The Godmother, page 14
Fornari, Orlando, and the baby were killed. The older children survived by playing dead after the car veered off the road and slammed into a tree. Those children were whisked to protective foster care far away from Puglia after authorities fully understood the dynamic of the crime. As survivors, they could have potentially described the shooters, thus their lives were in grave danger.
Orlando was murdered while out on parole after serving thirteen years for his role in the double homicide of a pair of twenty-year-olds in a drug dispute. The drive-by murder was classified by investigators as a vendetta for those murders, which had never been avenged. The baby’s father, himself a convicted murderer, had also been gunned down in a mafia hit in 2011, meaning there was no one in little Domenico’s immediate family who attended his funeral.
It is at times unfathomable to comprehend how a mother could take such risks when there is always an opportunity to go to authorities and live a protected life. The process is complex and not always assured, since evidence has to be corroborated before full protection can be granted. But when the alternative is a child caught in the cross fire of a vendetta, it is clear the bond and loyalty demanded by criminal groups is stronger than blood ties.
In 2014, Italian police tried to lift the lid on just what keeps people so loyal to such a deadly pact. They sent an informant to infiltrate a ritualistic ’Ndrangheta initiation taking place in the northern Italian town of Lecco, where the group has made substantial gains in recent years. The shocking video[5] shows men huddled around the new “devotee” in what feels something like a cross between a pagan ritual and a college fraternity initiation. The language is arcane, but the message is clear. Those being initiated must swear to kill themselves if they ever make a mistake and accidentally betray the organization. (If they do it intentionally, the other members will take care of his death for him.) The preferred choice of suicide is the cyanide pill they are told to always carry, or, if that doesn’t work, a self-inflicted gunshot. “Always reserve one bullet,” the man lording over the initiation says. “That one is for you.”
“It is a mother’s duty to inculcate in her children silence, gender differences, and contempt for public authorities, while simultaneously playing the role of a custodian of honor, keeping the flame of vengeance for offended men alive,” writes sociologist Rossella Marzullo in her study of ’Ndrangheta children for the Review of Social Sciences in 2016. She says that within the ’Ndrangheta, children are incited to avenge the honor of fathers and brothers killed by the criminal groups they are part of. Trying to extract children from those toxic situations comes at a price—parents or family members who loved them when they were bad can no longer keep them close if they suddenly turn good. Schools have had limited success in trying to teach about organized crime when so many children are growing up in criminal families. Teachers can try to introduce concepts in the curriculum that illuminate what is really happening around them that might click with some children, but educators worry that it can also be dangerous. Teaching kids a different perspective on the culture in which they’re growing up could upset the equilibrium at home and force them to drop out. If they get an education, at least they stand a chance. Those who don’t will never escape their criminal destinies.
But the ’Ndrangheta group has recently seen a remarkable trend with a number of children forcibly removed from their family homes by the Juvenile Court of Reggio Calabria. There, judge Roberto Di Bella pioneered a program in which alleged membership in the ’Ndrangheta could be considered child abuse, punishable by the removal of the child from their parents—an about-face from writing off the future of these children through complacency. The effort started in 2002 when Di Bella got tired of seeing eleven- and twelve-year-olds hauled into court for acting as lookouts for their older brothers and fathers. Since then, he has removed around fifty boys and girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen from their families. In about one-fourth of those cases, the mothers choose to leave with their children, though rarely do they become state’s witnesses.[6] In some cases, the men of the families insist the wives go along with the children to ensure they come back to the “family” once they are no longer minors.
Di Bella used legislation[7] based on the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed in 1989, and Italian Civil Code 315-bis to ensure children in Italy are “educated about the principles of legality, solidarity, human dignity, and alternative standpoints.” But his real aim was to break the cycle of criminality that runs so deeply in ’Ndrangheta families, even though a worrying trend shows that taking the children away to be educated can backfire.
In an interview in 2019, just six years after the first kids were sent away, Di Bella told me that the new generation of highly educated daughters are actually coming back to their families and taking a more active role in drug trafficking, as accountants and sometimes even dealers. Having been educated abroad, they are often more tech savvy and culturally aware, which means they can help the criminal groups strategize on a more global level. In mafia families, women are rarely allowed to go to university. Prosecutor Cerreti explained to me that if children are educated or enlightened by meeting someone who cues them into the trap they are in, they will quickly see all that is wrong with the criminal world they live in and, most likely, get out of it. She has seen the success of the judge in Reggio Calabria take children away from criminal homes who don’t go back. She has also seen this in some of her turncoats who saw the light and understood that all that they had learned from family members was wrong. As long as they are educated by the criminal family, there is less risk they will leave.
For the most part, that is why Pupetta stayed with the man she suspected of killing her first son. For all her fame and influence, she was conditioned to believe that she could not exist without him.
“I made mistakes when I was young,” she said. “I stayed in relationships that were bad. I did it not for love but for necessity. Now women know better. Then we didn’t.” She said that she could not have easily afforded to take care of her twins without Umberto. And more than that, she wanted to be part of a family—a dream she thought had died when Pasqualone was murdered. Even though Umberto was hardly a good man, he made her feel part of something.
