Poems have wolves inside...

except one: the most wonderful of all...

she dances in a circle of fire

and she gets rid of the challenge with a shrug.

Jim Morrison

Author: Eva Mikula

https://www.facebook.com/ev a.mikula.75

evaedit23@gmail.com

Editor: Marco Gregoretti

marcogregoretti.gregoretti@gmail.com

Editing: 8 Media srl

8media.srl@gmail.com

Cover graphics: Augusto ‘‘Ace’’ Silva

acesosilva@gmail.com

Publication: 2021 Italy

Copyright: © 2020 Eva Mikula

DRS filed on 22-01-2021

© Edition Il Ciuffo

Translated by Nevia Ferrara

Published by Tektime

Eva Mikula

LOOSE END

Hidden truths about the White One Gang

by Marco Gregoretti

INTRODUCTION

The life of each is the sum of what each of us is into the depth of one's heart and not of what others think of us. It is the essence of one's self that intersects with those close to us and with those who cross our lives.

I don't believe in destiny. Destiny is a convention, a construction for those who use to feel sorry for themselves. However, everyone is the arbiter, aware or not, of their own life, always and regardless of whether or not they are inclined to spend a senseless and flattened existence on the interests of others.

This is Eva Mikula's story, a young girl who was wrong of growing up very quickly, perhaps too quickly, in a difficult if not impossible context, and of trying to change her existence for the better, and this did not can be considered a fault.

She did so with the very few tools she had at her disposal given her age, looking for shelter, stability and new affections in a world alien to her that soon became hostile, finding herself alone among the wolves.

What she thought to be the golden world of a beautiful fairy tale soon turned into a nightmare from which it seemed impossible to wake up. It might seem like a story similar to many girls like her, but this is a different story, very particular.

Eva will become, in spite of her, the protagonist of the recent history of the Italian Republic, the story of the criminal gang of the White One that will indelibly mark her existence from a very young age. Six criminals, including five policemen on duty in different locations in Emilia Romagna, will cross their lives with Eva's. Criminals who with their actions will produce a long trail of blood, robberies and mourning from 1987 to the end of 1994.

Despite her being dragged into black news stories and international judicial intricacies that have sunk her even more and exposed her to public mockery, she never gave up, never stopped to feel sorry for herself.

Eva struggled to survive, not to be killed by criminals first and distorted justice later. She fought against everyone, even against those who would have had the task and the legal duty to protect her. She did it for her sense of justice, for her future, for a life under the banner of normality. She fought and won the first half of her most important game, a game that is still open, and she must continue to do so in order not to be once again banned by society, by those who have divergent interests regarding the truth.

Eva got back in the game and decided to do it for her children, so that they never have to suffer abuse or be ashamed of anything in comparison with others, just like their mother did many years ago.

Enjoy the reading.

Làszlò Posztobànyi

Poet, composer, journalist.

1. THIS IS MY STORY

This story, my story, begins on August 18, 1975 under the sign of Leo and ends on July 28, 2020, the day of the turning point in the year of catharsis.

That day, between random web searches and what I read about my past, something clicked in me. As if a crazed embolus had circulated in search of all those emotions that each of us holds and keeps inside the soul.

I was surprised to see that my feelings: sadness, disgust, anger, joy and fear were all in total conflict with each other. Along its path, the embolus also encountered awareness, which in turn led to the search for consciousness. In this great confusion shrouded in the darkness of memories, my ego exclaimed: "Who are you? Who is Eva?". After a moment of silence and hesitation, the conscience spoke: "We must mend the threads between us, with all our feelings to find peace. To do this we have to take a trip back in Eva's life, do a bit of order without neglecting anything".

The embolus dissolved, vanished, Eva looked in the mirror, spoke again and decided: the truth will be our guide, as always.

The truth is not what you find on the web, written in the newspapers, said on TV or manipulated in certain courtrooms.

So, on August 4, 2020, after thinking about it for a long time and after reorganizing the first documents, I wrote to Marco Gregoretti, a journalist.

A dry and decisive email with which I asked him to get in touch with me.

Why him? I don't know, I felt I could trust. I managed to get his phone number too. I called him, I wrote him long messages that touched my memories, since I was a child. I have sent him complicated e-mails relating to some of my letters and others, which related facts that you will find in this book. I asked him to help me put them in good shape, in a more correct Italian than mine. In short, I tested him. I wanted to understand if my instincts were still alive in me; I needed confirmation and to know that I could truly trust him.

It was thus that throughout the summer we talked, wrote and exchanged opinions, thoughts and memories, even hard, very hard, like those of the events related to the infamous White One Gang, a brand of horror.

I used a thousand tricks to scrutinize his personality. But he too was cautious at first, incredulous that I had looked for him, without mediation. Then it didn't take us long to abandon our respective distrust to their fate. We talked a lot. I jammed his email with documents. I remembered some articles he had written about me; that of Panorama in the days following the arrests of the Savi brothers and the other members of the gang, and the one in the magazine of the television program Quarto Grado, where he only talked about me.

So I didn't have too much trouble starting to talk to him about my children too, about my personal, professional and sentimental events that have crossed my life.

When we finally met in person in October it was as if I have known him, not since ever, but very, very well.

He phoned me from the train to tell me that the B & B where he used to stay during his trips to Rome was closed. So he was a guest in my accommodation facility.

There have been many other meetings, real and virtual, also due to the limitations decided by the Government due to the coronavirus pandemic.

I told him everything I wanted to tell in front of a mirror. Even the most intimate things that happened to a woman, whose suffering began very early, as a child.

There is no present until the past is clear to you; where you no longer need to escape from the injustices suffered to get out of the woods; I just have to find the courage to accept my story, tell it to everyone, just like the story of Little Red Riding Hood is told to our children. Now I write my story for myself, surrounded by a beam of light.

2. SO STRONG SO ALONE

In 1999, at the age of 24, I decided to move on. The seven criminal trials against me had ended. In my head I had only my life, my future. I had to leave behind a piece of the past, stay away from TV, from the spotlight of the public scene, because everything that talked about the history of the White One Gang, the trials, my private life, was annoying, it made me uncomfortable. It did not represent the real Eva, I was not the one told by the media to public opinion.

That parenthesis no longer belonged to me. I wanted oblivion to erase the stereotypical figure of the woman of the leader of the gang of murderous criminals, for all of them I was always and only Fabio Savi's ex-girlfriend.

It was time to try to fulfill the dreams I had cultivated since childhood. I had to find my "logic", my path, at least so my head and heart asked me, only in this way I would have had more hopes and more possibilities, because, up to that moment, the male figures in my life had transmitted me only traumas, illusions , betrayals and sufferings.

It was in 1999, during an evening with some friends, that I met the Neapolitan footwear entrepreneur, in his sixties, Franco. His company had gained a good chunk of the Italian market in the production and distribution of shoes. His strong points were the casual line, made in Alicante, Spain, and the "fashion" line conceived in a factory near Naples, which is also the headquarters of the company management. He gave me the opportunity to show him the designs in which I had tried my hand at imagining models of women's footwear to be proposed in the following season. He examined them carefully. He liked them and chose some, following his indisputable professionalism acquired through years of experience in the field.

His nephews, sons of the sisters, also worked with him. It was a constructive commitment that offered me the opportunity to travel. I felt fulfilled and satisfied. Franco treated me like a daughter, and played an important role in my maturation process, as a woman and as an entrepreneur. He took me to heart, introduced me to his family, his wife, his two daughters, all his collaborators and his friends.

He was aware of my story, learned from newspapers and televisions, but he was always very respectful of the decision to leave everything behind, he never asked me for anything with the intention of knowing or learning more. He was only interested that I could grow professionally, that I fit into society and that I was protected from the risks that a beautiful young and lonely girl can run, easy prey to the mechanisms that detach you from reality and from a sober lifestyle.

Franco was like a father, able to pass on the value of independence to me, to teach me the techniques of commerce, the management of work and private life. However, I did not imagine that disenchantment was, once again, around the corner.

I realized that his grandchildren, a few years older than me, did not have a correct commercial behavior. For example, they took an order for a thousand pairs of shoes from a wholesaler, but only invoiced eight hundred. They cashed the rest in black and the money ended up directly in their pockets. They did this for their own interests, to the detriment of the company. I told Franco about it, bringing him the evidence. He was upset.

He summoned his grandchildren, his was a family business, so there was a very high risk of creating irreparable fractures even between relatives. The two grandchildren were clear and uncompromising: "Either we go, or Eva goes! ".

I anticipated any answer from Franco, I thought about resolving the question that could have become very painful for him: "You don't have to decide anything, I've already decided. I'm leaving". I came out with regret, I didn't even give him time to reply. I went away forever, but already as I was leaving I was thinking within myself: "Eva you have to realize something of yours, exclusively yours".

For more than four years, from 1999 to 2003, I was a happy single, independent, without a man to break "boxes and plans". I didn't want to share anything with anyone in my private life anymore. The event, in some ways painful, which caused my exit from Franco's company and my consequent renunciation of the protective umbrella that he represented for me, convinced me that the time had come to become the absolute protagonist of every aspect of my life, while maintaining a good friendship with him.

Meanwhile, I felt more and more an active part of Italian society. In a country where everything had happened: society in crisis, terrorism, speculative finance, I saw a new world advancing. And it didn't seem so far away that I couldn't reach out and grab it.

