Gangsters' Wives (20 page)

Duquesa is a very enclosed port so everyone knows everybody. They all thought we were dykes to start with because we were always together – one Australian woman and two English. We were the talk of the town – mind you, people down there get excited about a Tupperware party, so it wasn’t saying much.

We’d been invited to a friend’s bar on Christmas night. When we got there it was closed. By this time we were already well oiled. We thought: It’s Christmas. We have to go out. We heard this disco music coming from the port and followed it. It was a private function and we were really casually dressed in jeans, but they invited us. We danced about. Then these four guys came in. My girlfriend immediately fancied one of them, who turned out to be Brazilian, but my attention was on his dark, handsome friend.

My girlfriend got chatted up by the Brazilian. They wanted to fix up a date for the following night but she didn’t speak any Spanish and he didn’t speak any English. I spoke a little bit of Spanish, so they introduced me to the friend, whose name was Alex and who seemed to speak every language under the sun, to get the exchange of telephone numbers done. There wasn’t very much contact between us that night, but there was something about him I found really attractive, although I could tell he was a lot younger than me.

The next day my friend asked me to come with her in case her date didn’t show up. So we both got all dolled up and Alex came along, doing a double take when he saw us. He told us his friend would be along shortly and sat down next to me, looked into my eyes and that really was it. It was instant.

All that night we chatted as if we were the only two people in the room. He was very charismatic, very attentive. He made me feel special. He’s a fabulous dancer and I love dancing and I was impressed by the fact he could speak seven languages.

We started seeing each other. I thought he was Italian at first. He played a little game with me. He spoke Italian most of the time with some French. It wasn’t until three months later, when he was about to move into my apartment, that I found out the truth – that he was actually Romanian and that he’d spent seven years in prisons in three different countries, mostly for car theft.

I took that in my stride. ‘I’ve got a confession as well,’ I told him. ‘I’m not forty-one, I’m forty-nine.’ He said, ‘I know. I’ve already looked at your passport.’ Then he revealed he was twenty-seven, not thirty-six as he’d told me.

Funnily enough, the twenty-two-year age gap didn’t seem to be an obstacle. We liked the same things. I loved trying to talk to him in French, which I’d studied at school, and he was a fabulous cook. He loved music and opera. I got a piano and tried to teach him to play. We spent every day together.

When my friends found out Alex was Romanian, I had to take an awful lot of flak because Romanians cause an awful lot of problems over here – but then so do English, so do Moroccans, so do Arabs. One person does not represent a country.

From early on, I knew he’d been in trouble with the law in the past. He didn’t hold back what he’d done. I knew he’d been a drug dealer. Because he told me about his childhood, I could see why he did it. He was kicked out of the house at fourteen, dropped in Germany, and told to get on with life. No kid of fourteen can survive living on the streets without meeting the wrong people.

At first I thought the drug dealing was all in the past but when we started living together, I realised it wasn’t. He was very secretive. He’d say, ‘Oh, I’m going out. I’ll be back at eleven or twelve.’ It would get to one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock and he’d still not be back. Then I’d get a phone call to let him in the apartment. He’d never say where he’d been, but I knew there was something dodgy going on. There were organised gangs dealing in drugs along the coast, and I realised he was probably involved with one of those.

I told him I didn’t want him doing it. But in the end, what could I do? I had to accept it. And besides, he could be so romantic I forgot about everything else. He’d go off and disappear and I wouldn’t know where he was and then on his way back he’d call in at the garage and buy a little teddy bear or a rose.

I pinned my hopes on the club I was setting up with my friends. We were rushing around getting staff contracts drawn up. I was going to get Alex to provide the security. It was going to be an ideal new start for him, his chance to do a normal job, which he’d never done before. It would take a total change of mindset.

At the same time though, I was worrying privately about whether Alex was with me because he thought I had money. Let’s face it, that’s what most people think if they see a young guy with a much older woman. I know I fell in love with him quicker than he fell in love with me, and the imbalance bothered me. It was always in the back of my mind.

