The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia. Alex Perry
fell silent. Denise said nothing.
You know what your mother’s like, said Carlo. There’s nothing anyone can do.
Carefully, Denise asked her father, ‘Where is my mother now?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Carlo.
Denise thought her father was a terrible liar. ‘I didn’t believe him for a nanosecond,’ she said. ‘Not one word.’ All his kindness over the last few days, all the opening doors, fetching coats and driving them around – his whole Milanese bella figura act – all of it was gone. Carlo appeared to have regressed. He seemed raw, almost primal. He wouldn’t even look at her. And suddenly Denise understood. The dinner with her cousins. The calls to Lea that wouldn’t go through. The endless hanging around. The urgent discussion between the men in the apartment opposite. Lea had been right all along. Denise, who had begged her mother to let them go to Milan, had been catastrophically wrong. ‘I knew,’ said Denise. ‘I knew immediately.’
Denise understood two more things. First: it was already too late. Denise hadn’t spoken to her mother for three and a half hours. Lea never turned off her phone for that long and certainly not before telling Denise. It’s done, thought Denise. He’s already had time.
Second: confronting her father would be suicide. If she was to survive, in that moment she had to accept Lea’s fate and fix it in her mind not as possible or reversible but as certain and final. At the same time, she had to convince her father that she had no idea about what had happened, when in reality she had no doubt at all. ‘I understood there was very little I could do for my mother now,’ said Denise. ‘But I couldn’t let him understand me.’ Inwardly, Denise forced her mind into a tight, past-tense dead end. ‘They’ve done what they had to do,’ she told herself. ‘This was how it was always going to end. This was inevitable.’ Outwardly, she played herself as she might have been a few minutes earlier: a worried daughter looking for her missing mother. The speed of events helped. It was absurd, even unreal, how in a moment Denise had lost her mother, her best friend and the only person who had ever truly known her. She didn’t have to pretend to be struggling to catch up. She even had the feeling that if she willed it hard enough, she might bring Lea back to life.
It was in this state, with Carlo in a daze and Denise acting like there was still hope in the world, that father and daughter drove all over Milan. ‘We went to all the places we had been,’ said Denise. ‘Where we’d had a drink, where we’d eaten pizza, the hotel where we had stayed, over to Sempione Park. We went to a local café, a shopping centre, the McDonald’s where we had lunch and the train station, where my father bought two tickets for my mother and me. We went all over the city. I was phoning and texting my mother all the time. And of course, we found nothing and nobody.’
Around midnight, just after the train to Calabria had departed, Denise’s phone rang. Denise was startled to read the word ‘mama’ on the screen. But the voice on the other end belonged to her Aunt Marisa, Lea’s sister in Pagliarelle, and Denise remembered that she had borrowed her cousin’s phone before leaving for Milan.
Gathering herself, Denise told Marisa that Lea was nowhere to be found and that they had just missed their train back to Calabria. ‘Have you heard from her?’ Denise asked her aunt. ‘Did she call you?’
Aunt Marisa replied she had had a missed call from Lea sometime after 6.30 p.m. but hadn’t been able to reach her since. Marisa was calling to check that everything was all right. Denise replied that Lea’s phone had been dead all night.
‘They made her disappear,’ Marisa told Denise, just like that, with Carlo sitting right next to Denise in the car.
‘She was so matter-of-fact,’ Denise said. ‘Like she assumed we all expected it. Like we all felt the same.’
Denise and Carlo kept driving around Milan until 1.30 a.m. Finally, Denise said there was nowhere else to look and they should file a report with the police. Carlo drove her to a carabinieri station. The officer told Denise she had to wait forty-eight hours to make out a missing person’s report. With Carlo there, Denise couldn’t tell the officer that she and Lea had hidden for years from the man standing next to her, so she thanked the officer and they returned to Renata’s, where her aunt opened the door half-asleep in her dressing gown.
Renata was surprised to hear Lea was even in town. ‘We came up here together,’ Denise explained. ‘We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to cause any trouble.’ The three of them stood in the doorway for a second. Denise found herself looking at her father’s clothes. He’d had them on all evening. It had been in that jacket, thought Denise. That shirt. Those shoes.
Carlo broke the silence by saying he would keep looking for Lea a little while longer and headed back to his car. Renata said Denise could sleep in Andrea’s room. To reach it, Denise had to walk through Renata’s and Giuseppe’s bedroom. ‘I could see Giuseppe wasn’t there,’ she said later. ‘And I ignored it. I ignored everything for a year. I pretended nothing had happened. I ate with these people. I worked in their pizzeria. I went on holiday with them. I played with their children. Even when I knew what they had done. I had to be so careful with what I said. 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. But I knew.’
In Calabria, Lea Garofalo’s disappearance needed no explanation. The mafia even had a term for people who, one day, just vanished: lupara bianca (‘white shotgun’), a killing which left no corpse, seen by no one. In Pagliarelle, the remote mountain village on the arch of Italy’s foot where Lea and Carlo were born, people knew never to speak Lea’s name again.
They wouldn’t be able to forget her entirely. Lea’s modest first-floor studio, its shutters and drainpipes painted bubblegum pink, was only yards from the main piazza. But the four hundred villagers of Pagliarelle had learned long ago to live with their ghosts. In three decades, thirty-five men and women had been murdered in mafia vendettas in Pagliarelle and the nearby town of Petilia Policastro, including Lea’s father Antonio, her uncle Giulio and her brother Floriano. In such a place, in such a family, Lea’s disappearance could seem inevitable, even a kind of resolution. Years later, her sister Marisa would look up at Lea’s first-floor window from the street below and say: ‘Lea wanted freedom. She never bowed her head. But for people who follow the ’Ndrangheta, this choice is considered very eccentric. Very serious. You want to be free? You pay with your life.’ Really, Marisa was saying, there was nothing anyone could do.1
Alessandra Cerreti knew many of her colleagues shared that view. When she arrived in Calabria from Milan seven months earlier as the province’s newest magistrate, she had been struck by how many Calabrians still accepted the ’Ndrangheta as an immutable fact of life. Outside southern Italy, the mafia was regarded as a movie or a novel, an entertaining, even glamorous legend that might once have held some historic truth but which, in a time of more sophisticated concerns such as financial crises or climate change or terrorism, felt like a fable from a bygone era. Not so in Calabria. Like their more famous cousins in Sicily and Naples, the ’Ndrangheta had been founded in the mid to late nineteenth century. But while the Sicilians, in particular, had seen their power steadily eroded by a state crackdown and popular resistance, the ’Ndrangheta had grown ever stronger. The organisation was still run by its original founders, 141 ancient shepherding and orange-farming families who ruled the isolated valleys and hill towns of Calabria. Its foot soldiers were also still quietly extorting billions of euros a year from Calabria’s shopkeepers, restaurant owners and gelato makers – and murdering the occasional hard-headed carabinieri or judge or politician who stood in their way. What had transformed the ’Ndrangheta, however, was a new internationalism. It now smuggled 70 to 80 per cent of the cocaine and heroin in Europe. It plundered the Italian state and the European Union for tens of billions more. It brokered illegal arms deals to criminals, rebels