Mafia Princess. Marisa Merico
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pay her attention.
Some confused and irate husbands might make idle threats if any other man got close to their wife, estranged or not, but with Dad it would have been action not threats. With him so close by, how could Mum ever find happiness again? What man would want to be with her and play surrogate daddy to his little girl when he knew Dad was around the corner? One guy, Gianni, decided he couldn’t live with the risk of reprisals for getting close to Mum and me, and he broke off their relationship.
Mum did see other people, including one guy who was a friend of the family so they had to keep him all hush-hush from Dad. One night he stayed over at the Mussolini flat with its one big room with one big bed. Mum slept on one side, I slept in the middle, and this guy was on the other side. I was seven years old and slept in pyjamas. I didn’t have any underwear on. I woke up in the middle of the night and this guy’s hand was between my legs, on me. He wasn’t messing. It was just there. Plonked on it. What could have happened if I hadn’t woken up? I was lucky he didn’t do anything more.
I pushed his hand away and cuddled up to Mum. I never told anybody. What if I had mentioned it to Nan or my dad? Well, Mum might not be alive. I’m not kidding when I say that. Dad would have taken me from her, chopped the guy’s hands off and killed him.
I can’t condemn Mum. She only wanted some personal happiness, as did Dad, but both in their own ways. Yet Dad had changed. Breaking his own rules about business and pleasure, for that’s all that women had meant before, he took Adele along to his meetings. One evening, on 2 October 1977, he got a call about a heroin shipment worth around £50,000 to the family; nothing to be concerned about, a simple distribution deal. He arranged to meet the contact man, Vittorio Bosisio, at a local coffee shop to make the arrangements for the next day’s delivery.
Unknown to Dad, Vittorio Bosisio was a dead man walking. He had run up hard against a brutal, no-nonsense Yugoslav called Mimmo Pompeo who carried machine pistols like cowboy six-guns. Bosisio hadn’t paid off on a drug shipment and Pompeo issued an order to take him out. But Vittorio Bosisio, hard-faced and streetwise, was crafty and had kept himself alive for three months. Now he needed money, needed a deal. And someone tipped off the Slav where he’d be that evening at 9 p.m.
No one knew that Dad and Adele would be there too. They and Bosisio ordered three double espressos, water and a biscotti each on the side, and were talking quietly when the first spray of automatic fire riddled the windows. The Slavs were determined Bosisio would die. There were eight gunmen firing from behind a line of parked cars. A thunderous rat-a-tat sounded as bullets howled into the cafe. Vittorio Bosisio took the full blast of the assault and his body was punctured from head to toe.
Adele tried to escape by running out of the front door but she rushed headlong into the guns. She was shot in the head, killed instantly, spilling on to the pavement. She’d just turned seventeen years old and was three months pregnant.
Dad acted instinctively, turning his body and throwing his hands up in front of himself, trying to block the gunfire. A barrage of bullets caught him in the arms and legs. The blood spurted and he collapsed onto the tiled floor in a coma, near death.
When the police teams arrived, they arrested him.
‘In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.’
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Dad woke up with flowers and a detective by the side of his hospital bed. The investigatore di polizia was there to see that no harm came to him. The flowers were from Mimmo Pompeo, who was concerned about his own protection since he had ordered the shooting. Adele’s death and Dad’s almost-fatal injuries were collateral damage. He and young Adele were not meant to have been there. The floral arrangement was a message of apology.
Sorry for killing your pregnant girlfriend.
Sorry for shooting you full of holes.
And, probably, sorry for not finishing you off. Which would have happened if not for emergency surgery and clever doctors.
The police didn’t have to think like Sherlock Holmes to realise that, when he fully recovered, a bunch of roses wasn’t going to be enough to calm Dad down – he wanted revenge. Vendetta? He wanted a massacre. Adele was the love of dad’s life. He was devastated by her violent death.
On the front pages were photographs of her blood-soaked body splayed across the ground, a pregnant, teenage victim of mobster gunplay in central Milan, and it made provocative and controversial news. It sparked heavyweight political pressure from Rome. This was a national scandal. Something had to be done, lessons learned, the usual useless political claptrap.
Still, with Rome on their backs, the authorities in Milan were determined to prevent open warfare between the Yugoslavs and the Di Giovines. They wanted no more bodies on the streets, no further voter-upsetting mob mayhem in the newspapers.
They’d arrested Dad in the aftermath of the killings and now they charged him with a string of old robberies and burglaries. They dug up anything they could from the unsolved files to convict him, to stop revenge shootings by getting ‘Lupin’ off the street. They had him bang to rights on the robbery of furs and artwork worth several hundred thousand pounds from Countess Marzotto Trissino’s villa near Verona. He wasn’t happy about that. Unknown to Dad, his brother Francesco had photographed the proceeds of their burglary and sent the snaps to the Countess demanding a ransom. That wasn’t smart, and the enraged Countess immediately blew the whistle. Dad and Francesco were identified as thieves, so there was one genuine problem in the long but generally token charge list waiting when he was carried into court on a stretcher and laid out next to the dock.
I was seven years old, but that moment is a locked memory card. It was scary for me at the back of the courtroom where I sat with Nan. I kept grabbing her hand. She kept telling me quietly not to worry, not to fuss.
Dad had a beard and long hair and was on a stretcher wearing a white gown covering his bullet-punctured body. It was the first time I had seen him since the shooting.
He looked like Jesus. Appropriately, for the plan was to crucify him.
He was so red-eyed and pale and lost-looking, I wanted to jump over the wooden railings and get to him. I just wanted to hold on to my dad. I never wanted to lose him. It was then, at that moment, when I was seven years old, that a lifetime love, a precious bond, was forged. There was a strange, psychic thing. He hadn’t made eye contact with me up to that point, but then, as my emotions were boiling over, he looked straight at me. While the judge was sentencing him to return to San Vittore prison for a year, Dad smiled and blew me a kiss.
As he was stretchered from the courtroom by two armed guards, he craned his neck and gave me another smile, blew a second kiss and mouthed: ‘Spiacente [sorry].’
I was no longer just his little princess. I was his Mafia Princess. I would do anything for him.
Nan murmured to me: ‘Don’t worry.’
She could afford to be relaxed. She knew there wasn’t going to be too much hardship. She had made arrangements for Dad to have his favourite foods in jail and any wine he wanted. He’d also have drugs and cigarettes, but not for his own use – he never touched them. The cigarettes were the pennies and pounds of prison, dope of any kind the top currency, to barter and bribe.
Of course, I did worry. Mum was not there with the rest of the family for the court case. She’d already decided she’d had enough of our life in Milan. While Dad was locked up in San Vittore we travelled to Blackpool and stayed with her mum and dad and my auntie Jill. We hung on longer than our usual trips because Mum wanted to see how I would take to life in the UK, but I got physically ill because I was so desperately homesick for Italy, for the family.
When Dad got out of jail in November 1978, it wasn’t a game of Happy Families. I hardly saw him and never knew when I would again. He was totally single-minded