Then something happened that really put his true feelings to the test. When Alex and I had been together a few months, the arrangements for the nightclub I’d planned to open were finally sorted. I phoned my divorce mediator in England who’d been holding the money from my settlement in trust and left a message saying: ‘Right, everything’s ready to go. Can you transfer the money from my account now?’ I should have heard alarm bells when he never rang back. Finally I spoke to him and he told me he needed to come over to Spain to check everything was in order.

I thought it was a bit strange, but it was a lot of money and I assumed he had a duty of care to make sure the divorce settlement wasn’t going to be wasted on a precarious venture.

When the mediator arrived, he didn’t actually seem that interested in the club but was much more concerned with talking to me about his own company and trying to persuade me to invest in that instead or as well. I said, ‘My life is in Spain now. I don’t want to invest in a company in England’. He seemed disappointed but resigned and promised to transfer the money as soon as he arrived back in the UK.

But once he’d got back, I couldn’t get him on the phone. I left message after message and got no reply. Also, no money. Increasingly concerned, I contacted a lawyer in England and then the fraud squad. To cut a long story short I never got the money and I lost the club. There was a two-year court case but no one could recover the money.

After that, my whole life collapsed like a pack of cards. I lost my investment home in Spain because I had to sell that to survive. I couldn’t pay the mortgage on my property in England so I lost that. In total I lost £450,000. That was my entire life savings, including my divorce settlement.

From being a relatively wealthy woman, I was now penniless. I was fifty years old and I had no home, no business and no prospects.

If Alex had been after my money, he’d have been out of there like a shot, but he stuck by me. Even when we ended up living in the car for a little while, he didn’t leave me. That’s when I finally accepted he loved me for me, not for what he thought I could give him.

We both did whatever work we could do to get back on our feet a little. Then, while the court case was going on, I went over to Romania to meet Alex’s family. At the time people told me I was mad to go to Romania – I’d be taken off and never heard from again. In fact it was the opposite. When I arrived at the airport, the security guards took my bags. I was like royalty. Alex had gone on ahead of me and when I arrived, he was stood there and he kissed my hand – which was the Romanian way. We couldn’t cuddle in front of anybody. I just melted.

The poverty in Romania shocked me. I had never been anywhere with no running water or electricity and you went outside to do your business in a hole in the ground. People were getting up at five a.m. to go to work in a horse and cart. It was an eye-opener, seeing kids with deformed limbs.

Alex’s aunt ran a children’s hospital. When I first visited, I thought: Oh my God, we’ve got to do something to help. We even went as far as setting up a registered charity, although we’ve never had enough money to get it off the ground.

The first Christmas we were there, we went to the hypermarket and I spent a load of money and we made all these parcels and delivered them out to outlying villagers where we knew the father wasn’t there and there was no money for Christmas. That was the best Christmas I ever had. That’s what Christmas is supposed to be like.

Even though she’s a year younger than me, I got on famously with Alex’s mum. She said, ‘If my Alex is happy, I’m happy.’ The whole family made me feel very welcome.

That’s not to say it was all perfect. Alex has a terrible temper and that first visit to Romania showed a violent side to him. When I arrived, he’d hired a friend to drive us around. The friend kept coming on to me and Alex saw it. He lashed out and caught me with his ring and cut my eye open. I got out of the car and just ran.

He ran after me and he was sobbing his heart out. He said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ That’s when I realised that all the beatings he’d suffered as a child had taken their toll. I think he thought I was just going to go off with this other guy.

He said, ‘I don’t want you to leave. I’m in love with you.’ I forgave him of course, but I was worried this would turn out not to be a one-off – and I was right.

Meanwhile I got back in touch with my ex-husband. He knew what had happened with the divorce settlement and obviously felt sorry for me. We’d had a home in Florida and I asked if he’d consider selling it. He said, ‘Well, I’m never going to go there because there are too many memories.’ So he sold that and sent the money over to me. That was a financial lifeline.