I did not have to and did not want to depend on anyone anymore, neither on men, nor on a subordinate job, none of this, only on my working skills. I was not engaged, I did not want to get engaged and I would not do it until I felt the firm earth under my feet. I aspired to certainties that could materialize only through the creation of my own company, the possession of a home, a car of my own.

Not that I hadn't had any proposals or opportunities to bond emotionally to someone, but I rejected them with casual ease. I just felt a strong need to open up to myself, towards something that made me feel good. I was looking for a key to shoot, to run.

Once a friend told me: "In the practice of the ancient martial arts we learn how to return to the starting point, through the maturation that is reached with years and years of training.

This means that the first technique that we learned when we were young amateurs, after a journey made up of infinite challenges and fights, we are able to internalize it and execute it with the strength of a mountain and with the wisdom of an old Master ".

What was my first "technique" when, precisely as a "beardless", I ran away from home? That of working as a waitress in a bar-restaurant in Budapest. I felt great, important, satisfied and free behind that counter or serving between tables. Even washing dishes.

Here, that's how the light bulb went on! I was given the idea of going back to my starting point: quickly looking for and finding a place to set up a restaurant business. Do you want to compare Italian coffees and cappuccinos? And the food? I already imagined my creativity and my desire to design new things at the service of the people, perhaps with some hints of Hungarian and Romanian cuisine.

What to do? I dreamed of a restaurant bar, I wanted to serve people. I started researching and studying the procedures for acquiring a license. I quickly discovered that it was not easy in those years, to acquire a license for a diner bar already started, cost a lot, they all started with minimum requests of one hundred and fifty thousand euros. And who had so much money?!? Not to mention the other costs required to open a business of that type.

In front of my house, in Rome, there was a fruit and vegetable shop. The space was not very large, about 120 square meters. From the balcony I observed that very few people entered that shop. I often wondered how the owners managed to move forward. I therefore thought that it would not be difficult to convince the owners to rent or sell the business. I took the subject away, went in and asked: "Do you have any idea, if in the surroundings there is a commercial space for rent?". They replied that they knew nothing, that they hadn't heard anything or even seen any signs nearby. I insisted: "Not to be intrusive, excuse me if I'm direct, when does your contract expire? This space and also the position would be perfect for me". To sweeten the pot I added: "If you intend to sell, maybe you can agree on a small severance pay". But I was disappointed. Apparently there was no sale of the shop in their plans.

"No" they answered almost in unison. "We live on this. We have no intention of leaving." I think, above all I feel, that some events in our life, in particular those concerning the sphere of what we would like to happen, in affections as in work, in short, in existence, do not happen by chance.

Luck cannot always be a coincidence, I believe more in the power of thought and desires. And at that time at the top of the list of my projects, there perform a commercial activity: the project to open a bar restaurant, diner, in that area of Rome.

But the first concrete attempt to start laying the foundations did not go well. At least, so I thought. Yes, because after a few weeks, still looking out from the balcony of the house, I saw a van with the back door open, in front of the shop. They loaded the furniture and some boxes. The owners had given up: they no longer intended to continue their business. In my opinion they couldn't even cover their expenses because a supermarket had opened nearby.

It was an opportunity not to be missed. In perfect Eva style, I immediately got in touch with the owners of the walls, an elderly couple. He was really very nice, she was a witch. Man of other times, Calabrian. I told him: "I saw that they are leaving the place. I want to take it ".

Luck or coincidence? Here's what happened to me in those days. And then tell me if I didn't have a hand from heaven, which paved the way for me to realize my project, which was also my dream. Within those walls of that street there had never been a bar or even a restaurant.

I needed the license. I called the office in charge of the Municipality. Since the licenses were limited to each district, I asked if there was a free one close to the street that interested me. The employee replied that no, there was nothing available. I was upset but I didn't give up, I insisted on the phone. I convinced her to double check. "Wait, wait... please give me the number you are interested in... let me see something". I dictated the exact address again and, as if by magic, she replied: "You are lucky miss, because from number 700 to 780 the licenses are free!". It was now done, I obtained the license from the municipality without having to take it over from others, paying only the cost of the administrative documents. I rented the premises and contacted the Lazio Region to obtain the funding dedicated to female entrepreneurship, I had the requirements of Legislative Decree no. 185/2000. I had also enrolled in the training course for the food trade and the administration of food and drink to study and obtain the professional requirement.

After nine months, just like the time of a pregnancy and after an investment of two hundred thousand euros, I realized my secret wish: I inaugurated the bar, restaurant and diner, which, in a short time, became the flagship of food and bevarage of the area.

I had redone all the interiors: masonry, systems, kitchen, bathrooms, changing rooms, the living room, the furnishings, the graphics, in short, everything. I made a careful selection of staff based on the desire to do and the desire to grow. Things were going well, really well, I was happy. I started work in the morning at six and came home at midnight, shoulder to shoulder with my employees, we had made a good team.

It was tiring, but time wasn't wasted. After a year, the business was launched, the customers were numerous and, many of them, regulars.

I was finally in control of myself and everything that interested me: I had no partners, no boyfriends or husbands. Free and happy, I trusted only myself, I constantly monitored the work of my employees, I managed and planned my small business every day, I did not delegate anything to anyone. I had a camera system installed to keep everything safe and I took care of the customers, offering first class service every day, where the smile was never lacking. It was my thing and it worked great. The passion for work stimulated creativity and ideas.

During the weekends the place had also become a meeting place for the young people of the area, who then went to the center of Rome in the evening to the most attractive nightlife areas. I offered a wide choice of aperitifs and turned the bar into a pub by putting on lounge music and soft lighting. So in the end many of those guys stayed with me all evening. They preferred my place to raids in the center.

Many Romanian citizens also lived in that neighborhood. The community was large and strong. I contacted a Romanian cook and on Sundays I offered dishes of the typical cuisine of my country. They came to me in ever more numerous groups. I had to set the tables outside. To express the idea of the success of those Sundays based on Romanian cuisine: I bought whole pallets of beer, but they were never enough. Destiny, which is no coincidence, always knocks on your door when you least expect it, as if to remind you that it never abandons you. It is only a matter of understanding whether to accept it, to let oneself go into its arms or to resist: just a matter of choices. However, it was at the very peak of my success as a restaurateur, that the phone calls from friends who complained because they had lost track of me came in mercilessly. How to blame them. I was only thinking about work and I was no longer looking for them. One became more insistent than the others.

“Eva, you are gone, you didn't go out anymore. Since you have this place you are buried in there”. She was absolutely right. Relationships and, above all, friendships must be cultivated and maintained; they are good for the spirit if they are pure and sincere. So it was that I accepted her invitation to go out one evening: “Come on, next week let's meet, Tuesday they inaugurate a live music theater, come with me, I already have the invitations”. I went there coming directly from my restaurant, I had not even dressed in a fancy way, only pants and a shirt. The event was in Piazza dei Cinquecento; after just over an hour, I told my friend that I would leave, because the next morning I would open, as always, at six. Leaning against the wall there was a guy who was talking to the owner of the music theater. To reach the exit I was forced to pass between them. Referring to me, one of the two, the one leaning against the wall, said, making me hear him: “Here! You should invite girls like her”. Since I am a person of spirit, I retorted on the fly: “In fact, I was not invited, but my friend.” He, as they say in Rome, with a face like b... promptly replied: “But then I would like to invite you to dinner on Saturday...”. “If I remember you until that day, why not?!” I replied smiling as I handed him my business card. From the appearance and sophisticated clothing, he appeared to be a type full of himself. My reply had taken him by surprise and I took advantage, with a feminine touch, to take his clutch bag out of his jacket pocket. “Come and take it back if you want” I concluded smiling as I left.

The next day he was already at my place. Destiny or coincidence given that he was Biagio and that he will become my son's father?

Without warning he showed up at my bar-restaurant. It was around 6:30 pm. I wasn't there at that time, I went to the accountant. As I was returning, the phone rang, I pulled over the car to answer. It was an employee of mine: “Madam, there are two people here who are looking for you” I asked to talk with them. Biagio, amused and with a bold voice, said: “See?! I came to meet you, but if you want, since you're not there, see you next time... ". I could also have answered him: Okay come on, come back another day.

Instead: “Okay I'm coming back, but there are two of you, who is the other?”, he replied: “He is my friend. I've never come around here and without him I would surely got lost, I brought the human navigator ”as if he were talking about an imaginary place out of this world. He lived near Piazza del Risorgimento, vain and snobbish, he could not stoop to the periphery. What's wrong with the road that leads to the lake?

I was wondering while he was being funny. Anyway, I let the waiter come over and I suggested: “Offer them what they want, I'm on my way”. Biagio was inside with his friend. He had been accompanied by him, as he had told me on the phone, precisely so that he could act as a navigator: he had worked at Sip (now Telecom) and knew every corner of Rome and its hinterland.

The bartender, upon entering, told me that during the wait they had eaten half the counter: sweets, pastries, chocolates.

That day my story with Biagio actually began. I had started with a good-looking dude who never missed an opportunity to make me notice. Me, the loser who lived in the countryside, on the northern outskirts of the capital, he upper class who lived in the center, the beating heart of the metropolis: “I like to smell the stench of asphalt. All this green makes your head spin, too much oxygen”, he repeated like a broken record.

