Wall of silence shrouds murder

of two Canadians

By Rosie DiManno / THE TORONTO STAR

CALANNA, Italy - What's bred in the bone is often spilled in
the blood.

These are the ancient hostilities, passed on from one generation to
the next, and imprinted on the heart as if by some genetic code of
retribution.

Grievances are nurtured, a sense of dishonor festers, and the
yearning for vengeance hardens into a tumor of malice.

The Italians have a word for it, a word that has become part of the
global lexicon: vendetta.

They won't say it out loud, not here in this small Calabrian
mountain village - a calcified hangnail on the big toe of the
Italian peninsula - and certainly not to a stranger who comes prying
into their personal affairs.

The citizens of Calanna, high in the hills that overlook the Strait
of Messina, are insulated by geography and insular by temperament.

They see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

But someone has committed evil. Someone has committed murder.

There is nothing to mark the spot on the hairpin mountain road
where blood was shed last month. No flowers, no cross, no epitaph
carved into the cactus-encrusted hillside. But this is where a
40-year-old Canadian barber, Angelo Morena, and his 67-year-old
mother Rosa Versaci were ambushed and shot to death as they drove
back to their lofty ancestral village after a family shopping
excursion on Jan 11.

Morena's wife Anna - four months pregnant - was sitting in the back
seat with the couple's daughter Lysia, 4. They were carrying parcels
on their laps.

According to police, the Renault had just nosed out of a turn when
it was bumped from behind and pushed up against the guardrail. Two
unidentified men jumped out of the second vehicle and blasted
Morena's car, cutting down Morena and his mother in a burst of
pistol and machinegun fire.

Local journalists who visited the scene immediately afterwards
reported that the killers had directed their shots cleanly and
precisely through the windshield. There seemed to have been a
deliberate attempt to avoid hitting Morena's wife and child, who
were crouching in the back. After the gunmen fled, Anna Morena
grabbed her daughter and ran about 2 kilometres (more than a mile)
to a relative's home.

These are the known facts - an apparently senseless act of rural
banditry.

Morena's relatives on both sides of the Atlantic cling to the
theory of a random crime with robbery as the objective.

"My nephew had no enemies,'' insisted Pasquale Morena, from his
home in Nepean, near Ottawa. "This must have been planned as a
robbery. You know how thieves like to attack tourists in Italy. They
think if you're visiting from Canada, you must have lots of money.''

Then he adds the instinctive denial that his family has stubbornly
maintained ever since the tragedy. "There is no vendetta, there is
no family feud.''

Robbery, however, would seem an illogical explanation for the
mountain mayhem. The bodies weren't looted, wallets and parcels were
ignored and, as Italian police reporters point out, bandits would
never leave behind live eye witnesses.

Violence and bloodshed are indeed endemic to this poor province.
The region is tyrannized by the Calabrian version of the Mafia -
'Ndrangheta - which, among its other interests, controls the
trans-shipment of heroin from Asia's Golden Triangle of Myanmar
(formerly Burma), Thailand and Laos.

In the past year, the government has attempted to get tough with
sweeping arrests of more than 1,000 suspected Mafiosi.

In return, the 'Ndrangheta has waged a campaign of terrorism
against politicians and carabinieri (paramilitary police), in a bold
bid to destabilize the government.

Only last week, two carabinieri were shot and gravely wounded in an
ambush outside the airport of the regional capital, Reggio di
Calabria. Last month two other officers were slain.

There are "criminal ties between Calabria and Metro,'' says Staff
Sergeant Larry Tronstad, a specialist in organized crime with the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "They're solidly entrenched in
Toronto.''

But organized crime does not seem to be involved in the messy
deaths of Angelo Morena and his mother. "We've asked around, but
nobody's ever heard of him,'' Tronstad says.

The likely explanation for the murders, certainly the way local
police are viewing it, lies within the shuttered windows of Calanna,
and has its genesis in another killing.

Morena and his mother died, it is believed, because of a family
feud that has remained dormant for 17 years.

"It just shows you that Italians never forget,'' Tronstad says.

The story begins, in fact, much earlier. It beings with Morena's
own father, Rosario Morena. It was Rosario who killed his wife's
nephew, Letterio Versaci, in 1961. Then he immediately turned
himself in to the authorities, saying not a word about why he had
done it.

In Calanna, almost hidden in the foothills outside Reggio, the
inhabitants still claim ignorance about what happened but rumor
suggests the nephew had raped a female relative.

