The Godmother, page 9
Police intervened when they overheard Marchese give the marching orders to carry out the young wife’s murder. “I want her in a room and beaten with wooden sticks,” he directed them. “Her brains smashed open.” The woman went on to seek protection, though she is not known to have testified against her husband or any of his associates.
Another particularly unfaithful mafia wife named Angela Bartucca is often referred to in police records as a “femme fatale.” While she survived any retribution from her ’Ndrangheta husband, who was sentenced to a lengthy prison term, she was ultimately connected to the deaths of several of the young lovers she took when her husband was incarcerated.
Her first was handcuffed inside the car he and Angela had used to secretly meet for sex. The vehicle was set on fire while he was still alive in it. A second lover’s bruised and bloodied corpse was tied to a tree under which he once engaged in a romantic tryst with Angela, according to a turncoat who, at the time, was given the job of spying on her, and who also told investigators that the lover was beaten to death slowly over a number of days with ample attention to his genitalia, which had, in part, been dismembered. A third and final lover was Valentino Galati, a younger ’Ndrangheta man who was sent to guard her and keep her from cheating. Not long after his assignment started, the two ended up in bed. Valentino disappeared—another traceless lupara bianca death.
In some rare cases, especially when the husband is much older than the wife and has been sentenced to life, he will consent to a proxy for the sake of her sexual needs. This ensures her own survival in case she dares to try to find someone on her own. In many cases, the local priest is called in for the job, since he will never commit to falling in love with her.
While mafia men seem, at least in public, to prefer their women angelic, mafia women seem to keenly understand the power of their sexuality. For those who are incarcerated, a few coquettish glances can easily soften up the male guards, which often leads to a little extra time in the rec yard or even gifts from outside. Pupetta used her own seductive gifts with great mastery, often winning favors for other inmates as well, who would then owe her.
On the outside, provocative conversation can be used to test alliances and elicit secrets. Many mafiosi daughters and sisters have been coaxed into using their sex appeal against the enemy. Throughout the history of Italy’s major syndicates, legend states that confiding in a woman was often seen as a grave betrayal, punishable by death in certain cases. The idea was that if a woman could get a man to break the omertà, she might also get him to turn on his criminal brethren in other ways, or even to the police. Pupetta whispered to me in her kitchen about a woman she knew whose sole job was coaxing secrets out of rival clansmen. “She paid a huge price for it because once she was discovered, they sliced off her breasts and let her bleed to death,” she told me without wincing.
Still, while it plays into a certain romantic image of the loyal mafia wife to think of her crying alone in bed until her husband returns smelling of his lovers’ perfume, there is ample evidence to suggest that the wives are also playing around on the side.
Today, mafia women are often key confidantes to their men, going far beyond just filling in when they are incarcerated and instead acting as key advisers who can easily step in when they need to. Because of the intimacy of this bond, betrayal becomes even more dangerous. Anti-mafia prosecutor Cerreti took a calculated risk when she successfully lured Maria Concetta Cacciola, a woman born into one of the most violent factions of the ’Ndrangheta whose own destiny seemed sealed by fate, to the state’s side. Maria Concetta’s mother, Anna Rosalba Lazzaro, was deeply involved in her family’s ’ndrine, and her father, Michele Cacciola, was himself a top-tier boss. Maria Concetta lived an unenviable life from a young age, during which she had expressed a desire to leave Calabria and all the crime and corruption that were wrong with it. Instead, her father married her off to rival Salvatore Antonio Figliuzzi at the age of thirteen to settle a vendetta, and she was systematically beaten and raped by her husband for years. She later described a personal hell of violence, fear, oppression, and cruelty that often included her husband holding his pistol to her forehead and pulling the trigger on a gun; she had no idea whether it was loaded.
Her husband eventually went to jail for mafia-related crimes, during which Maria Concetta filed for divorce and had the audacity to start a new relationship. Her family publicly scorned her actions, reminding her that marriage is for life and the only way out is death. She was eventually held hostage by her father and locked up and beaten in her childhood home until she promised to leave her new lover and stay devoted to her imprisoned husband.
On May 11, 2011, at the age of thirty-one and with her husband set to serve several more years in prison, she decided to leave once and for all. She had been summoned to the local police station after her son Alfonso had been stopped for driving without a license. At that moment, she spontaneously told a police officer that she wanted to talk to someone about her experience, including her family.
The head of the precinct called Cerreti, who told them to tell Maria Concetta to go back home and pretend that nothing was wrong, in order to avoid arousing suspicion. Even the slightest delay at a police station in the heart of ’Ndrangheta country could prove fatal. She’d be killed by her own parents if for any reason they thought she might turn into a pentita, and Cerreti didn’t want that to happen. The police told her to come back a week later.
