The Godmother, page 15
By her early teens, Debora started moving in different circles from other mobster daughters, who dated the sons of what was left of her father’s Band of Magliana gangs. By her late teens, she was dating members of the Casamonica family, whose criminality seemed familiar but whose Roma ancestry she found exotic.
In the 1990s, the Casamonicas were emerging as an aspiring criminal association in Rome under the leadership of Vittorio Casamonica, who in the 1960s had moved in from the southern Italian region of Molise, where he was raised in a nomadic Sinti family. Vittorio’s parents had escaped Nazi Germany when Hitler’s henchmen started an ethnic cleansing known as the Romani genocide, during which around half a million nomadic Roma people were killed. The Casamonica family found a home with other nomadic people in southern Italy. But as post-war poverty ravaged the region, there was little left for the community to live off, so the Casamonica family moved north.
Once in Rome, Vittorio easily found his footing. He taught himself to read, separating himself from many of his peers who had to rely on street crime to contribute to the family income. Vittorio wanted to do better. He attended school and soon enough he was a mini boss among a clan of misfits who would never fully integrate. But he didn’t want to be an outsider, so he started to copy what the Italian boys at school did, from the way they wore their hair to the twang of their Roman dialect.
Before long, he was being “trained” under the criminal direction of Enrico “Renatino” De Pedis, the de facto king of the Band of Magliana who was looking to rebuild his empire. He thought Vittorio would prove useful because he spoke Italian well but could also communicate in the Sinti dialect, which few understood. He never imagined the boy who grew up in the nomadic camps under the bridges of Rome possessed the criminal acumen it would take to one day threaten him.
At the time, the Casamonica nomadic people were finding a role as foot soldiers for the larger criminal organizations, but Vittorio dreamed of being a boss himself. Later, when his dream had been realized, he loved to sing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” in one of his many palatial houses in the suburbs of Rome, which is a scene that his grandchildren and nephews captured on video and shared on social media to such an extent the videos are now viral.[1]
De Pedis would eventually be buried in the Vatican’s Sant’Apollinare Catholic Church run by Opus Dei in central Rome, where young Emanuela Orlandi was last seen after a music lesson. In 2012, as part of a futile search for the missing girl, his tomb was pried open to see whether her bones were buried with him. They were not, but several sets of other unidentified bones were found next to his. Vittorio was there when De Pedis was originally buried, and he was there again after the church refused to put his remains back in the original Sant’Apollinare tomb. He was eventually cremated and his ashes scattered at sea near Ostia.
Even as the Casamonica power base grew, they were ignored by most authorities. Not even the anti-mafia police appreciated their full potential, in part because they were still considered common criminals by the authorities, who were sure they were incapable of garnering the respect from the more established crime syndicates. But that lack of scrutiny allowed the Casamonica criminal organization to grow unchecked, and they eclipsed the Band of Magliana, which finally dissolved in the 1990s; by then most of their members were dead or rotting away in jail. The Casamonicas married Italians from other crime families to try to thin their Roma blood, and distanced themselves from the nomadic Sinti people. The latter were still living in makeshift camps in and around Rome, and were a target of right-wing leader Matteo Salvini, who took great pleasure personally bulldozing their encampments. But the Casamonicas still practice the paramichia rituals of their heritage, albeit under much more refined circumstances than their nomadic peers.
In 2002, Debora married Vittorio’s nephew Massimiliano Casamonica in a Sinti ritual that tied her to him until death—which was loosely interpreted as his right to kill her if she strayed. She was just eighteen years old. Twelve years and three children later, Debora had decided to leave. Massimiliano was in prison on a drug-related conviction and Debora started frequenting nightclubs and swanky restaurants with Italian friends who had never understood why she had fallen in with the Casamonica clan.
Word reached her husband in jail that she was straying beyond Casamonica control, so Gelsomina sent in Debora’s Sinti sisters-in-law Liliana and Antonietta, who kidnapped her and kept her inside a hidden chamber in one of the family’s luxury Roman villas for forty days, threatening to dissolve her in the large vat of acid they kept in a secret basement room.
When they finally let her out, it was on the condition she would remain faithful to the family. She tried to reach out to her family and old friends once more, but her former female in-laws took her back down to the basement and made her dip her hair into the acid. She remembers the smell and the sizzle, which she said reminded her of the burning flesh she had smelled wafting up from the basement years earlier. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized what the strange smell was. Debora says the vat drained into the same pipe as the villa’s toilets and drains, meaning victims of the Casamonica clan were flushed into Rome’s ancient sewer system.
Her imprisonment finally ended after she convinced the in-laws that she would stay true to her husband. But the first chance she got, she ran away and filed for divorce. She also filed a police report, but then changed her mind and refused to sign it out of fear of retaliation against her children, whom she had left in the clutches of the Casamonicas. The clan soon found her in a safe house her lawyer had set up, and they dragged her back to their Roman stronghold, where she says the Sinti sisters beat and tortured her once again. They spared her life only because her husband wanted to deal the final blow for her betrayal when he got out of prison. They threatened to kill her children if she ever tried to escape again, which put an end to her attempts.
