Dark world of mafia wives
Lea Garofalo was brutally murdered by her husband and his fellow gangsters. Her crime? Going against the Italian mob’s code of silence. Her death shone a spotlight on the cut-throat activities of the mafia
I’D TRIED hard not to meet the mafia. My idea was to drive into Pagliarelle, a tiny village at the end of a high mountain valley in the foot of Italy, take a tour of where one of the best-known mafia wives, Lea Garofalo, and her husband and clan boss, Carlo Cosco, once lived, then leave. Garofalo was one of a handful of Calabrian mafia insiders to turn state’s evidence, and almost the first to reveal the staggering reach and wealth of the world’s most powerful organised crime outfit. In revenge Cosco and four others murdered her and dumped her body in November 2009.
This I knew from thousands of pages of testimony I’d gathered for a book I was writing about the Calabrian mafia – the ’Ndrangheta – and the three mafia wives and mothers (including Garofalo) who’d tried to take it down.
How had the ’Ndrangheta become so successful? Why had so few people ever heard of them? And why had some of their own women tried to destroy them? I first heard about the women rebels of the mafia in 2015 during a trip to Italy, investigating the involvement of organised crime groups in migrant smuggling.
The story would take me across Europe over the next two and a half years. One of my most important stops was the mafia stronghold where Garofalo and Cosco were born. I knew I wouldn’t be welcome. Thirty-five people had been killed in mafia feuds in Pagliarelle and the nearby town of Policastro since the late 1970s, including Garofalo’s father, brother and uncle.
This endless cycle of secrecy and revenge – omertà (the code of silence) and vendetta – meant that turning up and trying to interview a mafioso would be foolhardy and probably futile. So I was careful, taking time to stop off in Policastro to interview the mayor about Calabria’s unique agriculture and history, visiting the town’s grey-stone piazzas and thousand-year-old churches with the chief of police and, almost as an aside, asking him to phone ahead and ask Pagliarelle’s lone policeman if he would quietly accompany me to Garofalo’s small apartment.
After taking a few descriptive notes there I was to jump in the car and drive back to Rome, seven hours away. My plan fell apart almost immediately. As my interpreter, Giuliana, and I pulled into a side street, a car closed in behind us. I walked over to it. A plump man in jeans and a T-shirt leant out of his window and said, “I’ve told everyone you’re coming.”
This, I gathered, was my policeman. “Really?” I replied. ‘Because we’d hoped . . .”
“You must meet them. Out of respect. Follow me to the piazza,” he instructed.
I tailed the officer up a steep hill that led to a small square. On one side was a drinking fountain. On the other a tobacconist where a small group of young men
‘They can order a murder just by looking at someone from the dock in court'
were standing around their scooters, drinking coffee, watching us intently.
Almost immediately a white Fiat arrived. A woman emerged and strode across the square. She had long, black hair and wore a black trouser suit and large dark sunglasses. The policeman introduced her as Lea’s sister. “This is Marisa Garofalo,” he said. “And that is Lea’s old studio,” Marisa said, pointing to a first-floor window with bright bubblegum-pink shutters.
“Your sister’s death made her an antimafia icon,” I said, pulling out my notebook. “How is the campaign?”
“Things are moving,” Marisa replied. “Until recently no one around here spoke about Lea’s death. But I took her story all over Italy and we even had a gathering here. People responded well. It’s a beginning.”
“Do you worry about your own safety?” I asked. Marisa shook her head. “Lea was always rebellious,” she said. “She wanted her freedom. But it made trouble inside the family. For those who believe in the ’Ndrangheta, this choice [to talk] is considered eccentric and very serious. Often, you pay with your life.”
I tried to read Marisa’s expression behind her sunglasses. Like her younger sister she’d been born into the ’Ndrangheta. After Lea was killed, she’d set up and led an anti-mafia campaign in her name. Yet now she seemed to be saying she’d never have fought the ’Ndrangheta like her sister, and perhaps even that she regretted any of it had ever happened. I was confused .“Were you close to Lea ?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” Marisa said sharply, no emotion in her voice. Then she held up her phone, took my picture, and Giuliana’s. After that, she instructed us to write down our names in her diary in full, then she told us she would be immediately escorting us out of Pagliarelle and on to the main road.
A week later my picture appeared in two local newspapers next to reports about the foreign reporter travelling around Calabria that detailed precisely who I was, where I’d been and who I’d met. I decided not to go back.
PAINTINGS of bulls discovered in caves in the mountains of Calabria date back to 12 000 BC, according to archaeologists. By 530 BC, Pythagoras was teaching mathematics in Crotone on the estuary below Pagliarelle, while nearby the citizens of Sybaris were drinking wine piped to their homes through a network of terracotta “vinoducts”.
