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To assist the English reader, I have used anglicised place names: Florence not Firenze, for example. By contrast, I have observed Italian custom when it comes to individuals’ names. Maria Concetta Cacciola, for instance, becomes Concetta, or ’Cetta, at the second mention. In another difference from Anglo-Saxon custom, Italian women retain their father’s surname after marriage. Thus Lea Garofalo kept her name after she married Carlo Cosco but the couple’s daughter was called Denise Cosco.
The symbol of Milan is a giant serpent devouring a screaming child.1 The first city of northern Italy has had other totems: a woolly boar, a golden Madonna and, more recently, the designer labels that make Milan the fashion capital of the world. But the eight-hundred-year-old image of a curled snake sinking its fangs into the writhing, blood-soaked body of an infant has remained its most popular emblem, adorning flags and bas reliefs on the city walls, the Alfa Romeo badge and the Inter Milan jersey. It’s an oddly menacing standard for a people more normally associated with family and food, and a strangely crude one for a city whose artistry reaches the sublime heights of da Vinci’s The Last Supper – and most Milanese generally profess ignorance of its meaning. In more candid moments, however, some will confess they suspect that the image owes its endurance to the way it illuminates a dark truth at the heart of their city: that the dynamism and accomplishment for which Milan is famous depends, among other things, on who you are prepared to destroy.
In the four days they spent in Milan in late November 2009 before her father killed her mother, then erased any trace of her from the world, Denise Cosco could almost believe her family had transcended its own special darkness. Denise was seventeen. Her mother was Lea Garofalo, a thirty-five-year-old mafioso’s daughter, and her father was Carlo Cosco, a thirty-nine-year-old cocaine smuggler. Lea had married Carlo at sixteen, had Denise at seventeen, witnessed Carlo and his brother kill a man in Milan at twenty-one and helped send Carlo to the city’s San Vittore prison at twenty-two. Denise had grown up on the run. For six years, from 1996 to 2002, Lea had hidden herself and her daughter away in the narrow, winding alleys of the medieval town of Bergamo in the foothills of the Alps. Lea had made it a game – two southern girls hiding out in Italy’s grey north – and in time the two had become each other’s worlds. When they walked Bergamo’s cobbled streets, an elfin pair holding hands and curling their dark hair behind their ears, people took them for sisters.
One night in 2000, Lea glanced out of their apartment to see her old Fiat on fire. In 2002, after a scooter was stolen and their front door set alight, Lea told Denise she had a new game for them – and walked hand-in-hand with her ten-year-old daughter into a carabinieri station where she announced to the startled desk officer that she would testify against the mafia in return for witness protection. From 2002 to 2008, mother and daughter had lived in government safe houses. For the past eight months, for reasons Denise understood only in part, they’d been on their own once more. Three times Carlo’s men had caught up with them. Three times Lea and Denise had escaped. But by spring 2009, Lea was exhausted, out of money and telling Denise they were down to two last options. Either they somehow found the cash to flee to Australia, or Lea had to make peace with Carlo.
If neither was likely, reconciliation with Carlo at least seemed possible. The state had dropped its efforts to prosecute him using Lea’s evidence, and while that infuriated her, it also meant she was no longer a threat to him. In April 2009, she sent her husband a message saying they should forgive and forget, and Carlo appeared to agree. The threats stopped and there were no more burned-out cars. Carlo began taking Denise on trips around the old country in Calabria. One September night he even talked Lea into a date and they drove down to the coast, talking into the early hours about the summer they’d met, all those years before.
So when in November 2009 Carlo invited his wife and daughter to spend a few days with him in Milan, and Denise, her hand over the phone, looked expectantly at her mother, Lea shrugged and said OK, they’d make a short break of it. Lea’s memories of Milan in winter were of a cold, dismal city, the trees like black lightning against the sky, the winds tumbling like avalanches through the streets, driving small monsoons of icy rain before them. But Denise would love Milan’s shops, Lea and Carlo needed to talk about Denise’s future and ever since the summer Lea had found herself wondering about Carlo again. Twenty years earlier, he had held her face in his gorilla hands and promised to take her away from the mafia and all the killing – and Lea had believed him chiefly because he seemed to believe himself. Lea still wore a gold bracelet and necklace Carlo had given her back then. There was also no doubt that Carlo loved Denise. Maybe Denise was right, thought Lea. Perhaps the three of them could start over. The idea that Carlo’s new geniality was part of some elaborate plot to catch her off-guard was just too far-fetched. There were easier ways to kill someone.
Lea Garofalo had outclassed Carlo Cosco from the start. Carlo had earned his position with the clans but Lea was born a mafia princess, a Garofalo from Pagliarelle, daughter of east coast ’Ndrangheta aristocrats. Carlo was as broad and handsome as a bear but Lea was altogether finer, her natural elegance accentuated by high cheekbones, a slim frame and her long, thick curly dark hair. Carlo’s stuttering grasp of Italian and his sullen, taciturn manner was never more noticeable than when he was with Lea, who spoke with the sophistication of a northerner and the passion of a southerner, laughing, arguing and crying all in the same five minutes. In any other world, it would have been the natural order of things for Lea to have walked out on Carlo a few years into their marriage and never looked back.
At least Carlo was making an effort not to gloat, thought Lea. He had a friend drop round 100 euros for the train tickets to Milan. When Lea and Denise pulled into the city’s central station, Mussolini’s opulent glass-and-marble monument to northern order and power, Carlo himself picked them up in a black Audi and took them to the Hotel Losanna, a cosy backstreet place a block from the Corso Sempione, Milan’s Champs-Elysées, and a short walk from their old family apartment on Viale Montello. And for the next four days, Carlo refused even to discuss the past. He didn’t mention the ’Ndrangheta or how Lea had broken omertà or the way she almost destroyed everything for which he and his brothers had worked. Instead, Denise said the three of them enjoyed a ‘quiet and pleasant’ mini-vacation, the kind of family holiday they’d never had. Milan’s Ferrari showrooms and Armani stores were a million miles from the goat pastures of Calabria, and Carlo seemed happy for
