I learned from the lifers that the best way was to keep your head down and do your time in the easiest way possible: without getting your morals and your rights and wrongs in the way. For there’s no black and white, only grey. As I found out when I heard the stories of some other inmates.
There was Maria, who was inside with her friend Tina, a couple of harmless-looking young girls. Except they were killers. In Wales, they’d gone to this old lady’s house, a woman they knew, tried to get money from her and kicked her to death. It was a noncey thing to do, you don’t kill an old person.
‘We were on Valium,’ they told me. ‘We were on this, that and the other to the point where we were totally out of control, out of our heads and had no idea what we were doing.’
It wasn’t an excuse but they were actually nice girls to get on with. They were a similar age to me and I had a laugh with them. I couldn’t think about what they had done. They were sorry for what had happened. Had they been knowingly nasty and evil it would have been different. If you believe in God, then you believe that everybody should have a second chance. It’s an instinctive thing; you either like someone or you don’t. Tina and Maria were just normal girls. They had committed a horrific crime. But I would put my hand in a fire and swear they wouldn’t do anything like that again.
What astonished me in Durham was how such normallooking women could be inside for such incredible crimes. Sheila was inside because she set fire to her ex-boyfriend and the girl he was going to marry. She got her new boyfriend and his mate to kidnap the couple. They tortured them, tied them up, splashed petrol on them, torched them and shoved them off a cliff in their car. They didn’t stay around to see the couple jump out, roll around the grass and live, although they were horrendously burned.
We were all in Durham when the papers reported that the couple who survived the attack had got married. We knew Sheila wouldn’t be happy about it and worried that she might cause problems but she was just very moody that day.
She had a tendency to take out her frustrations on Susan May, the one accused of killing her aunt, taunting her that she was guilty, which always wound her up. Sue had a friendship with a guy in the men’s side of Durham who used to send her sneaky sandwiches with a little message inside. It cheered her up but it was against the rules, and one day Sheila shopped her. She was like that. She was mean.
Once, just before lock-up, she pointed at me aggressively and said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
I looked at her, took my Cartier glasses off and said: ‘No. You’ll see me now!’
She tried to look away and I snarled, ‘You’ll see me now.’
The officers were chanting, ‘Come on, lock up, lock up.’
I said to her: ‘That’s convenient, isn’t it? Come on, what is it you want?’
She made up some pathetic response and backed off. She was quite a strong girl. She was petite, but she worked out a lot. By then, I did and I was bigger so I would have hurt her as much as she would have hurt me. She’d have come down with me.
I also had trouble with a child killer who looked like a creature from Planet of the Apes. She was blonde, blue-eyed and freaky-looking. She’d smothered one of her partner’s children but the guy gave up his other kids to be with her and still visited her. Once she’s out, if he’s still with her he won’t be allowed to see his children. I couldn’t believe that man would still have anything to do with her after she killed one of his children!
She was in the servery one lunchtime. I couldn’t stand her and I didn’t like the fact that she was serving my dinner. We could bring in our own porcelain plates from the outside, although we weren’t allowed proper forks and knives. This woman gave me some lip and put rubbish on my plate and I thought: ‘Stupid cow.’ The lunchtime duty officer was looking out the window and didn’t see the aggro building. I held my heavy plate like a frisbee and threw it at her face. It hit her hard, then shattered on the floor. I was glad. I didn’t care. I knew they couldn’t ship me out to another prison because nowhere else would have me.
The funny thing was, I didn’t get into trouble for that. They never put me in solitary. They never locked me in my cell. I always seemed to get away with things. I never kicked off. I was a pretty good prisoner really. They knew that if I ever kicked off, there was a reason, and I wouldn’t be doing it every five minutes.
Everyone reacts differently in an institution. And weird stuff happens. We all had a period at the same time. How strange is that? And imagine the tension?
