Authors: Marisa Merico
In the morning I woke up feeling a bit eerie but then ‘Ordinary Day’ by Duran Duran came on the radio. It had sad echoes for me. Michael, who’d been my first lover, had a brother called Chris who was my age. Chris took his own life when I was in Italy. He loved Duran Duran and they played ‘Ordinary Day’ at his funeral. I felt an overwhelming calmness when the song came on. I felt as if he was looking after me in some way. I know it sounds mad but I believe there must be something out there. I’m not sure if it is a God. I like to believe that there is something out there and once we go, our spirit doesn’t.
I was remanded for three weeks at Bow Street Magistrates and taken to Holloway prison, where I became a new statistic, prison number TG0416. They couldn’t cope at Holloway, they had no Cat A facilities. I kicked up about it, told them so. I should have shut up.
I got shunted back to Durham but not to my top-floor view of Durham Cathedral. I had a new cell. The security had tightened up so much that every month I had to go into a different cell. Each time I went in a cell, I had to clean it. It was an obsession, a touch of OCD, and I told them: ‘You’re moving me because you want me to scrub every cell in this place!’
The guards were terrified that the Mafia would break me out and fly me to freedom in a missile-equipped helicopter. We’d tried to do that with Dad in Portugal but I knew there was no possibility of it now because, apart from anything else, all my relatives were in jail – yet they acted on instructions that I was one of the most dangerous people in Britain.
I was back and forward to London, every time in an armoured vehicle, cuffed and shackled to my escort officer. Before I went out into the van I was strip-searched, following strict procedures so that I was never totally naked. Every time I went for a pee I had three guards outside the door. My every move was watched, and the claustrophobia was horrible.
I’d often be sick in the stuffy armed vans on the trips south but ‘orders are orders’ and they wouldn’t open the cuffs to allow me to clean up. If I complained about anything I always got the same answer: it was being done, or couldn’t be done ‘for security reasons’. They seemed to think I was some comic-book super-villain, able to appear and vanish at will. The daughter of Arsène Lupin, indeed.
They’d stop for a break halfway through the five-hour journey. Often we stopped at Leicester prison, which is the local men’s jail in the Southfields area. But once, for ‘security reasons’, we stopped at Leeds prison. At reception where they process the prisoners they told me there was a special toilet I could use exclusively. It had been built for a visit by Princess Anne. It was pink and frilly, very smart for a prison toilet. I got to use the royal facilities because I was a woman. The guards shackled me to a long chain and played it down the stairs to the toilet so I could just push the door to but I was still chained to them. I couldn’t go anywhere else anyway. It was ridiculous.
They’d guard me in a cell as the escort guys took their tea break. I was an escape risk – no stopping at service stations.
They wouldn’t stop anywhere but other prisons for, of course, security.
They told me they believed Dad was going to free me but Dad couldn’t help himself at that time. My solicitor told me that somewhere in Whitehall it had been decided that I was to be treated as a Home Office prisoner, like an IRA terrorist. It was political. And everything to do with me was handled at high political level. The amount of money spent on me! They didn’t have that sort of security with Rose West and Myra Hindley. God knows what they thought was going to happen. I wasn’t going to leave my daughter anyway, no matter what, even if the cavalry came to get me.
After the stop at the royal loo, I was taken to Belmarsh prison, the Cat A men’s jail in Greenwich where they bang up terrorists. I asked about Holloway but was told, ‘They can’t hold you there because they haven’t got enough security.’ They locked down the hospital wing and put me in a solitary cell. The woman officer told me, ‘We’ve put a sheet over your window; don’t go near it because if the men find out that you’re a woman they’ll keep you up all night.’
I was stripped-searched again but this time I had to strip off completely. They gave me a dressing gown and said: ‘You need to squat.’ I wasn’t comfortable with that at all. It was horrible, demeaning. When I squatted, they put a metal detector underneath me.
