A Dutch arms dealer, whose daughter got into a relationship with 'Ndrangheta boss and later pentito Emilio Di Giovine , delivered those thirty bazookas.
Di Giovine: "With heroin I had taken all of Milan"
19 July 2019 - 06:00
The boss of Piazza Prealpi then repented tells of the bad eighties and the mother who ruled the neighborhood
Luca Fazzo
He was, even behind the bars of a courtroom, brilliant, witty, in his own way likeable. Now he is an old man who is moved when he thinks of his four and a half year old son, "I don't know if I'll have time to give him a future." In between, thirteen years in which Emilio Di Giovine had time to repent, to leave his cell, to rebuild a life. And now to tell the TV cameras of Cose Nostre the story of how he came to reign over the city: «I took Milan with heroin».
Last night the long interview with Di Giovine was broadcast on Rai 3. For the first time, not the ever-identical chronology of the crimes of the Eighties is being told live, but the raw mentality behind it. And it is impressive because it is not a semi-illiterate killer who tells them but a viveur, one who during the trials told a reporter why the mafia disgusted him: "The mafia have a crazy life, full of rules: and don't do this, and do that. I am a crazy head, an adventurer ».
Its base was piazza Prealpi. His mother was Maria Serraino, the only real female boss that Milan has known. “My mother wasn't tender, she was the boss of everything. She was semi-illiterate but she did the math better than me, she was an absolute cunning, no one could do it up. She decided quickly: a problem was born and tac! She solved it. It was awful, it had some kind of animal instinct. And I'm talking about the years in which bags of heroin money came to the house all the time, we had full refrigerators, we didn't know where to put them anymore. "
To the masses of deaths that the heroin market sowed in those years in Milan, the old boss does not even dedicate a simulacrum of respect. At least it's sincere. And he is sincere when he dedicates resentful words to his sister Rita, who was the first in the family to repent: “They took her with a thousand pills of ecstasy she stole from my brother. She repented and had my mother given a life sentence and had three generations arrested for a thousand pills that she was out in three days. She is humanly not justifiable, she never made her mother put an end to her sentence. I would go to jail at the cost of not going out anymore ».
Maria, the old boss, died a few years ago: and on the walls near Piazza Prealpi there are still the murals that pay homage to her; on the other hand, at the funeral, as the very Milanese salami maker in the square tells us, "we all went there". "Because my mother - says Emilio - kept the neighborhood in order, did not allow extortion to be done".
Not only. «From life - says Di Giovine - I had everything I wanted as a child, when I grew up in Calabria learning to shoot, and competing with my peers to see who ate raw chillies without crying. I wanted money, cars, women. And I had them ».
Women, especially. Beautiful to die for. And you get in trouble because of him. "All the women who have been with me have had a bitter fate: the maximum of good and the maximum of evil." The worst of all was "Lele" who was pregnant with him at the age of 17: "We were at the restaurant with Vittorio Bosisio and his wife: they went in to kill Vittorio. I was not armed, I could not answer. I threw myself under the table with Lele. When the shooting stopped, I had her foot in my hands. She was dead. '
To his credit, Di Giovine has one of the most spectacular escapes that he remembers, the one from the basement of the Fatebenefratelli where he had been taken for a visit and where his boys burst in, dressed as doctors and nurses, with sticks and stunners. He had arrived there by bribing a guard: «Corruption ... I would say exchange of favors. I always followed this line because money allowed me to. I had a power out of the ordinary. I was at my best, I had men waiting outside, money, a beautiful woman, what was I doing in prison? I said to my lawyer: you have a budget of two billion to get me out of jail, I don't even want to know how you spend it, the important thing is that I get out ».
Meanwhile, in Calabria war broke out between the clans, an interminable massacre between families. And from Milan, Emilio gives his relatives the weapons that will close the game, thirty bazookas arrived directly from Switzerland, capable of piercing armored cars like tin can. The favor is returned to him. "My uncle told me what you need up in Milan, how many men do you need ?. They sent up the boys, potential hit men. With them I conquered Milan. I've never killed anyone, but I've had them killed. When I tell you you have to do this and you don't, the third time I get bad and you have to die. I was uncontrollable, I didn't listen to anyone, â€says Di Giovine.
"He acted even before he had thought, and this was what made him dangerous," recalls Maurizio Romanelli, the prosecutor who had him arrested. "Now I have a diploma as a cook and I pay my bills regularly," he says: all that is needed is "and I'll go to bed early." To repent, he explains, "I had to kill myself that I was before, otherwise I would have been too proud to do so." The episode should perhaps be shown in schools, especially in the finale. "I threw my life away."