Ena, a Dutch drug smuggler, asked for vibrators for all and the officer laughed: ‘We’d can’t do that – it’d be like a swarm of bees in here. Buzz, buzz, buzz.’
One night somebody got hold of a load of ecstasy tablets and they had a party in the television room. I didn’t take any because I didn’t want to be crawling up the walls. I had some hash and got stoned at the back of the room instead, watching all these girls get off their faces. They stripped to bras and knickers and danced to rave music. The walls were dripping with sweat; it was like a steam room. Not once did the screws come. They turned a blind eye.
Finally, finally, after more than sixteen months on remand in Durham, they finalised the case against me and gave me a trial date – 20 November 1995. The Italian courts were still hosting members of the family. I probably could have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the person with the most relatives in prison.
They moved the case against Mum and me to Newcastle Crown Court for security in case I might try to intimidate witnesses. Or stage a dramatic escape. But I only wanted to get home to Lara. And make sure Mum didn’t go to jail. Her health was really suffering with everything. The cops didn’t understand any of that.
There was a police escort for the trip to and from court. Station wagons at the front and rear of the van. The police in the cars had automatic weapons trained on the van. Sirens were blaring and helicopters were trailing us, like noisy vultures in the sky. At court, officers were armed with wicked Heckler & Koch MP5 single-shot, three-burst carbines. They said it was unprecedented. Apparently, they thought the Mafia might swoop in with armed helicopters and free me.
The week I went to court in Newcastle, Rose West went on trial at Winchester Crown Court. The Geordies got their geography wrong and, thinking I was her, chucked eggs at the armoured van that took me to court. I could understand that.
On the Wednesday, 22 November, Rose West got ten life terms for murdering ten women and girls, including her sixteen-year-old daughter, her eight-year-old stepdaughter and her husband’s pregnant lover. She and her husband Fred West were charged with killing a dozen people altogether but he escaped the trial because he’d killed himself in jail in January that year. They sent her to Durham’s Special Secure Unit, the official name for Hell Block.
I’d pleaded not guilty to laundering £1.6 million, carrying the cash across Europe in Lara’s carrycot, but I wobbled on that plea when I was standing alone in the dock at Newcastle. Mum was only a few feet from me looking hurt, lost and terribly, terribly vulnerable. She was not yet fifty years old but she looked like a little old lady, all hunched up by her fears and confusion.
The prosecutor Anton Lodge QC liked his own voice. For him, Dad was ‘The Godfather’, the great Mafia Don. He started on about how Adele was shot aged seventeen and three months pregnant. The jury went ‘Ooh.’ I burst out crying and asked, ‘What’s that got to do with me?’ I couldn’t stop crying.
Mum was looking at eighteen months in prison for helping me with the bank accounts. That wasn’t right. I couldn’t risk her doing a day. The prosecution gave me a choice: plead guilty and the charges against Mum would be dropped. If I didn’t, what would happen to Lara? Who would bring her up? They said the two words that convinced me to change my plea: Social Services.
I’d said nothing about anything or anyone in England or Italy. Omertà. If I had, I could have got a better deal. They had loads of paperwork evidence but it was just bank account details. If I’d s
hut the Geneva account and gone off with the cash, there wouldn’t have been a paper trail. I didn’t see myself as money laundering. Even though it was wrong, I didn’t see anything I did as wrong at the time. When you’re young it’s exciting, you’re on a power trip.
Now I faced the consequences.
If Mum stayed out of jail she could look after Lara. I had to plead guilty, and that’s what I did on 23 November 1995. I don’t remember leaving the dock when I was sentenced. There was only the echo: ‘Marisa Merico, I sentence you to three years and nine months in prison. Take her down.’
The next I knew the sirens were wailing and we were racing across the Pennines. I was off to rejoin Myra and Rose and the rest of Britain’s most dangerous women.
And to find love in different variations.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN?