I would never have gone into Rome, in 50 square meters, leaving my beautiful house of 200 square meters, surrounded by nature. Moreover, I preferred to pay the mortgage and have my own apartment forever, rather than shell out the money for rent every month.

In the end he accepted: together yes, but at my place. It was really very tiring. Nothing suited him. Our tastes were very distant. “Why did you buy a house right here? And why did you decorate it this way? With all this stuff?”.

He liked extreme minimalism: a table, a sofa and a TV. He stood with his breath on my neck to change all the furniture. I did not even think of it remotely, every corner told of me, of the sacrifices I had had to face to give the house the image I dreamed of.

The pressures from him soon began to bother me, I could not tolerate the results of my sacrifices being questioned. “I sweated from my forehead to set up this house. And I don't think you've done much better than me”. However our story went on. Maybe it wasn't the best for me, but I wasn't bad with him. He was a smart, intelligent person with a law degree and work experience in the real estate sector. And then I wanted to become a mother: I became pregnant with a child that we both wanted and desired. Biagio was forty-four, had never married and was very close, perhaps too much, to his parents. For this reason he did not absolutely feel the need to become a father, but he strongly felt the need to give a grandson to mum and dad.

He had benefited all his life from the generosity of his parents, who now pressed him to have a grandchild and he wanted to please them.

In August 2003, 5 months pregnant, as always, I went to visit my parents, while Biagio was busy with his work. At that precise period he was following Saadi Gaddafi, a Perugia footballer, son of the Libyan dictator. His needs were very varied and he needed a legal consultant also for finding the accommodation that had to be suitable to host, on her arrival in Italy, his wife with all the trousseau of companions, dogs and bodyguards. After two weeks in Romania, I returned to Italy by plane.

At Fiumicino, at passport control, they stopped me. According to the border police, I could not have landed in Italy because, being a resident of Rome, I would have needed a work permit. An Italian-style bureaucratic puzzle. Or a spite to Eva Mikula, to the uncomfortable Eva Mikula. Those were the years in which Romanian citizens could enter freely and without a visa for a maximum stay of three months as tourists. I, who had been residing for 8 years and a company started with 8 employees, could not enter. They wanted to send me back to Romania. I called Biagio. He came running.

But they didn't even let us meet. I could only look at him through the windows. I didn't feel well. They only allowed me to take the medicines I needed for pregnancy out of the suitcase. I panicked: the next morning I was supposed to open the company. I imagined the employees waiting for me and the customers having breakfast sitting at the bar.

The next morning, at the change of shift, I tried again to explain the absurdity of what they were doing. I was finally able to get in touch with a lawyer experienced in the legislation relating to entry visas, in force at the time. It turned out that the mystery could have two reasons: total incompetence of the policemen or targeted fury on my name. To think badly... The law, in fact, established that the entry visa was mandatory only the first time for those who entered Italy for work reasons. Or for those who did not yet have an indefinite residence. The lawyer called the border police office. And they let me pass. With the sadness and bitterness of those who feel unwelcome. A woman pregnant with a child with an Italian father who had been paying taxes in Italy for years, forced to sleep on an airport bench. From Fiumicino I went directly to my restaurant bar. There was no time to feel sorry for myself.

A question tormented me: “How can I start a family and manage a business at that pace, with those hours?”. I was at a crossroads: family or work? Biagio did not like the idea that I ran a restaurant, that I worked in a bar-restaurant: “It is not an activity that suits you, an office would be more suitable; a more level job for you, instead of being among people who cannot speak and write, who come to have coffee with muddy construction shoes. You cannot be among these people”. I replied: “Those muddy people feed me.” “What does it mean?” Biagio retorted “Then get married to a butcher who has a lot of money, rather than a distinguished person”. I decided to sell the place.

Francesco was born, an infinite joy, I was finally a mother! My nature, however, could not bend, in fact after a month I was already pawing: I absolutely had to go back to doing something, to work, also because no kind of financial help came from the child's father and I still had the mortgage to pay. It can't really be said that he was the typical husband of the past: he out to work and to bring the sustenance for the family and his wife in the house to take care of the housework and the children.

So I began to ask myself questions. Basically I was thinking, “He's never okay with anything about me, he makes me feel out of place, inadequate”, so my self-esteem started to falter.

I was looking for answers in my memories: what had struck me about him? Why had he somehow managed to win me over? I believe the apparent refinement; a feeling perhaps accentuated by the fact that he came out of the canons of the people I had known and frequented until then. Already from that clutch bag that I took out of his pocket, it was evident that he was a man of good taste, well dressed at least, but his humility and modesty did not dwell in him. I thought he would be, in some ways, a good guide. And I can say that, in some areas, such as the professional one, he went like this.

In the period in which I began to attend it, the story that in spite of myself had brought me into the spotlight of notoriety and that had made me live under protection brought in the courtrooms, very far from the life I dreamed of, was still very well known.

Although it was a past that I still wanted to leave behind, I talked about it to Biagio although I avoided describing too many details. He never judged me. But he too had asked a few questions, and, perhaps for this very reason, I began to ask them too.

Passion, in my imagination, was another thing. Another dream in the drawer? Who knows, you can't have everything in life; someone like me, not a saint with a skirt and dancers, with a regular life in the parlor of mommy and daddy; one who had lived on the edge, in short, a woman already passed through the meat grinder of life experiences, could have ruined her reputation, her balance as a scion of a good Roma family.

Rather, I found myself in the words of Loredana Berté's song: “I am not a lady, one with all stars in life... but one for whom the war is never over”.

I don't know if it was good or not, but Biagio consulted with his friend, the one who acted as a navigator when he came to visit me for the first time in my place. "Don't care about her past of her" he told him "Eva is beautiful, smart, autonomous, independent, she has a welcoming home. In your place I would throw myself headlong".

Not really headlong, but Biagio followed the advice. He kept a little distance, a retro thought, more than anything else. According to him I missed the culture, the study, the Italian style. It was as if I was expecting nothing else. After all, one of the deepest frustrations I carried inside was precisely that of having interrupted school when I ran away from home.

I loved books, I wanted to grow culturally, to learn, to understand, to know. Incidentally, I began to study jurisprudence, a subject of which empirically, in the field, I had learned not everything, but a lot, especially of the thousand streams of the criminal law.

I was looking for answers in my memories: what had struck me about him? Why had he somehow managed to win me over? I believe the apparent refinement; a feeling perhaps accentuated by the fact that he came out of the canons of the people I had known and frequented until then. Already from that clutch bag that I took out of his pocket, it was evident that he was a man of good taste, well dressed at least, but his humility and modesty did not dwell in him. I thought he would be, in some ways, a good guide. And I can say that, in some areas, such as the professional one, it went like this.

In the period in which I began to attend him, the story that in spite of myself had brought me into the spotlight of notoriety and that had made me live under protection brought in the courtrooms, very far from the life I dreamed of, was still very well known.

Although it was a past that I still wanted to leave behind, I talked about it to Biagio although I avoided describing too many details. He never judged me. But he too had asked a few questions, and, perhaps for this very reason, I began to ask them too.

Passion, in my imagination, was another thing. Another secret wish? Who knows, you can't have everything in life; someone like me, not a saint with a skirt and dancers, with a regular life in the parlor of mommy and daddy; one who had lived on the edge, in short, a woman already passed through the meat grinder of life experiences, could have ruined his reputation, his balance as a scion of a good Roma family. Rather, I found myself in the words of Loredana Berté's song: “I am not a lady, one with all stars in life... but one for whom the war is never over”.

I don't know if it was good or not, but Biagio consulted with his friend, the one who acted as a navigator when he came to visit me for the first time in my place. “Don't care about her past” he told him “Eva is beautiful, smart, autonomous, independent, she has a welcoming home. In your place I would throw myself headlong”.

Not really headlong, but Biagio followed the advice. He kept a little distance, a retro thought, more than anything else. According to him I missed the culture, the study, the Italian style. It was as if I was expecting nothing else. After all, one of the deepest frustrations I carried inside was precisely that of having interrupted school when I ran away from home. I loved books, I wanted to grow culturally, to learn, to understand, to know. Incidentally, I began to study jurisprudence, a subject of which empirically, in the field, I had learned not everything, but a lot, especially of the thousand streams of the criminal law.

During the five years of judicial proceedings and the seven trials against me, from 1994 to 1999, I carefully read all the procedural documents and proceeded side by side with my lawyer.

I really understood many aspects of your way of setting up criminal trials. But I was interested in civil law and so I began to study it; it would have been very useful to face a new professional challenge that I was convinced I could launch and win: the real estate sector, as an entrepreneur and expert, and not in the role of intermediary agent, because facing people and public opinion, still gave me anxiety.

I also added a little practice to the books; initially Biagio gave me a hand, especially when I had to write letters, he wrote them for me, or corrected them. However, when I told him that I wanted to try my hand at judicial auctions, a difficult and difficult environment, consolidated in the classic “Italian tours”, he got a little sideways.

Biagio did not look favorably on this choice. “It's not for beginners” he advised me against, but very politely, he let me go down that road. And he did well, very well! I started my new professional experience as a secretary in a company that paid me very little, but the practice in the field I needed to gain experience.

In fact, then I took off, and from secretary I passed first to head and then to manager: I had people to manage and increasingly difficult and demanding tasks.

