Farewell to Denise Garofalo, witness of justice and daughter of Lea Garofani

When in October thirteen years ago thousands of people attended her mother's funeral, from behind a window Denise honored Lea's "courage to rebel against the mafia culture. He had the strength not to give in to resignation and indifference", he said from behind a window that was supposed to protect his identity and his young age.

Today - after years of fragility, pain and a wound that has never really healed - that strength has failed her. And from another window Denise Garofalo ended her life, at the age of 35, after four days of agony. Like another very young girl in the history of the Anti-Mafia, Paolo Borsellino's "picciridda", the justice witness Rita Atria.

Denise could not bear the heartbreak of the murder of her mother, killed and torn to pieces on November 24, 2009 at the behest of her father, Carlo Cosco, after Lea's choice to report her ex-partner's criminal affairs. But the 'Ndrangheta - even kilometers away from Calabria - punishes these betrayals with death.

Lea entered the justice witness protection program in 2002, after having reported in particular about the drug trafficking in Piazza Baiamonti, a murder and the plots of the Crotone clans in Milan, where Lea lives with Cosco in the popular neighborhood of Quarto Oggiaro.

Accompanied on the difficult path by the Libera association, Lea lives under a false name, elsewhere, escorted. “I do it for my daughter,” he recorded. And precisely by leveraging his love for Denise, the ex-partner will convince 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 deal with all the levers, especially emotional ones, and the deceptions implemented against the "courageous women" who tried to free themselves 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, accepts.

The cameras of the Arco della Pace in Milan framed her last frames, before being kidnapped, killed and torn to pieces. Three years later, after Denise, at 17, had moved with her father to Calabria, the remains of her body were found.

But for Denise also the shock of seeing her father and the boy who had become her boyfriend arrested for the murder of her mother, together with four others. Her boyfriend himself helped the magistrates find what remained of Lea's body.

At the trial, behind a screen, Denise, accompanied by the lawyer Enza Rando di Libera, testifies, accuses her father and also resists attempts at intimidation. His statements were crucial in the trials that ended with a string 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 lacerations that not even time soothes.

And Denise, after having problems with addictions and having had a child herself, could no longer cope: her internal balance was broken, to resume the image of Don Luigi Ciotti. «Courage and suffering represented the two extremes within which Denise's entire life moved, the two levels of the scale that she tried for a long time, with all her strength, to keep in balance».