The delay served two purposes. If Maria Concetta was serious about confessing her role and testifying against her family, she would come back. If instead she had been sent to try to get something from police or lay a trap, she wouldn’t return. A week later, Cerreti was waiting with local police in the Rosarno station when Maria Concetta walked through the side door. She went back twice more, and on May 25, after Cerreti was able to corroborate some of what Concetta had told her, she decided it was time to put Maria Concetta into protective custody. Under Italian law, police then have just 180 days to work with the collaborators to try to get as much corroborated information as they can to extend protective custody. Often that’s not enough time, which puts the turncoats at risk. It’s a flaw in the judicial system that crime families are well aware of, and they do what they can to trip up police work if they suspect someone has given evidence. Cerreti would like to see the time limit extended. “We have a short period of time to understand the entire situation,” Cerreti told me. And even once protection is granted, it is reevaluated every four years to determine whether the collaborator is still cooperative, has returned to the mafia family, or has disappeared.
The stories Maria Concetta told police were astonishing, offering a horrific inside view of life deep inside the labyrinth of the ’Ndrangheta’s complicated structure. She unveiled the complex relationship between her parents’ crime families, introducing a number of people law enforcement had never considered to be such integral players. By the end of May, she was living safely on the other side of Italy under an assumed name, but she knew that the ’Ndrangheta would never forget—or forgive—her betrayal. Further, her children were still back in Calabria, and they were being used in what amounted to a blackmail campaign to get her to rescind her confession.
Through a trustworthy contact, Maria Concetta started sending messages back home to stay apprised of her children’s welfare. She was assured they weren’t doing well in her absence. The contact, who was likely not trustworthy, said they were being abused for her “crimes” against the family. With each message, Maria Concetta grew more desperate, pleading with Cerreti to somehow get her children out of there, which proved impossible. With her husband in prison and the children living with family members, there was no legal reason to remove them. Italian law works to protect collaborators, but for those who risk their lives to escape their abusive and criminal existence, the loopholes are frustrating—or worse.
On August 2, 2011, just three months after she turned, and after hearing that her children were near the breaking point, Maria Concetta reached out directly to her mother and brother, despite having given police ample evidence against both of them. Even if she knew it would be a fatal decision, she wanted to hug her children one more time.
The family made a plan to pick her up from her hiding place, which at that time was in Genoa. They promised her they would allow her to hold all three of her children and return to safety, explaining that they “understood” why she fled. At the last minute, Maria Concetta got scared and called the police, who intervened before her family could collect her from Genoa.
Maria Concetta’s family wouldn’t give up, and they pressured her to return home, promising her security and offering to hire lawyers to make sure she was safe. She was torn between wanting to see her children and wanting to protect herself, but ultimately she needed to see them again. On August 8, she returned to Rosarno. She hugged her children, and the lawyers she was told were there to protect her instead coaxed her into signing a retraction of her confession, taping what would be the last words she ever spoke.
Three days later, she was dead from drinking muriatic/hydrochloric acid, which her family said she did to take her life. The coroner’s report reads like a horror movie script. She had drunk a liter of the acid, which would have burned her throat and been impossible to do on her own, given that the body’s reflexes would have made her vomit. It was as if someone had poured it down her throat. Her official cause of death was a heart attack, undoubtedly prompted by excruciating pain as the acid ate through her esophagus and stomach walls. Still, her family said she had committed suicide for having betrayed the family.
Cerreti did not believe the suicide excuse, citing dozens of “traitors” who had died after clearly being forced to drink acid, a not-so-subtle message to others contemplating betrayals of their own. At least half a dozen ’Ndrangheta women died after drinking acid between 2005 and 2015, according to the local Reggio Calabria death records. Four had tried to confess to police, and the other two had cheated on their ’Ndrangheta husbands.
A few days after her body was found, Maria Concetta’s family filed an official complaint against Cerreti and her team, accusing the star anti-mafia prosecutor of coercion and preying on someone with mental-health issues. The complaints followed a convenient script that implies women are too weak-minded to make such decisions on their own. They insisted that prosecutors had coerced the turncoat victim to “fabricate allegations” in exchange for money and security that never came. The family cited tricks by law enforcement they claim were meant to break family bonds by using children as a carrot to get them to confess. That so many turncoats rescind their stories is the best proof yet that leaving an organized-crime syndicate is often fatal—with the exception of Giusy Pesce, who is still alive, at least for the moment.
Cerreti, shaken by what she knew in her heart was the murder of her star witness, ordered an investigation into the death, which eventually found Maria Concetta’s father and brother involved in her demise, though only on a peripheral level. In 2014, an appellate court in Reggio Calabria reduced their negligible sentences even further, dropping her father’s sentence from five years and four months to four years, and her brother’s sentence down from six years to four years and six months. Her mother’s two-year sentence was upheld.
Still, Maria Concetta’s ultimate sacrifice for the truth did not stop Cerreti from seeking out the next brave woman who could help her kneecap the ’Ndrangheta. While working with Giuseppina Pesce, she received a letter in her office from another Giuseppina who was a distant cousin of her recently deceased star witness.
