Lea Garofalo: the revolution of the mothers

Lea Garofalo was one of the first women who tirelessly sought to break away from the fate that her family and her town had laid out for her. The deaths and the birth of her daughter would change her life forever and give her a new purpose: to save herself in order to save her daughter. Here is part of her story.

Lea Garofalo with her little daughter Denise.

Being born in Calabria is something special—but being born a woman there is even more so. It’s not necessarily good or bad; it’s just different, special. But if you are also born in Petilia Policastro—a place remembered by the devil himself—then the women of Petilia Policastro (if such a term even exists) who manage to leave it behind and succeed, will go down in history. One of those women was named Lea Garofalo. She was the daughter of Antonio, the niece of Giulio, the sister of Floriano and Marisa, the wife of Carlo, and the mother of Denise. Like most people in the world, Lea’s life was initially shaped by her family of origin, but also by the place where she was born. Petilia Policastro, a town with barely a few tens of thousands of inhabitants, was the place where Lea grew up, and the place she would escape after burying most of her family. Petilia Policastro was the town where her father was murdered, where her uncle was killed—when he tried to avenge his brother’s death—and where her cousins were also assassinated. Lea’s life was shaped by her family and by the southern town in which she was born, but her death came in the north, in Milan, caught between fear and the hope she held onto while trying to form a new kind of family—one that would allow her to break the ties of blood and land that bound her to the Garofalo name and to Petilia Policastro.

A father usually walks alongside his children when they take their first steps—especially when they begin to walk. They hold the child’s hands, lean their own body forward, and take one or two steps to accompany the child’s ten or so tiny steps that span no more than fifteen or twenty centimeters. Lea learned to walk alone. The war between her father's mafia family—the Garofalo 'ndrina—and the Mirabelli family from the neighboring village of Pagliarelle, was filling up the local cemetery. On New Year’s Eve of 1974, when Lea was barely eight months old, members of the Mirabelli 'ndrina murdered her father Antonio, marking the beginning of a war that would unfold through time and blood. Seven years later, her uncle—Antonio’s brother—was also murdered while attempting to kill the Mirabelli leadership. The duty of revenge fell to the eldest son of the clan, Floriano Garofalo, Lea’s brother, who was expected to continue the hunt against the Mirabellis, even as his own family kept being killed. In 1989, when Lea had turned fifteen and, like the few teenage girls in Petilia Policastro, spent her days at the town square talking to the few friends the village had to offer, she had the misfortune of witnessing her first murder. It was her cousin—himself part of the mafia family—who became one more body offered up in the bloodletting that defines faide, the mafia blood feuds.

During the 1970s, Calabria went through profound and violent transformations. The ’Ndrangheta—the mafia organization of Calabrian origin—was beginning a long transformation that, by the end of the 20th century, would place it at the top of transnational organized crime. During those turbulent years, faide between the ’ndrine that made up—and still make up—the ’Ndrangheta intensified. With the global expansion in drug demand, the ’Ndrangheta rushed to seize this economic opportunity, becoming one of the first mafia organizations to take advantage of the situation, relying on the extensive family networks that had spread across multiple regions of Italy and the world. By the early 1990s, several ’Ndrangheta families had settled in northern Italy—especially in Milan—where they took control of and directed the drug trade, human trafficking, and money laundering operations.

Despite being surrounded by corpses, Lea still managed to fall in love. She began a relationship with a young man four years her senior from the neighboring village of Pagliarelle—a romance born amidst the horror and despair of a town engulfed in a faida that had already lasted nearly twenty years. Lea’s boyfriend was also a ’ndranghetista, a thug, who along with his brothers was trying to rise within the ranks of the criminal organization. Winning the heart of a family boss’s daughter like Lea and marrying her could be a strategic shortcut for Carlo Cosco, an aspiring full-fledged mafioso. Santina, Lea’s mother, had also fallen in love with a ’ndranghetista, Lea’s father. But unlike many other mafia women, she had managed, in some way, to push back against the fate that being part of the mafia world usually imposed on women. Santina worked as a cleaner at the village school and encouraged her daughters to pursue education, urging Lea and Marisa to finish their studies and choose their own paths—a future that, if they wished, wouldn’t be defined by the Garofalo surname or by Petilia Policastro.