Naturally, as if it were the consequence of what I had quickly built up also in this field, carrying on the challenge launched, I found myself again the arbiter of myself and, once again, I got back on my own.

With Biagio, from the sentimental point of view, the story had cooled down a lot. It could not be otherwise: we had very different characters and visions of life, almost at the antipodes. My eyes had seen things he couldn't even imagine. He lived with a film noir and didn't realize it. I was the film and he was a single in the family. He did not even know how to seize the opportunity that this woman could represent for his growth in the real world, not the easy one of good neighborhoods, with his back always covered in all senses, by his parents. It was certain that I could not expect to change a man over forty. Strangely, however, the agreement on work was progressing well, it worked, we were like two partners without a formalized company. In order not to think about the sentimental emptiness, the unhappiness of the couple, I worked more and more intensely, so almost without realizing it, I took away important time also from my son, from his growth.

Biagio, however, continued to represent a milestone for me, at least in what we had professionally built together. He was a fair person, of his word and who didn't hurt me, at least physically.

Psychologically, however, when my success began to gallop, his attempts to attack my self-esteem became more and more frequent: “You don't know how things work in Italy”, a phrase already heard in the past by another person whose name was Fabio Savi.

In his opinion, I was not adequate to the Italian system; he knew it better than me and therefore, by default, only his way of thinking and his way of acting were right. In short, he mortified me, he was a great provocateur and quarrelsome of character, he loved Neapolitan dramas. I would not have imagined, however, that this attitude of him would also manifest itself in the home, for the education of our son. I tried to impose some rules, to try hard not to give in on everything, not to consent to every request of the child. To say some no. Of course it is easier to always say yes; it is at the moment, then who knows when he will grow up what he can expect if he is used to having everything he wants. Biagio did just that, he raised him by spoiling him and excluding me from the educational process. So dad was God and mom a nuisance. The space and the role of mother were canceled, I was put aside in a corner: “Mum doesn't understand anyway, she comes from Romania”.

I lived this double drama at home: excluded as a mother and lacking in love. Biagio seemed less and less empathetic to me, I was a woman who did not feel loved, not because he did not love me, I am convinced that, in his own way, he had a lot of love for me, but I almost never perceived it.

Life, the vicissitudes, the pains, the fears had had on me the effect of never letting me give up, of not leaving things in half and of splitting hairs to understand, to give myself and to give explanations. So the word “empathy” caught me. It captured my thoughts, my logic, and then I started studying it and learning its meaning. I understood the importance of this aspect of the human being, of his nature.

Why didn't I feel Biagio's love? In my imagination I wore the white coat and the cap with the red cross and became the nurse of the cohabitation relationship and of the family. I was naively convinced that if I had understood the problem of him, of Biagio, I would have given a boost to our relationship and I would have made sure that the child saw harmony between the parents in love.

I was naive indeed, because thinking of being able to solve our problem only with this type of attitude and without the collaboration of the other party, was a mission lost from the start.

So, after yet another fight, as always for a trivial reason, I asked myself: “What is the use of being a Red Cross nurse? I'm just sick. With him or without him, what would change in my life? Surely it could change for our son who would no longer hear the screams of arguing parents”. We women, faced with strong motivations, know how to be determined: when we close, we hardly retrace our steps. I did so.

Our friends were amazed and obviously harshly criticized me. I can't blame them completely, Biagio, in fact, had a double face. Away from the family context, from the private, he was the most adorable, most communicative, most distinguished, most elegant and expansive person. He was able to make everyone love him, a great merit of him.

With me at home he was a completely different person, and no one believed me. Even a friend of mine said that I was lying, that it was impossible that Biagio was the one I described to her during our friendly conversations, in an attempt to explain the reasons for our separation.

To make her understand what I was talking about, I secretly recorded what Biagio said about her and made her listen to it “So now do you believe me?” She nodded.

I did not wage war on anyone; I did not sue, I did not appeal to the court to have the custody of our son, I maintained relationships suited to the situation and open dialogue, which still work very well now, even if Biagio tried to do everything to change my mind and stay with him. He spoiled our son in an ever more blatant way. He knew that by doing so he would distance him from me and that, for this very reason, perhaps I would take a step back.Biagio was well aware of the fact that for me having a family had been the culmination of a great dream. It bothered me not having had the empathic certainty of being loved. Even in small gestures.

Sometimes a word said with admiration would have been enough: “Brava!”. It is not trivial: the desire for a sincere compliment has always been missing. Since I was a child. I needed it and right.

The hugs of the heart. Strangely, green no longer gave Biagio a headache and he didn't miss the stench of the asphalt in the center of Rome that much. He left very reluctantly.

I was suffering in silence when Biagio came to pick up the child ahead of schedule. My heart wept if he asked to leave earlier or when he did not have the pleasure of coming to me on the appointed days. As a mother I could have hired a lawyer to claim my rights. But it would have been frustrating for a seven-year-old: I continued to shed bitter tears, taking advantage of every little moment allowed to be with him and pass on my love to him, avoiding quarrels with his father as much as possible. I said to myself: Eva, the years pass and when Francesco grows up, he will understand that I suffered to let him live a peaceful childhood.

Time has proved me right.

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1. Eva Mikula at Ai Piani restaurant, Rome 2004

2. Eva Mikula photo shoot, 2002

3 and 4. Eva Mikula when she started the restaurant business, 2002

3. SCAMS OF DESTINY AND FALSE NEWS

Fear, disappointment, insecurities. The end of the story with a person I had discovered terribly different from the idea I had of him, when for love I left Budapest to follow him to Italy. In reality he was a robber, a murderer. The arrest, the interrogations, the trials, the police escort to the hearings, the secret hiding places reserved for witnesses under protection. I was very young, bewildered and fragile. Then, the flow of life turned the pages of my existence. The episodes, the stories settled on each other and, finally, a coexistence that lasted years and a desired but absent child arrived. I don't know what I would have given for a hug, for a little love, if it had happened to me I would have melted. It was as if I had called it.

Thus, an evening happened in which I tried to distract myself by going out with a friend. I was in need of affection, hugs, consolation and approval. But, without too many words, I made a big “bullshit”. I tied myself to the most different person of how, in reality, should have been the man with whom to have a relationship in that particular period of inner fragility. He was a man of few scruples, cynical, apparently adorable. A sentimental scammer who managed to land a blow against me, taking advantage of my emotional situation. Indeed, precisely because he had noticed the condition in which I was, he only pretended to love me and I fell completely.

In four months he took away all my savings, a sum that corresponded to about seventy thousand euros. I was so foggy that I didn't notice anything, until one day two agents of the finance police in civilian clothes showed up at the house: a man and a woman. They exhibited the badges and showed me a photo of a man: “Do you know this person?” It was him, he had left my house two hours earlier. I made them sit down and we sat down in the living room.

My legs were shaking, they explained that his real name was different from the one I knew him by. He actually wasn't called as he had always told me: Roberto Marzotto. “Mrs. Mikula” they told me, “this is a swindler by trade, he is a hunter of women who find themselves in a situation of emotional weakness. With the unfortunate he passes himself off as an entrepreneur well positioned in the upper middle class, and plucks them”. I understood the whole situation on the fly and denounced him immediately. I told the two agents about the trap I had been living in during those months; the world collapsed on me, a bolt from the blue.

I called myself stupid, I even felt guilty. I couldn't get over the fact that I had been so inexperienced. After a life spent without receiving a hug from the heart, authentic, it was hard to discover how a despicable individual had used my need for love to cheat me. It seemed incredible: a brutal and inhuman behavior because it was not carried out by a stranger, but by a person with whom there was an emotional involvement, at least on my part.

If I had suffered a scam at work, maybe a bad deal, a failed investment, anything else, it wouldn't have weighed on me that much. But he frequented my house, he had stroked my son's head and touched my body. No, I couldn't think about it, at least not rationally. I still feel the deep pain and existential discouragement: an incredible discomfort, which was mounting while the two financiers were talking to me. They also suffered for me. I came out, metaphorically speaking, with bruises and broken bones from that story too.

Meanwhile, Biagio, my son's father, would not give up. Just relying on the bad experience I had lived, he insisted: “Do you see what people are out there? People who use you for money, for your skills, for your beauty. You will hardly find someone who is looking for you and who wants you for who you are, for what the real Eve is”. Biagio was really helpful to me at that juncture, but I still had no intention of resuming the relationship with him. I was more and more fragile and he proposed to me to get back together, not me, I felt inside me that nothing would change, that soon everything would return to the situation as before, to quarrels, to misunderstandings. But I was certainly interested in maintaining a good relationship: we had a child together and we had to take care of making him grow up peacefully.

The heart of each of us cannot be closed to love forever, not even mine. What is certain is that all the experience led me to develop a sense of mistrust towards people, in particular for the male gender. I necessarily had to protect myself a little, but I didn't put my feelings in a safe locked with an impenetrable combination. Another unspeakable, tragic suffering had to come, and it did. But nothing happens by chance and nothing happened by chance coincidence.

I had started putting short stays in Hungary and Romania on my agenda. The painful scam I ran into had made me think a lot and I began to think that perhaps it would be appropriate to leave Italy to plan a new life in Hungary.

