Marisa Merico - Mafia Princess

Still, he didn’t realise that getting involved with Maria Serraino could get him killed. Just for spinning her a line.

There was no way Nan could take a prison guard home to meet the family. It would be like bringing home the cops. She’d have been disowned and Grandpa would certainly have fallen off a cliff.

Nan found a way. She offered to do the washing for the prison guards in return for a little money. It was an excuse to keep visiting the prison after her father was freed. And Rosario Di Giovine was a quick learner in the ways of Calabria. They kept their affair secret and later my grandpa quietly left the prison service and avoided the cafés and bars the other officers went to. His time there didn’t even stay on his CV. It was as if it had never been. Instead, he became a truck driver, a very useful skill in the Serraino family.

Rosario had a way with him but his charm was tested as Nan’s father and brothers watched closely. In those days you weren’t ever left alone with a man. You had to have an escort. If you went out for an ice cream you had to have a chaperone. That’s how it worked. And it worked double for newcomers like Grandpa. He could feel the eyes on him. But true love always…

As a young couple time dragged for them, so before long they’d run off together to another village in the mountains. The family realised what had been going on and, sure enough, Nan was pregnant.

The atmosphere was difficult, with tension and violent arguments between Grandpa and Nan’s brothers, but circumstances dominated everything. They married and my dad, Emilio, was born twenty days before Christmas in 1949. The Serraino–Di Giovine dynasty had begun and so had the baby production line. While Grandpa became a trusted lieutenant and started driving contraband for the family, Nan began giving birth.

In those tough post-war years, even with all the ducking and diving, the thieving and smuggling, it was an almighty struggle to stay ahead. The ways of Calabria were always respected. My nan was the one who kept everything together and she was always taking in strays, both kids and dogs. She was a lovely, genuinely giving woman, but she had a ruthless streak in her. If you did something bad to her family or disrespected them, she wouldn’t think twice about getting you beaten to a pulp. Just like that she would kick off. That was the world she had always lived in.

When her son Emilio was four years old his grandfather made him watch a pig being slaughtered. The pig’s throat was slit in front of him and the blood dripped into a bucket. This little boy had to immerse his arm up to the elbow in the blood and stir it so it wouldn’t coagulate. There wasn’t room for waste because they wanted to make a batch of blood sausage. Emilio had to keep stirring the blood. That was the side of the family that made him a man. That’s how all the children, the masculine children, as they put it, were brought up.

Kindness to strays and buckets of blood? One extreme to the other.

By 1963, Emilio had six brothers and four sisters and they were all living like chickens, constantly scratching for space and food. It was then Nan decided life would be better in Milan. It was like moving abroad, going to Australia. It was faraway and foreign to them. But Nan packed her bags and her kids and moved north. She had some money saved, and she had guile and single-minded determination. It was enough to get them an apartment on the Piazza Prealpi, which is where La Signora launched her criminal organisation (which was worthy of that title from the start).

She made associations within the Milanese underworld but most important was the established Calabrian connection: from there, at first, came the cigarettes and booze, the currency of her start-up operation. Her gang were a young, wild bunch. Over time all her kids were in the act: Emilio and his tough-guy brothers Domenico, Antonio, Franco, Alessandro, Filippo and Guglielmo. And his sisters, Rita, Mariella, Domenica and Natalina had walk-on parts too. And the ‘strays’ were thankful to help by running errands.

Nan was ever-purposeful; nothing was done by chance. She spoke with a distinct and difficult dialect. It’s very hard to understand – she really needs subtitles – unless you’ve grown up with it. However, her meaning was always crystal clear.

The Piazza Prealpi, fifteen minutes from central Milan on a slow traffic day, was pivotal to her empire. The square housed an assortment of market stalls with flapping awnings and flaking paint where you could buy the fresh basics for breakfast, lunch and dinner. On other smaller but busier open-air stalls there were younger, louder guys selling newspapers, magazines, booze and cigarettes. It was a downbeat neighbourhood of city life and lives. But families didn’t have to go any further for their needs. The cafés, bars and restaurants were open from dawn until the small hours. There were always people about, happier to sit outside than in the squashed, dull blocks of council flats which comprise the Piazza. There was an eager, waiting market for anyone with commercial enterprise, a bit of get up and go.

Nan instantly realised the potential to sell cheap cigarettes and hooky alcohol in the square and make a fortune. She knew that contraband bought in volume and without duty could be sourced and sold much cheaper than it was at present, but still at immense profit.

She didn’t rush at it. She began slowly by selling to the shopkeepers at knockdown prices which became lower and lower, so low that people came from all over the city to buy. She met the demand.

Nan held ‘board’ meetings every morning in her kitchen. Once her children reached a useful age they were told what to steal, how to steal it and who to move it to. Go here. Get this. Do that. Speak to him. Come back to me. If one child ratted on another, told their mother that one of the others had stolen something, the telltale was beaten. Mercilessly. The rule was you said nothing, you kept quiet or the punishment was harsh. The code of silence, omertà, trumped blood bonds. Nan’s law was: ‘You have to shut up.’

Emilio and the others never went to school. Nan was the headmistress, discipline was the whack of a big, stained wooden soup spoon. There was one supreme teaching: ‘First make them fear you. Then they will respect you.’

Nan had few dreads. Maybe God, the Catholic church. I would watch her in the afternoons when she stepped outside the apartment and put her chair out on the street. She would sit there quietly holding her rosary beads and I’d get goose bumps hearing her prayer: ‘God, forgive me for anything I’ve done today.’

Yet, the legend was she knew things before God did. She had eyes in the back of God’s head. She certainly paid him off. The Church was the only place her money went, other than the family and professional expenses. She gave thousands to the Church, perhaps to assuage her guilt. Maybe it was bribery of the Almighty – paying for a place in Heaven? She used to send fabulous clothes (stolen, of course) inside the prisons. She gave thieves heroin: it was a vicious circle. She donated all kinds of goodies to the nuns and priests who worked with the poor in Milan. No one ever asked where they came from, which was just as well. I think it made her feel a bit better inside, that she was balancing things out. None of the family went to confession because everybody thought the priest would have to be paid off to keep his mouth shut. I’m not sure if Nan was bartering with God but she certainly did that with every living thing.

Elsewhere it was cut-throat business. She abruptly axed the legitimate suppliers who had been dealing to the Piazza Prealpi stallholders for decades. It was simple business from both sides of the market stalls. Nan could sell everything cheaper and eventually almost all the shopkeepers and landlords in the Piazza took daily deliveries of knockdown stock.