The support Lea found in education and in the love of her partner became the illusion that would guide her life from age fifteen onward. After a year of dating Carlo Cosco, the young couple got married and fled to Milan, where Floriano Garofalo—Lea’s brother—had been living for a few years, running drug trafficking operations in the city. In the ’Ndrangheta, blood does not dilute—it thickens, generation after generation. For Carlo Cosco, marrying into the Garofalo family meant becoming a trusted subordinate, close to the boss. The base of operations for the Calabrian mafia families in Milan—among them the Garofalos—was a massive building located at number 6 via Montello, in an enclave between Chinatown, the Russian quarter, and the skyscrapers of Porta Nuova. The mold-covered, three-story building had a panoptic layout that allowed for surveillance of everyone’s movements, making it ideal for stockpiling drugs, weapons, and trafficked women from South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Through that structure of concrete, steel, wood, and Roman tiles, during the 1990s, passed the majority of the heroin, cocaine, and hashish consumed throughout much of Lombardy.

Lea had escaped and arrived in Milan with little in her suitcases but full of hope. She dreamed that the city of the north—capital of fashion, lights, and glamour—might offer her a few small chances to dream things that were impossible in Petilia Policastro. She would be the one to turn those chances into reality. But Carlo Cosco’s ambition to rise within the ’Ndrangheta, under the patronage of Lea’s brother, turned all those dreams into nightmares. Life in Milan ended up being worse than in Petilia Policastro. The building they lived in was depressing. Daily life consisted of a constant coming and going of strangers, shouting, and drug transactions that often ended in violent and scandalous fights. Depression became Lea’s faithful companion, and she attempted suicide several times. Amid this flood of dark thoughts, in the spring of 1991, Lea became pregnant. The news felt tragic. She couldn’t even handle her own life, and the mere thought of dragging someone else into that life—someone who would be entirely dependent on her—pushed her even deeper into despair. She tried to abort the pregnancy several times, but she was unsuccessful. Having to continue the pregnancy forced her to make decisions. In December of that same year, Lea fled Milan while pregnant and on the verge of giving birth. She escaped to give birth alone, with the idea of putting the baby up for adoption and sparing them from a fate dictated by some devil that seemed to curse the Garofalo family, the children of Petilia Policastro, and especially its women—Lea was expecting a girl—condemning them to lives surrounded by unhappiness. But when Lea held her tiny baby, Denise, against her chest, her plans radically changed. Lea was in love again—this time with her daughter—and clung to a small yet powerful hope for life.

Lea Garofalo, the woman who became a hope for women in the mafia.

Lea’s relationship with Carlo Cosco worsened as his criminal responsibilities increased. It grew ever more violent and contemptuous toward her. Even with Denise now in their lives, the two of them were forced to spend long hours and entire days locked inside the apartment on Via Montello. Sometimes, Carlo Cosco himself would force Lea to cut heroin, cocaine, and hashish—because although his rank within the criminal organization had risen, it still wasn’t high enough to free him from the menial tasks reserved for an upstart with no legacy in the ’Ndrangheta. Nor did it exempt him from personally collecting extortion payments or carrying out murders. Life inside that ’Ndrangheta outpost was a ticking time bomb for Lea and Denise. The wars between Calabrian mafia families had extended the battlefield to Milan, and the building on Via Montello was quickly becoming a beachhead every ’ndrina wanted to conquer in order to control the city. Though Carlo Cosco was the brother-in-law of boss Floriano Garofalo, and along with his brothers Vito and Giuseppe Cosco was being promoted within the organization by three other high-ranking mafiosi—Floriano Toscano, Silvano Toscano, and Thomas Ceraudo—the mafia clashes were multiplying and edging ever closer.

The Calabrian faida, which was leaving more and more corpses in its wake from Petilia Policastro to Milan, was beginning to draw the attention of law enforcement. The authorities began to set their sights on the stronghold at Via Montello. Deaths around that hub soon began to multiply. In 1994, Antonio Comberiati—a rival ’ndranghetista of Floriano Garofalo who lived in the same building as Carlo Cosco—began to rise through the ranks and escalate the war. He murdered Silvano Toscano and Thomas Ceraudo, Floriano Garofalo’s lieutenants in Milan and the patrons of Carlo Cosco and his brothers within the organization. In the mafia world, every attack demands a response—violent, whether precise or not—but always a response. Perhaps not immediate, but inevitably it comes. In this case, it would come six months later. On May 17, 1995, on a day of heavy rain in Milan, the courtyard of the building on Via Montello was nearly empty. The residents were shut inside their apartments. Lea and Denise were resting in bed. Suddenly, several gunshots drowned out the crackling of rain on the iron balconies. Some residents peeked through windows or leaned halfway through doorframes to look out onto the courtyard—where, lying face down in a pool of rainwater and blood, was Antonio Comberiati, the enemy of Floriano Garofalo and Carlo Cosco.