Alex and I decided to set up a hairdressing salon in his city in Romania. There was only one salon in the whole of the city so there was plenty of scope. That was going to be another new start. Alex was so excited, I felt it could really turn his life around. Away from the organised gangs back in the Costa del Sol, he could throw himself into something legitimate.

The initial arrangements all went well and I left Alex in charge of sorting things out in Romania while I flew back and forth to Spain trying to earn what money I could, working mostly for telesales companies or property developers.

On one of my visits back to Romania, Alex proposed. I got in the car at the airport and he said, ‘We get married.’ I said, ‘OK.’ He had the ring already, so I put it on. It wasn’t the most romantic thing, but that was him all over.

I didn’t have any doubts about the marriage, although that’s partly because some Romanian marriages are symbolic and don’t count anywhere else. There were no legal documents. We had a ceremony in Alex’s mother’s house with a proper priest but it was more of a blessing than a proper marriage.

The day was lovely. His mother did it the English way. We weren’t allowed to see each other the night before. He stayed in her house, I stayed in an apartment. In the morning I was told I had to stay in the bedroom of the house and get prepared. I could hear people coming in and furniture being moved. I’d bought a long gold Chinese-style dress. I got all ready and was summoned out. When I came out there were garlands of flowers everywhere and candles and lots of tables of food and the priest was there along with the family and other guests. All the women were in long dresses. It was just lovely – I’d never been happier in my life.

Some guests at that wedding may have wondered about the age gap, but to tell you the truth it bothered me far more than him. He always told me he’d never particularly liked young girls. He’s got a very low opinion of younger girls because the ones he knows either have worked as prostitutes or at least got paid for sex. In Romania they’d do a blow job for five euros to get some money to get a driving lesson.

After about nine months of hard work, the salon opened. I invited a hairdressing friend of mine to fly over to do a celebrity masterclass. Everyone adored him and we had a really busy week and there was champagne for all the new clients and it all looked like it was going to go really well.

Alex was in his element, and once again I left him at the helm while I flew back to Spain to work. Big mistake. I don’t know what got into his head. He decided he was a businessman and didn’t need to ask me anything. He totally ruined the business. He borrowed some money against it and extended it and bought extra land. He thought he was doing the right thing by expanding. But while it might have been the right thing eventually, to do it so soon was a catastrophic mistake.

Plus, he’d borrowed it from the wrong people. The salon was never going to start generating the kind of returns we needed so soon after starting, so the bit of money we had left we had to use to pay the loan off, leaving us nothing to run the business.

It all got very fraught, and I was frightened because of how violent things can get there. I remember one time Alex had a phone call and within ten minutes five cars had arrived full of blokes. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘Now we do boom boom.’ They’d all arranged to meet up and have a big fight. I couldn’t believe it.

Despite our best efforts, we ended up hopelessly overstretched and we lost the salon – and with it the last of my financial security. I was back at square one – broke and homeless, utterly demoralised and furious with Alex.

While the loss of the business didn’t split us up, it inevitably caused a lot of friction between us. Alex felt humiliated and, as he’s such a proud person, that made him defensive and angry. I was hugely resentful. I realised that I was basically on my own, and the only person I could rely on was myself.

Desperate for money, I was introduced to a guy who lives over here in Spain – I can’t say much about him because he’s well known – who was into bondage. He’s rich and offered me a job working for him as a high-class dominatrix. He offered to set me up in a villa and assured me I wouldn’t have to have sex with the clients as there were two other girls who took care of all of that. I’d just have to ‘discipline’ them.

It was such a world away from the life I’d lived up until that point, but I was really desperate. We had no money, nowhere to live. When he said Alex could provide the security, I thought: What have I got to lose?

Actually the dominatrix work wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. It’s pure escapism. You put on the costume and the make-up and you become someone else. Even though I didn’t have sex with the clients, it was very hard for Alex to accept me doing that kind of work. It really got to him. But there really was no alternative. I lived in the villa and he stayed in an apartment I’d rented, but most of the time I couldn’t even afford the electricity.