Mafia boss daughter was only a teenager when Camorra came to her family for permission to kill someone

The daughter of a Mafia boss has revealed she was only a teenager when the mob came to her family to organise an assassination.

Marisa Merico's father was Emilio Di Giovine, who was once one of the most feared Mafia dons around.

She was even entrusted with running the family business when her dad and nonna were sent to prison, in charge of huge drug deals, carrying hundreds of thousands in her underwear as she travelled across Europe.

Speaking to LADbible, Marisa said she was only young when she learned about the true brutality of the mafia.

"It was with a Camorra mob boss had come to speak to my nanny, my dad, they actually got life for this," she said during a Minutes With interview.

"And the guy who had done something to them, he lived in our area, he was well known to us, he'd done work with my family.

"And he'd disrespected them somehow, to do with a job, with something they'd done, and he came to us to ask permission to kill him. And I overheard it, I was probably about 19.

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"So I think that, well, was I supposed is supposed to go to the police? Well, no, you can't do this, because the Camorra would have turned on us, they would have started a war, so we can't, you can't just it's not that simple to stop something.

"And that, I think, that's probably the most the worst thing ever, is knowing someone was going to die."

Marisa explained that her family were originally from Calabria, which is the toe of Italy, but that in the 1960s, her grandmother, nonna, moved to Milan in the north of the country.

She said that though they were far away, they always had the backup of the Mafia back in their home region, and they would smuggle cigarettes from Switzerland. This then slowly escalated, until they were smuggling drugs.

You can hear her full story here:

Her mother was an English au pair, who met her father in Italy the late 60s.

But when Marisa's father went on the run for murder, she and her mum ended up moving back to England.

And when she was 18, Marisa moved back to Milan, and began getting more and more involved in the criminal side of the family.

"Mainly the money side of it, the laundering, so taking money to pay for shipments of cannabis," she says.

"We were supplying a lot of Europe with it as well. Of course, ecstasy tablets had just come out then, so we were swapping in deals.

"I didn't ever go and get the drugs or see them, I was the one who went to pay for them or put the money in the bank."

Adding: "I used to wear Bridget Jones knickers and go and take hundreds of thousands just tucked in my knickers."

You can watch more from the Minutes With series here.

Topics: Crime, True Crime

Dominic Smithers

Dominic Smithers is LADbible's Editorial Lead. After graduating from the University of Leeds with a degree in French and History, he went on to write for the Manchester Evening News, the Accrington Observer and the Macclesfield Express. So as you can imagine, he’s spent many a night wondering just how useful that second language has been. But c'est la vie.

@SmithersDom