The Godmother, page 18
In 2008, she entered the program again, but quickly left once more and spiraled between paranoia and depression for years. Finally, she reunited with Carlo—or so she thought—and reluctantly moved back to Calabria, where she depended on him financially. There, she was nearly kidnapped by a man disguised as a dishwasher repairman whose tool kit was filled with duct tape and wire instead of plumbing tools. Police suspected he was sent by an associate of Carlo’s who didn’t trust him to rein in his troublesome wife himself. Carlo paid for Lea’s and Denise’s apartment in Calabria and a smaller flat in Milan where she worked part-time under the condition that his mother and other relatives live with her. It was a hell from which she and Denise once again tried to escape. She did, but it would be her last taste of freedom.
In the summer of 2009, she reconciled romantically with Carlo against the advice of her lawyers and almost everyone who knew them both. On November 24, 2009, when they were supposed to rendezvous in the apartment in Milan to discuss Denise’s future, she disappeared. A year later, a pentito told police that she had been brutally beaten in a Milanese apartment and her body burned for three days straight to destroy any trace. 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 had left for Milan to meet Carlo.
When Denise turned eighteen, she could make her own decisions about her life’s path. She decided to testify against her father and others in a criminal trial that resulted in life sentences for six men, despite the defense’s insistence that Lea was alive and well in Australia. Denise is now living under the same witness-protection program that failed her mother.
Over the ensuing years, memorials across the country have been set up in the memory of Lea Garofalo. Gardens, parks, and even streets in mafia towns have been named after her as a reminder of the pain and the price of justice and the overall failure of the state to protect her.
Not all turncoats fail to make a difference, and one of the most powerful in the history of the Sicilian Mafia was Giuseppina “Giusy” Vitale, who became a pentita when she was in prison serving a term for a murder she had ordered as the head of a crime family. She was raised in a typical criminal family in Sicily in the 1970s, when widespread poverty pushed many young men into the criminal underground. Her brothers Vito and Leonardo ran the Palermo suburb of Partinico, where they grew up learning the type of violence that ensured their longevity in the mob. Giusy grew up under their control, often beaten and threatened and even forced to drop out of school at the age of thirteen so she wouldn’t become smarter than they were.
Both brothers went into hiding and later ended up in prison with lengthy terms for murder, which left Giusy in charge. She first ran messages back and forth between their hideouts and later to and from their jail cells before eventually making her own often deadly managerial decisions. She was handed her own lengthy sentence for ordering her husband—a hit man—to kill a rival in 2003, which is when she decided to become a witness for the state.
While women’s roles within the Cosa Nostra were especially hard to define, Giusy clearly got as close as she could to boss status. She had been a chief confidante of both of her brothers—who threatened her with death should she betray them—and only decided to testify against the cosca when she met another pentito by the name of Alfio Garozzo, who was allowed to visit her to try to get her to turn. The two fell in love, and Giusy’s testimony provided colorful details that would have made Godfather author Mario Puzo proud, including witnessing a secret meeting in which superboss-in-hiding Bernardo “the Tractor” Provenzano was dressed in bishop’s vestments and driven in a parish limo, which implied not only creativity on the part of the mob, but complicity on the part of the Church.
She was responsible for giving investigators vital details about Matteo Messina Denaro, the current Cosa Nostra boss of bosses, who was still on the run when this book went to print, but who may very soon be captured as those closest to him fall into various police traps. His fiancée at the time he disappeared was Franca Alagna, who competed for his attention with a number of lovers, including an Austrian woman who worked every summer at a tourist restaurant in Selinunte, Sicily, and with whom he is said to have fathered at least one child. But the child who made the biggest impression on authorities is Lorenza, the daughter he had with Franca and who is under constant surveillance, since police believe she and her father are, like most Italian fathers and daughters, extremely close. Every few months, Denaro’s henchmen and mafia women are scooped up as authorities tighten the noose around him, but Franca, who lives with his mother, remains free. In October 2021, more than sixty people were arrested in an area of Sicily. Denaro was said to have been spotted in an SUV, but remains elusive to capture.
Giusy filed for divorce from her hit man husband, which is considered another unforgivable crime that calls for death, and her brothers have both vowed to kill her or send someone to do the job before they get out of prison. Giusy has remained defiant, speaking out through the press and insisting that she only testified to save her two children and marry Garozzo.
Not long after she collaborated, Garozzo rescinded his own testimony and removed himself from the witness-protection program, telling a judge that despite everything, “there is an indissoluble” love between the two. But that love may have been an arrangement of some sort to keep them both under the witness-protection program. Giusy told the court that Garozzo’s collaboration was riddled with “falsehoods,” charging that he had tried to set a trap for her with “false collaboration.” And in fact, authorities had a difficult time corroborating any of what he told them, causing them to waste valuable time chasing dead ends when they could have easily been focused on a more truthful pentito.
To try to prove the point, court records show that he also described his lover Giusy as “certainly not a woman for whom a man can lose his head,” implying that in appearance she was hardly the stuff of romantic dreams. Giusy has remained a collaborator and continues to testify in important criminal cases while living under protection, including her brothers’ ongoing trial. She did, however, work to clear her ex-husband, Angelo Caleca, the father of her children, from the murder she was convicted of ordering.