Giuseppina Multari, who had been under witness protection since 2006, had sent a cryptic note of encouragement through Cerreti to her distant relative. Multari had been forced to marry Antonio Cacciola, Maria Concetta’s brother-in-law; he’d abused drugs and frequently abused her in depressive fits of rage. Her husband eventually died by suicide, though Cerreti believes he was killed for betraying his chosen wife. Giuseppina was accused by his family of instigating his depression and blamed entirely for the suicide, and her punishment was to be held captive and raped by whoever craved sex—or power—among his surviving family.
On the night her husband died, she later told investigators, her father-in-law, Salvatore, took her by the arms. “He shakes me and says if my son killed himself for you, I’ll kill you and all your family,” she said. “From that moment, the situation has become absolutely unlivable for me . . . I could not leave the house freely, only by asking permission from my in-laws or brothers-in-law, who should have accompanied me. No one spoke a word to me. I was also prevented from taking care of myself, in the sense that it was they who determined which doctor and how they should visit me.”
Her captors were mostly other women, sisters-in-law who felt no mercy or perhaps envied the fact that Giuseppina’s husband had died and thus she no longer had to suffer marital abuse.
The note she wrote to her cousin was a simple one, amounting to, “Good job! Stay strong!” and was signed “G. Multari, Witness Protection.”
Intrigued, Cerreti searched the archives to figure out more about this woman she had never met and found the records buried in layers of forgotten bureaucracy. She learned how Multari had been kept as a tortured slave by her husband’s family. Each night her captors locked her and her three daughters in their home and then kept her segregated from others by day, unable to leave the home except to take her three children to school or visit her dead husband’s grave. Their reasons for keeping her under constant guard are not entirely clear, as Cerreti is vague about why Multari was such a prized possession.
One night in 2006, Multari’s captors had gone to a party and she climbed out of a window and ran to the busy seaside, hoping she could blend in until she found someone who could help her. Her brother, also part of the group who terrorized her, tracked her down. He took her to the hospital and said his gift to her was not returning her home. But when authorities refused to help her, citing lack of proof that she was sincere about leaving, she found herself back in her captive hell. Eventually, she wrote a letter to the local DDA (Direzione Distrettuale Antimafia, or National Anti-Mafia Directorate) and left it with a teacher at her children’s school, hoping she would send it. The letter explained her situation and that of her children, giving intricate details about various ’ndrine members and the address where she could be found. The police rescued her and her kids and put them in protective custody, which soon became a new kind of prison.
No one ever came to take her testimony or to explain what was supposed to happen next, until Cerreti reached out to her six years after she had gone underground. “There was no reason this woman, whose life was such hell, was forgotten like this,” Cerreti said. “I was sure she had a credible story to tell if only because she was still waiting and had not dared to go back.”
What Giuseppina Multari told Cerreti led to the discovery of one of the biggest stolen weapons caches ever found in Europe and the arrest of sixteen bosses in Calabria, Germany, and the Netherlands under the Deus investigation who were eventually convicted of mafia collusion with the intent to infiltrate European Union–funded entities. Her testimony also led to the arrest of every single member of the Rizziconi town council for organized crime and the city government to be dissolved.
After Cerreti secured the arrests of the arms traffickers, she turned her focus on those who had kept Giuseppina and her children captive for so long. By the end of Cerreti’s investigation, the torturers were arrested and charged under ancient antislavery legislation that had not been invoked for decades. The convictions included three women: forty-three-year-old Maria Cacciola, thirty-six-year-old Jessica Oppedisano, and sixty-three-year-old Teresa D’Agostino, who are still in prison at the time of this writing.
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Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestselling novel, The Godfather, gave armchair crime buffs and mafia aficionados permission to lionize the mob and, in doing so, try to dissect what life is really like inside the deadly underworld. Puzo, who died in 1999, often insisted that his creative account of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra was “purely fictional” and that he had no help from “the inside” when telling his tales with such stunning accuracy. Most who know the story of the real-life mob have little doubt that in making such a claim he was protecting his sources and, very likely, his own skin.
Much of what he wrote about (and what he helped Francis Ford Coppola bring to life for the movie series) rings painfully true, especially his portrayal of women as conservative and somewhat transactional figures. The trilogy aptly portrayed what mafia women were allowed to do during the eras it represents, but so many film depictions that followed Coppola’s trilogy get it so wrong.
Blatant promiscuity on the part of mafia women is one of the most commonly misrepresented facets of mafia life in pop culture. Mafia wives and girlfriends tend to be portrayed as provocatively dressed and garishly unsophisticated along the lines of Michele Pfeiffer’s bizarre female figure in Married to the Mob or the “pants suits and double knits” worn by the wives and molls in Goodfellas. Badly scripted scenes in those movies evolved into Carmela Soprano’s suburban New Jersey housewife chic, complete with gaudy jewelry, garish fingernails, and spray tans. The portrayals make for great entertainment, but the real world is much different.
In reality, mafia women tend to follow styles trending in the larger culture, with one exception: when they are mourning the loss of a husband, father, or brother, their black attire—customary for mourning women even outside crime culture—is accented by red lingerie under their clothing.