In the two millennia since, however, southern Italy’s story has been one of conquest and decline – when the Renaissance and Enlightenment swept the north, they missed much of the south. In 1861 the kingdom of Italy was formed, joining the cultured and prosperous north with the illiterate and feudal south, but the marriage has proved difficult.
While northerners thrived in business and banking, the south remained a dry and torpid land of small-boat fishermen and shepherds. All three of Italy’s big mafias – Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples and the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria – were founded in the mid- to late-19th century on this great lie of a united Italy.
Styling themselves as righteous south- erners resisting a colonising north, they started as brigands and highwaymen, expanded into protection rackets and kidnappings, and graduated to corruption, drug smuggling, arms dealing and money laundering. But whereas the Sicilians went to war with each other and the state in the 1970s and ’80s – a decade and a half of assassinations and bombings that resulted in 1700 deaths–and the Neapolitans were prone to street shootouts and flashy parties, the ’Ndrangheta preferred quiet sophistication.
“Mafiosi very rarely make a direct threat,” says anti-mafia prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti, who persuaded the other two women besides Garofalo to testify against the Calabrian mafia. In a series of interviews that lasted seven hours, she explained the style of their threats: “They send messages with a double meaning. Sometimes the message is in a mere gesture. They can order a murder just by looking at someone from the dock in court.” On one of my last trips to Calabria, Cerreti’s fellow prosecutor, Giuseppe Lombardo, told me the ’Ndrangheta was so good at money laundering, other organised-crime syndicates around the world paid it to do the same with their fortunes – meaning the Calabrians managed not billions but trillions of dollars. Unwittingly, countless people around the world lived in their buildings, worked in their companies, shopped in their stores, ate in their restaurants and elected the politicians they funded.
Lombardo produced evidence to show that since the 1980s the ’Ndrangheta’s moneymen had blackmailed at least two foreign governments into allowing the organisation to operate freely on their territory, by buying up their debt and threatening to cause a default by dumping it.
In the 21st century no other organised crime outfit in the world has had such influence over so many lives. Watching the ’Ndrangheta’s top boss, Domenico Oppedisano, drive his lemons and olives to market in a three-wheeler before he was arrested in 2010 (and later convicted for his role in the crime syndicate), no outsider would ever have suspected who he was. It’s hard to marry that sophisticated intimidation with an organisation run by men who still dressed as farmers.
How was it possible for the ’Ndrangheta
to grow so big so quietly? Two-and-a-half years of reading through 2 000-page accounts of decades-long investigations and interviewing prosecutors, policemen, lawyers and academics would produce a single answer: omertà. The Calabrians melted into their landscape. Away from the cities, they spoke not Italian but Grecanico, a dialect dating back to the 11th century.
Meanwhile, inside the community, indoctrination began at birth. Newborn babies were presented with a key – symbolising the state – and a knife, representing the ’Ndrangheta: their mothers nudged them into choosing the blade. At 18, boys were initiated at candlelit rituals at which they stood inside a horseshoe of men, cut their finger with a knife and dripped blood over a picture of St Michael the Archangel, while vowing lifelong allegiance.
Those I spoke to said that young followers of a slain boss have been observed rushing to his corpse to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood and press it to their lips, presumably an act of loyalty or one linked to the Catholic communion.
The ’Ndrangheta’s blood cult made the historians I spoke to laugh. John Dickie, professor of Italian studies at University College, London, and author of several books on the mafia, likens its “solemn ravings” to a scout ceremony that crossed Lords of the Flies with Monty Python.
But inside the closed world of the ’Ndrangheta, its myths and legends earned it the fidelity of its members, the fear of ordinary Calabrians and, as a result, the thick cloak of opacity that enabled it to hide from the world. This was how, almost without anyone noticing, a small group of farmers from the wild hills of southern Italy became the century’s mightiest gangsters.
“They completely control their territory and their government,” says Michele Prestipino, one of Italy’s senior anti-mafia prosecutors. “People who live there accept that to get something they have to knock on the door of the mafia and that there’s no future other than what the mafia sees.”
LEA Garofalo was born into ’ Ndrangheta aristocracy – then her father was assassinated in a mafia feud in December 1974 when she was eight months old. She eloped to Milan with Carlo Cosco at 16, hoping to escape her family, only to discover Cosco was smuggling cocaine.
Garofalo fell into a depression and even contemplated suicide, says her lawyer, Enza Rando. But after she gave birth to her daughter Denise in December 1991 she changed, according to Rando. “Lea fell in love all over again. Denise gave Lea a reason to live.”