The building at number 6 Via Montello in Milan.

Carlo’s new promotion within the Garofalo ’ndrina was immediate. In addition to being Floriano Garofalo’s brother-in-law, he was now his most trusted man and one of the most powerful figures in the ’Ndrangheta in Milan. The murder committed just meters away from his daughter would once again change everything in Lea’s life. Life and death kept provoking drastic turns in Lea’s path, time and time again. When Denise was born, Lea found in her daughter a reason to live—and to protect. Her life would be meaningful only if she could keep her child away from the kind of life she herself had once tried to escape. The murder of a mafioso just meters from her daughter, at the doorstep of her own home, changed Lea forever. It was her last chance to defy fate. This was no longer Petilia Policastro—it was Milan. She had a daughter, and she still wanted to dream, together with Carlo Cosco and Denise. But for her husband, the organization had always been the goal—above everything, even his own family. When Lea begged him to leave the ’ndrina, to abandon Milan and start a life with his wife and daughter, Carlo’s response was to beat her. With that blow, Lea understood that the violence had only just begun—that death in her home and the bruises on her body would gradually become part of everyday life, for both her and her daughter.

This time, Lea fled with Denise. They went to the police. In front of the Carabinieri—Italy’s military police in charge of investigating the mafia—Lea told them everything she knew about the criminal activities happening inside that building in Milan. Her statement accelerated the authorities’ investigation into her family and the operations at Via Montello. In May 1996, the Carabinieri surrounded the ’Ndrangheta stronghold in Milan and arrested Floriano Garofalo, Carlo Cosco, his brothers, and several other members of the organization. The Garofalo ’ndrina was almost entirely dismantled, and many of its members were transferred to San Vittore prison in Milan. Lea had made her decision driven by life and death—the two forces that kept giving rise to her hope. That hope once again led her to face Carlo Cosco, this time in prison, where she begged him to leave the mafia, to cooperate with the justice system, and to choose his family. Carlo asked Lea to come closer to the bars that separated them. She did—and in the middle of a cold, hate-filled gesture, Carlo put his hands around her neck and began to strangle her in silence, right in front of Denise. The guards reacted late, but in time. They pulled Lea away—gasping, panicked, clutching Denise in her arms—and she fled once more. Carlo Cosco, her great love since adolescence, her husband, the father of her child, had tried to kill her. For Carlo, nothing Lea had said made any sense. He was one of the most powerful men in the powerful Calabrian mafia in the wealthy north of Italy. He was a man who had left behind the surname of poor southern Calabrian shepherds and farmers—and any betrayal of that legacy, or of the mafia, risked sending him back there.

Lea was a young mother of twenty-two with a five-year-old daughter, learning together how to live. At twenty-two, Lea was truly starting over. She had to learn to be a single mother, to be a woman outside of the mafia, cut off from her family, her past, and Petilia Policastro. Lea and Denise learned together. They moved to the city of Bergamo, about sixty kilometers northeast of Milan. At first, they lived in a convent of Ursuline nuns—a congregation dedicated to education, following a model similar to that of the Jesuits. Later, they moved into a small house not far from Lake Iseo, also on the outskirts of Bergamo. Those would become their happiest years—for both of them. They eventually moved to the city center. While Denise continued with school, her mother worked temporary jobs in bars and factories to supplement the state allowance provided through the witness protection program. Like her own mother before her, Lea insisted that education was the tool that would give Denise freedom—and through it, the power to defy her destiny.

Read about one of the many homes she lived in while fleeing from her mafia husband.

