Mafia Princess. Marisa Merico
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wouldn’t just be sauces; she would cook all sorts of dishes, including veal, chicken, fish, even tripe. She had a freezer full of meat, polythene bags stuffed with cash hidden among the ice cubes, and boxes and boxes of nicked gear in her larders. She was a regular Delia Smith, but with a .38 revolver in the spice cupboard and a couple of other handguns in the dried pasta. Instead of shopping lists, she would have notebook catalogues of dubious contacts for every possible chore, surrounded by cans of chopped tomatoes. Cooking was her therapy. She never went out. She never did anything. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink. Her interests were totally family and business, the Calabrian way. And I adored her. She always had time for me no matter what dramas were going on – and being an Italian household everybody knew about them. You heard them! Very loudly. But even the noise was a comfort to me. It meant that the family were all around and I was safe. It was my warm blanket.
Nan would cook lunch for whoever was there and Mum would be in charge of supper, when there were always at least twenty to feed. Mum felt she was beginning to belong. Her spoken Italian was good but bastardised, using the family dialect, a magicking of Calabrian and Sicilian; she so enchanted the market stallholders when she was out shopping that they called her ‘the blonde Sicilian’.
But she was aware she wasn’t having the same effect on Dad. She’d prayed she would feel the same heart-stopping emotions she had felt for Alessandro. That it would work out between her and Dad. That he would grow out of being a jack-the-lad driven by his lust for new excitement, for girls and fast cars. What she didn’t and couldn’t fully understand at first is what it truly meant to have the blood of the Serraino–Di Giovine family surging through him.
Her education didn’t take too long. There was little to do most evenings, after the cooking and the washing up, but talk. And, more importantly, listen. She never heard the words Mafia or ’Ndrangheta for they were never spoken. She realised there was a lot of ducking and diving going on, but if Emilio was making money dealing in dodgy cigarettes it didn’t seem too serious to her. On the crime scale she thought it was a bit like bringing in too much duty free. Certainly, that’s how the family’s ever-growing mass smuggling operation was presented to her. And Mum heard what she wanted to hear. She was wise to do that for she was about to be recruited by the ’Ndrangheta.
Dad’s smuggling crews criss-crossing in and out of Switzerland at the Italian border town of Lago di Lugano were being increasingly hassled at the checkpoints. He decided to ‘disguise’ the trips as sightseeing and romantic days out and sent drivers across accompanied by women. Dad began taking Mum on his own runs. It worked: the police pressure eased, and the volume of cigarettes being brought back to Nan’s doubled within a few weeks.
Dad tried not to let Mum in on the extent of the family operations. It was a feeble effort. She saw him carrying a gun. She saw the police arrive threateningly and leave happy. If she did question any of the bewildering events the answer was always: ‘There’s no need to worry or get involved, so don’t.’
Her big question – to herself – was when our family was going to get its own home. So, in her protective way, she was just happy Emilio was out earning some money, which she hoped would bankroll an escape from the shoebox life at Nan’s. That we would be a family unit, not part of a daily and increasingly crazy cavalcade at Nan’s. She wanted to raise me in Italy where she had made friends.
Vital to that dream of domestic bliss was her relationship with Dad. She couldn’t ignore her inner self which told her she didn’t truly love him; they were brought together by circumstances. Yet falling pregnant was a big deal and, rebound guy or no rebound guy, the rules were you stayed together and tried to make it work. Well, that was how she saw it.
After the long kitchen table drama when I was born and she held me in her arms, her emotions, her heart and mothering instincts, took over. Her life purpose was now to care for me and she didn’t want to do it as a single mum. She wanted me to have a mum and dad.
For Dad, his only concern then was business, which was booming and expanding into even more dangerous territory. The Turkish gangs running drugs throughout Milan were hiring ‘money collectors’, teams of hard men to bring in the payments. Dad started making tidy sums from this but saw the dealers themselves getting lavish payoffs of more than £10,000 a time, which was enticing. He was still indulging in his favourite pastimes, stealing cars and dating girls. When the girls met him he always had a polished Porsche, a red Ferrari – he likes red – or a new Alfa Romeo. A racing driver? It didn’t look or sound to the girls like the buckets of bullshit it really was.
Mum was just keeping her head above it all. Dad was gone a lot of the time and she was pretty sure he was having affairs but she couldn’t prove it. She was lucky to be single-minded and determined, for the toll on her was incessant; flirting with postnatal depression and not knowing what shocks or surprises would present themselves each day – and there were usually one or two – she remained strong.
Mum desperately wanted her own space, and Dad finally got us out of Nan’s and into a small rented apartment. It wasn’t grand but it was our home and an escape from the bedlam of Nan’s house, where there was another baby, Auntie Angela, who was only a month older than me, and the raging testosterone in the house with all my uncles. They were growing up, doing their own thing, having their own bit of business here and there. There was fighting between them but nobody would dare fight with them. It was ‘I hate you, but nobody else can hate you.’ If any harm came to one of them, then everybody would band together. It was like a circus with lots of zany characters and hoops being jumped through. Nan was the ringmaster in a sauce-stained apron. Some people would shrink back when she shouted but I knew she only raised her voice to those she loved. If she shouted at you, everything was OK. Silence wasn’t golden, not at all.
I was now very much part of it, by blood, and that’s a lifetime bond. And because of me, so was Mum. But for much of the time it was the life of a single mum. She didn’t know what Dad was doing, where he was going or who he was seeing from one day to the next. He was all over the place with his smugglers. The consignments grew and grew. But the bigger they were, the bigger the problem of moving them into the country.
Mum had been to England to show me off to her parents and returned with a present, an elaborate carrycot with lots of side pockets for nappies and all the other baby paraphernalia. When Dad examined it, he noticed there was also a slot underneath where he could hide dozens of cartons of cigarettes. Instead of a traditional family lunch, he began taking us out in the grey Fiat 500 for a 45-minute drive to Lake Como, where we would collect the cigarettes and then return for tea with some of the contraband concealed in the car and me lying in my cot on the rest of it. Dad was so pleased with this scheme, he took photographs of me lying on a Marlboro mattress. There’s one picture where I have a cigarette on my lips, the Marlboro baby. Little did he know that the police would come upon these pictures one day in the future.
Mum and Dad’s life appeared to settle, but there’s no smoke without fire. He was still vanishing without warning and leaving no message telling where he was. Business. Always business. But he was around enough for Mum to get pregnant again. An accident. And a tragic one in so many ways.
Dad continued fooling around. He was still only twenty-one years old when he got involved with a blonde English dancer called Melanie Taylor, who was touring with a cabaret show. She thought she was in love with him. She was only one of the girls he’d been seeing but it had been going on for some time. Mum, heavily pregnant, heard his brothers talking about the relationship. Finally, she lost it. She marched off to the bar where the dancing girls went in the evening. She burst in, telling them to let this slag Melanie know that the guy she was screwing was her husband and she was expecting another baby with him.
When word got back to Dad about what had happened, he calmly walked into the bar and told Melanie and her friends that Mum was mad. He was cold and calculating and claimed she was pregnant by someone else and he was leaving her over it. Everyone believed what they wanted to believe.
Mum had vented much of the rage from her system, and she was mentally and physically tired and weary of it all, so she got on with having her second baby. She knew it was going to be another little girl. Dad didn’t bother to turn up for the birth, which this time, at Mum’s insistence,