In 2016, she attended the funeral of the godfather Vittorio, who had died of cancer at age sixty-five. A gilded hearse was pulled by six black stallions through central Rome beneath a helicopter that dropped rose petals over the procession. The police blocked traffic through the capital as the procession wended its way along the streets.
A lone trumpeter played Nino Rota’s “Speak Softly, Love”—the theme from the Godfather movies—as Vittorio’s coffin was carried into the Church of San Giovanni Bosco. White roses adorned the portico and massive posters showing him with a halo over his head were taped up on the basilica walls. “You have conquered Rome, now you will conquer heaven,” said one. “Vittorio Casamonica, King of Rome” read another. Once the coffin and immediate family, including Debora, were inside the church, the theme from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey blared from speakers for no apparent reason other than to underscore the surrealism of it all. Hundreds of people attended, including many nomadic Sintis who lined the perimeter around the church and cried that the son who did them all so proud had died so young.
Vittorio’s funeral was a show of power by the Casamonica clan—and it managed to embarrass Rome’s city leaders, most of whom were at the beach for the summer holidays when the spectacle took place. Meetings were called and questions were asked as the funeral ran across all the news outlets. Who gave the criminal family permission to fly a helicopter over Rome’s normally closed airspace? Who authorized the police to provide protection and traffic control? No one seemed to know. The priest who conducted the Mass said the family were important patrons in the community. He admitted to me in an interview that he had baptized and married hundreds of members of the clan right there in the sizable Roman church that had tax-free status, thanks to the Vatican’s immense influence over city politics.
Anti-mafia officials were both embarrassed and dismayed that such an important crime family could host what amounted to a state funeral in the heart of Rome. They justified their own scandalous oversight by saying that the Casamonica family was unimportant and only on the margins of criminality. But privately, they feared that they had simply overlooked what had somehow become one of the most powerful crime families in Italy. The Casamonica clan was under moderate surveillance, but at least part of the reason they remained unchecked for so long was because they spoke in a Sinti dialect and the Rome authorities just didn’t have a translator who understood it.
At the funeral, Debora was secretly approached by a woman who whispered to her that she was an undercover police officer who had infiltrated the clan by posing as the Italian girlfriend of one of the Casamonica cousins. She had learned of Debora’s harsh treatment because it was used as an example to threaten her, a warning that any “outsiders” would be watched extra carefully or end up like Debora. The officer told her she knew of the report she filed and, even though she wasn’t specifically working Debora’s case, would help her if she could.
It could have been a trap, especially since the police officer admitted being tied to a Casamonica man. Debora took a risk 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.” Her risk changed the path of the Casamonica family forever.
Within weeks of the funeral, Debora was able to escape the Casamonica clan thanks to the undercover cop. She arranged to get another agent to pose as one of the private drivers Debora had asked to have drive them to the prison for the weekly visitation with her husband. He was continuing to threaten to kill her, even though she had seemingly come around and decided to stay with him. At the very least, she was certain cruel beatings for her original betrayal awaited her, and their visits were a toxic mix of love and hate.
Once she and her children were safe in protective custody, she told investigators everything she knew, including addresses, names, and secret meeting places where the Casamonica clan met. She told them about the vat of acid and the many people who were taken into the basement, never to emerge from it.
From her safe house, she wrote a longer note to her rescuers. One translated excerpt in court documents reads:
I always fight for my children, but I would like to guarantee them a future because unfortunately my life has given me that disease, which may also be one that I will never be cured of. My life is limited and you have helped me to take back the children and have arrested those beasts who exist without respect, who are ignorant, disrespectful to others (and I ask myself how I chose to choose to be part of them) and for this I will always be indebted. But maybe I can translate all that you want or teach you their language, or if I cover everything I have told you and that I have yet to tell you when you come here, I can testify against them . . . even if the risk against my life will rise . . . I can tell you these things because having lived and coexisted with them all this time I not only have to find the dignity of being a mother (as I really wanted for my children) but also to be a woman and to be an honest person, as I really feel I am. My children will have to follow different examples.
Debora later testified in a Bologna court about the inner workings of the organization, which was far more entrenched with the major syndicates in Italy than previously realized.
She also explained how the women of the Casamonica clan did all of the work: They made the decisions, paid bills with money hidden around their homes. The family spent thousands on reconstructive surgery for those who were hiding from the law and needed to change their appearances, or for women whose men didn’t like the way they were aging. The Casamonica women also paid skilled lawyers who helped them fight small charges that might lead to bigger discoveries.
Debora described how the Casamonica women ordered hits, hid illicit drugs, and called the shots when it came to deciding who would get loans and how much interest they would have to pay, which, at times, topped 1,000 percent interest. They managed bodyguards who trained in the villas’ private gyms in martial arts, and they decided which weapons would be carried and by whom, though the preference was always to be able to do bodily harm with fists and clubs rather than firearms, which are easily traceable in Italy. Debora was also trained in these criminal managerial skill sets, but she told police she never felt she could adequately play the role even though she grew up watching her mother fulfill a similar one for her own criminal father.