Perhaps this involved ceasing from action, giving up some dreams. The relationship with my parents had reconnected and consolidated in recent years. My brother, on the other hand, had died a while ago, at 37. His wife found him lifeless in bed due to a heart attack, perhaps...

I started a new relationship with these assumptions. Through my sister-in-law, in Budapest, I met a man of sound principles, a hard worker. After a few months of dating and the ritual introductions to the family, we longed for a life together. I also thought about drawing up some work projects in Hungary, referring to my now familiar restaurant business, with the addition of hospitality. I had in mind to build a hotel with a restaurant, a children's playground, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

There was also the availability of land that was perfectly suited to the project: I had just received it from my parents. I had taken action to have the funds allocated by the European Union, so I was able to enter and benefit from a tender aimed at developing rural areas.

I was a 35-year-old woman who had started living in a fulfilling love relationship again, in fact I got pregnant. Somehow fate was giving me the opportunity to fill that inner void that prevented me from feeling one hundred percent mother with the firstborn. My possible mother-in-law, however, did not agree on the relationship between me and her son. She did not agree with the idea that she was having a nephew and that we were not yet married. Furthermore, I still lived in Rome, there was my son whom I could not give up and the real estate company that had to be followed. We would have had to wait at least a year to get organized and to create our nest in Hungary. There was a timing discrepancy between the objective situation and the pregnancy, a reflection that could also make sense. Also, my man's mother didn't like the past of “Eva Mikula”. For her I was the ex of a criminal, involved in a bad story of the Italian underworld, so I could not be included in the group of reliable people.

In summary: I would never have been a good wife. She hammered her son from morning to night with these considerations.

The fate tragically thought to resolve the dispute in the worst possible way. A referee decided for us that no one would ever know if I would be a good wife and what kind of dad and husband he would be. While he was traveling to Rome by car, just to organize our future together, he had a fatal accident on the highway. Our life flew to heaven with him. I will never forget the phone call from his friend informing me of the crash, of his tragic death. From his mother an embarrassing and absolute silence.

After the phone call, I felt bad. It was 5 in the morning, I was 3 months pregnant and I started bleeding. I called the ambulance and the operator questioned me instead of understanding the emergency, and then told me that the ambulance could arrive in 30 minutes. How could I wait so long alone and bleeding? I had only one support on which I could, however, count in Rome: Biagio. He picked me up and rushed me to the hospital, where I was stuffed with tranquilizers and injections for ten days to avoid losing the baby.

I had had a 50 percent placental abruption. A cruel unknown began to torture me: would my daughter be affected? The doctor, on the other hand, recommended not to underestimate the evidence that she would have offered me a life as an unmarried mother, with a son without a father. In fact, the daily difficulties I would have to face were evident. I imagined them very well, and I knew that the only person I could actually count on, namely Biagio, didn't take very well the fact that I had set foot in another relationship. However, I carried on with serenity the months until the birth. I rolled up my sleeves, worked out the mantra within myself, the guideline: “Yes, raising a child alone is one more reason to fight, to give myself new goals”. I did not want to remain anchored to the past, to the problems and conflicts with Biagio, even on how to educate our son. It was another important step. Responsibilities increased; I could no longer make mistakes and take risks that could then fall on the creature that was growing in me. No more wrong paths and inadequate men; I had already suffered too many disappointments from them.

In the meantime, we had reached 2010; the reputation that preceded me in the private sphere was excellent.

I was able to build a good image of a decent person and a hard worker with my work, seriousness and professional reliability. With neighbors, with the employees of the restaurant bar. In my real estate business, I had good feedback and some rewarding friendships. Instead, among those who had no direct contact with me, for the outside world, I was always and only the Eva Mikula of the White One Gang. I wanted to get out of that discriminatory aura that surrounded me due to the indelible history of judicial news in which I was involved in spite of myself. People outside my circle of relationships, “the insignificant others”, continued to perceive me as the complicit woman of murderers, the sly and ruthless dark lady seen in the courtrooms, on TV and in newspapers and told following the construction of a a convenient truth that had little to do with due process.

My image was as if embedded in that indelible story, very heavy to bear; an oppressive prejudice of public opinion that did not reflect the truth of the facts, neither yesterday nor today. “Don't care Eva” I said to myself, “you have the most beautiful thing in the world, soon you will be a mother again”.

After my daughter's dad died, I waited for a call from what would be my little girl's grandmother. It never came. I called her, out of a form of due respect, when her niece was about to be born, a week earlier. I was kind and loving. She answered me badly, very badly indeed, and slammed the phone down. I have never seen her again, never heard her again, never looked for her again.

All my vicissitudes, meanwhile, seemed to never end, it seemed there could be no peace for me. I still had my belly, it was June 2010, I was having lunch alone, in peace, sitting in the kitchen and stroking my baby who was about to come into the world. I was watching Tg5 of one p.m. as usual. I was lost in thought. I rubbed my eyes, maybe I was wrong, it couldn't still be me in the photo they were broadcasting.

Instead, alas, it was me, Eva Mikula, they were talking about me. My fork dropped to the ground, “Oh my God, what have I done now?” The reporter said: “Eva Mikula's husband arrested for robbery”. “But who is he?” I wondered, they didn't even mention his name, I didn't understand who they were referring to. They only transmitted my photo and my personal details. In the evening edition they slightly corrected the game: “Ex-husband arrested”. Finally, at the end of the service, I realized who they were talking about: a person I hadn't seen and heard from for fifteen years.

It was a guy I married in 1996, during my trial period. After two years of marriage, we separated and after three, we divorced. We no longer had any kind of connection. His parents were important Roman merchants, owners of some bakeries; most likely influential enough not to allow the personal details of the son arrested for robbery to be disseminated to the press. When we got together he was a clean boy, from a bourgeois family, but with the habit of gambling. Our relationship ended precisely because of this, we were too different, our respective visions of life were irreconcilable.

After 15 years from the end of our marriage, this person, by agreeing with an accomplice, a cashier of a banking institution, had organized a robbery. A stunt that probably would have served him to have money to throw in some gambling den or to pay his gambling debts, he was certainly not a serial robber. The news of the arrests, in itself, would not even have caused a sensation, it would have passed trivially without interest in the local news, good only to increase the aseptic statistics on the productivity of the police: people controlled, people reported, people arrested.

Thus, to satisfy the need to appear in the headlines, the marketing of the carabinieri, to whom that arrest was due, came into action, combined with the incorrectness of the journalists who did not filter the news. I thought that, surely, some press officer of their command fed the reporters without specifying the details, merely saying that one of the responsible was my husband, indeed my ex-husband, obviously taking care not to mention his name, precisely because he belonged to a family very much in sight of the capital.

What a godsend also for journalists eager to be able to chroma key the photo of a beautiful irregular girl, with the past from crime news. Who knows, maybe it was useful for someone to associate my name again with a crime, to sell more copies or to make more audiences, it did not matter to check the news first. Of course, the story ended up in all the news and newspapers, for the benefit of their ratings and their balance sheets.

So I called my lawyer and, through some acquaintances, I tried to understand where the news came from and what the source had been. Thus I had the confirmation that it was an official press release from the carabinieri that issued it to the press. I was told that, while the arrested man was handing his identity document to the carabinieri, a photograph of me slipped from his wallet and he was carrying it with him (he still kept it!). They recognized me and did not miss the wonderful opportunity to be able to go on all the national news. They had gone so far as not to let the details of the robber leak out, preferring to throw my name at the news fairs, without even caring in the least about the effects and consequences that this unfortunate thought of theirs could cause me.

The person who passed that news to the press, in fact, had no reservations about what this senseless and out-of-context news could cause to Mrs. Eva Mikula. What could interest him in the path taken by Eva Mikula after 15 years from the closure of her legal case? Virtually nothing. Such a character, unscrupulous to say the least, could not think that Eva Mikula had an image of a mother and an entrepreneur to defend. He had to emphasize the result of a job at any cost, even passing over the rights of others. To make himself beautiful with the garments by bringing them the rich press review with my photo. Who I had nothing to do with all this. Marketing 1 - right to be forgotten and confidentiality 0.

A truly low-level cunning. I was angry and intent on making a mess. My lawyer stopped me, I don't know if he did well or not, not even why he did it, he told me: “You can't denounce the Carabinieri, it's just news, it goes by. With the story behind you, denouncing them would be a wrong step, the spotlight would turn back on you again”. I gave up, but the incorrectness of that news continues to circulate on the web and, above all, contributes to fueling the final equation in public opinion: Eva Mikula equals crime. There was, in fact, the cynical phone call from Biagio who had heard the news, but not from television. Some friends had called him saying:”What's going on? Are you crazy? Did you make a robbery?”

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5. Eva Mikula New Year's dinner 2006

6.The first day of kindergarten of her son Francesco, 2005

4. PERSECUTION OF PREJUDICES

My path and my life path were once again crossed by bad people. I was getting the idea that there could be no peace for me. Another oppression, a pure evil was waiting for me around the corner, which took shape through the madness of a person who hurt my good faith towards others.