I asked, ‘What am I going to have in there. A gun?’
They just said they needed to do it.
When they left, I felt violated and very shocked. I shouldn’t have been but I was. It upset me. I didn’t feel very human or feminine. I knew I was just a name and number to them, but it didn’t feel right. Of all the indignities I went through in the prison system that was the greatest. It made me wonder how on earth I had got to that moment, question every decision I had made. Was family loyalty, wanting to do what my dad wanted, to make him pleased with me, worth this humiliation? Just thinking about it makes me hurt with a deep, emotional damage. I was made to feel like a wild animal.
But the next time I appeared at Bow Street things were better. When I got back to Durham I told Susan May about the indignities of that first experience of Belmarsh. She wrote a letter, and my MP complained. The authorities admitted that what had happened to me was wrong. I’d made history as the first female to be held in a male prison. The next time I went I had the governor, the Samaritans and the priest at the door.
I’d got all that sorted, but by June 1996 I’d stopped going to Bow Street. Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, signed off on my extradition. I wouldn’t see Lara. I wouldn’t see Mum. What about my letters with Frank?
We kept writing because it took nearly eight months for the Italians to come and get me. A Scotland Yard extradition squad collected me to get on a plane on my twenty-seventh birthday, 19 February 1997. One of them was a big, tall bloke and nasty with it. His partner was quiet, but the
tall bloke couldn’t stop making snide comments, such as, ‘They’ve put you in first class and I can’t imagine why.’ When they’d frog-marched me with armed police all around to the top of the stairs up to the plane he said: ‘See you in fifteen years.’
His prediction might have been accurate but there was no need for that. I wasn’t cheeky. I didn’t swear at them. I just did as I was told. I didn’t demand things. I was devastated because I’d left Lara, and I knew that I wouldn’t see my little girl for ages. I’d already missed nearly three years of her life. She’d started school without me being there to take her to the school gates. She had new friends and her own interests. She was growing up without me.
When I was handed over to Italian Interpol my treatment all changed. The man and woman escort didn’t worry about handcuffs on the plane. When the food came the woman asked: ‘Would you like some wine?’ I nearly fell off the seat. I hadn’t had any wine for two and a half years. She was very kind. It was a different attitude altogether.
Especially when we landed in Rome. Two plainclothes cops took over and said they had to process me at Rome Central. One was quite flirty: ‘Have you ever been to Rome before? We’ll take you for a tour on the way.’
I saw the Coliseum on a beautiful sunny day in February. It was a real birthday treat after being lucky to get an hour a day in the open air at Durham. Later, they pointed out more sights as we drove to the north-east edge of the city, to Rebibbia, the location of Italy’s major mixed penitentiary. We
drove into Rebibbia prison through the Via Tiburtina entrance and I saw the churches of the Via Casal de’ Pazzi and Piazza Ferriani. I wondered when I might ever see such beauty again.
In Rome the prison conditions were as convivial as the cops and the view, but it was only a couple of weeks until I was taken to Vigevano women’s prison near Milan to await my trial.
My dad and Uncle Guglielmo had been extradited from Portugal, Bruno had been extradited from Spain. Nan and scores of others were already involved in the long trials in the special anti-terrorist, concrete-built courtrooms in Milan.
It was going to be a family reunion in court.
In vino veritas
[In wine there is truth]
Nan and Auntie Angela had both been held at Vigevano and the inmates were very much aware of the Di Giovine name. I had a cell in the high-security wing; it had a sink, a toilet and a bidet but there was never hot water. I soaked my washing in the bidet and was getting ready to sleep one night when I thought I heard Bruno’s sister Silvia’s voice. It was, it
was
Lara’s auntie.