7
Drugs, Guns, and Vats of Acid
Debora took a risk—it could have been a trap—and scribbled a note on a grocery store receipt from her handbag and handed it to her. It read, “I will tell you everything to save my children.”
Pupetta recoiled when I asked her if she had ever dissolved anyone in acid. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, as if shooting someone more than twenty times is somehow a more civilized assassination. “Acid is for savages.”
Pupetta’s first murder was carried out with a handgun. The second—for which she was ultimately acquitted—was a decapitation. Acid baths, while a mafia staple, are often reserved for extraordinary hits. The victim doesn’t die right away, and instead their skin burns off in about fifteen minutes with, one might imagine, excruciating pain. After that, the organs and bones dissolve into the liquid, leaving no trace at all. The pain is exacerbated only by the practice of having someone who might also be under threat watch the whole ordeal.
Threats by visual example are common among all Italy’s syndicates, and nowhere is this more evident than with the allies of the country’s newest criminal gang, which has taken the use of acid as a deadly weapon to new heights. Despite the name, the Mafia Capitale, which is based in Rome, is not officially categorized as a “mafia” organization, meaning its criminals cannot be charged under Italy’s special mafia laws, including Article 41-bis, which allows for “hard sentences” to try to get the perpetrators to turn state’s evidence.
The Mafia Capitale is a loosely structured umbrella group that was run by Salvatore Buzzi and a one-eyed gangster named Massimo Carminati. Both were sentenced to twenty years in prison for mafia association, extortion, bribery, bid rigging, and false accounting related to the infiltration of the Rome city government in 2014. They reportedly received millions in kickbacks for fixing corrupt contracts in garbage collection, park maintenance, and refugee centers—the latter of which was, in Buzzi’s words that were caught on a wiretap, “more lucrative than drug trafficking.” In 2019, Italy’s highest court ruled that Mafia Capitale is no mafia at all and just a conglomeration of clans that are not affiliated in ideology but more out of convenience. The court then abolished the sentences, and both criminally guilty men were released in 2020 with no strings attached, not even probation. In October 2020, Buzzi opened a burger joint in Rome with a mafia-themed menu, with burgers named after Gomorra and Suburra, which are the two most popular mafia-themed shows on Netflix in Europe. In interviews he gave before the opening, he said prosecutors pay double, judges pay triple, and anyone he was originally convicted with will get a discount.
The two most important clans that supported the Mafia Capitale’s efforts were the Spada family from the coastal town of Ostia outside of Rome and the Casamonica family. Both are former Sinti nomad families, which Italians still refer to as zingari (Gypsies), who struck it big in the criminal world when the Casamonica patriarch, Vittorio, came to Italy’s capital city. They run a business with an annual turnover of nearly $108 million, according to Rome police.
The last known boss of bosses of the Casamonica clan was a sixty-five-year-old woman named Gelsomina Di Silvio, who was arrested in 2019 and testified in a complicated trial that was sidelined and then restarted several times by the COVID-19 pandemic. Described as a “woman of character,” and not in a good way, Gelsomina is unrepentant and wears her dark, wiry hair in a tight bun. She as closely resembles Pupetta as any crime woman does, constantly interrupting the court in her recent trial to say she regretted nothing. She was sentenced in June of 2020 to seventeen years in prison for mafia collusion, which she is appealing.
Gelsomina was widely thought to have been a turncoat, though in her testimony in the spring of 2020, she very specifically denied cooperation with authorities. “The news reports accused me of being a collaborator of justice and of having named my family,” she testified, in part as a message to her family. “I am no stranger to these things. When did I ever mention someone’s name? I have never reported anything to anyone. I have never been a collaborator of justice.”
She is the second wife of Ferruccio Casamonica, one of the pillars of the Rome-based criminal family. She managed the clan’s affairs even before her husband went to prison, and notoriously handed down punishments in person, including kicks, slaps, punches, knife wounds, and acid attacks.
Like Pupetta, she clings to her infamy, at times embracing it. From prison, she has written countless letters to the media, describing the crimes against her family and the “vendettas” carried out as a form of racism to their Sinti heritage. But she is cunning enough to know how to send hidden messages in these missives, and in early 2021 police asked the media not to print anything she sent out, since it very well could land them in trouble for collusion by publishing her coded prose. It is a classic example of Italian authorities being unable to stop the rot from the inside. The Casamonica family and its allies have killed people under horrific circumstances, according to numerous turncoats who worked on the periphery of the Casamonica family—often drug runners or lookouts who weren’t bona fide family members and felt little allegiance to the group. There are never bodies to be found, because they were ground up and fed to animals or dissolved in acid. But to stop them, authorities must threaten the media from reporting what is happening under the noses of the public. It is a layered and complicated cycle that will continue to perpetuate until and unless the criminality can be stopped at its core.
