Gangsters' Wives (11 page)

After that he was transferred to the Maze prison, which was effectively run by the prisoners rather than the authorities. Johnny even got himself a mobile phone in there, though they were quite unusual at the time. We used to smuggle in vodka inside balloons in our knickers. The cubicles in the visiting area were high and it was a given that intimate stuff might be going on. Everyone knew that partners were going to have sex in there

I was in court for his trial in September 1995. I was upset the whole time. He was sentenced to sixteen years. When I heard the verdict, I was dazed. I jumped up in court and yelled: ‘I’ll wait for you Johnny.’

During his first year in prison, Johnny finished with Gina for a while, but he still phoned her all the time. She manipulated him. I’d get angry with Johnny because of that – he was like a naughty child in my hands.

I was madly in love with him when he and Gina split up, and desperate to have his baby. We got engaged while he was in prison and I had an engagement party to celebrate. I’ll never forget that night. Obviously Johnny couldn’t be there, but he sent me a present which I unwrapped in front of everyone in the bar – a twelve-inch vibrator with a note saying ‘Make sure you wait until the wee man gets out, but use this in the meantime’. But the engagement was broken off within a week.

I don’t regret all those ups and downs. It was my life at that time. But I do regret giving him so much support when he was going between Gina and me. I even forgave him after we got engaged and then he went and married Gina.

When he married Gina, it broke my heart. The day of the wedding he rang me and he was laughing. He thought it was a big joke. I said the marriage was doomed.

Gina rang me later. She actually said, ‘You’re a nice person.’ I said, ‘Do me a favour. Give him the love he deserves. He’s a good man.’ It was the only time we called a truce.

After Johnny and Gina got married, he still called me all the time. I regret being his agony aunt and his sex therapist. He’d come off the phone to her and then cry to me about something she’d done.

I knew I shouldn’t go near him after they got married, but it was a case of my mind telling me ‘no’ and my heart telling me ‘yes’. Johnny was like a child in many respects. I couldn’t leave him because I had this mother thing about him.

I kept up seeing him in prison and was even granted ‘private visits’ with Johnny where we could have sex. I desperately wanted his child because I wanted something permanent from him. We did agree to try and did that for six years or so. I don’t know whether it was because of the steroids he was taking, but it never happened.

I was all over the place emotionally. I got heavily involved with shoplifting and robberies and credit card fraud. Sometimes I’d steal to buy the things Johnny asked me to get him in prison, like designer clothes, but I can’t blame him for that, despite how crazy he made me.

Johnny would ring me all the time from prison, even though he was supposedly married to Gina. I couldn’t move on with my life at all. It really messed with my head and I had two mental breakdowns.

By the time Johnny was released early from jail in 1999, he had enemies. He managed to piss a lot of people off by shooting his mouth off and being so changeable. He was too mouthy. He wanted to be known, and when he did get known, he didn’t like it. He brought a lot of it on himself.

Even then we carried on seeing each other, despite everything I’d gone through, until something happened to finally bring me to my senses. He suggested I work as a prostitute in a loyalist-run brothel. It was the final straw. I stuck my fist in his face and broke his nose. After that, he tried to make me think it was a joke, but I knew it wasn’t. I decided I wasn’t going to let him carry on making a fool out of me.

I knew then that it was never going to work, no matter how much effort I put into it. It was the hardest decision I ever made. I had been such a good influence on him. I told him he was getting too greedy. He used to call me Mystic Meg because everything I predicted came true, but he should have listened to me. I’m convinced that if I’d stayed with him, he’d still be here. He wouldn’t have gone as power-mad as he did.

Over the next few years, in and out of prison, Johnny pulled the whole Protestant community apart. He wanted full power of the Shankill and the UDF. You can’t do that. Johnny was hated by the UDF.

By the end, Johnny saw himself as King of Ireland. He wanted full control of everything.

