The Godmother, page 17
Giusy left the ’Ndrangheta’s clutches with the help of the prosecutor Cerreti, but eventually succumbed to the torture of her children, pressure, and threats. In April 2011, Giusy publicly accused Cerreti and her team of malpractice and undue pressure to confess. That statement paved the way for Giusy to return to her family and reclaim her children from their torture chamber. It also allowed Giusy to collect more information about the clan, which she reported to police a few months later, after ensuring that her children were safe.
Among the many revelations Giusy shared with the investigators, which led to the arrests of seventy-six of her family members and their associates, was the mantra she had been taught all her life and which makes the ’Ndrangheta so successful at dissuading pentiti: “An ’Ndrangheta woman who repents is a stain that only a family member can wash with blood.” Meaning that if she is ever caught, she will be killed for collaborating, and anyone close to her is vulnerable as well.
Collaboration is often even more deadly for those who stumble into a crime family unknowingly, as did the young grad student Rossella Casini, who disappeared without a trace in 1981. She grew up far away from the crime ambit of Italy’s deep south in an affluent family palazzo in suburban Florence, where she was pursuing a degree in pedagogy in the Magisterium Faculty at the University of Florence, which was a fashionable way to get a theology degree in the late 1970s without actually joining a religious order. In 1977, Rossella met a dashing young economics student in Siena named Francesco Frisina when he moved into a room her family rented out. She was attracted to his dark good looks, which were a far cry from those of the boys she was meeting at the time, who were all headed for the priesthood. The two soon fell in love.
Rossella, of course, knew her new beau was from Calabria, but her mother recalls that they never once thought he was part of a crime family. This was before the advent of the Internet, when searching family histories or even spying on someone’s social media were not yet possible. The two moved forward at a healthy pace and were soon planning a life together.
In the summer of 1979, Rossella traveled with Francesco to his hometown of Palmi on the coast of Calabria. She had never been south of Rome and found the trip exhilarating. She loved his family, too—until Francesco’s father, Domenico, was assassinated by ’Ndrangheta hit men from a rival gang[8] during her visit. Rossella knew immediately that she was caught up in a bloody mafia war. Francesco pleaded with her to leave, but she stayed in Palmi while he sorted out the affairs of his father.
Rossella eventually returned to school in Florence but went down to Calabria on the weekend of December 9. At the end of the weekend she said good-bye to Francesco and headed back to Florence. A few hours into her journey, she had a feeling that something was not right and called Francesco’s home. When he didn’t answer, she called his friend, who reported that he had been shot in the head during a scuffle in which he had allegedly tried to kill a rival just a few hours after their romantic weekend had ended.
Rossella turned around and, upon seeing him bandaged up in the hospital in Reggio Calabria, insisted her beloved be transferred from the rundown center where she was sure he would die to the neurosurgical ward at the prestigious Careggi Hospital in Florence.
While he recovered in the northern facility, Rossella went to work on him, trying to convince him to repent and cooperate with police, which he did in 1981, giving vivid details of the family feud of which he was an integral part. Rossella testified as well, sharing details she had gleaned of the family she had only just met.
Not long after Francesco—by then recovered from his injuries—started collaborating, a relative lured him to Turin and convinced him to recant all he had told the anti-mafia investigators in Florence, which he did before returning to Palmi.
Heartbroken, Rossella went to Palmi in hopes of rekindling their flame. She was never seen again. In 1994, some thirteen years later, a pentito named Vincenzo Lo Vecchio shed light on her disappearance. Lo Vecchio, who was living in Palmi when Rossella last traveled there, told investigators that he was part of a crew sent to do away with “the foreigner” for turning Francesco against his family. Rossella was kidnapped and raped by the group of men who then cut her up into little pieces and fed her to the fish in the waters off a tuna processing plant.
The pentito’s confession led to the arrest of four people, including Francesco, who allegedly was in on the kidnapping, rape, and dismemberment, along with his sister Concetta. The trial started in 1997, more than sixteen years after Rossella disappeared. But after a series of delays that lasted nine years, all four were acquitted. Still, in February 2020, the city of Palmi named a street after Rossella and her community in Florence dedicated a park to her.