I knew she’d been arrested. Guns connected to Bruno were found in her apartment. But I didn’t know where she was after her eight-year conviction on arms charges. It was such a comfort to hear a friendly voice, someone I knew so well, that it gave me a warm glow. Maybe it was a good omen. We had lots of time to talk to each other, to speak about all that happened to everybody else in the extended families. Silvia and I poured our hearts out to each other. It was wonderful to be able to talk freely and not be concerned what I said. I was already a convicted felon, so what more could they do?
The prison had an association room where we’d cook for ourselves. They had a canteen and we’d make a list each week of things to buy. We were allowed two cartons of wine
a day. It was prison paradise, the good life. Sometimes we’d save the cartons for a birthday blow-out and have a party. We’d ferment it with sugar and everybody would get smashed.
But I also got the girls fit. I was used to three hours a day in the Durham gym so I started aerobics classes in the yard. I’d get them stretching, doing handstands and cartwheels. We played volleyball in the gym once a week. I could release some of my anger when slamming the ball into the net. I did sit-ups in my cell. I did it all to help me sleep, to get my brain to switch off. If I didn’t knock myself out with exercise, I’d just lie in bed worrying about the future, about Lara, and what would happen at my trial. Mum sent a parcel every week with Lara’s drawings and tapes of her talking as well as loads of photographs. Such mementoes made me happy but terribly tearful at the same time.
And Frank was writing all the time. I’d thought our strange arrangement wouldn’t survive when I left England, but it did. At first he had no idea where I was and phoned my mum, but she didn’t even know I was in Rome. When it settled down we sent letters to each other every day.
It was November 1997 before I went to court in Milan for a mini-trial. Other family members had been dealt with in the previous weeks. Nan got life.
La Signora
had diabetes and was on a stretcher in court to hear the verdict, which made legal history – the only woman ever found guilty of such top-level Mafia association. She was carried from court by a team of
carabinieri
and was joking with them all the way. I wasn’t
there to see it but I bet she’d corrupted a couple before they even got her out of the courthouse.
Auntie Livia got twenty-four and a half years, which reflected her skill as an entrepreneur. Uncle Antonio and Uncle Filippo, who’d been with Dad in Spain and Portugal, got thirty years each. Grandpa Rosario, who was on a respirator during the trials, was serving eighteen years. Auntie Angela, born a month before me, got fourteen years. Uncle Franco had been hit with eight years at the start of the
Mani Puliti
trials in 1995. With the scores and scores of other Mafia associates, cousins and second cousins, friends and family, the total tariff before I got into the dock was near to 1,500 years.
Dad went off on a different trial. Italy had extradited him on drug trafficking charges but then charged him with murder. That broke the European extradition rules – you can’t get a person back for one thing and charge them with another. It was all legal gobbledygook because he still got life in prison.
As did Bruno who, after spending three years in jail in Madrid, was done again in Milan on arms trafficking charges.
Uncle Guglielmo was in court with me. The ‘Untouchable’ prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli continually played back Auntie Rita’s evidence: the details of the heroin deals, the movement of currency, the killings and control in the Piazza Prealpi. After we’d spent hours listening to this, Uncle Guglielmo turned to me and commented: ‘Rita must have
really hated you to say all that about you. God, she must have really hated you!’
I was devastated. I knew Rita was off her head with pills much of the time but she’d always been good to Bruno and me. I thought she loved me and helped me for that reason. I didn’t need to hear this bile. Guglielmo was simply astonished at what she’d told them. And so was I.
Maurizio Romanelli told the court I was Dad’s right hand, his voice, the financial wizard behind the money movement, the architect of the business operation. I should have known better. He picked out Angela and said that, unlike her, I hadn’t grown up in the family. Angela grew up in that venal environment, and I didn’t. Angela had got fourteen years – what would they do to me?
I was among the last to go on trial and Romanelli wanted more glory headlines. They were talking about twenty years. That was to frighten me. They gave me ten years. Lara would be sixteen when I got out. I’d be thirty-seven. I couldn’t bear that thought so I changed my plea to guilty and was sentenced to six years. In that plea bargain I retrieved four years of my life.