I’d always said I’d never turn against Johnny but I felt sick when Gina sold her story to the
Daily Mirror
, saying how she’d stood by him while he was in prison when I was the one who visited him all those years. I read about how Gina was pining away without her love, and how she’d had to endure 3000 nights without Johnny. In 2002, I told my own story in the
Mirror
to set the record straight.

When I read my story in the paper – ‘Johnny Adair’s Lover Reveals All’ – I got a shock reading my own words. It was only then I realised what I’d been through and what my kids had been through and how crazy it had all been. I turned a corner after that.

When Johnny was released from prison for good in 2005, he had little support left and his friends and family were threatened with death unless they left the Shankill area. If he ever came back to Ireland he’d be shot dead within seconds.

Gina settled in Bolton while Johnny ended up going to live in Scotland. They’re not together any more. I still don’t think he can handle the fact he’s a nobody. Johnny will go anywhere he has support, wherever people will look up to him and make him feel big about himself. He has always been in denial and he’ll keep going that way for the rest of his life.

I still miss the good times but Johnny betrayed a lot of people. He turned out to be a loser. He betrayed every one of the people who supported him. He became too greedy. Even so, no one knows the whole truth.

Sure, people have given me a hard time over Johnny. I still live in Belfast and in most people’s eyes I’m still Johnny Adair’s mistress, even though he’s been gone all these years. People get afraid. That fear still exists.

I now have a lot of Catholic friends. Even at the height of the Troubles I had Catholic friends. I wouldn’t want to dredge everything up again.

I wish I could leave that part of my life behind. Even after all these years I don’t live a normal life here. Everyone knows who I am when I go into a bar. I’m afraid to get involved in conversations in case the subject comes round to him. I don’t want to be singled out just because of the man I was once involved with.

I’ve been called all the names under the sun. The whole focus for people’s anger in Ireland has been turned on Johnny Adair.

I would like to see him again. I think about it all the time and he obviously wants to see me. Last year he rang the local journalist to ask for my number. A friend of his sent me a message a few months ago saying Johnny often talks about what would have happened if he hadn’t chosen Gina, if he’d made a different decision. There’s definitely some unfinished business there. I think maybe I’ll go over to the UK where he’s living now. There’s a need for me to bring closure into my life, and he can’t come back here.

I’ve never settled with anyone else and neither has he. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone like I loved him. He gave me so much love and no one else has come close.

I wouldn’t go down the road of getting back with him though. I wouldn’t want it all to kick off again. I had two mental breakdowns. I can’t believe I put myself through it, or put up with it.

It makes me angry sometimes when young kids think he’s an icon. He’s infamous, but in many ways he’s teaching young people the wrong way.

Johnny is an icon, but he’s not a hero to me. He’s a man – the man I fell in love with.

In Love With a Mad Dog
by June Caldwell and Jackie ‘Legs’ Robinson is published by Gill & Macmillan

No gangsters’ wives’ book would be complete without an account of marrying into the Mafia. Growing up in a large Italian family in 1960s Brooklyn, Andrea Giovino learned from an early age to idolise Mafia guys. As a woman, and a very attractive one at that, she had a succession of relationships with powerful Mafia-connected men including Frank Lino, a ‘capo’ in the Bonanno crime family and Mark Reiter, an associate of the Gambini family, who is currently serving a 260-year prison sentence for narcotics trafficking. During her time as a ‘Mafia wife’ she was involved in loan sharking and money laundering. In 1992, she was arrested on drugs charges and decided to turn police informant. John Fogarty, her boyfriend at the time, and her brother Johnny, both guilty of multiple murders, also agreed to cooperate with police in return for her release. After refusing to join the Witness Protection Program, she moved to Pennsylvania with her children where she lived quietly for many years until her autobiography
, Divorced from the Mob
(Da Capo
Press), turned her into an unlikely champion for women involved in relationships with abusive men
.

When my book,
Divorced from the Mob
came out in 2004, a lot of people thought I was crazy. After all, my evidence had helped to put a lot of people away and I’d had to flee New York City with my children because of threats to my life. Anyone normal would have hidden away in fear, right?