Lea and Denise’s daily life had begun to settle into an oddly normal rhythm. They even managed to take summer vacations in Pagliarelle and Petilia Policastro, staying at her mother’s and grandmother’s house, and for a while, they seemed genuinely happy. This entire situation deeply disturbed Carlo Cosco and his mafia associates. Unlike Cosco—who remained behind bars—many of them had already been released and returned to Calabria. They would see the two women strolling through town, eating ice cream, sitting on the benches in the plaza, unafraid. Their visible happiness only deepened the hatred toward Lea. The fact that ’Ndrangheta men hadn’t attacked her yet gave Lea the false illusion that everything was behind her—but in the mafia, and especially when it comes to women, nothing is truly over until the mafia decides it is. Mafias are idiosyncratic by nature, and this was especially true when it came to women within the ’Ndrangheta. There was a repeated claim that the mafia’s so-called code of honor—one that never really existed—compelled ’ndranghetisti to protect the women of their families. In reality, it never prevented them from keeping mistresses, exploiting trafficked women, or exposing them to faide. If one compares the vast number of legal cases involving women killed by the mafia with those of women murdered by partners or ex-partners, most of the victims had no criminal ties at all. These same files show that, before being murdered, women had often suffered harassment, symbolic, physical, and sexual violence. In many cases, their faces were disfigured—cut or burned with acid. Within the mafia, if a woman disrespected a man—as had happened in Lea’s case—it was the woman’s own family who was expected to repair the offense. Carlo Cosco waited for the family’s boss—Floriano Garofalo, Lea’s brother—to be the one to punish her. Not only for having cooperated with the justice system, but also for abandoning him.

By the year 2000, Lea and Denise’s routine began to unravel. Peace was now a thing of the past. One day, the car parked outside their building—Lea’s car—was set on fire by Vito and Giuseppe Cosco, Carlo’s brothers, both recently released from prison. The warning was aimed at Lea—but also at her brother, who was failing in his duty to punish his sister. Lea tried to maintain her and her daughter’s sense of normalcy, but now she had to move with far more caution. Still, she clung to their routines. That summer, as usual, the two traveled to Calabria for vacation. Two years after the car attack, in the summer of 2002, while Lea and Denise were eating ice cream in the town center, Vito Cosco intercepted them. He began berating Lea, telling her it was her duty to take Denise to visit her father in prison—that it was her responsibility as both a mother and the wife of Carlo Cosco. The public reprimand grew increasingly heated and aggressive. The arrival of Floriano Garofalo—who had been released from prison just a few months earlier—did nothing to calm the situation. He joined Vito Cosco in rebuking his sister, reminding her of her obligations as the woman of a man serving such a long sentence. Floriano Garofalo grabbed Lea by the shoulders, held her tightly, shook her, and finally slapped her, knocking her to the ground. He leaned over her, grabbed her by the hair, and just when it seemed he was going to strike her again, he whispered in her ear: "You have to run. If you don’t run, I’ll have to kill you."

Lea used to go to the beach with Denise whenever money and time allowed.

That same summer, the circle of threats surrounding Lea grew even tighter. The front door of her grandmother’s house—where she and Denise were spending the summer—was set on fire in a clear warning. The next day, Lea, accompanied by ten-year-old Denise, went to the Carabinieri in Calabria and stated that she wanted to testify not only about the criminal activities of her husband and his family in Milan, but also about everything she knew from her past. Lea wanted to shed light on the darkness she came from. Standing before the commander of the Carabinieri, she said: “I want to break away from the past and from the environment we lived in.” She recounted the violent clashes between her family and others in the Petilia Policastro and Pagliarelle region going back to the 1970s—the story of a faida that had spanned decades and already claimed dozens of lives. She provided detailed information about crimes committed by her brother, her husband, and other members of the ’Ndrangheta, both in the north and in the south.

Lea and Denise were placed in the witness protection program and relocated to the region of Ascoli Piceno, just a few kilometers from the Adriatic Sea. Lea was admitted into the program under the legal status of a “pentita,” or cooperating witness—even though she had never committed a crime herself—a fact that left both her and Denise in a state of constant indignation. “All I know is that my life has always been nothing. No one ever gave a damn about me. I never had love or affection from anyone. I was born into misery, and I will die in it. But today, I have hope. A reason to live and to go on. Her name is DENISE, and she is my DAUGHTER. She will have from me everything I never had from anyone,” Lea wrote in her diary. Because of the small age gap between them, Lea and Denise pretended to be sisters to help mask their identities. But in public, Denise often slipped and called her “mom,” and they had to cover it with a new web of lies.

Life in the witness protection program was harsh. In six years, they moved six times, never able to form lasting bonds. Lea kept losing jobs that had been so hard to find, and Denise struggled to make friends. The only real conversation Lea had was with the court-appointed lawyer assigned to her as a cooperating witness—something that filled her with even more despair. She began to feel terror, and the news only fueled it. In August 2003, she read that a man named Vito Cosco had murdered two petty drug dealers after being insulted. This Vito Cosco—not her brother-in-law, but someone with the same name—fired into a crowd, and one of the many stray bullets struck a two-year-old girl and a sixty-year-old man who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The massacre in Rozzano, as the incident came to be known, left four people dead. This other Cosco then took refuge—just like many criminals before him—at number 6, Via Montello in Milan, where he remained barricaded for three days before surrendering to the police.

