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executed in classic manner while he drove to the sweatshop he owned outside Naples, where he employed master tailors and seamstresses to make high-quality copies of designer clothing. He got behind on his extortion payments to ’Ndrangheta; they threatened to seize the business. He resisted; they took him out before breakfast.
    After her husband’s murder, ’Ndrangheta made Lucia a deal. She would continue to run the fake high-end clothing business, but now as a money-laundering scheme for their cocaine operation. Profitable for everyone. Her mistake was to hire Chinese immigrants, cheap labor, to work in the shop. It didn’t matter that drug money flowed in and out as usual. By hiring the Chinese she had crossed the crime families who control the counterfeit merchandise trade—an unforgivable slap in the face that could unbalance the delicate truce between the clans. She was a wild card. ’Ndrangheta had to cut her off.
    They called her La Leonessa, the Lioness, because she was remorseless and arrogant as a cat, and she obliged the nickname by sporting skintight animal prints, furs, and ropes of gold. From the photos and news clippings reproduced in the file, the Lioness looked like the cliché of a mistress: full-busted, with thick black hair and the size-two body of a teenager. She vanished from a supermarket parking lot in January of this year—punishment for dealing with the Chinese without permission.
    That was the theory. But if the husband is always the prime suspect, the lover must be second in line. While the file details five trysts in luxury hotels in Como and Milan between Nicoli Nicosa and Lucia Vincenzo over the past year, it contains no hard evidence that they were in the cocaine business together—but why not? Lucia was an overconfident amateur and Nicosa a street-smart opportunist who might have been looking for a partner. Maybe he saw a way to prove himself to the big boys by aiding in her death.
    Like the princes of the Italian city-states, Nicosa seems to possess a natural understanding of alliances. The son of a Sienese coffee roaster, he graduated from the Università degli Studi di Roma and studied in the United States at Harvard Business School. There he connected with the son of a member of the ruling class of El Salvador. In that deeply troubled country it was open season for ruthless young men. His classmate’s father liked the charming, big-eyed Italian and treated him like another son; he gave him a postgraduate course in bribery and corruption that allowed Nicosa to buy out the indigenous farmers who were growing yucca, in order for him to plant coffee. The file notes that although the civil war had ended, “buy out” was often a euphemism for “disappeared.”
    Nicosa continued to profit from a cordial relationship with the right-wing power brokers. After a major earthquake, he was awarded a contract to build a water treatment system. Although the water project is still touted on the official government website as having revitalized a devastated area, it was never built. Nicosa and his behind-the-scenes benefactors pocketed millions.
    It was in the aftermath of this earthquake that he met Cecilia Sanchez, a young doctor working in an emergency clinic set up near his plantation. There is a gap of three years before Cecilia immigrated to Italy, and they were married in Nicosa’s hometown of Siena. It could not have been easy for a young woman to leave a poor extended Catholic family that depended on her income as a doctor. There isn’t much in the file on Cecilia’s side of the story, except copies of the letters she sent to FBI HQ in Washington, D.C., searching for an American relation named Ana Grey. She gives the reason as a small inheritance she is allegedly holding for me, but then the letters grow more desperate:
    “… Since I was a little girl, I have held in my heart the name of Ana Grey, our relative who lived in America. I believe that we are meant to find each other.