The Godmother, page 13
Her dad was arrested and pegged as a top ’Ndrangheta boss in 2010, which coincided with Siderno being named as the capital of the ’Ndrangheta’s narco empire. Before his arrest and the total collapse of the local Figliomeni network, Jole hooked up with a married man whose jilted wife was the sister of a rival clan boss who outranked her own family. The sultry affair was reported in the society pages of the local paper as if the families were legitimate celebrities, and it nearly caused a clan civil war—and Jole’s death.[1] Her father’s arrest and the revelation that indeed he was one of the ’Ndrangheta’s most important bosses in his own right watered down the scandal of the illicit affair because it put Jole on a more even playing field with the scorned wife.
But around 2015, it was all too much, and Jole suddenly decided to leave town, feigning disgust with her father, the ’Ndran-gheta, and her former lover. She moved to Ivory Coast to start over. By not-so-odd coincidence, the African nation was conveniently emerging as one of the ’Ndrangheta’s most important cocaine-trafficking hubs.
That’s when I first reached out to Jole via Twitter, which she no longer uses—or at least not under her real name. It seems unfathomable that someone seemingly so needy of anonymous approval as she was when she first went to Africa would be able to go entirely incognito. At the time, I was researching female turncoats, which I thought she was, and which I was sure would be the focus of this book until I realized that the bad girls were much more interesting than the good ones. She was cordial and brief, answering my questions via Twitter’s messaging platform in short missives peppered with requests to follow, retweet, or promote her in any way I could.
“No, I do not know anyone from Calabria here in the Abidjan,” she once wrote.
“Yes, it’s a coincidence that the ’Ndrangheta is here as well,” she agreed.
And, “Sure, I guess it’s harder to escape than you think.”
We messaged about Canada and her family and my own family there, whether either of us could see ourselves living with such cold winters after the heat of Italy. But mostly she wanted to talk about the consultancy business she said she was trying to set up in the publishing industry. Time and again, she asked for contacts and help in getting her new project off the ground, which is generally a red flag for me during an interview because it shows that the source is not as well-placed as I had originally thought. This wasn’t necessarily the case with Jole, though. Instead, she had an impressive social-media following in Ivory Coast—much more than she had in Italy. I later determined that she was actually trying to recast her persona outside of Italy, so if anyone tried to verify who she was they wouldn’t come across her family’s mob ties first.
During her first year or so in Ivory Coast, Jole spent her time between the busy port of Abidjan and the smaller inland town of Doropo on the border with Ghana and Burkina Faso. A newspaper article in her hometown Calabria paper La Riviera even ran an interview with her in October 2013. She sent me the clip. In it, she was described as “a manager in a cybersecurity firm in Abidjan” and the article focused on her efforts to make Siderno and Doropo “sister cities.”
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project also reached her around that same time, and she told them in an email that she felt she needed to move to a developing nation “to be valued” for her abilities and “not to be pre-judged based on personal things that happened to my father.” [2]
Meanwhile, back in Calabria, authorities were closing in on an investigation tying Jole to the ’Ndrangheta’s dealings that utilized Abidjan and Antwerp, Belgium. The Calabrian criminal group had started to shuttle cocaine and heroin from South America through Abidjan to avoid shipping it directly to Europe, which had proven risky. Antwerp was at the time emerging as the port of choice for Europe’s cocaine and heroin traffickers. Port workers were easily bribed to turn a blind eye to cargo containers from South America, from where drugs had for years been shipped.
Through wiretaps released in 2014, it became clear that anti-mafia investigators had an inkling that Jole did not leave the ’Ndrangheta behind after all and was certainly no pentita. She had apparently acted as a fixer of sorts for ’Ndrangheta agents looking to set up contacts in Ivory Coast, which she did at the request of her father, who she very likely had known all along was a drug baron. In one police transcript, a local drug lord is heard telling another man how thankful he was for Jole’s help in Ivory Coast. “If it wasn’t for her, we would be ruined,” he said. “I don’t understand the language. I know nothing. Fuck. Well, I mean I came here precisely to see her.”