‘Love is stronger than justice’
STING,
TEN SUMMONERS’ TALES, 1993
My court ordeal was over but prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli was still recounting the life and crimes of the Di Giovine and Serraino dynasties to magistrates in Milan. It was part of the Government’s Mani Pulite [Clean Hands] legal showcase to trumpet the fact that they were acting against the Mafia. Dozens and dozens of trials went on for months and months. Some were held in a secure bunker courtroom, some televised, and all involved murder, drug trafficking, money laundering, gun-running and the one they could get everybody on – Mafia association. Almost all my family were up on one or more of those charges.
Auntie Rita was the star witness but at times the prosecutor had to deal with interruptions from the courtroom.
‘Ugly whore!’ Nan yelled out.
She was warned to keep quiet.
‘But it’s my daughter, your honour!’
Mum kept me in touch with the trials when she visited with Lara. Absolutely everybody who saw me had to get police security clearance. I learned the ways of Durham during my remand, but it was different being sentenced there. It was so final. When Mum and Lara left after the visits the pain was real. I could feel it and my whole body would shake. Heartbreak does hurt.
The things Mum had said all those years ago tumbled around in my head. What if I’d listened to her? What if? They were just words now. I had to do what I’d always done – accept my circumstances and deal with it. I’d be remorseful, I’d be sad and I’d be angry, but who was I going to shout at, who was I going to blame? The world? I got on with it.
Some days the atmosphere inside was thick with tension. My favourite fellow inmate Susan May helped ease it. She wrote formal letters for us prisoners, to MPs, lawyers and legal aid organisations, and everyone went to her, including Myra.
I asked, ‘How can you sit in her cell and take notes?’
I think Sue’s innocence meant she could see good in anybody. But I didn’t understand it. She was from Oldham so she grew up with the horror of Myra Hindley. She could even have been one of her victims.
A lot of the reason I kept my head down in prison was because of Sue. I could have lost it but she held me back and spoke with the voice of reason.
Still, I couldn’t have a bath because of Rose West. I saw her getting into it and no matter how much I scrubbed that bath I couldn’t use it. She came over and sat down when I was having lunch with Sue once and I had to excuse myself. I said to Sue afterwards: ‘If you know she’s going to come, tell me because I don’t want to sit with her. I’m not going to be horrible to her, but I’m not going to be nice to her.’
Yet Rose West looked like any other woman queuing up at Tesco. She didn’t look evil. She wasn’t hard-faced. She looked like a midwife or a nurse. She didn’t look like a sexual monster.
That didn’t help in the showers. Most of the girls covered themselves up and dried themselves discreetly. Not Rose West. She was quite blatant. She stood there naked in front of me. She had a black bushy forest on her. She wasn’t a slim woman. She was just drying herself, patting herself off, and she looked at me and I freaked out a bit.
Myra was quite menacing. She had an aura about her. Girls would shout names at her but they could’ve saved their breath. She’d heard it all a million times. Myra was very thick-skinned. If you went past her cell it stank, a horrible overwhelming smell, a musky stale tobacco smell.
There was an IRA escape in 1995, after which security was tightened and we couldn’t get our shopping at Sainsbury’s any more, and they also segregated the Cat As on visits. It was all right for Rose West to be with everybody else, but not me. We were lepers and the screws sat at the table with us. Nothing was private. I couldn’t stand being on visits with child killers around, especially with Lara there. I could cope with everything, but I couldn’t cope with that. Yet I was in there with them. All because of money. And the money hadn’t meant that much. The amounts were so vast – how high can you pile a million dollars? Rushing around Europe with all that money had been like playing Monopoly – and I got the ‘Go to Jail’ card.
I’d been in Hell Block for about eight months when I got friendly with Lisa Corah. From the age of twelve and through her teens she’d been abused by her sister’s husband Philip and it had messed her up. Lisa found it hard to build a relationship but she started going out with a guy called Adrian. One night she told him about the abuse. He went mad. She begged him: ‘Don’t do anything. My sister has kids. She’s family.’
