When in October thirteen years ago thousands of people attended the funeral of the mother, from behind a window Denise honored the «courage of Lea to rebel against the culture of the mafia. She had the strength not to bow to resignation and indifference», she declared from behind a window that had to protect her identity and her young age. Today – after years of fragility, pain and a wound never truly healed – that strength has failed her. And from another window Denise Garofalo ended her life, at 35, after four days of agony. Like another very young woman in the history of the Anti-Mafia, Paolo Borsellino’s “picciridda,” the justice witness Rita Atria.
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Denise could not bear the tearing caused by her mother’s murder, killed and dismembered on November 24, 2009, by order of the father, Carlo Cosco, after Lea’s decision to report the criminal dealings of her ex-partner. But the ’ndrangheta – even kilometers away from Calabria – punishes these betrayals with death. Lea entered the witness protection program in 2002, after particularly revealing the drug trafficking in Piazza Baiamonti, a murder, and the plots of the Crotonese clans in Milan, where Lea lived with Cosco in the popular Quarto Oggiaro neighborhood. Accompanied on the difficult path by the association Libera, Lea lives under a false name, elsewhere, escorted. “I do it for my daughter,” she stated. And precisely by leveraging the love for Denise, the ex-partner convinced her to meet again, years later, after a first attempt to kill her in Campobasso, where she was living.
Like many other women who tried to free themselves from the yoke of the ’ndrangheta, Lea also had to face all the levers, especially emotional ones, and the deceptions enacted against the “brave women” who tried to break free from the clan. “Let’s meet to talk about our beloved Denise,” Cosco told her, to convince her to meet in Milan. And Lea, who in the meantime had left the protection program, agrees.
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The cameras at the Arco della Pace in Milan captured her last frames, before she was kidnapped, killed, and dismembered. Three years later, after Denise, at 17, had moved with her father to Calabria, the remains of her body were found. But for Denise, there was also the shock of seeing arrested for her mother’s murder her own father and that young man who had become her boyfriend, along with four others. It was precisely her boyfriend who helped the magistrates find what was left of Lea’s body. At the trial, behind a screen, Denise, accompanied by lawyer Enza Rando from Libera, testified, accused her father, and resisted intimidation attempts. Her statements were crucial in the trials that ended with a series of life sentences.
Denise remained under protection until 2018, living under another name, finding a job and a new dimension of life, followed by the Central Protection Service of the Criminal Police. But there are wounds and tears that not even time heals. And Denise, after also struggling with addiction problems and after having a child herself, could no longer cope: her inner balance broke, to use the image of Don Luigi Ciotti. «Courage and suffering represented the two extremes within which Denise’s entire life moved, the two sides of the scale that she long tried, with all her strength, to keep balanced».
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