The lengthy investigation and wiretaps also turned up that the larger criminal population had a lurid interest in Jole’s disastrous love life. Even in Canada, thugs who remembered her when she visited as a teenager were caught up in the Kardashianesque soap-opera details of her affair, discussing who was more at fault: the mob-mayor’s daughter they knew from way back or the philandering boss? In the end, it was decided—and thus speculated in the tabloid press—that Jole’s married lover broke the code of ethics for disrespecting his wife. That the wiretaps were peppered with such banal observations at first led investigators to believe perhaps Jole’s love life was a cover for something else, or that by mentioning the affair mobsters were really talking about drug deals or murder hits. In fact, they were just gossiping.
Those wiretaps led to the arrest of twenty-three people tied to the Figliomeni clan, including several in the Toronto suburb of York. Five years later, in 2019, the same joint-op forces with the reinforcement of more than five hundred officers set out to arrest twenty-eight people in both York and Siderno. Canadian authorities seized millions in assets in raids that lasted seventy-two hours. The cache included $1 million in cash and another $1 million in gaudy jewelry, forty-eight restaurants and cafés, twenty-seven luxury homes, and twenty-three luxury cars, including five high-spec Ferraris. One Ferrari alone had a value of $672,000. They also found ATMs, video lottery terminals, and several exotic animals.
There is still some speculation that Jole’s early intentions in getting out of Italy were genuinely to escape her family’s influence, but that she was quickly sucked back into the only life she knew, either by force or choice. The truth may never be known. She has never cooperated with police, despite countless opportunities to turn. But it remains a curiosity why she would choose Ivory Coast—where the ’Ndrangheta was setting up contacts—when there were plenty of other developing countries she could have moved to had she really wanted a fresh start. More likely, her story was a ruse. A woman running off over a broken heart remains the perfect cover under which to build her daddy’s business from the ground up—and a believable one in a country like Italy, where women are so often portrayed as weak, hysterical, and driven by emotion. She has never been arrested, and at present, has not been heard from again.
Jole’s loyalty to her father is hardly unique among mafia spawn. Totò the Beast had two daughters who remain dedicated to their family history and seem to hover in the shady area of Italy’s not-yet-convicted set.
In the summer of 2019, just two years after she helped bury her felonious father, the Beast’s youngest daughter, Lucia, moved to Paris to “reinvent herself” after being refused a state-funded “baby bonus” that all new parents in Italy were receiving at the time to help counter the negative national birth rate.
She was told that the state could not reward her for having a child because of her father’s sordid reputation, even though she had never been investigated for any crimes herself. That she was neither a pentita nor apologetic for Dad’s reign of blood-stained terror helped little. Neither did the fact that in Paris she could have lived anonymously but chose to exploit her family name. She sold her abstract art on a website called Lucia Riina Art, where she peddled countless depictions of pale women with orange eyeliner and pouty lips painted on slabs of wood or canvas as well as blotchy landscapes clearly labeled as her hometown, Corleone, where the deadliest Riina of all had long ruled in infamy. Such a reputation might have caused some daughters to shy away from the use of the name, but she seemed to revel in it, or at least she learned how to successfully exploit it.
Lucia and her husband acquired a license to open a sleek Italian restaurant they decorated with brown shutters and darkened windows just a few blocks from the Champs-Élysées in the fashionably expensive 8th arrondissement. She called the establishment, which advertises authentic Sicilian food, Corleone by Lucia Riina.
Inside, on the paneled walls, hang photos of her infamous dad and the Riina family crest adorned with a lion holding a human heart. Using the name Corleone, an obvious mob reference outside of Italy thanks to The Godfather enterprise, drew scorn from the families of the many hundreds of victims of Lucia’s father’s bloody tenure as the boss of bosses.
