Chapter One

*Note to all my readers:-

Some of this book is written in Italian with the English explanation in brackets next to it. The reason is simply that the Mafia are from Italy and Sicily and as it is their language it makes their conversations more authentic. I hope you enjoy the book.

Manchester is a large industrial city in the northwest of England, it is the main city in Greater Manchester County consisting of 2.868 million people. A huge metropolis of kind, friendly people who have always opened their homes and lives to those from all other countries and cultures. In the nineteenth century, this included Italians from the province of Caserta,

Campania emigrated to Ancoats in Manchester to settle, they also came from Lazio and were known as Neapolitans, Naples being in Campania. Manchester at that time was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and very attractive to emigrants. There were strong regional differences between the immigrants, the Northern Italians looked down on the Southern Italians, and in consequence, regional cliques were formed with intense rivalry. The first generation was definitely not happy at the thought of their offspring marrying into the local English and Irish communities. Of course, as the Italians arrived and formed communities they brought with them the Mafia and it did not take them long to establish themselves.

Alfonso and Louisa arrived in Manchester after the end of World War Two, he was a Master Tailor and she was an expert lace worker, together they quickly established a factory and then another. They had three children, two girls who returned to Italy to marry the men they were told to marry. They also had a son, Mario who married the only child of another Italian family, Georgia joining the two families and starting the first Mafia family in Ancoats. Mario and Georgia had four daughters, two sets of twins, and just when they thought it would never happen they finally had a son Tommaso. Georgia died six months after his birth never recovering from the blood loss and he was brought up by his older sisters. The families gradually took over the City and then the County, becoming more and more powerful as they took over clubs, gambling dens, protection rackets, brothels, and drug running. As their ‘family’ grew so did their fortunes, very quickly they became millionaires, and then as the years passed they became billionaires and the Grand Dons began to move into the upper circles of British Society. They started small marrying into lower ranks and gradually moving up until using their unlimited riches they married the sons and daughters of improvisihed Dukes and Duchesses and slowly became accepted into the highest echelons of that Society. Tommaso was born in the early 1970s and in 1995 he married a pretty young Irish virgin Julia, who had just turned seventeen when he got her pregnant. Her deeply religious Catholic family insisted Tommaso marry her and the teenager found her brief bit of fun with the handsome Italian led her into a nightmare. Her family washed their hands of the girl as soon as he put a ring on her finger and she soon discovered she meant nothing to her handsome husband. He told her repeatedly she had just been a quick fuck for him and he was furious she had got pregnant hadn’t she heard of the pill? Julia was innocent, she had believed all the lies he spun her to get her into bed, and she had genuinely thought he would marry her when she discovered she was pregnant. He had married her but only because they had held a gun to his head, it united two of the biggest families in the North, bringing the Italians and Irish under one ‘family’.  Unfortunately, that baby was a girl, and two years later she had twin girls much to Tommaso’s disgust, he had looked at them in disdain,

‘Can’t you do anything fucking right?’

He sneered at her without even looking at his daughters, girls were of little use to the powerful Grand 

Don, to him they were collateral that he would have to find a husband for. He had left the hospital with his arm around one of the pretty Nurses that he was paying to care for her. He was not a good husband, he had never been a good husband as from day one he had many mistresses only bothering to use his young wife to get her pregnant. Now she had produced three girls and he did not make the effort to hide his dislike and sent her to the Cheshire countryside having lost all interest in her. He did not want daughters, he told Julia cruelly as they grew into their teens, and then he broke her heart by telling her that he had found them husbands and as soon as they turned sixteen they would be sold on. There was nothing she could do to help them, she was too weak and run down, while he enjoyed the millionaire lifestyle with an endless stream of pretty girlfriends she was forced to account for every penny he gave her and lived in a modest house with no servants or Capos. Two years later he brought her up to the City because he had a formal engagement that required him to have his partner attend with him. She had been very reluctant to go but he had her dragged away from his teenage daughters by his Capos and she had good reason to be afraid of him. After the engagement, he had spent the rest of the night raping her viciously before sending her off back to her distraught daughters. It resulted in her becoming pregnant again and she gave birth to another set of twins thankfully this time they were sons. She lost a lot of blood at their birth her body could not take the abuse of having more children forced on her in later years. They had to do an emergency caesarian section to get the baby out alive and then a complete hysterectomy to save her life. The boys were big healthy babies and he soon found a woman to care for them but his wife never recovered. She was in the hospital for four months after the birth and when she returned home she was not well enough to look after her daughters, and a  lively set of twins and it quickly took its toll on her broken body. Tommaso took her baby boys away to live with his mistress in the luxury apartment he had in the town center. She never saw them again and three years later she succumbed to her body's weakness collapsing while collecting her daughters from the local school. The oldest had stood holding her little sister's hands as the medics did their best to revive the poor woman but she was dead before they even got to her, she had given up, finding no reason to fight for her own life leaving her daughter's fate to their uncaring father. Tommaso did not even attend her funeral handing his daughters over to a local woman pretending it was so as not to interrupt their schooling when in all actuality it was just the cheapest option he could find. He paid her the minimum to give them the very basic care they needed to get through until they were sixteen.  On each of their sixteenth birthdays, they were married off to older weaker Dons who were happy to have such young wives to play with and all three handed over their ‘family’ to Tommaso in return extending his ‘family’ to make it extremely powerful and very rich. The girls had put up no fight, they had known from the moment their Mother died that no one would protect them and their father had made sure they understood their future. It wasn't pleasant being married to a man old enough to be your father but it was actually far better than being under his care, once the unplwasantness of sex was overcome the men for the most part did not treat their young wives too badly. They were allowed to see each other and socialize, and they were pampered and petted by their older husbands and in return, all they had to do was please these men sexually. The first time, on their wedding nights, they were raped repeatedly and the next day their husbands told them as long as they did what was asked of them in the bedroom they would live a life of luxury. The girls knew they had no other choice, apart from each other no one else cared if they lived or died, so they accepted their roles and got on with their lives they even produced children giving their elderly husbands something to brag about.                                                                                            Conner and Callum, were Tommaso's Twin sons and in contrast to their older sisters, they had the very best of everything, designer clothes, the latest toys and gadgets, and an expensive private education. They grew up having whatever they wanted handed to them without question, if they got into trouble their father always bailed them out. When they grew up and discovered girls the trouble started in earnest, they did everything together, they were identical and very good-looking. It was easy for them to charm a girl and once they had her they took what they wanted, if she objected she was told it was their word against hers and nobody would believe a little tart. They always picked girls from the state schools, the pretty ones who thought hooking up with the mega-rich twins was their way out of their family's poverty. It amused the Twins to see their eager faces when they talked of what they had, making them false promises about sharing their incredible wealth. It worked every time, the girls were so desperate they would let the Twins do whatever they wanted and they soon developed their ‘tastes’. They liked to take the girls together even if they objected and screamed in pain it only excited them more and of course, their father silenced any court cases by offering their parents the kind of money they could never refuse. Tommaso was secretly proud of the way his precious sons acted, they were Alpha males and it wasn’t long before they showed him just how Alpha they were.

They had worked for the ‘Family’ since they were fourteen, learning each faction readying them to take over when their father stepped down only they did not want to wait.