By the end of 2003, Carlo Cosco was released from prison—and immediately set out to find Lea. Not Denise—Lea. He even went to the convent in Bergamo where they had lived years earlier, posing as a cousin of Lea’s. He enlisted several men in the search, including a cousin of Lea’s who had once worked as a police auxiliary. Using internal police information systems, this cousin obtained an address that appeared to be the residence of Lea and Denise. But the address listed in the protection program was not their home—it was the Perugia police station, which was in charge of their safety while they were hidden in that region. When this breach became known to Lea and the authorities, she and her daughter were relocated again—this time to Florence. Amid this crisis and their ongoing hope for survival, Lea’s life continued to be touched by death. The faida that began with her father’s murder in 1974 was still unfolding more than thirty years later. Her cousin Mario was killed in September 2003, and her brother Floriano in June 2005. Floriano’s death was a storm of contradictions. The mafia had ordered him to kill his own sister—but he never did.

Lea’s life kept getting more complicated. Her relationship with Denise became tangled—just as it often happens between teenagers with complicated lives and mothers overwhelmed by fear. Denise wanted to see her father and live a more “normal” life. Lea, meanwhile, was not allowed to interact with anyone outside her daughter and had to survive on a meager government stipend. The emotional toll was unbearable—and parts of the justice system began to claim that Lea’s testimony had been limited, outdated, and unverifiable. This placed her and Denise on the brink of being expelled from the witness protection program. While her lawyer filed appeals to prevent that from happening, Lea’s frustration pushed her to voluntarily leave the program in mid-2006.

Life in the program had been exhausting. They moved constantly, couldn’t form real relationships, lived in economic hardship, and Denise’s growing up made things harder. Carlo Cosco sent messages to Denise, promising a better life if her mother would only stop keeping them apart. Lea continued fleeing—now without state assistance. She and Denise returned to Bergamo, to the convent where their journey had once started. From there, they moved to Fabriano, in the province of Ancona. By the end of 2007, in this never-ending pilgrimage of suffering, they arrived in Rome, where they met Don Luigi Ciotti—a priest and founder of the anti-mafia association Libera. Ciotti quickly put them in contact with a volunteer lawyer experienced in helping women escape the mafia. After convincing Lea to reenter the witness protection program and filing a series of legal appeals, Lea and Denise were readmitted and relocated once again—this time to Campobasso, in central Italy. Denise adjusted quickly, made friends at school. Lea, for a while, set aside her paranoia and started pushing back against the program’s rules. A few months later, she once again chose to leave the program—leaving her and Denise alone once more. Life with Carlo Cosco had been hell—but witness protection was no paradise.

They had no money and, after so many years on the run, no support network. Desperate, Lea decided to change tactics. She sent a message to Carlo Cosco, claiming her testimony didn’t implicate him, that it wouldn’t be used in court, and that they had left witness protection. All she wanted was to live without fear of being killed. In exchange, she offered to restore his relationship with Denise. Carlo accepted. Their family dynamic began to resemble something closer to a functional—albeit divorced—household. Lea and Denise decided to stay in Campobasso. Carlo rented an apartment where Denise lived along with his mother and one of his nephews. He himself stayed there on occasion. He paid for the apartment and, with that, made Lea feel his looming presence. Her relationship with Carlo and his family never relaxed. She couldn’t understand why they were there, with her and her daughter. She had protected Denise—shielded her from every danger, even the ones that hadn’t yet arrived. Dangers that would inevitably come just from being near the mafia.

Denise and her mother, Lea Garofalo.

The fragile coexistence shattered just days after Lea's thirty-fifth birthday. Her relationship with her former mother-in-law was strained to the breaking point. Piera—Carlo Cosco’s mother—accused Lea of making her sick with all the yelling and insults. One night, Lea and Carlo ended up sharing a room for the first time in thirteen years. The atmosphere was tense but calm, until Piera’s complaints made Lea snap. Holding a knife in her hand, she began screaming at everyone in the room: “What the hell are all of you doing here? What the fuck are you doing here? Get out of here. All of you. Out! Out! Out!” The fury in Lea’s voice came from the depths of her soul. With spit flying, tears streaming, and her face red with rage, she was unrecognizable. Lea pointed the knife at Carlo as she screamed. Without a word, he packed his bags, kissed Denise, and walked out of the house. Denise could only cry.