It also angered Nicolò Nicolosi, the mayor of Corleone, who complained to me in an interview that his fight to distance his city’s name from mafia crime was not helped by the daughter of the city’s biggest criminal so brazenly exploiting it. “How do we disassociate ourselves from a scourge like this?” he asked. “A restaurant with our town name associated with Totò Riina will damage our reputation.” Nicolosi’s predecessor in city hall, it must be noted, loved Francis Ford Coppola’s treatment of Mario Puzo’s trilogy and the Hollywood fairy dust that lifted the dusty hilltop town to global infamy as mafia aficionados flocked to the city.
In fact, before the pandemic, thousands of tourists each year would visit Corleone’s mafia museum, which showcases bullets used in real hits and newspaper clippings and media images about real crimes. More recently, guided walking tours have been on offer that take mafia aficionados to spots where hits were carried out. Provenzano’s former hideaway, which is now called Laboratorio della Legalita (Legal Laboratory), has walls covered with artistic renditions—often in abstract form—of paintings of mafia massacres spanning a period from 1943 to 1997 and is a highlight of the tours.
Nevertheless, despite the ensuing scandal surrounding the Corleone restaurant in Paris, the high-end eatery has consistently positive TripAdvisor ratings from people who, whether they admire or despise the subtle references, always seem to love the authentic Italian cuisine. Lucia, it must be said, does not personally run the restaurant; she delegates that task to minions and instead spends her time between Paris, Geneva, and Corleone.
Totò the Beast’s older daughter, Maria Concetta Riina, took capitalizing on her grandfather one step further. Together with her husband, Antonino Ciavarello, she opened an online store in 2017 called Zu Totò, which in local dialect translates to Uncle Toto. The idea was to cash in on the Beast’s notorious reputation with “Zu Totò branded products,” such as coffee pods and keychains. The intent of turning a fast buck, the couple said, was to raise the capital needed to expand the company’s inventory because, as the website explained, “they,” meaning the state, “confiscated everything for no reason.”
The site goes on to reference the Riina family coat of arms and, apparently, all that it stands for. “Thanks in advance for your trust,” a post on the site says. “The lion is wounded but not dead. He will soon rise and continue to fight as he always has. Always.”
Activity on the Zu Totò website was frozen in 2019 after Maria Concetta was placed under investigation for dealings tied to a London company called Formations House, which billed itself as an agency that “helped develop and manage new companies.” The company website bragged that it had created “over 400,000 companies, partnerships, and trusts” and sold 25,000 “ready-made companies and partnerships” through twelve financial jurisdictions.[3]
British authorities had a different take on Formations House, alleging it was a cover for seasoned and wannabe criminals to anonymously launder money and conceal taxes. The company has been investigated countless times yet has remained unscathed, thanks to a number of loopholes that may now close post-Brexit. The whole business was run by an elderly woman named Edwina Coales, who, it turned out, had been dead for quite some time yet somehow managed to stay listed as CEO of more than a thousand of the dodgy enterprises, even signing off on all the transactions, apparently from the grave. As of publication, the company was somehow still running, albeit under the watchful eye of British authorities, who demanded that the dead grandmother’s name be removed from the books.
Maria Concetta had dealings with the company as far back as 2007, when it opened a business for her called T&T Corp. Ltd. The company was registered to her, her husband, and Katia La Placa, the daughter of another Cosa Nostra boss from Corleone. T&T Corp. descriptions say it dealt with the import and export of wine, oil, and coffee, but what caught the eye of Italian authorities was its advertisement for “40-day lightning-quick divorces” in Italy, where the average divorce takes more than a decade, thanks to the influence of the Catholic Church. T&T Corp. was eventually given a citation for offering divorce papers without anyone on the payroll possessing a valid license to practice law. But the owners’ real loss came in 2019, when the Italian state confiscated $1.7 million in profits the Beast’s daughter had saved up—thanks to a law that allows the sequester of assets from heirs of non-pentito mafiosi.
Not all children of mafia dons grow up to enrich themselves on their father’s terrible legacy. It used to be said that the mafia didn’t touch children, but that rule is being ignored with greater frequency—the aforementioned Anna Death might have been just the beginning. In 2018, Francesca Castellese, the Sicilian mother of a dead teen named Giuseppe di Matteo, was awarded more than $2 million by the state in damages for her son’s death under regulations that award victims of mafia crimes damages, despite the fact that she waited twenty-one full days after her son disappeared to report him missing.
