabbed in the street like that. Just done what he said. His eyes were glazed. He looked as if he’d escaped from a mental hospital.
He got his justice, though. Imagine if you did that to every pervert? They’d think again before abusing kids, abusing young girls. I wish it could be like that. My family could have got done for it, as could all the rest of the lads around the area, but that didn’t stop them for a split second. That guy had invaded our restricted world.
But as far as Mum was concerned I’d overstayed my welcome in it. I was meant to be back at college in September but I was still in Milan and she was screaming down the phone: ‘You’re not eighteen yet. If you don’t come now, I’ll get you done.’
She was within her rights, and the Italian authorities would have backed her all the way. Of course, I now believed I was above all that. I was part of the clandestine clan. Untouchable. But I got an urgent lesson about that. We were not immune from the cops.
Rita had two children, Massimo and a daughter Elena. She had separated from their father and by September 1987 she had married Salvatore Morabito and they’d had a baby son Michael. Salvatore was from Calabria. One of Dad’s cousins had told him to look us up in Milan, where he soon became part of the organisation and a regular courier to New York. He looked the part – respectable, no criminal record, a regular guy and a perfect heroin mule. Rita, sometimes with Nan, would collect him when he arrived back at Milan airport. They clicked after the third trip and became partners in life and drug dealing.
One night I was at their place watching television with Elena, in between playing on the couch with the baby, when there was a rap on the front door of the apartment. Auntie Rita came in from the bedroom and put her finger to her lips. She peered through the spyhole in the door and saw Salvatore almost filling the doorway. Then she saw the cops beside and behind him.
There was a back stair and she pointed at me and then at it: ‘Marisa! Get out! Run, run!’
There wasn’t time. The door was kicked in. I’d never seen so many cops in my life. There was a swarm of them.
Two fresh-faced officers marched over to me and put their hands on my shoulders: ‘Sit down.’
I started to ask something.
‘Quiet! Don’t move.’
‘But…I…what…?’
‘Quiet or we’ll arrest you.’
I shut up.
When I looked over they had Auntie Rita and Salvatore handcuffed and banged up against the wall. The cops were tearing through the apartment, emptying drawers, looking inside cupboards, pulling up the carpet. They took each room in turn, double-checking and then checking again. They found scores of bags of heroin in the kitchen, hidden in soap-powder boxes beside the washing-up liquid, squeezy sponges and thin bleach underneath the sink.
They escorted Auntie Rita, Salvatore and the kids out of the apartment. They just left me there. On the couch. I stared at the TV, which was still on, showing a bizarre soap opera called Licia Dolce Licia.
I was mesmerised, but not by the TV antics of Manuel De Peppe. I couldn’t think. Moments before I’d been bouncing a baby on my knee. I was hurt and angry – at myself as much as anything or anyone. Because I didn’t understand. I’d thought the family was untouchable.
I went to Nan’s and questioned Uncle Guglielmo. He couldn’t understand my concern and was laughing: ‘Marisa, quit worrying about it. None of this has anything to do with you. They didn’t take you away because they know you are Emilio’s daughter. They know you are not involved. It doesn’t matter. This is life for us.’
And for me if I stayed in Milan with Bruno. Mum knew that and when she heard a whisper about the drugs raid and the arrests from one of my cousins she came to get me. She had to take the train – I was the one running around in high-powered cars and living well – as she couldn’t afford the air fare. She demanded I come home with her there and then. I was screaming at her to let me stay. I didn’t want to be bossed around by her but she had the ace argument: until I was eighteen I had to do as she said. I had no choice but to go back to Blackpool.
Mum was so determined to get me out of there she’d brought enough money to fly us both back to Manchester. I met Bruno before I left. We had no time to say more than goodbye.
I went with Mum but it was a terrible time between us. She was trying to look after me, but I didn’t see it that way. She never sat me down and said: ‘You could be involved in murder and drugs and all that goes with it. You could get killed.’ She would just say: ‘Your dad’s a thug, he’s this, he’s that.’ And I didn’t want to hear any of it. I shut myself off from everything she was saying.