On May 2, 2008, Lea and Denise traveled to Rome for a concert. They spent several days in the Eternal City and returned to Campobasso on May 5. Tired from the trip, Denise stayed home from school. Her father had called to say he was sending a technician to repair the broken washing machine. Around midday, the doorbell rang. Lea answered with a knife hidden in the back pocket of her jeans. The "technician" walked in and chatted with Lea on the way to the kitchen about what might be wrong with the machine. But once inside, silence fell—a silence that often comes just before a storm. The man never opened his toolbox. Lea finally said: “If you’re here to kill me, do it now.” The so-called technician was in fact a hitman sent by Carlo Cosco, tasked with abducting and transporting Lea to Bari, in the Puglia region, where Carlo and his brothers were waiting to murder her. He lunged at Lea, trying to strangle her—the same method Carlo had used nearly a decade earlier when she visited him in prison. Denise heard the struggle and ran down to help. She jumped into the fight, trying to pry the man off her mother. The assassin panicked. Denise wasn’t supposed to be there—she was supposed to be at school. He managed to shake both women off and fled.

That same day, Lea and Denise fled again, spending the night in a pension in Campobasso. They had no money and had left in a hurry, bringing nothing with them. The next morning, they slipped out without paying and pitched a tent in a square across from the mayor’s office. It was the only place they felt safe—but it wasn’t a life. Lea made a desperate choice: to return to Calabria—to Petilia Policastro, to Pagliarelle. It was the one place where anyone could kill her, but also the only place where she and Denise could have a roof over their heads and a hot meal. They boarded a train and went back to her mother Santina’s house. At first, they lived in complete seclusion. After a few days, Denise started going out—walking around the village, eating ice cream, hanging out with friends, and even going on excursions with her father, who was now traveling frequently from Milan to Calabria. Lea, on the other hand, found herself back in the very same prison she had escaped from at age fifteen. Twenty years later, she was locked in again—this time not by bars, but by fear. The only people left in her life were her mother and sister.

Seeing Denise spending time with Carlo began to calm Lea’s nerves. She started to let her guard down, convincing herself that maybe Carlo had softened, that perhaps he had forgiven her for all the supposed betrayals. Slowly, she began walking through the village herself—still afraid, but buoyed by a faint glimmer of hope. She even resumed talking with Carlo. They spoke about their daughter, about forgiveness, about building a future, about the possibility of a healthier relationship—maybe even more than that.

Then came a summons to appear in court in Florence. Some time earlier, Denise had been attacked by another teenage girl who accused her of stealing her boyfriend. In the heat of the moment, Lea struck the girl, resulting in a minor assault charge. She had to appear before a judge with a lawyer. Once again, she was represented by the same lawyer from the Libera association who had helped her so many times before. The hearing was brief. The lawyer negotiated a minor sentence—a simple warning. While still in Florence, Denise received an invitation from her father to visit him at his home in Milan—the same building where Lea had fled from years earlier, after being beaten by Carlo. Carlo promised Denise a few days of relaxation and shopping in the fashion capital—things far from reach in Calabria. Lea convinced herself, or allowed herself to believe, that Carlo had changed. That Milan wasn’t Calabria. That he wouldn’t dare kill her there. Their lawyer begged them not to go. She pleaded with them, even offered them a place to stay in the facilities run by Libera, where they would be safe and protected. But Carlo Cosco’s slow and calculated manipulation had done its work. Lea no longer saw a man who had abused her. She saw a man who no longer hurt her—and who seemed to love his daughter. She and Denise said goodbye to the lawyer, and that night, boarded a train to Milan.

Lea wanted her daughter Denise's life to be as far away from the mafia as possible.

When the two arrived at Milan’s train station, Carlo Cosco was already there waiting. Also waiting were several members of the Cosco 'ndrina. Vito and Giuseppe Cosco—Carlo’s brothers—Massimo Sabatino—the fake washing machine repairman—Rosario Curcio and Carmine Venturino, two more members of the criminal organization who had been shadowing Lea day and night through the streets of Milan. They were all part of a plan that Carlo Cosco had failed to carry out in both Calabria and Florence—a plan that, in time, would justify what had long seemed like Lea’s paranoia. In Milan, Cosco’s plan to kill Lea failed more than once. He managed to separate her from Denise on several occasions, but each time, the men from his 'ndrina failed to act. Carlo Cosco’s obsession with killing Lea was well known in both the world and underworld of the 'Ndrangheta. He could no longer afford to wait. His reputation—already tarnished by Lea, and for far too long—needed to be restored. His final opportunity came the night mother and daughter were supposed to return to Calabria—on the 11:30 p.m. train. To make it happen, he arranged a farewell dinner for Denise with her cousins, while he himself was to have dinner alone with Lea.