That Christmas of 1997 I saw Lara for the first time in nine months. Mum put her on her passport and they came over for two weeks. I was allowed one two-hour visit a week so I had four hours with them altogether. It was wonderful and horrible at the same time. Kissing Lara goodbye was terrible because I didn’t know when I’d see her again. They couldn’t afford to keep visiting.
In January 1998 they gave me a release date of 2003. Frank was due out in 1999. I worried that he wouldn’t wait around for me for four years. He hadn’t even met me, for goodness sake!
Under Italian law you are not fully convicted until you have exhausted every appeal. I needed a last straw to hang on to and one of the family’s lawyers, Vincenzo Minasi, found it. He discovered the Italians hadn’t handled my extradition properly. When I was re-arrested outside the gates of Durham prison I should have been interrogated within five days by Maurizio Romanelli, the prosector. It didn’t happen.
Minasi told me as only an Italian lawyer could, hands waving in the air: ‘This is not right! We will not have this!’
And he didn’t. Lo and behold, he got me out. It was Saturday, 13 June 1998, exactly four years and twelve days after I’d been arrested in 1994. The Italian legal teams had been going through Minasi’s appeal and arguments and worked through to the weekend searching for rebuttal. I’d had so many knock-backs I thought it wouldn’t happen, especially on a Saturday.
The senior officer that day at Vigevano was a nice lady; she was quite short and had a squeaky voice. The prison knew the appeal was in and she stayed with me in case I tried to kick off or even kill myself if the decision didn’t go my way. It was a hot day.
‘Di Giovine?’ she said from my cell door.
I murmured something.
‘Pack your stuff, you’re going.’
I nearly passed out. I felt dizzy. My head was all over the place. I just remember sitting down hard on a chair and she said: ‘Di Giovine? Are you okay?’
I burst into tears.
‘Come on, Di Giovine. Get your stuff.’
I couldn’t get out quick enough. I was in shock. All I had were a few items of clothing, some curtains and a gas burner – you had a gas burner in Italy so you could cook in your cell. I said goodbye to Silvia and gave her a kiss through the slot in the cell door. She started crying. For me, and for herself. I felt sorry for her and left her most of my stuff. I put the rest in a bin liner and walked down the corridor in the clothes I stood up in. The prison authorities gave me about twenty quid and that was it.
I walked out of Vigevano for the first time – I’d always been taken by armoured van before. Outside the gates there was a car park, and at the end of it there was a bus stop and a phone box. From there, I called Bruno and Silvia’s mum. After she’d finished having hysterics, I said I’d meet her in the centre of Milan. I wanted a drink, and I wanted to get out of there. There was no shelter. There was no place I could get in the shade.
I got on the first bus that came along, carrying my bin liner, and the other passengers must have thought ‘prison’ but I didn’t give a shit. I paid and I felt weird even doing that, having money. For four years I’d had no money in my hands. I’d used a pay phone but with a card, not money. There was nobody opening doors for me. Nobody. Four
years. It’s a long, long time. When you’re on the outside it might not seem that, as the change happens gradually, day by day. I had to swallow it all in one hungry gulp. You know those flashbacks in the movies? For me it was the other way around but just as surreal. I’d stepped into the future.
I got off the bus near the train station and went into a nice, shaded café with a phone. Mum was at home. It was my friend Naima’s wedding that day but she hadn’t left yet.
‘Mum, it’s me. It’s me, Mum. I’m out.’
I could hear the sigh of relief all those hundreds and hundreds of miles away. I talked to Lara for ages and then to Mum again. We babbled all sorts of arrangements. After that, all she wanted to do was get to the wedding and tell everybody, to share her happiness.
Frank had given me a number for his friend Barry and I called him with the news to pass on to Frank.