Giuseppe’s father, Santino, was a Cosa Nostra underboss who had turned state’s evidence against the Sicilian mafia, a betrayal for which the boy’s death was an inevitable act of revenge.
The thirteen-year-old was kidnapped in 1993 from a horse barn where he was preparing to ride his favorite horse. The men who grabbed him were disguised as anti-mafia police who had promised that he could see his father in protective custody. The boy is said to have told them he wanted to join his father. Instead, they tortured him for 779 days to try to get Santino to withdraw his testimony about the gory details of the murder of anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone. Photos of the boy in various stages of torture were also sent to his grandfather, also a Cosa Nostra member who, along with Francesca, tried in vain to convince Santino to change his mind.
Santino refused, and Giuseppe was slowly strangled to death on his fifteenth birthday, according to another pentito who was there—and who later described the boy’s anguished cries for his father as he gasped his last breath.
The pentito said Giuseppe’s body was dissolved in acid. The death was recognized by the state as a mafia crime, even though many of his own family members had never left the criminal world. As such, Santino’s death was considered by the public to have been an internal affair. Outrage ensued that the state’s fund for victims of mafia crimes was used to pay Castellese, who had, after all, tried to convince her husband to retract his testimony and stay in the syndicate and only repented years later telling investigators that, despite being married to a top mafioso for fifteen years, she was shocked to find out that he was in the Cosa Nostra. As a pentita, she was required to testify in several trials, but each time she broke down in uncontrollable tears, rendering her testimony useless. Magistrates and prosecutors pleaded with the court to not make her suffer through the details of her son’s terrible death, but in doing so gave her an easy excuse to avoid betraying her criminal family.
There are murders of mafia children even more heinous than that of Giuseppe. In 2015, in ’Ndrangheta country in Calabria, three-year-old Nicola “Coco” Campolongo was shot at point-blank range in the forehead along with his grandfather Giuseppe Iannicelli and his grandfather’s twenty-seven-year-old Moroccan girlfriend.
Their bodies were found in a burned-out Fiat near the crime haven of Cosenza after Giuseppe had expanded his own drug enterprise into another ’Ndrangheta clan’s territory and reportedly refused to give them a cut of a recent sale. A fifty-cent coin was found on the scorched hood of the car, a sign that the hit was about a debt, according to lead prosecutor Franco Giacomantonio.[4] “In all my years investigating organized-crime murders, none has been as horrific as this one,” he told me on the sidelines of Coco’s funeral, which was attended by local officials and even mentioned by Pope Francis. “It is unimaginable that a child can be made to pay for the crimes of his parents.”
Coco was living with his grandfather because his twenty-four-year-old mother, Antonia Iannicelli, was in prison, serving a four-year sentence for the possession and sale of drugs. Police refused to let her attend her toddler’s funeral, out of fear it could spark a gangland war if she showed up after rumors that she had cooperated with police to secure such a light sentence.
Italy’s national police chief Alessandro Pansa signed an emergency proclamation in Coco’s name to try to ensure the protection of mafia children. “We need to make sure the protocol does not forget children who are growing up in vulnerable situations outside the law, who may be victims or witnesses to crimes,” he told me in an interview in 2015. “We need to make sure Coco is the last child ever killed like this.”
Six months later, three-year-old Domenico Petruzzelli was caught in the cross fire in Puglia, where the remnants of the struggling Sacra Corona mafia have been clinging to power for years.
The toddler was sitting on the lap of his thirty-year-old mother, Carla Maria Fornari, who was in the passenger seat as her lover, forty-four-year-old Cosimo Orlando, drove the car. Her older children, aged six and seven, were in the back seat and dove to the floor when a car passing their vehicle opened fire, pumping twenty shots into the front seat at such close range they left paint from the shooter’s car on the driver’s side door as the bullets ricocheted.