Francesco was arrested in Rome in 2013, while he was allegedly working to expand the ’Ndrangheta’s reach to the capital city.
When Pupetta spoke about organized crime, she mostly spoke of it as if it had nothing to do with her. She felt removed from it, not only because of her age, but because there is a sense of pride and territory among the groups. She was nicknamed Lady Camorra after committing her first murder, and she spoke of the two other major crime groups negatively.
The ’Ndrangheta, she said, are animals. The Cosa Nostra, she claimed, is impotent. The Camorra, she said, is not a criminal group at all.
“It is exaggerated by people like you,” she told me early on. “You help perpetuate the myth of the mafia. It’s your fault, not mine.”
9
Dying to Escape
The pentito sent them to a field where police found more than a thousand tiny bone fragments and what was left of the necklace Lea was wearing when she went to Milan to meet Carlo.
In 2018, Pupetta agreed to be a guest on a local Italian TV program called Reality Car, which was sort of a talk-show version of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke without the singing. The host, Emilio D’Averio, dressed in a tuxedo on top, asks somewhat banal questions to mostly former celebrities while driving around the guest’s hometown, which in Pupetta’s case was Castellammare di Stabia.
When he asked her about the popular Italian TV series Gomorrah, she said she had to turn it off about halfway through the first episode. “Gomorrah? It is not educational,” she told D’Averio. “Faced with all of those terrible scenes, I turned off the television and I never watched it again.” She was particularly horrified about how children were cast as characters based on real-life kids whose horrific experiences with the Camorra she felt were “glamorized” and made to look like normal life. “Involving the children like that is unheard of,” she insisted.
Many scenes in the series take place inside the Le Vele housing projects in the Neapolitan suburb of Scampia, which I visited for Newsweek in 2008.[1] One of the last of the condemned buildings was torn down in February 2020 as part of a revitalization plan for the crime-ridden Naples suburb. The seven apartment blocks shaped like sails were built in the 1960s and became symbolic of the Camorra’s power. They were immediately taken over by drug dealers and criminals and the architecture, meant to mimic the narrow alleyways of Naples, became a perfect way to escape police when they dared to enter. In the 1980s, after a devastating earthquake left tens of thousands of people homeless, the complex became a shelter of sorts and squatters took over.
Rather than trying to clean up the debacle that Le Vele had become, authorities started tearing it down in 1997, as if getting rid of the structure would somehow get rid of the criminal system.
Visiting was a terrifying experience, though I wish I could go back. After my research for this book and my previous one took me deep into Camorra crime country where Nigerian women are trafficked, I could have entered that neighborhood with a greater understanding of the Camorra and without so much fear. At the time I visited Le Vele, I was the mother of six- and eight-year old little boys and admittedly earnest. Twelve years and two books later, I would approach the assignment differently, ask different questions, and be brave enough to want to see down more of the creepy, dark corridors. The city dismantled Le Vele during the pandemic, but the criminals by then had moved on.
I remember the sound of plastic syringes crunching like frozen snow under my feet when I walked up to the more inhabited of the two buildings. In the basement of one of the two buildings that still stood in 2008, women sitting behind folding tables sold single syringes of heroin for one euro apiece next to candy bars and cans of soda. Fix in hand, the customers would go down to the dark basement to shoot up. Patrons who pulled up in fancy cars were met by runners—mostly teenage boys—who exchanged wads of cash for brown paper bags.
The morning of the day I visited the complex with a photographer, there were around twenty cars in the parking lot and lines of people ran up the stairs from the basement around midday. A few hours later, the after-work crowd arrived and cars were double-parked. A queue of customers snaked around the outside of the buildings. Finished with school for the day, children rode their bikes over the syringes and played soccer, using the garbage as goal posts.