Around six in the evening, Carlo Cosco picked up Denise and brought her to number 6, via Montello. Then he went to get Lea, supposedly to take her to a restaurant in Milan’s historic center. But first, he asked her to accompany him to a nearby apartment to pick something up. They got out of the car in front of a building on via San Vittore. As the two entered, Carmine Venturino watched from a safe distance in the dark. Lea and Cosco took the elevator up. When they reached the apartment, they were met by Vito Cosco. Then the assault began. Lea was beaten again and again. Her clothes were torn. And finally, she was murdered—strangled with a cord wrapped around her neck. It was likely Carlo Cosco who reserved that final act for himself.

Half an hour after the two had entered the building, Carlo Cosco left in the same car he had arrived in with Lea. Minutes later, Vito Cosco exited and approached Carmine Venturino. “It’s done. Lea is dead. Take care of it,” he told him. After thirteen years, in barely over thirty minutes, with forty or fifty seconds of force and fury on a taut rope around Lea’s neck, Carlo Cosco had fulfilled the mafia’s brutal tradition—and his supposed duty.

Carmine Venturino was joined by Rosario Curcio. Together they returned to the apartment and found Lea’s body. It had been hidden beneath an overturned couch. Her face was swollen, unrecognizable. Disfigured. Bruised. Her mouth bloodied. The green rope still embedded in her neck. They wrapped the body in a bedsheet, placed it in a box, and carried it down to the building’s vestibule. Then they loaded it into the car’s trunk and left it parked on the street. The next morning, November 25, 2009, they drove to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Monza, nearly an hour from Milan. Venturino and Curcio had brought ten liters of gasoline. They threw the body into a metal container, doused it with fuel, and watched it burn. Then they dug a pit. After an hour of incineration, Carmine Venturino took an axe and hacked Lea’s remains into pieces. They tossed the fragments into the hole, covered it with earth and a sheet of metal, and drove back to Milan. Later, Vito Cosco gave them five more liters of gasoline. The three men returned to Monza, unearthed the remains, and set them ablaze once more. When the flames began to fade, they added paper and wood. When only charred remnants were left—some still vaguely human—they smashed them with shovels. Then they returned to Milan. But they still weren’t done with Lea. The next day, Venturino and Vito Cosco returned to Monza for a third time. They collected what few pieces were left of Lea’s body—now mixed with heaps of ash—and dumped them into a second pit, not far from the first. The suffering, the hatred, the violence inflicted on Lea—both in life and in death—had finally come to an end.

The logistics warehouse where Lea's remains were hidden.

The very day her mother disappeared, Denise naturally suspected her father. Carlo Cosco claimed they had argued and that Lea had run off, but insisted he was calm, confident that she would return. Along with Denise, he presented himself to the authorities and filed a report on the disappearance of his ex-wife and the mother of his only daughter. To prevent any attempt by Denise to cooperate with the justice system, Carlo Cosco arranged for her to be taken to Calabria—to Pagliarelle and Petilia Policastro—where he could keep her under control. He placed her in the care of her aunt Marisa—Lea’s sister—but under the constant watch of Carmine Venturino, who acted as Denise’s driver, chaperone, and confidant. This attempt to control the fallout of Lea’s murder—of a woman who had denounced him for years and who, rightly, made him the prime suspect—left loose ends.

In December 2009, Massimo Sabatino—the fake washing machine technician who had tried to kidnap Lea—was arrested in Milan for heroin trafficking. Not long after, he began to confide criminal secrets to his cellmate, especially about assignments Carlo Cosco had given him and failed to pay for, including the failed kidnapping of Lea. Sabatino’s cellmate used the information to negotiate a more lenient sentence for himself. He passed everything he learned on to the authorities, who began corroborating his claims. While not yet conclusive, the evidence was steadily building against Carlo Cosco and the rest of the 'ndrina. Meanwhile, Denise was falling in love with Carmine Venturino. She trusted him and begged him for news of her mother. But although Venturino was risking his life by falling for the daughter of the boss, he could not bring himself to tell her the truth: that he had helped murder her mother. By then, investigators were closely tracking Carlo Cosco and his men. They were also watching Denise and Carmine Venturino.