Thanks to Debora’s secret note and testimony, which led to the escape of two other non-Sinti women married into the Casamonicas, multiple arrests were made in the summer of 2018, a full two years after Vittorio’s funeral, which was the amount of time it took investigators to complete their investigation and corroborate Debora’s leads. Meanwhile, Debora was in hiding and her own family disowned her for betraying an affiliate crime family.
By the time the last of the 2018 arrests were made, thirty-one people were in prison and three remained on the run. Police sequestered the beauty parlor that Debora told them about, where women who orchestrated criminal activity while getting pedicures or their roots touched up were able to talk without fear of being bugged. Debora also told them the address of the gym that was favored by local politicians and where Casamonica men trained in martial arts. Police shuttered restaurants in Rome’s posh Parioli district and near the Pantheon, and a nightclub in the popular Bohemian neighborhood of Testaccio that was used for laundering money.
But the most surprising discoveries were made in the many lavish homes the Casamonica family members kept in slummy suburbs in Rome, which helped keep up the nomadic zingari facade. Police confiscated luxury cars, as well as hundreds of expensive Rolexes, thousands of euros in cash, guns, untold kilos of cocaine, jewels, and records outlining their businesses hidden inside gaudy furniture meant to look like faux-Baroque antiques. There were gilded or mirrored ceilings in the bathrooms, and the houses all had posing porcelain tigers throughout—which, when broken open, actually revealed safes with keys to secret properties stashed with jewels and cash in case anyone needed to make a quick escape. All of the homes had security systems that watched who drove within a few blocks and who entered and left the houses. As of this writing, police still aren’t sure they have located all the properties tied to the clan, or how extensive the clan’s reach had become.
Debora also tipped off police to a loan-sharking scheme run out of Ostia, where the powerful Spada crime family ruled the beachside resort town. Handwritten account books were found in the beauty parlor where the Casamonica women met, showing how loans of €10,000 were suddenly worth €600,000 and paid in cash, jewelry, drugs, and blood.
In 2017, a Casamonica family associate of the Spada family beat up a TV reporter live on the air when he was investigating whether there was an affiliation between the Mafia Capitale, the Casamonica family, and Italy’s major criminal groups. At the time, dozens of other journalists came forward to say they, too, had been threatened or beaten when they tried investigating these connections, which the Casamonica family insisted did not exist. Court documents would later reveal that the criminal families kept special billy clubs dedicated to the beating of specific reporters. Previously, authorities had worked on the theory that the Spada family in Ostia worked only with the Mafia Capitale group, but they soon learned that both groups were tied together by the Casamonica clan.
The beating of the reporter caught on camera depicted the bloody side of the Casamonicas, and Debora’s testimony underscored that such violence was par for the course. Her depositions included details of watching people being beaten to death in the family homes—in front of young children, who cheered and booed like the emperors during gladiator fights in the Colosseum.
After the initial arrests in July, police finally admitted openly the power of the Casamonica clan. “The family Casamonica has taken things to a new level,” a police statement read. “Forging close ties with the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta and the Camorra of Campania, it has a total turnover of about €40 million a year.”
Debora now lives outside of Italy with her sons, who have all assumed new identities. But she is sure she will one day be discovered and dragged back to the basement. So was Pupetta. When I told her what I knew about Debora and asked what she thought, she said, “The woman is doomed. You cannot leave a group like that alive, and in many ways it is better not to try.”
Pupetta wondered why Debora would have given up a comfortable life, why she had to get away. “There are ways to gain power in an organization like that,” she said. “She threw a real opportunity to be someone away.”
Pupetta’s infamy is in many ways what comforted her in her old age. When she died, she was celebrated as one of the most important “mafia women” in Italy, legendary for her crimes and misdemeanors, and an inspiration to those following in her footsteps. When I asked her about what legacy she wants to leave, she said simply: “That I fought for justice.”
8
The Sin of Confession
Rita spent her childhood stuffing heroin into shampoo bottles and hiding cocaine in the side panels of cars on her mother’s orders.
While the depth of women’s true involvement in mafia organizations may be up for debate, their ability to persuade their loved ones against becoming turncoats and breaking the omertà is undisputed.
Pupetta never forgave Umberto for betraying her trust after he was arrested in 1993 during a sting operation in Peru. He swiftly confessed, becoming a pentito. In doing so, he joined the loathed ranks of mafia turncoats, like his former associate Tommaso Buscetta, who in many ways kneecapped the Sicilian Cosa Nostra with his spilling of secrets. In a letter to a mob boss in 2019, Pupetta blamed the pentiti for ruining her, implying that she was still part of some aspect of the criminal world. Otherwise, how could a confession by someone collaborating with law enforcement have any impact on her? In 2021, another revelation surfaced during a Camorra investigation into a money-laundering racket in which large sums of cash were paid to Pupetta for undefined services. By then, her daughter, Antonella, had made it more than clear that I couldn’t contact her mother anymore. That she was still part of the criminal underground when I visited her house before the pandemic and yet denied being part of it underscored everything I thought about her and so many of the women in this book: that they are beyond rehabilitation, either so tied to the criminal world they have no way to escape, or they simply like it.
