Marisa Merico, The Mafia "Mum"

By Sponsor in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 8, 2013 6:00PM

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One of the mafia's more infamous ladies-in-charge in recent years is a middle-class mother of two and grandmother of one who lives in an English seaside town. Marisa Merico, the daughter of a British woman and an Italian drugs and arms trafficker, has been waiting for the chance to go back to Italy, where she ran her father's crew from the young age of 22.

Merico came from a long line of mafiosi. Her grandmother, Maria Serraino, was born into a drug-running mafia family in Italy, and she roped her twelve children into the business at early ages. Merico's father, Emilio Di Giovine, ran drugs in Italy and laundered money in New York until he was caught in the 1980s, deported and put in prison in Milan. Merico was a 13-year-old living with her mother in Blackpool, England when she visited him in prison, "I knew he was more than a petty criminal by the way the prison guards treated him. He slept on silk sheets in his cell and dined on lobster.”

At 17, she dropped out of school and joined her father's side of the family in Italy. She said of her grandmother, "The drugs would arrive from Turkey and she would tell them what to do with them. In the early days it was about heroin and later cannabis. She never left the kitchen and never took off her apron — but she called the shots. She cooked three meals a day and ran a Mafia family."

After marrying Bruno Merico, she and her husband started to smuggle durgs, helping carry huge quantities of money back and forth from Spain, and occasionally smuggling weapons as well. Her father was re-incarcerated in 1992 soon after his release, and even though she had a daughter of her own at that point, she took it upon herself to take control of his mafia clan in addition to her own family. "No one made me do it, but I felt obliged to," she told the Daily Beast recently. "When the ship sinks, you don’t run."

In 1993, her father's sister agreed to testify against the family upon getting busted for ecstasy possession, and Merico moved back in with her mother to hide out. Her father, uncles and grandmother were busted, and eventually Merico was caught laundering money in Blackpool.

Merico served 14 months of a five-year sentence in Italy but was released on a technicality. She was allowed to travel back to the U.K., though Italian authorities said they would appeal. So far, their attempts at extradition have failed and her arrest warrant is soon to expire. Now 42, Merico lives in Blackpool with her children and grandchild, awaiting the chance to return to Italy—if not her former life of crime—to see friends and family once again. She told The Sun, "Yes, we were rich and there were Cartier watches and Chanel handbags. But really all I wanted was my family's love and loyalty."