In 2018, police finally started taking Mafia Capitale seriously and seized property in central Rome, including a posh seafood restaurant in the touristy area near Campo dei Fiori and a popular nightclub called Marilyn in the Testaccio district a few blocks from where I live. When they sequestered the spot, the local coffee bars were abuzz the next morning, with much whispering about who in the area might have been affiliated. Police also closed a beauty salon called Femme Fatale, where mobster molls helped launder money, and the Vulcano gym run by Domenico Spada, a former prizefighter who tied the two crime families together. Among the gym’s valued patrons were five senators from Italy’s then-ruling Five Star Movement.
Debora Cerroni is a thirty-four-year-old Italian beauty who was born into an almost certain life of crime in her own right before marrying into the Casamonicas. She very nearly died in a vat of acid poured by Gelsomina in one of the clan’s creepy Roman basements in 2017. Cerroni is the first—and as of this writing only—female Casamonica turncoat, and the detail with which she has described the clan’s complicated network has led to dozens of arrests and seizure of several million dollars in assets. “Gelsomina was in charge of us. She is evil, she commands, she is something out of the ordinary, she is the devil in person,” Debora told prosecutors. “She needs to know everything, and be in charge of everything, everything, everything, everything! She is jealous of her children; she is the devil.”
I interviewed Debora in a secret location in late 2018 just before she was sentenced to two years in prison for her own crimes, and she also struck me as someone very similar to Pupetta, a woman whose fate lay not so much in personal criminal ambition but was rooted in the circumstances of her birth—circumstances she eventually grew into. As we sat for the interview, which was arranged through the help of one of her lawyers at the time, I couldn’t help but wonder how her life could have been different had she married into her own crime family, and not that of an emerging group.
Much like Pupetta’s father, Debora’s was a prominent gangster who never quite made it to the upper echelons. He was stuck in the hierarchy of the Banda della Magliana (Band of the Magliana), which was a mafia-style gang that had a successful track record in kidnapping, extortion, and murder. It was founded in 1975 in Rome and became best known for violent acts during Italy’s bloody Years of Lead when national terrorism was carried out by extreme political groups. The Band wasn’t necessarily political—they hired themselves out for all sorts of dirty jobs. But unlike Pupetta, Debora wanted out and, at least for the short term, collaborated with prosecutors who were able to make dozens of arrests based on her testimony.
The group was tied to Italy’s traditional mafia groups, running drug and arms rackets in and around Rome for the Cosa Nostra, Camorra, and ’Ndrangheta. They often worked with all three groups at the same time without ever being fully recognized as true affiliates of any of them.
Debora’s father was a specialist in extortion, and she says growing up she often overheard terrifying stories he told her mother after they thought the children had gone to bed. Debora told me that she had thought many times about turning her father in, but that she was sure her own parents would have killed her if she had turned on them.
The Band of Magliana was famously linked to the neo-fascist Nuclei Armata Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei), which was responsible for a 1980 massacre at a train station in Bologna that killed eighty-five people and injured more than two hundred. It’s the same group with whom the one-eyed Mafia Capitale boss Massimo Carminati honed his criminal skills as a young member. Carminati was famously acquitted in the 1990s of being an accomplice to the 1979 murder of a journalist named Carmine Pecorelli. He won his freedom thanks to a deal he made with prosecutors who were trying former prime minister Giulio Andreotti for mafia collusion. Ample evidence showed that Andreotti wanted the journalist dead and had close ties to Carminati, but the charges didn’t stick. The evidence used in Andreotti’s trial against the mobster and the politician was given by Tommaso Buscetta, the turncoat tied to the corrupt forensic psychiatrist Pupetta and her lover Umberto were accused of decapitating.
Carminati and Andreotti handily beat the charges of killing the journalist with the help of one up-and-coming attorney by the name of Giulia Bongiorno, who would make history in orchestrating the defense that won the freedom of American student Amanda Knox and her erstwhile boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in 2013. Carminati lost his left eye in a shoot-out while trying to escape across the Swiss border in 1981 after an arrest warrant was issued for him. He returned after the statute of limitations ran out.
The Band is also widely suspected to be involved in the 1983 kidnapping of Emanuela Orlandi, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee whose mysterious disappearance remains a favorite topic for conspiracy theorists in Italy. Among the many alternative theories of her disappearance is that she was kidnapped to be a sex slave for priests deep inside the hallowed walls of Vatican City. The group was also thought to be tied peripherally to the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II by Turkish hit man Mehmet Ali Ağca.
Debora was born in 1984, just as the walls were closing in around her father. By then, the end to the Band of Magliana’s criminal tenure was inevitable, but they carried out a few last sporadic acts in their dying days to cement their legacy. Debora grew up under the constant shadow of accusations against her father and his associates, and was taught not that he was innocent of such accusations, but that his criminal activity was justified.
Debora says she spent most of her early childhood visiting her father in jail or covering for him when he was in hiding. “I wanted to escape that criminality,” she told me. “Even if it meant just going to a different criminal gang.” Debora admits she couldn’t fathom what living in a normal law-abiding family would be like. And she didn’t feel she deserved a chance to find out. “There is no avoiding where we came from,” she said. “When you are inside, you feel like there is no escape and when you finally do escape, you are constantly afraid they will come and kill you. There is no peace in either place.”