Giusy’s testimony was not only harmful to the Cosa Nostra; she also had plenty of dirt about the Italian security forces that allegedly helped keep Totò “the Beast” Riina on the lam for so long. Among the secrets she spilled were accusations against a top Carabinieri officer named Mario Mori, one of the arresting officers who eventually brought Riina to jail. Had Giusy not been there to witness this event herself, no one would have understood the complicity of these corrupt cops. She outlined how Mori had full responsibility of overseeing a known hideout Riina used, and had once reported that there was no sign of the then-boss of bosses and didn’t even search the villa—clearly to cover up what he really knew.
Giusy proved he knew plenty, testifying against even the police that documents Totò the Beast kept hidden away in that villa “if discovered, would have put a bomb under the state.” She also told investigators that some of the Riina family hosted their patriarch and moved freely in and out of the villa under Mori’s watch—or blind eye. Mori, who would have expected Giusy to protect him, was investigated for abetting mafia activity and later acquitted, having convinced the court that indeed he did not see any proof that Riina had been anywhere near the villa in question, despite Giusy’s eyewitness accounts. Mori was tried again some years later for a drug-trafficking offense and eventually sentenced to twelve years in prison in April 2018 for threatening a judge.
In 2009, Giusy wrote a memoir with the help of Italian journalist Camilla Costanzo. The book, called Ero Cosa Loro (I Was Their Thing), clearly played off the Cosa Nostra name of the Sicilian Mafia; in it she recalls the day she decided to testify for the state. “My six-year-old asked me, ‘Mamma, what is the mafia?’ and that day I realized that there was still hope to save them.”
Pupetta drew a blank when I asked her if she would live her life differently if she could. Not for one moment had it crossed her mind. “I had very nice things at one time,” she recalled. “I had a house with a terrace in Sorrento, a beach house north of Naples. These were lovely places.”
I had what was a guilty pleasure of visiting Pupetta’s former summer home in the seaside town of Castel Volturno about half an hour north of Naples. It is an iconic 1950s-style bungalow surrounded by a high white wall that opens to an entrance with pillars on which diamond shapes have been cut. The square house has a curved stucco roof and floor-to-ceiling windows in the rooms that look out onto a long white wrought-iron arbor from which wisteria used to hang like silk. In the back, a patio with a portico-style ceiling like you normally see in Italian churches opens up to what was once an English-style garden with roses and short grass.
Pupetta’s house was part of a wider development called Coppola Village built by Camorra-tied brothers. It was patterned on Miami Beach and intended to lure American soldiers who were stationed with Allied Forces Southern Europe in Naples (as part of NATO’s continuing presence after the war), thinking they would like to buy weekend houses that felt like something from home. The project went bust before it was ever completed, and the buildings that weren’t confiscated by the state went on to house mostly Camorristi who, like Pupetta, had invested early.
The idea for this Floridian neighborhood was hatched by the Coppola brothers Vincenzo and Cristoforo, apparently distant relatives of film director Francis Ford Coppola, whose roots extend from this part of Italy farther south. The brothers lost millions in the racket but made much of it back when their family company was given the state contract to tear some of the property down. Most of the larger buildings were brought down with TNT in the early 2000s at great expense to the state, all paid back to the family that caused the mess in the first place.
The US military refurbished and rented many of the high-rise buildings that weren’t part of the state’s sequester from the Coppola family, who still owned them. The Americans gave up the last rental contract in the early 2000s, when paying money to crime families was no longer fashionable, thanks to greater awareness and anti-mafia investigations that started to home in on the curious financial relationship between the US government and the Neapolitan Camorra.
Pupetta was able to keep her house until it was confiscated by the state in the 1990s as part of a wider and somewhat inexplicable freezing of her assets. She lamented the loss. “It was a beautiful home, and right by the sea,” she recalled. Inside, the floors were covered with hand-painted maroon and white tiles that gave the main rooms a feel of opulence and grandeur. A fireplace in the main sitting room was covered with colorful mosaics into which her initials, A.M., for Assunta Maresca, were embedded. The summer villa is now home to Alice’s House, a cooperative for sex-trafficked Nigerian women, who have turned it into a sewing factory. The back garden, where Pupetta once hosted Camorra thugs, is now where the migrant women hold fashion shows and summer camp for kids.
A storage place that’s under the floor in one of the back bedrooms was previously used to store contraband goods from cigarettes to heroin, police say. Now it’s where the women run their own co-op where they store the colorful fabrics they use to make original designs.
Pupetta’s sequestered house is symbolic of a hopeful change in the country. On the front, a sign states: “Here the Camorra has been defeated.” Sadly, the sign is covered with graffiti and looks like someone tried to burn it. I showed Pupetta photos of the house, now largely unrecognizable, and most of her comments about the African influence and women who now work there are too vile to transcribe. Suffice it to say, she was severely disappointed that “such a wonderful house” had turned into what she described as a “whorehouse.”