Rosario Morena served 16 years. Shortly after he was released,
driving along this very same mountain road, he too was shot and
killed - just about where his son and widow would later perish. His
murderers were never found.

It was originally reported that Morena's wife fled Calanna at that
time, taking her son to Canada, settling in the Ottawa area. But
while Rosa Versaci spent a lot of time in Canada, and continued to
make frequent visits, Calanna was still her primary home.

This is where she owned a house and where her son, employed as a
hairdresser with the National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa,
returned with his own family to spend the holidays this past Dec.
12.

What happened?

The woman shelling peas by the side of the road gives a stranger a
shy smile, revealing a mouth like a crumbling graveyard. But when
the name Angelo Morena is mentioned, she shakes her head and rapidly
retreats.

The man sipping coffee outside the tiny bar shrugs his shoulders
and stares at his feet.

The local carabinieri says he is no longer allowed to speak with
the media and firmly shuts the door.

At the municipal building, town secretary Raffaele Albanese starts
to deliver a brief recital of historical facts before another
official stares him into silence. It's called omerta - say nothing -
and it doesn't apply only to the Mafia.

"A family vendetta, having to do with the father,'' Albanese had
said before being wordlessly rebuked. "It's a terrible thing. It
can't get any uglier than this.''

Back outside, the town's visiting doctor, an outsider himself,
directs an interloper to another tiny community, a mini-satellite of
Calanna - Rosanita - which is carved out of the rock farther up the
mountain.

"Go there,'' he whispers. "That's where Rosa Versaci lived.''

Rosanita is just a cluster of 10 houses turning into rubble as it's
being absorbed back into the mountainside. The road, unfit for
automobiles, is lined with olive trees. Netting is strung from
branch to branch and slung low over the ground the catch the
ripening fruit. It's as if the tiny enclave is covered in shrouds.

At the very top of the path, on a cliff overlooking the valley, is
Rosa Versaci's house. Christmas ornaments still dangle from a lemon
tree by the door, and standing there, clad in mourning black, is
Giovanna Morena - Rosa Versaci's 47-year-old daughter, Angelo
Morena's sister.

A month earlier she had buried her mother in the cemetery farther
up the hill and she had comforted her hysterical sister-in-law as
preparations were made to bring Angelo Morena's body back to Canada
for burial.

Now, unlike everyone else, Giovanna Morena is prepared to talk. If
only to refute the rumors.

She has heard the stories, of course, about how her mother
allegedly lured the adult Angelo back to Rosanita to avenge his
father's murder. That is the way many perceived his return here, and
that is the way it has been presented in the media.

Italian Canadian journalist Antonio Nicaso, who has an intimate
knowledge of Italian crime and peasant tradition, had earlier put it
this way: "Whoever killed the father believed the son had come back
for revenge.

"They believed the mother was pushing the son to vindicate the
death. In the tradition of the Italian vendetta, the mother has an
important role because she is the one with the power to keep the
feud going. If the son doesn't avenge his father's death, then he's
a fool, he's a man who's lost his honor.

"The killers wanted to stop Morena and his mother before the
father's death could be avenged. That's the way they thought,
anyway.

"But it seems Rosa Versaci was not looking for revenge. Maybe it
was just nostalgia, maybe she wanted her son to put some flowers on
his father's grave.''

But Giovanna Morena vehemently denies all of this, both the alleged
vendetta and the nostalgia.

"My mother didn't come back to Calanna. She never left here. This
is where she's lived all these years, and my brother has visited
here before. Why would he pick now to avenge my father's murder?''

Giovanna Morena says her brother and his family had spent several
weeks in the village conducting themselves like happy tourists. ``He
was a peaceful man, he went out driving every day with his wife. He
was not looking for violence.

"But maybe violence was looking for him. Maybe he made enemies
somewhere else, down in the city, perhaps even in Canada.''

She remembers how her sister-in-law came screeching into the house
that evening, half-mad about the shooting.

"Then the police came. They asked us about this feud and I told
them there was no feud. Then they warned me about leaving the house.
That's what frightened me. I've lived in this village my whole life
and I've never been afraid before. They made me afraid.''

The Canadian consul came down from Rome to offer assistance to
Morena's widow. Rosa Versaci was buried. Police, after interrogating
Anna Morena, allowed her to return to Canada with the body.

"Tell them the truth,'' says Giovanna Morena. "Tell them there is
no vendetta.''

Feb. 6, 1994