I lived in a large building, but the needs deriving from the increase in the economic commitments undertaken, the higher real estate expenses at a time when the sector was in crisis, and other personal events (a small girl, a son of whom I tok care for my economic part, the expenses for the babysitter, the mortgage) pushed me to transform the property, obtaining a very nice small two-room apartment, with an independent entrance. In November 2014 I decided to put it on income and looked for who to rent it to. An Italian couple showed up, sent by a local real estate agency to which I had granted the mandate. They made a couple of visits and looked carefully at the small apartment. They seemed immediately interested, the real estate agent told me. In fact, after a while, they called me to confirm their interest and they became my tenants. I handed them the keys on December 12, 2014, I explained in detail all the features of the two-room apartment, they paid the first month and the security deposit as if it were a trial period, with the agreement that upon expiry they would confirm whether to stay, and then sign a long-term contract, or leave.

The numerous work commitments would often take me out of Rome and, in any case, with very busy hours: practically I always returned home very late and went out shortly after dawn. Also, at that time, I often commuted to London. These rhythms, mandatory to cope with everything that can weigh on the shoulders of a single woman, also gave me management problems with my daughter. Today I cannot explain how she at the time was able to get by, untangling myself between professional and family commitments, however I managed, with the strength of a mother, all this tortuous path. I only remember that I often took the baby with me.

One day my mobile phone rang: it was Lucia, a neighbor. I state that I got along very well with the whole neighborhood. Relations were cordial, sometimes even friendly. They appreciated me for who I was, not for the past or for the stories told about me in newspapers and on TV. Lucia told me: “Your tenant is on the balcony yelling with his partner. He wants to attract attention by shouting unique phrases about you”. “On me? And why?” I asked her. “He makes very bad statements about your past” Lucia replied, “it is really shameful” she continued, “I don't even want to repeat what he is screaming. Please do something, call him back”.

Instead of calling the tenant, another solution came to mind. I had learned little shrewdness, with everything I've been through in my life. I told Lucia: “Do this: record his words. Then I call him and ask him what the problem is”. And so it went. On the phone, he pretended nothing happened, it was to be expected. I urged him: “They tell me that you are screaming, disturbing the quiet of the building”. He took on a mortified tone, to try to reassure me: “No madam, nothing special. I had a little argument with my wife. But now everything is fine”. He didn't have the courage to repeat to me the insulting phrases he shouted from the balcony, he didn't say any of this.

The next day, Lucia called me back on the phone. Unfortunately I was out and about and didn't have the ability to manage what was happening at home. She turned me the recording of the umpteenth scene of my tenant. They were all insults to my person: “That is a criminal, a delinquent!” he repeated at the top of his voice on the balcony, “surely she was the cashier of the gang. She will have bought the house with the money from the robberies”. Then, turning to his wife, he continued: “But do you realize who we rented the apartment from, whose house we are?". These utterances continued the following day, due to a question of parking.

He had parked his car in a space owned by another tenant, who when he pointed out that the parking spaces were all numbered, was verbally attacked with words and insults also addressed to me: “It is the lady who told us that this parking lot was ours! You see, she is not even capable of being a landlord? Let her go back to her country!” And so other racist and discriminatory insults. So it was that I called him again, I wanted to understand what his problem was and at the same time protect myself from this subject. But he made a second silent scene, then I took the initiative and told him: “Listen here, if the property, despite you and your partner having viewed it far and wide before giving the monthly salary, does not match your expectations, given the vehement complaints you would have made in front of the neighbors so that they would hear them loud and clear, you are free to leave; not only that, I also return the monthly payment already paid”.

I stopped for a few moments and then resumed determined: “On the contrary, I'd really ask you to leave, I wouldn't want to have to see you every month, because in case you want to stay, in fact, we would have to stipulate a long-term contract”. I was very angry while talking to him, however I kept a certain calm. However, I wanted to tell him something: “You must not allow yourself to make statements about my person and about my past. I don't have to explain anything to you, you think as you please, but don't involve people in my private sphere, who certainly know me better than you, don't disturb my life anymore and go elsewhere to read about me on the internet. Don't create any other problems for me”.

So I thought I had silenced him. Instead, he changed the focus of his rants to add to the dose of slander and began listing alleged anomalies of the house: “You rented me the apartment without doing any maintenance. Every evening we smell gas from the boiler, there is certainly a leak, the television is not visible, the antenna must be replaced, there is an electrical outlet in the kitchen that has flying wires. How did you dare to rent a house in these conditions?” I was surprised the technician had assured me that everything was in order, as was the cleaning lady, and then I was present on site when I entrusted the property to the agency. However, faced with these complaints, I made the commitment to review any defects complained of and asked for an appointment the next day to go with the technician. The tenant told me that he had to stay at work late and gave me trustee permission to enter the house. While the technician did his work and I inspected every corner of the house for faults or imperfections, his eyes fell on a sheet of paper placed on a shelf in the living room.

He had hit me because I had read my name on a sheet of letterhead from the financial police. I read it without touching it and amazement assailed me. It was a complaint against me filed the previous day. He had insinuated that I was a scammer, because, according to him, probably I was not the owner of the house and I had collected the rent, without issuing the payment receipt. “But how can someone be so mean and liar?” - I wondered.

He seemed to have discovered a fugitive delinquent in me and wanted to prove his good faith as a model citizen. The same day I rushed to the Rome Provincial Command of the Guardia di Finanza where a complaint was recorded, providing all the documents at the same time.

I was intent on making a counter-complaint for slander, but I wanted to consult with a lawyer first.

Meanwhile, at home, the technician had not found the defects that the tenant complained of, except for a door to be adjusted in height and a burned-out light bulb. No problems with the gas, nor with the antenna signal. The next day the tenant called me back and, with an almost threatening voice, told me: “Here the gas comes out every day, even from the stove, I smell the stench!”. Not happy, he continued with the personal offenses: “You had to tell me right away that your name is Eva Mikula and you are the one of the White One. I discovered it, however, from the Internet, there is a lot about your past as a criminal. I suffered damage because of you”. I could hardly believe that a person could talk to me like that, in what capacity did he do it? I couldn't understand where he was going.

It was him who made me understand. Money. He did not finish his delusional phone call that the answer to my doubt arrived on time. “For the inconvenience I demand double the deposit, plus the monthly salary I paid, because to leave I have to face expenses”. So I immediately got the idea that, in addition to being in bad faith, he might be a bit disturbed. So I closed the phone call, which like all the others with him, I had been recording regularly for days now.

I went to the carabinieri to formalize a complaint for all the crimes for which he was responsible: slander, defamation, attempted extortion, blackmail and telephone harassment with requests for money.

In the barracks I explained all the facts in detail, I had also transcribed the telephone records, I provided the traceability of the payments made by him and my proposal for a full refund, as long as they left the house I owned. When the next day he was notified of the complaint, the neighbors told me, he too railed at the carabinieri, insulting me once again out loud in front of them: “But how! Have you taken a complaint against me from such a person? But do you realize? But do you know who Eva Mikula is?”. The military personnel did their best to calm him down. “The best thing is for you to get out of this house,” they told him. He had the nerve to call me for the umpteenth time: “You reported me for extortion, are we kidding? You are a poor fool who only seeks free publicity by hanging out with criminals, from this moment on don't address to me anymore. Forget you frightened me with the complaint, we will stay at home as long as we like”.

His partner called me back to tell me that if I didn't withdraw the complaint, they wouldn't leave. I had entered a state of total stress. After two days, the couple left the two-room apartment. I gave him back what they had left and also the month he had paid; obviously not twice as much as they claimed. The important thing was that they went away forever.

I thought that my complaint would have followed the expected procedure, however, more than two years after the facts, despite the testimony and incontrovertible evidence, the prosecutor strangely asked for dismissal, which was welcomed by the judge. Basically, after two years and a month of investigation, the law had come to the conclusion that my tenant's actions had not been slanderous, detrimental to my personal dignity, extortionate and therefore punishable by law. Perhaps because the plaintiff was named Eva Mikula. From my perspective, however, this umpteenth episode that I had to close in the basket of my dramatic experiences, upset me and all the good reputation hard earned over the years. It had touched my neighbors with brutality and, in particular, it had also muddied my working sphere, especially the relationships with the real estate agency, with which I often collaborated, here in the area and which was managed by some dear friends of mine. It was an episode that affected my daily life, my acquaintances with people who appreciated me for my seriousness, humanity and professionalism. Fortunately, I kept their esteem intact.

However, I felt an unbearable anguish that threatened to undermine everything I had been able to build up to that moment. I also went to the doctor, who prescribed me some anxiolytics and, for a couple of times, I underwent sessions by a psychologist. I feared that all these events would jeopardize the achievement of my full integration into civil society. Once again, however, I found the solution within myself, it could not be external interventions, pharmacological or psychoanalytic, the tool to resume the right path of my path. The right medicine was inner strength, the one I had trained by bearing the enormous weight of the past on my shoulders.

I thought about what I had managed to accomplish by believing only in myself. Difficult episodes can happen to anyone at any time, always when you least expect them. Public opinion had crystallized a distorted image of my person, it could neither be erased, nor modified, nor colored, because many, too many, lies had been told about me from the very beginning.

When I thought about it, I felt small and squashed, tiny and helpless. I was afraid that all prejudices, in addition to annihilating me, could fall on my children. This heavy gray cloud hung over my head, and as time went by it grew darker and darker. “But, mind you”, I mentally repeated to myself “You can say anything you want about me, so it's all false. But stay away from my children, don't even try to touch them. They have nothing to do with it”. My anxieties and my sleepless nights pushed me to write, wondering what was the origin of so much bitterness towards me, of the falsehoods that concerned me publicly exposed in the press. So I got the idea of sending a letter of release, strengthened by my full awareness of the reality that surrounded me, a letter written to the Association of the victims of the White One. Gang.