I took a moment to catch my breath at the café while I waited for Bruno’s mum, listening to the rattle of cups and saucers and glasses clinking in the washing-up bowl, the squeal of the espresso machine and high-pitched voices – just another day in Milan. I’d survived prison in Italy and in England. I coped with it, got on with it. I thought then about Nan and Dad and all their brothers and sisters, the family on the Piazza Prealpi, how I’d started life in an environment where you had to be strong, had to stand your ground yet follow the rules. I realised I’d had private tuition that prepared me for years in prison. If you didn’t fight your corner and give off a positive vibe you were stamped on,
pushed out of the way. You got no respect. And that meant you got nowt.
I’d been stoic and strong and I was determined to stay that way to survive on the outside. Yet at first, leaving the institutionalised systems where your every moment is accounted for, I was a little lost. Bruno’s mum and her brother took me back to her house. It was odd. I couldn’t really eat, I was so emotional. I lost about half a stone in a week. Today I’d be ecstatic about that, but at the time I didn’t really notice.
I was free, released on a technicality. My passport was in England with Customs and Excise. They had extradited me with no passport. Mum kicked up a fuss, got on to her MP and made a wonderful nuisance of herself. When Lara’s school finished for the summer holidays she flew over on her own, escorted as an ‘unassisted minor’ on British Airways. She was with me for five weeks and it was lovely. We went away with Bruno’s mum to the seaside, to Calabria, where once again I could take in the sweetness of the orange blossom, the aroma of the South.
But life behind bars was never far off. I visited Bruno every week once I got out, and I took Lara along to see him as well, but it was four years since we’d all been together as a family and we’d moved on. I was in love with Frank now. He couldn’t phone me because he was Category A and was banned from making international calls but he was writing to me at my mother-in-law’s house. Although that was awkward, I’d explained to her that I wasn’t in love with her son any more. She knew the situation.
Lara went back to England for school just before her seventh birthday on 11 September. I was upset I was going to miss her birthday but I was still stuck in Milan. Mum had been berating Customs and Excise about my passport and eventually they got in touch with her old friend Roger Wilson, the guy who had had the frustrating job of interviewing her back when we were first arrested.
Mr Wilson probably, and quite happily, thought he’d heard the last of Patricia Di Giovine. He hadn’t. He was brought into the whole confusing situation and at last they forwarded my passport to the British Embassy in Milan for personal collection. I picked it up on 16 September. I also got some cash – and itchy feet. There was nothing for me to hang around for. There was no point in having freedom if I couldn’t be with my little girl.
On the same day Dad was involved in another mini-trial, charged with murder for the killing committed by the
Mafiosi
from the Camorra, the one he and Nan had sanctioned way back in 1988 when I had just moved over to Milan from England. The day I got my British passport back he was found guilty. I felt sick with the stress of it all. I was outside when they brought him from court and he smiled and waved. This time I blew him a goodbye kiss. I had no idea when I would ever see him again.
Bruno was in a different court later that day. He saw me and mouthed: ‘Are you coming to visit me?’ I shook my head. I saw the panic in his eyes because he knew I was going. He knew I was out, he knew Lara was in England, he
knew what I was going to do. He had this horrible look of despair on his face. He was sad because he liked seeing me, but he wasn’t my priority any more – neither was my dad. I thought they’d both had enough out of me. My daughter was number one in my life. And freedom, no matter how flimsy, was the only way I could be with her.
I was off. But not by plane. I couldn’t afford the air fare. Bruno’s mum drove me with my few belongings, a refugee’s bundle, to Milan Central Station. I didn’t get the sleeper on the night train, because that was too expensive. I looked like a student hitchhiker returning from the summer away. There was a young English couple in the compartment and I sat with them. At the Swiss border they just glanced at our passports and thought we were all together.
At Paris I changed trains and had a shower at the station. Time had moved on; before I went inside there were no public showers there. After we set sail from Calais I tried to phone Mum from the ferry but there was no answer. At Dover they glanced at my passport and that was it.