Mafia Princess (19 page)

‘Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints Farewell to pride.

All that is left is men.’

JEAN PAUL SARTRE
,

THE DEVIL AND THE GOOD LORD
, 1951

I screamed out all the pain of Frank’s death and the anguish of the weeks that followed it at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Blackpool on 21 October 2000. My waters had broken and I refused any anaesthetic when our baby started arriving. Little Frank took six hours to be delivered and we did it together on gas and air, the most natural way. I needed to feel the pain as he was born. I called him Frank for I wanted him to know about his dad, who was not perfect but had a side that was good and kind and loving.

His dad’s funeral in Leeds had been difficult. There were lots of people, some of them strangers to me, even members of his extended family. It was a day in the twilight zone.

Some folk had put flowers at the post where Frank fell when he was shot. A few of the messages talked about the 1990 American film
King of New York
in which Christopher Walken plays a big-time gangster who gets out of jail and pursues a vendetta against his criminal competition. So that’s what they thought.

With young Frank and Lara to worry about, I turned my thoughts away from the underworld power struggles in the north-west of England to my own extended family at home,
in Italy and beyond. I was the one on the outside trying to watch out for the interests of an astonishing assortment of characters and deal with the continuing Mafia machinations.

Valeria Vrba, the glamorous and determined survivor, was living in Slovakia with her daughters Etienne and Giselle, who was my sister. She’d escaped the authorities but was very much a wanted woman because, along with me, Valeria was important in the movement of our money around Europe, Holland, Switzerland, Germany and Spain. Valeria had corrupted several women in the banks in Geneva and Zurich and those women had testified against her to save themselves some years in jail.

There was a lot of money in those accounts and I would love to know who kept it. Did it go into somebody’s pocket? Wherever it went, Valeria was in the frame for laundering millions in a string of currencies.

When I talked to her from Blackpool, I advised her to get a lawyer to sort out her situation but she said it would be too expensive. Only half a dozen or so years earlier I’d have given her the money without batting an eyelid but now I simply didn’t have it. I told her she should get out of Slovakia and go to a country where she would be safe from extradition but she didn’t listen to my warning. She was sending Etienne once a year to visit her father, Mario the Sicilian, in Brazil unaware that he still wanted revenge on her and my father. He had waited and waited for the most hurtful and, for him, the most perfect time. In 2000 he found out that Etienne was flying out of Vienna Airport and that Valeria
would be there to see her off. She could have sent her brother or someone else but it was only about an hour’s drive across the border from her home and she wanted to see her daughter off safely.

She was arrested by the Austrian police acting for Interpol after Mario described her exact movements for them. Etienne flew to Brazil and has never returned. No one has heard from her or anything about her ever since. Valeria was extradited to Italy, leaving six-year-old Giselle with her grandma, just as I had had to leave Lara with my mum.

There were a few months when no one knew where Valeria was. I couldn’t get hold of her and I didn’t know what the hell had happened to her. Eventually Dad found out on the prison grapevine that they’d thrown the book at Valeria. They had it all in taped conversations between her and Swiss women bankers. She was jailed for eighteen years.

So Giselle was one of the increasing number of people I had to worry about. Mum had suffered a lot with her health and had to have heart surgery. She was still able to help me with babysitting and school runs but we were finding it a struggle to live on the little money we had coming in. I tried to get jobs, even stacking shelves in the supermarket, but with my criminal legend I never got any employment. There’s not a lot of call for Cat As.

What concerned me most was a knock on the door from the Italian authorities. Would what happened to Valeria happen to me? Would they ever extradite me? And if so, what would happen to Frank and Lara?

Nan was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2007, a life sentence that ended the one imposed by the state. She was freed under a supervision programme and now lives back on the Piazza Prealpi. Life has come full circle for her. But Grandpa Rosario is no longer around. He became so ill during the trials that he had to stop attending and he died in 1999.

As she was throughout their marriage, Nan remained the more powerful figure. Even she can’t beat cancer but she’s stared it in the eye and slowed it down, delayed the inevitable. She’s still finding ways around the system – any system they throw at her.

Uncle Guglielmo is out of jail and has a new life in Spain with his new wife and their two sons. Auntie Angela is married and has a son, and she also looks after Nan in Milan.

Dad was also released in 2007 but into even stricter supervision. Again he’s one of the most wanted men in the world – by the Mafia this time. He’s in the Italian witness protection programme. He testified at a number of trials, giving evidence for the prosecution against families just like the Di Giovine–Serraino clans. It was high risk and there has been flak from the families, especially the Calabrian clan.