Even though Pupetta insisted she no longer had anything to do with her criminal past, her legacy will always be as an integral part of one of the deadliest and most dangerous criminal organizations in the world. She was twice convicted of murder tied to the Camorra, and suspected on dozens of occasions of mafia involvement. Her father was a known criminal. Twice she had children with known Camorristi. Her son has been arrested on suspicion of mafia involvement. Even well past age eighty, she never distanced herself completely from the underworld, and upon her death she was described as the first female mob boss.
It’s a complicated mix of notoriety and fame. She is respected in so many circles as a woman who went beyond what was expected from her gender at the time. But she was a killer, even if the men she killed arguably deserved to die. Pupetta died in peace, feeling that she had no vendettas or debts to repay. Not many other women in the mafia will have such an easy time. “I sleep easily at night,” she once told me. “I have no fear of dying.”
10
A Few Good Women
“The mafia is a world based on deception and lies. I continued to live in the lie because I was forced into a double identity and a life in a secret location. Today even the smallest lie weighs on me.”
Pupetta will never be remembered as a good person, even as age had softened her tough exterior. Her bold lies and bloody crimes are unforgivable—and why would they be forgiven, since she felt no remorse for any of them at all. Women like Pupetta who bask in the spotlight and seem to take great pride in their notoriety have in so many ways made it easier for the other bad women to follow. That she lived freely despite her murder convictions and other allegations is not so much a testament to her own strength and will, but to the failure and weakness of the state that cannot seem to eradicate the deep roots of organized crime in Italy.
Twice I met her daughter, Antonella, and both experiences were unnerving. She has hints of her mother’s beauty but little of her charm, and instead comes across as a slightly bitter woman who envies her mother’s fame. Antonella is not a mafia woman, as far as any police investigation shows. She has managed her mother’s affairs for years, so if Pupetta had ever been found culpable, she could have been considered complicit. It is impossible to know if she would like to be as notorious as her mother or if she was rejected from having an organizational role, but it seems clear that if she were affiliated with a clan she would be a different person and her agenda would be clearer. She was her mother’s gatekeeper until her death, and now she guards her legacy.
Her objective seems to be to keep her mother from doing anything for free. The first time we met, I was leaving Pupetta’s apartment when Antonella walked in. She seemed annoyed when she saw my espresso cup on the table. As I gathered up my notebook and pen to leave, she asked me simple questions that seemed to have no real purpose: Where would I publish the piece; who would be reading it; and who else was I interviewing.
The second time we met, she seemed angry that I had come back without going through her and told me in no uncertain terms not to return. Her mother, a woman I had by then spent enough time with to have seen as willfully strong-minded, seemed almost afraid of her. She kept her head down when her daughter spoke. She looked away when I tried to make eye contact. In fact, nothing I knew of Pupetta through my interviews and her interaction with others made sense when she was with Antonella, who made her immediately seem weak and frail. At that moment, I felt sorry for Pupetta, assuming her daughter had taken complete control of her life and affairs. But on further reflection, I wonder if it was an act on Pupetta’s part—if she was playing the part of the frail, elderly mother to keep her daughter from suspecting how capable she still was, part of an effort to convince Antonella that she had given up her previous life.
Though not much is known about Antonella’s very private life, she and Pupetta seemed to have long been close. The two ran cheap clothing stores in Naples and Castellammare di Stabia until they went out of business in 2005. Pupetta was the shop salesclerk, selling gaudy polyester tops and tight skirts for five to ten euros to people who would come in just to brag that they had bought clothes from Pupetta Maresca. Antonella had other work, but she ran the business side of the operation, and her name was on the tax records undoubtedly because authorities were keeping an eye on Pupetta for anything that looked like tax evasion or money laundering. The way the business was set up on paper, Pupetta worked for her daughter, though the money to start the business may well have come from Pupetta. The spotlight never found Antonella, despite her ongoing proximity to her famous mother.
My final interview with Pupetta was cut short by Antonella, who shooed me away one winter afternoon just a few minutes after I arrived. Her mother didn’t argue, and in fact I felt at that moment she was probably relieved. Antonella had come to her rescue spontaneously, it seemed, but perhaps the two had hatched the plan to cut things off. “I think you are done with your research now,” she told me, making it clear she was in charge. “I don’t think you’ll be back.”
After that interview, I tried in vain to meet Antonella separately, but she would not agree, citing the second wave of the pandemic and various lockdowns that kept the region around Naples hard to reach. But I felt she didn’t want to meet with me because she would have nothing to say, that maybe she knew nothing of her mother’s dark past except what she read in press reports. The two were close, undoubtedly, but the fact that she exists in the public imagination only as “one of Pupetta’s twins” is likely a painful reality. She grew up in a home that was beyond dysfunction, likely knowing that her father was suspected of killing her stepbrother and surely knowing that her mother was an admitted murderess. In the end, I could forgive her for being standoffish. The last time I heard from her was a simple text message in which she wrote “mamma è morta.” I had planned to see her a week after the funeral at the cemetery in Castellammare di Stabia, where there were clandestine plans to have a prayer service to mark the week since Pupetta’s death. But police again prohibited any such celebration of such a villainous life. I doubt I will ever hear from Antonella again.