The letter to the Association:

To the White One Victims Association at the President of the Ms Zecchi Association

I turn to you again, despite having received no response to my 2005 letters.

Reading in the newspapers, you hold me forever morally guilty and you are indignant at my every attempt to approach. It has now been 20 years since light was shed on the misdeeds of the “White One”. Surely you remember the details of those moments: the first news in the newspapers, how they were captured, because I entered the judicial and media limelight. I remember everything as if it were yesterday, I was between life and death as in the previous 2 years of living together, beaten and segregated in the hands of killer policemen.

I am attaching some of the first articles, and who better than inspector Luciano Baglioni and superintendent Pietro Costanza can confirm you, as they were the first to record my first statements, a flood that lasted 48 hours with the arrival of 3 Public Ministries from various prosecutors even at 3 am.

In what psychological conditions did they find me? A little girl, clandestine, threatened and terrified of death. I started helping to shed some light on the affair, when Roberto Savi, just arrested, was about to be released as there was not enough evidence against him. The other components were on the loose while the investigators were only at the beginning of the reconstruction of the crimes to be attributed to the gang. There were 4 people in prison: “the Santagata”, already convicted, who had been serving a sentence for years for crimes not attributable to them and released immediately after my confessions.

I was taken away and placed under protection by the State in a distant and secret place, watched for 8 months waiting for everything to be clarified based on my confessions, looking for other people involved that I was not aware of. Once the investigation of the gang was over and the Savi were charged with their crimes, I was accused by them of complicity in murder and other serious crimes in revenge, which charges were later retracted.

Meanwhile, I have undergone 7 trials in various degrees of judgment and I was fully acquitted. I was forced to do television appearances to pay my lawyers, to defend myself. I fought alone against everyone, I had only God, my 19 years and a clear conscience as a guide towards a justice that then came for everyone. I have never sought acknowledgments and thanks from anyone, I have put aside the controversy, leaving vent to your unquestionable pain. I was consoled by the satisfaction and sadness that enveloped me every time I followed your commemoration. I wanted to be present, in the last row, but to be there. Unfortunately, in fact, this never happened; but the worst did.

Public opinion has been subtly led to discredit me, to discriminate me to the point of making me an icon of crime, a character to be trampled on who only makes headlines in the crime news as it happened in June 18, 2010, when my name was used to give relevance to the arrest of a person unknown to everyone, even me, as divorced for 10 years when he was cleansed, I no longer knew anything about him and his life choices.

The news took off on all national news and newspapers. My requests for correction were not even considered. No body contacted me, no one corrected the news that, as a result, it only had a strong discriminatory pressure on me and my family. I am clean, without pending charges and lead a normal, modest and honest life as well as a mother of 2 children. To date, some people in my workplace, after reading the news featured on the web, driven by a strong prejudice, have insulted and defamed me in public, considering me a person involved in crimes, prejudiced and guilty of frequenting criminal environments.

Despite myself, I had to file a lawsuit. They will have to pay penalties and damages as per law, whose victims are they?... it is not an isolated case.

For 20 years I have remained in the shadows and at the mercy of the media but always in support of the truth and close to your thoughts and pain. The Savi are serving life sentences as confirmed recently, largely thanks to me, for my timely, assiduous and precious collaboration. Otherwise, I would have died before seeing Fabio Savi's handcuffs on his wrists. With your permission and understanding, I would appreciate you allowing me to join the White One Victims Association or, please, at least accept my silent and heartfelt presence at the commemorations of October 13th as a surviving victim of a fierce, absurd and unforgettable story. Waiting for your in-depth evaluation and understandable response, I renew my best regards.

Eva Mikula. Rome, January 28, 2015

The response from Mrs. Zecchi, president of the Association, was not long in coming: “It is a request that does not stand, I do not know on what basis you can make such a request”.

I was still of the opinion that at least those who had been closely touched by this story of the White One knew the truth about the capture of the gang. I was wrong, I realized, however, that this was not the case at all. No less angry was the reply of Valter Giovannini of the public prosecutor of Bologna, which no one had called into question in the letter, but evidently he felt compelled to put his seal with the reply: “Silence is enough to respect the victims”, as if to say to be silent so as not to raise questions already closed and sedimented in the procedural truths.

I felt more and more alone and marginalized, I was not yet ready to face and publicly reveal the truth about the dynamics of the gang capture. My daughter was still small, my energies were used to manage a life full of responsibility and I still had a step, a pawn to put in her place: to tell the story of her life, of her destiny, why she does not have a dad. But for all this I had to wait until she was at least 9 years old, as the child psychologist suggested to me that followed me in the single-parent education path.

The years passed quickly and on the right day made itself known without having planned it.

7.

7. Eva Mikula a selfie at home, 2011

8.

8. Eva Mikula and her son Francesco, 2012

5. JULIA ARRIVES AND EVERYTHING CHANGES

My belly was growing and my life finally seemed to go smoothly, perhaps also thanks to the rules I had imposed on myself starting with the first one: to avoid emotional jolts, nervousness and discussions in working relationships.

I tried to resolve any misunderstandings, conflicts, unforeseen events, with Olympic tranquility, like a true number one. I thought positive and this satisfied me; I worked hard so that no negativity could cross my mind and body as I was about to become a mother for the second time.

I protected the creature that was growing inside of me and in the long evenings in solitude I talked to her a lot. I imagined her small, small, looking up and listening to her mother.

She was giving me almost supernatural strength. At the same time she detached me from the disappointments of the past and illuminated the hopes of the future.

Yes, the regulator of my new responsible happiness was coming. I was able to bask in these strong and languid sensations, loaded with projects to be carried out by myself. The plan did not include associates or partners, I did not want to share my new life even with Biagio.

So it was that, when the pains began, I got into my car and, without saying anything to anyone, I went, for the planned Caesarean section, directly to the hospital.

I parked and arrived to the ward I already knew: I had done the tests and checks right there, at the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome and it was the second caesarean section I was undergoing.

Everything went well and the next day Julia was born. I was in seventh heaven. The first question I asked the healthcare staff was: "Is she healthy? Is she okay?" "Sure" replied the midwife. "She's a beautiful little girl" she added enthusiastically. I cried for joy. The inner voice whispered to me, caressing my soul: "Eve, you did it again, I'm with you".

That day it started my new life together with Julia. Biagio and our son came to visit me in the hospital, I have some beautiful photos of that very pleasant visit.

I went back to my nest driving the car. Biagio carried the baby inside the basket and escorted me aboard his car. Entering the house, he placed the basket with the baby on the sofa and left. A few hours later I went out with the baby in my arms to go to the pharmacy to buy what the doctors had prescribed for me and Julia.

The pharmacy was not far away, but it was almost evening and it was very cold in that gloomy November.

The wound from the caesarean section, still fresh, caused me a bit of pain. I hooded and, step by step, I arrived to the goal. The pharmacist widened his eyes when he saw me entering: looking like this and with a baby in her arms, he must have thought I was a gypsy begging for alms.

To his great surprise, however, he found himself in front of a mother who, with all her strength, and with her baby in her arms, asked for the medications for the surgery just undergone, the necessary to dress the umbilical part of the baby and the products for post-partum hygiene.

Really heroic, as only a mother can be. Returning home I thought that in those conditions, in the first few days, I would really have a hard time managing the baby, standing up, walking, bathing her, dressing her, taking care of her day and night. I absolutely had to get someone to help me; I thought about calling my mother in Romania, but a bad memory came to mind. When she learned months ago that I was pregnant, she seemed happy. As soon as I explained to her that Julia's dad had died in a car accident while I was in my third month and that I had also decided to continue the pregnancy, she fell silent. She disappeared altogether, for half a year, an interminable time.

I was really alone, without even her comfort, but I was happy all the same because I knew that she, my mom, had recovered and was fine. With the treatment she had stabilized. Fifteen days before the birth, the phone rang, I recognized her number. I really didn't expect it, after that long absolute silence. Finally I heard her voice again, it was my mom. I began to hope to have her soon in Rome.

She began with these words: "Excuse me, I had to think a lot about your choice, but I came to a conclusion: a good parent is better than two bad ones. I am proud my daughter for the choice you have made and if you need me, I'll be with you".

The profound meaning of what she told me came from a reflection on her life and, consequently, on mine.

As a child I had both parents and both declared themselves Christians; therefore a Christian family, yet it cannot be said that mine was a happy childhood nor that my mother was a loved woman, except in the first years of marriage.

It came natural to propose spending some time with me, after all I was about to give birth to her granddaughter. She replied that at that moment she would not be able to move because she had to bring the flowers to the market to sell them and she did not want them to be ruined, so as not to lose a profit.

I was disappointed "I'm worth less than her flowers" I thought. The economic costs that I would have had to face to get her to come to Italy so that she could stay for the necessary period would have been a hundred times more expensive.

I didn't count for anything to my parents when they had their busy schedule. After the birth, however, I called her with a determined desire to have her close for a while. I couldn't move and had a baby who needed to be looked after.

"Mom, this time I need help, I can't do it, I never asked you for anything and even now I would like to ask you, if I weren't in this condition: please come, don't tell me no".