When Dad got arrested, none of the family in the South helped him. They were all out making their own money and not one of them said anything to him. I believe that’s why Dad did what he did. He got so fed up with them that he made a deal to get himself an element of freedom in the witness protection system. He was helped in this by Dottore
Macri Vincenzo, who is a major player in the anti-Mafia brigade in Rome.

No one in the world knows where Dad is now. I speak to him on the phone but the sources of calls are shielded to keep him safe. He is very estranged from everything and everyone from the past. He knows so much: he’s been in the Mafia for more than half a century and dealt with underworld figures, arms dealers and major drug traffickers on a global scale. Now, he says, at last there’s a decent price on his head.

I don’t know if Nan’s release was anything to do with Dad’s arrangements with the Italian government but she still keeps in touch with the family in the South. It’s taken time but she seems to understand why Dad did what he did. But in 2009 it got a little crazy because he had to testify in a trial involving the next generation of Nan’s Calabrian family. They are still cousins and quite close. Dad’s evidence was bad for the family and they went mad. Nan was really angry with Dad and wouldn’t speak to him for a couple of months. Later, she told him: ‘I know what you’re doing, but you don’t have to get so personal.’

He didn’t want to go against the family but he had no choice. They were as much embarrassed as angered by it. It wasn’t good for their status. They’re still doing what they are doing. They’re still the Mafia. They’re still in business.

Dad has shocked a lot of people. I asked him about it towards the end of 2009 and he told me: ‘I cannot live with myself in thinking that I was part of that scum. They are all
scum. They’ve got no respect. They’ve got no sense of honour. They are no longer men of honour. I don’t remember going out and hurting old people. I don’t remember, because I never did it. Now there is just too much dirt. It’s like the lowest of the low. It’s not like old school, it’s not like it used to be.’

I know what he means. It’s these jumped-up young ones who think they can do whatever they want. It doesn’t matter what reputation anybody else has, they think they’re better. They think they know more.

And Europe is now a melting pot of gangsters, with the influx of Albanians and other nationalities, especially on the streets of Milan. They don’t have rules and they don’t have respect, as my family in Milan is constantly finding out.

Dad has done wrong in his life but things were never as bad as they are now in the 21st century when young kids are being shot in the street. We live in a world of what I call ‘plastic gangsters’. They’re not real and they don’t know what is.

Dad met many underworld figures in Europe and America. Lots of them met violent ends, including his Italian-American connection Paul Castellano, whose murder was ordered by ‘Dapper Don’ Gotti on 16 December 1985.

Dad and I have talked about a lot of things, but obviously it’s on the phone so it’s different. I can never look into his eyes and judge what he’s saying. Yet I have more of an understanding of him now, and he has of me. He’s got a lot of regrets. He used to think he could buy my affection but that always got on my nerves. All I ever wanted was his
time – but he spent his time gallivanting with women and that was his priority. Work and women. He was chasing dreams and ideas. The time he spent with me wasn’t proper time. He took me for granted. He used to spend more time with Anna Marie, the child he had with Fanny in New York when he was posing as Count Marco Carraciolo. In a strange twist of fate, in 2009 she had a DNA test and it turns out she wasn’t Dad’s daughter after all. How ironic that Dad spent more day-to-day time with her than he’d ever done with me.

He says now: ‘I regret not being with you more. I can’t go back in time, I wish I could. My biggest dream was always to make a palace for us all, to have all the family together. I just kept going to get more money to set it all up.’

There never was one big, last job. That’s all academic now.

Maybe I’ll never be able to sit down and talk to him face to face again. I never know when he might call and I have no way of contacting him. He’s very much a secret weapon.

Auntie Rita’s evidence was the fatal flick that brought down the house of cards. She left the witness protection programme in 2008. I still feel uncomfortable with it; to me what she did was the ultimate betrayal of her immediate family. I could never understand that. That was part of the life she was born into.

Just as I was.

I know terrible things have been done. I regret the fact that I have ever hurt people indirectly: the people who took the drugs and died; the guns that I sat on that may have gone
on to kill. I regret that with all my heart and I’m still paying for it now.

I don’t regret having had a certain lifestyle where I saw a lot of things and got to do a lot of things. I wouldn’t have that otherwise. I was being treated as a Mafia Princess, having money, going to buy what I wanted, when I wanted. I don’t regret that. I’ve paid for that.

