The grandfather murdered in the “Pagliarelle feud” in 1975, the uncle killed in Petilia Policastro in 2005 and the mother torn to pieces and burned in Milan in 2009. Denise Cosco, who committed suicide last Thursday in Ariccia at the age of 35, like her mother Lea Garofalo and the other women in her family, often had to wear mourning for the ‘Ndrangheta murders. Close family members and distant relatives ended up killed at the hands of the gangs for that heavy surname: like Antonio Garofalo, Lea’s father, who fell under the blows of the Petiline underworld in a mafia war. Then it was the turn of Mario Francesco Garofalo, cousin of the justice witness, killed at the age of 46 on 28 September 2003 by shots fired. A few months earlier, on 9 December 2002, the charred bodies of two other members of the Garofalo family were found in an abandoned Lancia Thema in Ponte di Ferro in the countryside of Petilia Policastro: the cousins Francesco, 38 years old, and Salvatore Garofalo, 41 years old, both killed with a gunshot to the back of the head.
This series of deaths followed by the ambush of Floriano Garofano, Denise’s uncle and Lea’s brother, who after making his way through the Petilini clans was eliminated in the hamlet of Pagliarelle at the age of 40 on 8 June 2005. The reason? He had refused to “punish” his sister who had begun to reveal her family’s illicit affairs and more to the anti-mafia magistrates. A trail of blood that reached its peak on 24 November 2009 with the barbaric murder of Lea in Milan: the witness of justice was kidnapped, torn to pieces and burned on the orders of her ex-husband, Carlo Cosco, because she had decided to end the criminal world that had never belonged to her.
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