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A British woman born into a brutal Mafia clan was seen as more of a risk than fellow prisoners Myra Hindley and Rose West when in jail.
Marisa Merico is the daughter of one of Italy's most notorious godfathers of crime, Emilio DiGiovine, and found herself caught up with the Ndrangheta syndicate in Italy.
That is where Merico ran into a woman nicknamed 'Granny Heroin', who ran the crime syndicate as ruthlessly as The Godfather.
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Marisa's grandmother Maria Serraino had been jailed for murder in 1997 and was at the head of a 200-strong criminal enterprise in Milan.
Their trafficking operations stretched all the way across to Britain, where a young Blackpool-raised Merico was caught up in gun running and cash for cannabis deals from the age of 18.
By the age of 22 was helping run the organisation after her father Emilio Giovine's arrest, but fled to England a year later after wanting to be out of the family business.
But she was arrested for money laundering in 1994 at age 24 and was thrown in Durham Prison, where she found herself alongside the likes of serial killers Rose West and Myra Hindley.
She found herself categorised as even more dangerous than the notorious murderers, The Sun reported.
Marisa said: "I was the double cat A prisoner held like a terrorist. The two IRA girls who bombed Brighton were in at the same time. Myra was single category A, I think because of her self harm; Rose was also A. I was in a higher category than her.
"Even some of the officers used to say 'why was that?'."
She said while working out of Milan in her teens, her main hustle was "taking money to pay for shipments of cannabis," using what she described as "Bridget Jones knickers".
"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."
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But it wasn't long until Marisa was exposed to the true brutality of the Mafia. She was just 19 when a Camorra mob boss arrived at her home seeking permission to kill someone.
Speaking to LADbible, Marisa said: "It was with a Camorra mob boss had come to speak to my nanny, my dad, they actually got life for this.
"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.
"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 said she was trapped in the mob lifestyle, adding that: "I had to step in and almost take over. I was trapped in that life because of my loyalty to my father."
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- Crime
- Mafia
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