I hated every minute I was in prison, even though I met some great people in there and had some experiences that made me a lot stronger. Because of that, I am the person that I am today. It’s made me more humble, more compassionate, more understanding of others. I don’t judge on first sight any more. There’s always something behind a face. You can’t tell by looking if someone’s a saint or a monster. Often, they don’t know themselves. And that’s terrifying.

‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.’

MARLON BRANDO AS DON CORLEONE
,

THE GODFATHER
, 1972

We held my beloved daughter Lara’s eighteenth birthday party at a social club near our home in Blackpool on 11 September 2009. She’s her own woman now. Reaching the age of maturity gives her the freedom to make her own choices, and her own opportunities. I believe turning eighteen is the transition to being an adult. In charge of your own life. It was for me and for my mum. We made our decisions, took our journeys.

I don’t worry about Lara falling in love with an Italian and going out to live there, as we did, because she could just as easily meet someone bad round the corner in Lancashire. You can’t think like that. She’s a strong-minded girl but she knows how life can go wrong and I think she’s smart enough not to make the mistakes I did.

Lara has been to visit her dad every year that he’s been in jail but always with my mum or Bruno’s mum. And always in prison. In August 2009 she thought she’d see her dad on the outside for the first time. Bruno was released after serving seventeen years on the arms and drugs charges. He was out, pending an appeal against that very release.

I made arrangements for Lara to go and see him and, now that he was free, to take her little brother Frank to visit too. It was all set, the flights were booked, when Bruno was re-arrested. We got the news while my sister Giselle was over visiting us from Slovakia. She’s half my age and hasn’t seen her mum since she was arrested. At least Lara saw Bruno regularly even if it was during prison visits. Sadly, they were not together on their shared birthday. They never have been.

Lara speaks and understands Italian very well but I’m only told that, for she never uses it in front of me. She’s got that silly teenage shyness about speaking a foreign language in front of me or her mates. Her dad says she chatters away perfectly well to him.

She’s got a boyfriend – he’s English. A nice lad, who’s handy at helping to put up shelves in my kitchen. He was at her party along with some other friends her age but I wanted as many family members there as possible. Frank’s folks from Leeds came over and there were my English aunties and mum, of course, chatting away. She worries more about the plot of
Coronation Street
on the telly now than the Mafia. Most of the Italian family were unable to attend Lara’s eighteenth, unavoidably detained.

Since Frank’s death I’ve only had one serious love affair and that had its complications. I bring a lot of history with me but also, for the right person, my passionate love and loyalty. Now I would have to be in a full partnership; I could no longer act to order or to please. I want to act with a man as a unit, move together with a purpose towards a future.

I legally separated from and then divorced Bruno; the paperwork was finally completed in 2000 when I got back to England, because there was no future for us. Life changed for me in many ways when I came to England; I knew I couldn’t have a gun under the tiles, or hide money any more. In Italy you could, and you could behave in a certain way. That’s how it was. I think in Italian when I speak the language, and it’s the same with English.

I have never said I was innocent because I’m not. I’m not an angel. I’m not a devil. I’m in between. I’ve done wrong, and I sat in prison for more than four years. I’ve paid for it. I didn’t in any shape or form try to get out of it, even though I was very young and very naïve when I became a Mafia Princess. It’s different now; I’m more aware of what’s going on in my surroundings.

I am loyal literally to the death. I’m like that with my friends. People don’t stick to their values or their principles. Or to their loyalty. I do. This is what has got me into trouble – the loyalty I have felt towards my own blood. People that I cared about and loved. It’s got me into trouble because it’s in my blood, part of what and who I am.

I want a life of stability and happiness now. There will always be stress – you can’t eradicate the past – but let’s hope it will continue to be about who’s taking the cat to the vet for his shots. Or if Lara will catch the last bus. Or is the new
Terminator
movie going to spook little Frank, who is not quite nine years old? He likes all these films and video war games. I watch him blasting away and think of his dad.

After one games session he asked me, ‘How do you get killed with one bullet?’

His dad was. Killed with one bullet. Which is something else I am going to have to go into with him. My son is growing up and one day he will want to know what happened. I wouldn’t want him to take it into his own hands to get revenge, maybe bring on a vendetta. I’m worried that when he’s eighteen or nineteen years old, more full of more testosterone than thought, he might go looking for his dad’s killer. And because of that horror scenario, I have always quietly kept in touch with people who might know the answers. One man whom I have respect for told me not to be concerned.

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

There had been a problem over a rejected business offer, a moneymaking proposal that had been turned down. It led to upset and I was told that the lad who was with Frank the night he died is now long gone.

I didn’t inquire further.

I learned at my nan’s knee not to ask too many questions.