Cosco’s efforts to calm and control Denise were in vain. Even though she had left the witness protection program in a gesture of goodwill toward her father, she was still secretly cooperating with the Carabinieri. In April 2010, Denise fled once more—this time without her mother. After a conversation with her lawyer from the Libera association, she took a train to Turin, where a group of activists from the same organization sheltered her in a secure, undisclosed apartment. Cosco’s desperation reached a new extreme. To protect himself and the 'ndrina, he ordered Carmine Venturino to kill Denise—his own daughter. When she resurfaced, Venturino was supposed to eliminate her. But he refused. He knew this refusal could be his own death sentence in the eyes of Carlo Cosco. He dodged the order with lies and excuses. Meanwhile, the investigation into Lea’s murder advanced, and on October 18, 2010—almost a year after her death—the lead prosecutor issued arrest warrants for all those involved: Carlo Cosco, Vito Cosco, Carmine Venturino, and Rosario Curcio. Massimo Sabatino was already in custody. Carmine Venturino was arrested on the beaches of Botricello, near Catanzaro, Calabria. He was walking alongside Denise when a group of officers approached and handcuffed him without resistance. One officer turned to Denise and told her: “Venturino is one of your mother’s killers.”

A few days later, Denise left again for Turin. She re-entered the witness protection program, supported once more by members of the Libera anti-mafia association. All she could do now was wait—for the trial of her mother’s murderers: her father, her uncles, her partner. And to cling to the hope of someday finding Lea’s body. Denise testified in court without hesitation. For two days, she recounted the suffering she and her mother endured in their fight to escape the terror imposed by her father and the criminal world he belonged to. At every opportunity, during the prosecution’s questions, she tried to highlight her mother’s courage—how she had pulled her out of that darkness. In March 2012, after multiple procedural delays, the trial concluded. All the accused were sentenced to life in prison. On the day of the verdict, hundreds of young people filled the courtroom galleries and the streets outside in support of Denise. But Lea’s remains were still missing.

Young people and women always supported Denise in her search for justice.

Carmine Venturino, at thirty-four years old and carrying the weight of a life sentence on his conscience and shoulders, decided to cooperate with the justice system. He told the authorities he had met Carlo Cosco and his brothers as a regular user of hashish and heroin. That he later began dealing those same drugs on the streets for Cosco’s 'ndrina, and that over time he became entangled in all sorts of crimes. He revealed that the Coscos had sided with the Mirabelli family in their faida against Floriano Garofalo and had taken part in the murders of Lea’s cousins and brother. A month earlier, security forces had once again stormed the building at number 6 Via Montello in Milan. The site, which housed more than two hundred residents, was cleared out after all were identified. Several 'ndranghetisti were arrested, and the rest evicted. The mold-covered three-story concrete block—panopticon-like in design—where Carlo Cosco and many other mafiosi had once found refuge, was finally emptied for good. Carmine Venturino also pointed authorities to the site where the remains of what had once been Lea were buried. A mother, a Calabrian woman, born in Petilia Policastro, who had dreamed of escaping that hellish land cursed by the devil. From the pit, investigators recovered 2,812 bone fragments, pieces of a dental implant that Lea had gotten in 2007, and microparticles from a necklace and bracelet she had worn the day she was murdered. Three kilos of ash completed the nauseating recovery scene.

On October 19, 2013—almost 1,500 days after the murder—Milan’s frozen streets bore witness to a final farewell. The coffin holding Lea’s remains was placed on a stage before a crowd that had gathered to pay tribute to a woman who had fought to rewrite her destiny—and succeeded, at least, in rewriting her daughter’s. Denise, from afar, speaking by phone to the crowd through loudspeakers, said: “Your heart and your conscience will always be fountains of freedom. You were a true martyr, and your spirit will never die.” As the funeral ended, a Calabrian woman—the wife of a ’Ndrangheta boss—approached the lawyer from the Libera association who had stood by Lea’s side and asked for help in testifying against her husband. “Lea taught me to be brave. Lea taught me to have courage.”

The revolution of Calabrian mothers had begun. After Lea, more women began denouncing their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons tied to the mafia. In recent years, Italy has created a specific support program for women like Lea and Denise—women who committed no crimes, who chose to collaborate with justice, but who found no real support from the state in their quest to build a new life.