I was struck by how accessible this place was, that if I, an American journalist, could waltz up and start asking questions, surely police could shut the place down. But what Gomorrah so brilliantly portrayed was the extent of the integration the Camorra has in Neapolitan society, as do all the mafia groups in the broader Italian society. From a vantage point like Le Vele in 2008, it almost seemed the other way around, that the law-abiding society has integrated into the criminal world.
The photographer and I each had to pay a “fixer fee” of €87.50 to our guide Lorenzo Lipurali, much as I paid Carmela to take me around to the ex-cons in Naples. Lorenzo’s curiously specific fee was based on old Italian lire rates, and I was told in advance to bring the exact amount because Lorenzo wouldn’t make change. Of course, the expectation was that most journalists would just round it up to €90 to give him a little tip, which I did.
Keeping our fixer happy seemed a wise investment, because for all intents and purposes, fees like his or Carmela’s are protection money. A French TV crew visiting the complex the same day had refused to pay the protection fee, and they were held at gunpoint in one of the apartments until they paid the equivalent of five hundred dollars. Lorenzo talked on his cell phone to the men who were holding them and would report on the progress of their payment, perhaps as a lesson to me that I did the right thing by following their rules. I thought for sure he was making up the story until I heard about it on the news the next day after the French crew was released.
We sat in Lorenzo’s immaculate apartment as his teenage daughter, who should have been in school, served espresso in little plastic cups. Gomorrah the film had just been released and was slated for an Oscar nomination for foreign film (which never ended up coming) and Lorenzo was excited. He slipped a bootlegged copy of the movie into a DVD player attached to a massive television. Electricity had long been shut off in the complex, so all the tenants had extension cords flung out windows and running to generators parked in a row near the entrance of the heroin basements. Lorenzo’s TV cord snaked through a hole in the wall.
Lorenzo fast-forwarded to the part of the movie where he played a tenant trying to help neighbors maneuver a massive velvet sofa to one of the top floors. “There I am,” he told me, pausing the disc to explain how hard it was to get the sofa to stop swinging. As he and the other men worked with the sofa, two preteen boys around the age of Lorenzo’s daughter Anna philosophized about how they might have to kill each other one day since they were in different clans.
In Lorenzo’s company, the photographer and I toured several apartments, almost all inhabited only by women and small children. The smell of bleach and cleaning products permeated the air and everything was spotless, even as it was falling apart. The windows that had bullet holes in them were scrubbed clean and the broken-down doors were polished to a shine. One woman named Maria Amaro invited me in for another cup of espresso, served in the same kind of plastic cup that Lorenzo used. Only later did I realize that it was because hot water was at a premium in the complex and doing dishes was a sure way to waste it, so almost everyone just used disposable dishes and cutlery. There was no official garbage pickup, so most people just threw their trash out of the windows into the courtyards below or down the elevator shafts. The elevator doors had been pried open but partially blocked with makeshift half walls to prevent anyone from falling to their death—unless it was intended they fall.
Maria liked the film, which she had also scored a bootleg of, but she was disappointed that the producers didn’t show more of the “human side” of life in Le Vele. “People are afraid to come here,” she told me as her three young daughters, all dressed in pretty pink tracksuits, rode new bikes up and down the corridors between apartments. “Everyone thinks we’re going to kill them.”
I asked her to describe what she meant, what the human element was that she felt was missing, and she said they didn’t show any “normal life” and only focused on the crime. I asked her what normal life was like in Le Vele, and she described a recent torrential rainstorm. “I thought someone was throwing rocks down the roof or shooting,” she said, pointing to the plastic roof over her small balcony. “But the rain was so strong the rats were falling off the roof like rocks.” As I sat in her immaculate kitchen and sipped coffee I couldn’t help but wonder how she thought stories like that would have softened the image in the film; how falling rats slamming onto corrugated plastic would seem “normal” to anyone.
Her neighbor Maria Mottola, another single mom with small kids running around, had an apartment just as spotless as Maria’s. She also liked the film, but for different reasons. “The attention from the film isn’t bad for us,” she said. “The reality is much worse even than what they show, but maybe this is an embarrassment for the country.”