Garofalo is known to have given Cosco a series of ultimatums to leave the
‘Lea never received the help she needed. She had to make her own way'
’Ndrangheta, but he refused. Just after midnight on 17 May 1995, Garofalo was sleeping in bed with Denise in their Milan apartment when she heard several shots ring out in the courtyard below. When she opened the door she could see the body of a rival gangster, Antonio Comberiati, lying on the ground.
According to Garofalo’s testimony after 20 minutes Cosco’s brother Giuseppe appeared at her door, exhilarated. “He’s dead,” Giuseppe said. “The bastard just wouldn’t die. Like he had the devil in him or something.” He giggled. Cosco arrived seconds later. “Where were you?” Garofalo asked. “Karaoke,” Cosco replied. “Liar,” she shot back. Cosco laughed. “Well, then, I’ve been over at the shop getting a sandwich.”
Garofalo later told the police she surmised that her husband had stood watch while his brother shot Comberiati, then the two men had dumped the gun in the street. (No one was ever convicted of the murder.) For Garofalo, something died that night. She’d tried to escape once before. For Denise’s sake, she had to try again. She made a statement to the police and Cosco was arrested.
Visiting him in jail, she gave him one last chance. “I want to stay with you,” she told him, “but on one condition: you collaborate with the carabinieri [police] and denounce the ’Ndrangheta. When you come out of jail we can start a new life. Or you continue this life and you will never see me or Denise again.”
Cosco leapt over the screen between them and grabbed his wife by the throat before the prison guards pulled him off. From that day, said Rando, Garofalo knew she was living under “a death sentence”.
She and Denise spent six years on the run, hiding out in small towns across northern Italy. In 2002, after Cosco’s men caught up with them, she testified a second time and entered witness protection. In her evidence Garofalo described the life of a ’Ndrangheta woman as ruled by a murderous misogyny.
“You don’t live,” she said. Fathers married off daughters at 13 in matches arranged between clans. Beatings were routine. Infidelity was punished by execution, often by forcing the adulterer to drink hydrochloric acid.
“You just survive in some way. You dream about something – anything – because nothing’s worse than that life.”
Garofalo said she was testifying because she wanted a better life for herself and her daughter. But she hadn’t reckoned on the sexism inside the Italian judiciary. Italy’s prosecutors would later defend their decision to eject mother and daughter from state protection in 2006, saying they couldn’t corroborate Garofalo’s evidence. But the truth, said Rando, was that Italy’s prosecutors, mostly men, could be as chauvinist as the ’Ndrangheta. Many believed a woman’s evidence could never be valuable.
“The state just didn’t understand how to make witness protection work, especially for a woman. Lea never received the help she needed. She had to make her own way,” Rando says.
By 2009, exhausted and out of money, Garofalo saw little choice than to try to reconcile with Cosco, who was by then out of prison. He appeared to agree, renting his wife and daughter an apartment. When he proposed a short break in Milan that November Garofalo consented, hoping to persuade him to pay for Denise to go to university. On the way to Milan, Rando met Garofalo.
“I told her, ‘It’s a bad idea. Carlo is trying to kill you.’ ” But without state support or a job, Garofalo said she had no option. From the train to Milan, she texted Rando. “Denise and I have to try to make a life for ourselves,” she wrote. “God bless us.”
“That was the last I heard from her,” Rando says.
Eleven months after Garofalo disappeared in Milan, Cosco and five accomplices were charged with murdering her at an apartment in Milan, then driving her body out of the city and dissolving it in acid. When the trial opened in July 2011 Denise’s decision to testify against her father attracted widespread interest.
In her statements to the prosecutors and at her father’s trial she described how for months after her mother’s death she lived with her father and his family in Pagliarelle.
“I ate with these people,” she said. “I worked in their pizzeria. I went on holiday with them. I played with their children. Even when I knew what they’d done. I had to be so careful. They were saying my mother was alive even after I hadn’t seen her for more than a year. I just made out like I didn’t know. I ignored everything. I pretended nothing had happened. But I knew.”
IN MARCH 2012 Cosco and five others were convicted of Garofalo’s murder (including his brother, Giuseppe, though he was later acquitted on appeal). One of the six later confessed to burning Garofalo’s body in a warehouse rather than dissolving her body in acid; shown to the site forensics teams found 2 812 fragments of her body.
In 2013, four years after Garofalo disappeared, Denise led thousands of mourners in a funeral in Milan; though she now lives under witness protection. The same year, using evidence given by Garofalo 11 years earlier, 17 men were arrested from in and around Pagliarelle and charged with seven murders, possessing illegal weapons and drug dealing.
By then Calabria’s prosecutors were also pursuing hundreds of cases against the ’Ndrangheta, some of them using her testimony, that would lead to 2 300 arrests and the confiscation of €2 billion (then R23,6 billion). Disbelieved in life, Lea was finally being vindicated in death.