So it was that my mother got on the first bus to Rome; she traveled for 24 consecutive hours from the north of Romania and I went to pick her up at the motorway exit.

We met in the petrol station service area located near the junction; I got out and walked towards her with little Julia in the basket, a 5-day-old girl. "But you took the creature with you, so small!" my mother exclaimed worriedly.

I laughed because I realized that she still had no idea what conditions I was in at the time, what it really meant to be alone in the world.

Amused by this externalization, I replied: "I could leave her at home, so she made us coffee".

We hugged each other tightly, I was jonesing for my mother: I hadn't seen her for over a year. She stayed with us for two months; so I had time to recover. Health returned to its place and so did I.

I put the work in order, found a babysitter to follow Julia as I worked; I hired her full time with room and board, to have continuity and tranquility. I had fully recovered and re-stabilized. So, having found my full balance, my mother left to go back to my father, she was always apprehensive for him.

She continually asked herself a thousand things: "What is he eating? What is he doing? Who did he talk to? Let's hope he hasn't argued with anyone. Did he remember to lock the door of the house when he went out to go shopping? Will he have found the socks in the bottom drawer of the closet?". They were the little anxieties of a woman who, despite what she had endured, continued to be devoted to her man. For me this almost maternal affection was an inexplicable fact, towards a husband who had mistreated, betrayed and beaten her and who had plunged her into the darkness of depression, alcohol, pain. But it was her free choice and I respect her.

The days passed in serenity with Julia nearby, I had found my lifeline. She had a different color, beautifully charged. She grew strong and fast like a train.

I too proceeded like a Frecciarossa train: I managed the house, the woman who helped me, the company and myself.

The frame of a rediscovered everyday life were the smiles of a little girl in search of love. Her sweet happiness perhaps concealed an unconscious unhappiness, mysterious to her, but not to me: she did not have a father. Slowly, therefore, my life began to oil the gears that risked rusting.

After a couple of years, I also managed to carve out a space for myself. With a group of friends, at least twice a month, we would go out for an aperitif or to eat a pizza. It became my own corner ritual, because the rest was governed by the imperative of my duties, my responsibilities: my daughter, my son, home, work. I was at the same time man and woman, mum and dad and also the responsibilities were double or triple.

That small, innocent and one-of-a-kind amusement with my friends had thus become a vital diversion.

Once again karma sent me an unpleasant warning: ugly, hateful, humiliating, bad, the same adjectives that fit perfectly with the actor who played that role of a little man by treating me unfairly, or perhaps in retaliation, because I had not indulged his winks. It was certainly not my fault, I did not like it.

I liked to go with my friends to a restaurant in the center of Rome, where they played live music. A pleasant place, I liked it very much and we were happy, there was a nice atmosphere and was frequented by apparently decent people. In my life path I had learned firsthand that there are at least two types of people: respectable and "bad" to stay away from. But appearances are sometimes deceiving.

One evening it happened that as soon as I crossed the threshold of the room a bouncer approached and invited me to go out, to go away. I thought for a moment that he got the wrong person, but he took me by the arm and forcibly dragged me out of the club and told me I should leave immediately.

My friends watched astonished without understanding what was happening. "I'd like to speak to the owner" I said. "I have a right to know why you're throwing me out." "Now I'll tell you" he replied when we were well away from the entrance and went back inside. After half an hour no one had appeared yet, neither the bouncer nor the owner, but the girls joined me to keep me company. I did not know what to do and did not understand, I knew the owner of the restaurant, he had come several times to our table.

He seemed a nice person with me and with all the guests. In truth he had addressed some more appreciation to me and wanted to take me out to dinner, but I declined his invitation, he was not a man I liked and I did not, however, want and intend to relate to him.

I just had to go home, but I promised myself that I would return the following week and that, if the scene was repeated, I would call the police. I always keep my promises and in fact I went back. Again, as soon as they saw me they threw me out. I asked again insistently to speak with the owner. He did not deign, but he sent me to say by a security officer: "You are not welcome because you are Eva Mikula of the White One Gang."

I called 113 and when a patrol arrived I explained that I was being prevented from entering a public place. They recorded my grievances. The owner was invited by the agents to come out to provide an explanation, justified himself aloud, in front of everyone: "The lady is not welcome in my place because she has a criminal record, she is a delinquent, has frequented delinquency, has been the woman of the White One Gang".

The policemen left with the report in hand and I tried to enter, but the two bouncers stood in front of me. I never went to that place again, but the bitterness remained in my mouth.

Appearances are deceptive, in fact. Other than good people! I later learned that this place was a reference point for business meetings. I don't care what others do, it's their business, but the discrimination I suffered was really heavy. A little revenge from the owner, a real minus habens, who had failed to invite me out for dinner and maybe even get something else, which perhaps he had taken for granted. Like all cowardly people, he retaliated by rubbing it in to humiliate me in front of others.

The police report of that evening did not lead to anything obviously, only a piece of paper remained, but I didn't want to let him get away with it. I went to a lawyer. What a pain! I asked myself: "But if I have to convince the lawyer as well, where can I go?". How many prejudices behind that refrain that is always the same: "Forget it, there are many other restaurants".

People always tended to trivialize and discourage me without trying to make the slightest effort to understand what I felt inside, without even trying to understand my state of mind, putting themselves in my shoes for the wrong I had suffered, no one felt a shred of empathy towards me.

I tried to get over it. But the bitterness remained, like the fear that other similar episodes might be waiting around the corner.

With the global recession that began in 2008 after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the clouds began to thicken over the real estate sector as well. Between 2011 and 2012 the crisis in my professional world made itself felt in a pressing way. So I chose the path of increasing the business by extending the network of contacts: I intended to broaden the range of action outside Italy, especially in London.

I had become a Rome-London commuter, a great sacrifice for me as a mother and for Julia as a daughter, but everything was aimed at our future. Luck helped me for once: my daughter's babysitter was good and very honest, she stayed with us full time for four years and I am grateful to her for the quality and amount of effort she put into helping me to grow Julia.

I was a very caring mom. At the beach or at the playground, wherever there were many people and the risk of her getting lost increased, I wrote her name and my phone number in ink on her arm. I taught her to dial 113, and told her that in an emergency, if mom got sick or wasn't at home, she would have to dial it. She asked me, as all children do: "Why?", I explained to her that it is the police number and that policemen are good people who intervene whenever someone needs help. Julia listened to me in silence. And then: "I want to call them now!" I was blown away, I thought that perhaps I had not explained myself well. "There is no emergency now, we are all fine, there is no reason to call", she, in a voice full of love and innocence, said "I want to tell them that I love them". I melted, it was touching. Her naivety had broken all kinds of barriers on respect and trust in the forces of law and order. I hugged her and promised that one day she would have the opportunity to greet all the policemen in person, even through their boss. A secret wish.

Managing had now become the word of my life: I managed the small spaces with the son who lived with his father Biagio, I managed the trips to London; I was managing a complicated job that I had to invent step by step and day after day, because it was full of traps and characters that were not always crystal clear. Fortunately, my London collaborators were suitably professional. And I learned from them to focus on a deal, to put into practice strategies to search and find clients for prestigious properties, to acquire the techniques to work on construction sites and to sell houses on approved projects.

And here I am, in a 2020 that has come quickly. Aware and fortified by the thousand adventures, sometimes very difficult, dramatic, bad, above all unjust of my life. In July, the hot days passed quietly, commuting to London was over: there was Brexit.

Italy was discussing the anti-Covid measures that in March 2020 had resulted in the total closure of every activity, of every move. Now we were a little more free, so I decided to take a spin on Google. I typed in my name and surname: Eva Mikula. I was curious, I already knew many articles about me, others where I had been unjustly brought up for reasons of opportunity and marketing of certain police bodies, were known but caused me anger and sadness. For example, those on the robbery of my ex-husband arrested by the carabinieri, who were careful not to spread his personal details, indicating him only as Mikula's ex-husband, or those on the Savi brothers, the killers of the gang who were asking for benefits to shorten the time their release from prison. All stuff already seen, I found no new or unpublished ideas or news. However, I came across some video interviews that I did not know, where the capture of the members of the White One Gang was described.

In particular, my curiosity was attracted by the stories of the public prosecutor of Rimini Daniele Paci and of the two agents, at the time of the events in the Rimini police station, Luciano Baglioni and Pietro Costanza.

They described, celebrating themselves in great detail, their great investigative capacity and the extraordinary courage put in place to complete the sensational operation.

I listened to their interviews found online for an entire afternoon. I felt like I found myself face to face with them, just like on that night between 25th and 26th November 1994.

From them not even a word about the young woman who, really bravely, put them on the right path, the girl who at the risk of her own life led them to the arrest of that group of policemen with a double life of brutal criminals.

They had erased me, as if wrapped in a black blanket. For them, in those paroxysmal and distressing days of 25 years ago, I had not existed. Not a single mention of my collaboration in the service of justice. They denied the evidence with the complicity of the time that had concealed the truth of the facts, sedimented under mountains of papers, among which they chose what to show and what not so that only their trial version emerged.

Now I'll tell you the real truth.

9

10

9 and 10. Eva Mikula and her daughter Julia, 2013

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12

11. Her children, Julia and Francesco, 2015

12. Eva Mikula a selfie in the car, 2016

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