Women in Le Vele are in many ways on the lowest rungs of the ladder for mafia women. They are not the wives and sisters of well-known capi, but rather the consorts of lesser-known criminals who end up taking the fall for bigger mobsters. These are the drug mules, the syringe sellers, and the runners who are unemployed and disenfranchised Neapolitans who possess no skills for legitimate work. They squat in condemned places like Le Vele, which often provide a cover for criminal operations like the heroin being sold out of the basement. But the “cashiers” or men who come by every hour in fancy cars, entrusted by bigger mobsters to pick up the proceeds from the drugs sold here, would do nothing to protect their men running the business in Le Vele. These men on the ground are easily sacrificed in police raids, and the women in their communities are even more disposable.
Hundreds of women in mafia families have been brutally murdered over the years. Some die in unremarkable ways, banally beaten to death by their husbands or wiped out in revenge attacks. The stories that tend to make headlines are the most horrific, like that of Lea Garofolo, who was killed—burned and buried—more than ten years after the first time she tried to leave the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta with her young daughter.
Although her father was brutally murdered when she was just eight months old, she was raised to believe that the crimes her family committed were justified and that wrong was actually right. Lea was a classic southern Italian beauty with long wavy hair and an olive complexion. Her petite frame and larger-than-life energy seemed at odds, and drew friends to her.
But Lea didn’t buy the idea that criminality was her destiny and from a very young age resisted the pressure to fit in. At the age of fifteen, she fell in love with a man named Carlo Cosco, who she believed was different because he lived in Milan, another planet from the dusty hills of Calabria. He seemed to be far out of reach of the criminal world she desperately dreamed of escaping. But what she didn’t know when she agreed to elope was that Carlo worked for her brother Floriano, who led the family ’ndrina. Marrying Lea was meant only to help him climb the ladder. Lea was devastated. She became pregnant and tried to abort the pregnancy rather than raise a mafia child who could never escape. She became suicidal, but after giving birth to her daughter, Denise, in 1991, decided she had a reason to live.
Four years and several murders in her own backyard later, Lea went to the police and told them what she knew and took Denise away. Mother and child hid out in a convent in Bergamo for two years, but then got up the courage to first rent a small apartment in the small northern city and then a larger house. Lea worked odd jobs, Denise went to school, and life seemed normal. Lea even dated and made friends.
Then she made a mistake. She started going back to Calabria to see her family, whom she had theoretically betrayed. Lea wasn’t a turncoat or pentita in the usual sense. Instead she had secretly testified against her husband and brother, and as such, she had never gone into hiding or entered the witness-protection program. But her real betrayal—at least to Carlo—was that she refused to visit him in prison, instead sending Denise with Carlo’s brother Vito. Her absence sent the message that she was disrespecting him and, with it, the entire ’ndrina.[2]
Carlo started using his sway to terrify Lea, first by having someone set her car on fire to make sure she knew they knew she was living in Bergamo. When she was visiting her grandmother in Calabria in 2002, her brother Floriano slapped her in broad daylight in a public square and told her to go see Carlo in prison. Because he was family and this was Calabria, no one said a word. Two days later, the door of their grandmother’s house where Lea and Denise were staying was torched to send the message that there was no escape.
Lea went to the Carabinieri the day her grandmother’s door was set on fire and turned state’s evidence, testifying about all she knew about everyone, including her brother, in exchange for protection for herself and Denise, which she thought would bring her peace and freedom. The police whisked her away to safety and moved the two of them every few months out of fear the ’Ndrangheta would kill them. Then, six years after she became a pentita, someone stalked and killed Floriano, first shooting him in the back and then ripping his face apart with gunshots, undoubtedly as a punishment for his sister’s betrayal. At the same time, Lea started to rebel, growing tired of the confinement and venturing out without telling anyone, as was required as part of her protection. The state had not had luck prosecuting any of the claims Lea made, in part because there were no other pentiti to corroborate them, so they tried to kick Lea and Denise out of the protection program. She won an appeal to stay, but then left on her own a few months later.