Auntie Rita and Salvatore were sentenced to six years each for drug trafficking. Nan’s lawyers put in the appeal. Early in December 1987 they got out of jail. Auntie Rita was freed completely, while Salvatore was put on house arrest in Calabria. It was business as usual, life pretty much as normal for them. And several judicial contacts of Nan’s had an extremely good Christmas.
When I heard of their release, I realised that although the family was not always immune, Nan looked after us all with the power of her imperfect morality.
And herself. In March 1988, just after my eighteenth birthday, Nan was released on bail. She moved back into her new three-bedroom Via Christina Belgioso apartment, which allowed more space for her activities. It looked like a high-street-store showroom, because everything was spanking new. Of course, everything was stolen.
She had chandeliers, marble floors and carpets so thick it was like marching through the jungle from one room to another. There were gleaming, wall-to-wall reproduction antiques, highly polished by some of the drug-dependent houseboys she had running around. She had a Florentine desk in her bedroom with drawers where she kept the few bits she considered precious, keepsakes rather than valuables. On top of the desk was her favourite item: a shiny black electronic bank-note counter. It was protected by her one indulgence – scores of perfume bottles, all shapes and sizes, from the traditional houses like Chanel, Dior, Fendi and Givenchy, gifts she’d collected over the years.
She’d gone high tech with the money machine because even her lifetime experience of counting cash with her thumb and forefinger, faster than the speediest bank teller, couldn’t keep up with her cash turnover. This device counted the money and sorted it into denominations, great piles of notes kept in similar cellophane packs to those used for the tons of heroin.
Nan had her system, her priorities. Drugs were weighed in the kitchen by the baskets of aubergines and courgettes, cash in the more fragrant environment of her boudoir. For her, nothing would get in the way of her return to pre-jail life. Even the police in her home.
Ezio Dorigatti, the copper given the job of ensuring that Nan was behaving and living within her bail conditions, failed to report anything untoward. He wasn’t a problem. Not for one minute. Why should he be? Nan looked after him. He was around the apartment most of the time and she fed him. In his early thirties, with a couple of kids, he complained about the money he was making and how difficult it was to make ends meet. She paid him handsomely. In return he ignored the drug dealing, and even concealed guns at his own home for the family and alerted her to any police action.
I was eighteen years and six weeks old when I telephoned Nan. I told her about Bruno. About Dad not speaking to me. About Mum going ballistic. How miserable I was.
Nan talked to Mum, who was finding it hard to accept that I was of age to go. But she’d known it was just a matter of time
. It was her life repeating itself. In some ways it was a relief from the horrible tensions we’d had, which were so contrary to our true feelings for each other. It was a mother–daughter stalemate. Mum is made the way she is and wasn’t going to change. I hated staying in England. She was always getting at me and we had no money. I’d had enough. I’d done a year of business studies but had no prospects. Everything I wanted in my life was in Italy.
When Nan said she would make a home for me in the apartment and look after me, Mum was in a corner. She didn’t like it but there was nothing she could do. Nan sent me £500 for the air fare and ‘a nice dress’. She made everything fine. She said to everybody: ‘They are in love. Leave them alone.’
I got on the first flight, on my way to begin my proper Mafia apprenticeship.
CHAPTER TEN
MAFIA MAKEOVER
‘I’m a good girl, I am.’
AUDREY HEPBURN AS ELIZA DOOLITTLE,
MY FAIR LADY, 1964
Bruno’s grin when he met me outside baggage claim could have grated a carrot. I’d never seen anyone so glad to see me and I couldn’t keep my hands off him. We were such new lovers we couldn’t get enough of each other. He’d brought a bright red BMW to collect and impress me and with a big smile he drove it into the forecourt of a bed and breakfast place, where we spent the entire day in bed. I didn’t notice anything about our surroundings. I didn’t care about that. It had been a long time and we made love like there was no tomorrow.
That night he took me to Nan’s. The next day Angela said she’d seen the car outside the B&B. She was laughing, in hysterics. She told me it was a knocking shop, notorious as the place the airport hookers took their clients. I couldn’t believe it. I told Bruno it was a disgrace but he just grinned and shrugged. And what did it matter? There was a bigger problem facing us – Dad.
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