Protection for women who defy the Mafia is changing in Italy. Does it go far enough?

The women who defied the Italian Mafia — and the price they paid

15 minutes ago|

Duration

6:30

"Take a map of Italy, tear Sicily from it and throw it away."

That was the advice the late anti-Mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino gave a young Piera Aiello in 1991, when she came to him to say she was ready to tell all about the Sicilian Mafia family she had married into.

Aiello's husband had been gunned down in front of her in the pizzeria they ran together. He was the abusive son of the local Mafia boss, and Aiello had been coerced into marrying him as a teen. Still, she wanted his killers caught.

"I have already decided," she recalls telling Borsellino about her decision to testify. "I just need to pack my bags."

Three days later, Aiello left Sicily with two suitcases — one filled with clothes, the other with toys for her three-year-old daughter.

The following year, Borsellino was killed, along with five members of his police escort, in a Mafia car bombing in the Sicilian capital of Palermo.

Aiello would spend most of the next three decades living under another identity, which kept her safe from the Mafia.

But cut off from her Sicily and her old life, building a new one was lonely and arduous.                        

"I couldn't find work, and I had to support my daughter," she said, explaining how she found work in the countryside harvesting olives, eventually saving enough to open a small business.

Aiello's early years in protection reveal a less visible aspect to Italy's long fight against organized crime: what happens after someone speaks out. For women, the rupture can be both practically and emotionally tougher.

A new Italian law extending protection from organized crime — and providing social, economic, educational and psychological help — to children and the adults caring for them, often their mothers, is designed to address some of those gaps.

Limits of protection 

Liberi di scegliere — the "Free to Choose" bill — became law in July and entered into force on Aug. 9.

Sen. Vincenza Rando spent years pushing for the law and working with women who wanted to break away from Mafia families. Many of them, she says, fall outside the categories around which Italy's traditional protection system had been built.

"Women who are neither justice witnesses nor co-operating witnesses, I call them 'cultural collaborators.' They leave that environment and build a culture of legality," Rando said. 

They may not be informants or have any useful intel about a murder, a drug shipment or an extortion racket. Their act of rebellion, she says, may simply be deciding that their children will not grow up inside a Mafia family and culture.

Rando says some leave homes flush with cash, only to end up with nothing. Others need a new identity just to sign an employment contract without being traced. Their children are forced to change schools and friends, thrust into a life with entirely different moral codes.

"If you move somewhere where nobody knows you and you cannot even say who you are, who can you talk to?" Rando asked. "Who can you safely tell your story to?"

Under the new legislation, people under the age of 25 and relatives who care for them may be relocated outside their home region, provided with education and psychological support and, where necessary, given new identities.

Critics say the law gives the state too much power over family life, allowing for the separation of children from parents, which could be seen as punishing children for their parents' crime. 

• Lea Garofalo was killed by her Mafia family. Now she's the face of anti-mob protests

But Rando and supporters say the law prioritizes keeping mothers and children together when the mother breaks with the criminal group.

Aiello supports its aims, but worries short-term intervention will not be enough to permanently break the cycle. She says longer-term support through education and job training is essential.

"What does it mean for the State to take responsibility for them for two years?" Aiello asked. "It means nothing."

For Aiello, the lesson from her own experience is that protection has to mean more than physical safety: it also has to provide the tools to build an independent life.

The 'privilege' of never walking alone

Anti-Mafia prosecutor Nino Di Matteo has spent most of his career seeing the cost of protection from the inside.

He has lived under police escort since 1993, at times under Italy's highest level of security. His two children were born while he was already under protection; within days of leaving hospital, he recalls, they too were travelling in an escort car.

Now based in Rome, he says people outside Sicily sometimes perceive police protection as a mark of status, which he says irritates him.

"People can tend to see the protected person as privileged," Di Matteo said. "From that point of view, I would rather not be 'privileged.' People should perhaps think about the sacrifice involved in never being able to take a walk alone." 

Di Matteo is equally wary of a lot of the mythology surrounding the Mafia itself. He points to the media's focus on its most cinematic elements of violence and overt criminality — "the so-called military Mafia" — rather than the white-collar Mafiosi who appear to be part of legitimate businesses and cultivate relationships with political and institutional power.

And he says women's roles in that world have also frequently been misunderstood.

"Women have always played a fundamental role, for both good and bad," Di Matteo said.

Some wives and mothers are the family enforcers of the Mafia identity of husbands and sons. Others have rebelled against it — often painfully breaking away — to become justice witnesses and campaigners. 

"For a woman I imagine it may be even harder," Di Matteo said of criminal organizations built heavily around kinship. "Especially when speaking out means accusing your own son, your own blood."

When Mafia threats reach your family

Federica Angeli came to protection by a very different route.

An investigative journalist in Ostia, Rome's gritty seaside district, Angeli spent years reporting on local criminal clans and their grip on parts of Ostia's lucrative beachfront economy.

In 2013, during one investigation, Mafia boss Armando Spada discovered the hidden camera she was carrying. Angeli says he detained her upstairs in a room, placed a gun between them and made clear that he knew where she was most vulnerable.

"You have three children. What shall we do?" Angeli remembers him saying to another man. "Shall we start with the youngest one, the one with the pretty eyes?"

A month later she witnessed an attempted double murder near her home. She testified and was placed under police protection.

For 13 years, armed escorts have followed Angeli through ordinary life: work, dinner out with friends, a day at the beach, family outings. She says friends stopped inviting her over because security officers first had to inspect their homes. Restaurants meant being seated according to security requirements. Spontaneity vanished.

Angeli chronicled her ordeal in the memoir A mano disarmata (Unarmed), later adapted into a feature film. In 2016, Italian President Sergio Mattarella made her a Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

But despite the public recognition, the beachfront clean-up in Ostia has sometimes generated resentment: Angeli says she hears residents complain that some establishments worked better under Mafia-linked operators. Other criticism aimed at her is more gendered.

"As a woman, and as a mother, I was heavily criticized for my choice," she said. "Everyone said, 'You put your children in danger,'" who for five years were placed under protection, too, due to threats.

But she rejects the idea that there is one correct maternal response.

"There is no handbook for being the right mother," she said of the decision to denounce organized crime. "But I wanted to free my children from having to bow to the Mafia."

• The Mafia from the mountains

Piera Aiello wanted the same thing for her daughter when she left Sicily.

She built a new life near Rome, and in 2018, she was elected to parliament — Italy's first sitting justice witness — after a long battle to regain her real name. She sat on the Antimafia and Justice committees, where she pushed for stronger witness protections.

And, this summer, more than three decades after Borsellino told her to tear Sicily from the map, she moved back to her beloved island.

"I kept that crumpled piece of Sicily in a drawer," she said, "And I picked it up and glued it back on."