Philip was a milkman and had just finished his round at 6 a.m. when Lisa’s boyfriend put a pickaxe through his head, killing him sraight out. He ran off with the axe to Lisa’s house saying, ‘I’ve just killed him. What can I do with this?’
She was in shock. ‘Just throw it over the back of the shed.’
It all kicked off and the police were trying to find out who the hell would want to murder a milkman. Lisa didn’t say anything but they found the murder weapon at the back of the shed and she was implicated. She got life but on appeal it was knocked down to three years for aiding and abetting. Just for that one stupid mistake.
She was a good-looking girl, about twenty-two years old. I mentioned her on the phone to Naima and she asked, ‘She’s not a lesbian, is she?’
It had never occurred to me. ‘No. She’s not.’
Laughing, I mentioned this to Lisa later and she said, ‘Actually, I am.’
I was quite naïve. We’d become really good friends and we used to train in the gym together, then one day she tried to kiss me. I’d never thought I would be attracted to a girl; she was very attractive, very feminine, but she had a masculinity about her as well. She didn’t wear make-up. She looked girly, but she used to wear rugby tops and shorts. I let her kiss me and I did find her attractive and things happened.
Afterwards I felt confused about my sexuality for a while but I decided, ‘I’m in here and this is now and this is how I feel.’
I looked at Lisa as a person – not as a man or a woman, but someone that I cared for. Being with her I learned about myself and my body and what I want and what I don’t want. I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t see myself as bisexual. It was a love affair with a person in prison who happened to be a girl and it was a nice, special time in my life. We got through stuff together. We didn’t go around holding hands or kissing. It was a loving, emotional uplift and cushion. I cared a lot about Lisa even though I wasn’t ‘in love’ with her.
Four months after our affair began Lisa was released. I was upset because I was losing one of my best friends, apart from anything else, but I was happy for her. She kept coming to Durham to visit me for a while but then she met someone else on the outside. Part of me was gutted, and part of me wasn’t bothered. I saw our love affair as something that happened in a set of circumstances that had now gone.
Then Frank came into my life.
Frank?
I could surely pick them. Frank Birley was one of the hardest men in the men’s wing of Durham prison. And that’s tough. He wasn’t a saint. He was in Durham for the armed robbery of a Blackpoo
l jeweller’s. He wrote me a lovely letter. And he got Charles Bronson – not the late actor but the notorious convict – to draw cards and cartoons for me. Frank was one of the few who could keep Charlie Bronson under control. Famous for attacking prison officers, rooftop protests and taking hostages, Charlie is often referred to as the most violent prisoner in the UK prison system.
With money laundering the ‘new’ crime and with my international connections I was a good story and the newspapers were full of it: every time a Mafia trial in Italy hit the headlines I got fan mail. I got letters offering me this and that. Do you want a stereo? One offered me a canary. Then I got a letter from Frank: ‘Hi, Marisa. I’m in the same situation as you. I’m a Category A prisoner. Hope you are all right in this country? Hope you are all right with the language. Hope you’ve got people looking after you. Wanted you to know I’m in the same boat. If you’d like to write to me…’
I was always tagged ‘Mafia’ and with my name Frank obviously thought I was pure Italian.
I knew a couple of girls had got hooked up with relationships inside by writing to guys in the men’s wing, but I always thought it was weird. How could you fall in love with a man you’d never met? I supposed it was fine if it kept them happy but I didn’t think I could do such a thing. I’d always used Bruno as a good excuse to keep other men away. But with Frank I didn’t do that. I wrote back thanking him for his letter: ‘You sound like a really nice older guy. Thanks for your support.’
Next thing I got a letter in which he said he was only thirty. Oh! Then he sent a picture of himself. He played tennis in there and he had his tennis gear on. He was posing with his racquet. He was very fit. He was working out. He had curly dark hair. I remember I got the mail from the office, and going up the stairs I stopped and swore: ‘My God. He’s fucking gorgeous.’
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