But I’m not the sort of person to live like that. I don’t want to live my life constantly looking over my shoulder. I won’t give anyone that kind of power over me. And weirdly, going public has made things better for me. I’m always in the public eye now and ironically, that makes me feel safer.

Where I grew up, cooperating with the police goes against every unwritten rule and value. I grew up in Brooklyn, in a mostly Italian neighbourhood. I was the sixth of ten children and there was never enough money to go round. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother – who dominated the family, including my father – sending me out into the cold early morning, shivering in ragged hand-me-downs, to steal bread, bagels and milk from the trays that had just been delivered and left on the pavement outside the neighbourhood corner store. I would have been about five and I guess my mother decided sending me made sense. After all, who’d want to see a little girl arrested for stealing food for her family.

There was a lot of poverty where we lived. There were too many people crammed together with little or no education. People did anything to feed their families – crimes for survival.

My mother was tough and always trying to think of ways to make money. One of those was setting up an illegal gambling den in our basement. Just after I turned six, groups of men started showing up at our house regularly. I’d know they were there because I’d see this long line of fancy cars out front. Our neighbours must have known these were Mafia guys. I don’t know what the financial arrangements were but, as much as money mattered to my mother, she also enjoyed the prestige involved in having mob-related men and activities going on in our house. She’d point to these men as they were leaving and tell me that they were the kind of men I should find when I grew up. And they were exactly the kind of men I did find.

Although my mother had to close down the gambling den when she was arrested, the ambition to marry a mobster never left me. It was the only ambition I knew. For a girl it was assumed I wouldn’t bother with an education, I’d just get a boyfriend instead. I grew into an attractive young woman with a nice body and I used that as my ticket to a better life. I had no schooling behind me. The future was frightening. All I could do was hope to find a well-connected man to support me.

By 1977, I hadn’t done too well in that respect. I was a single mother with a failed marriage behind me. My big chance came when I was offered a job serving drinks at another illegal gambling club hidden away in a Brooklyn industrial park. The people in the club were as restrained and refined as any group you’d find in a Manhattan nightspot – with one difference. The vast majority had either killed someone themselves, ordered or witnessed a killing, or knew someone who’d done the killing. I understood all this, but instead of being frightened by it, I was intrigued. Being able to rub elbows with some of the underworld’s elite was fuel for my fantasies of acquiring nice things.

That’s how I met Frank Lino, one of the captains in the Bonanno crime family and just about the most powerful man I could expect to meet. One day he called one of my brothers in and told him he wanted me to be his girlfriend. My mother was delighted. It was everything she’d ever dreamed of. How could I refuse?

While I didn’t love Frank, I grew very fond of him. We enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. For the first Valentine’s Day we spent together, he bought me a brand new 1978 Mercedes 450SL convertible. My favourite outings with Frank were our shopping trips to Manhattan. He’d have his limo pick us up, and we’d get dropped off at Fifth Avenue, then make our way up toward Central Park. Frank lavished diamonds, gold and other gems on me and bought us both matching platinum Presidential Rolex watches. He had homes in an exclusive area of Brooklyn called Marine Park and in Florida and a ski home on Hunter Mountain in upstate New York.

He was a man who seemed to have a near limitless supply of cash. I thought nothing of driving around in my Mercedes with thousands of dollars in my purse – at least I had that amount at the beginning of the day.

Frank and I seldom talked about business, but I knew that he was involved in the sale of drugs. The romanticised notion of the old-time mob guys not wanting to be involved in drugs is exactly that – an outdated and inaccurate picture of a far more disturbing reality.

But while I did care for Frank and he was very good to me, I knew that somewhere within him had to be a dead place, otherwise he couldn’t have gotten to where he was. And if it was there it could come out some day. I didn’t want to be around to witness it, or fall victim to it.

After Frank came other relationships with wealthy men such as Mark Reiter, who was eventually sentenced to 260 years without parole for drug trafficking. I made many mistakes choosing partners. They weren’t violent towards me but they tended to be abusive and have no respect for women. To them, a woman’s place was in the kitchen or the bedroom.