AGATA Frazzello could take it no longer. Last Saturday night, she climbed on to a chair in her kitchen, tied one end of a plastic cord around her neck, tied the other end to a rafter above her head and jumped to her death.
Her daughter Chiara, aged 21, found her body at three in the morning, hanging in a eerie stillness above a kitchen table covered with newspaper clippings that told much of Agata's story. Among the clippings was a note to Chiara: "Forgive me, Chiara, I can't take it any longer ... Get out of this cursed town."
Agata's story makes for sad but familiar reading, at least to anyone with a small knowledge of Sicily. Agata (43), her husband Salvatore and their son Mimmo all worked in the family jewellery shop in Niscemi, a small town in southern Sicily.
Last October 16th, two men knocked at the jewellery shop door saying they wanted to look at marriage rings (fede). Agata hesitated before releasing the safety lock on the door.
Her hesitation was only too understandable. She and her husband had already been threatened by mafiosi because they refused to pay the pizzo (protection money). To her regret, Agata opened the door. After making a few routine inquiries, the two young men exchanged a glance and then attacked, with one grabbing Agata by the throat, punching her and tearing at her hair, while the other attacked her husband and son.
In an interview with Dutch journalist Cecile Landman last week, Agata recalled: "When I managed to get away from his (the mafioso killer's) grip, rather than rushing to help Mimmo, I don't know why but I rushed out into the street to scream for help. There was a lad there, Massimo, waiting in his car for his girlfriend. He didn't hear because he had his radio turned up loud.
"Then I heard two shots. One of them missed, the other hit my son. I rushed back and I saw the bastard with the gun in his hand and he pointed it at my chest. I heard a click ... I remember that I had a yellow dress on, I looked at myself and wondered if I was dead ...
"I ran back into the shop and shut the door. I fell on the floor and started talking to my son and husband ... I didn't realise. Mimmo, how did it finish up? That bastard wanted to kill me too. My son was on the couch, my husband on the floor, dead, both dead ...
"I looked round, those bastards were out in the street, back at me trying to decide whether to also kill me, an awkward witness."
Those "bastards" did not kill Agata. Instead, they left her with a husband and son dead. A TV report of the killing last October showed dramatic images of an obviously distressed Agata, still in her yellow dress, walking round and round in the shop before she suddenly threw herself on her dead husband's body.
Three men had to pull her to her feet.
Since that grim October day, Agata's life had been a hell. The Mafia continued to threaten her, on one occasion beating her up in her shop and on another issuing a verbal threat even as she prayed at her husband's grave. Later, the jewellery shop was broken into and a note left, threatening to kill her daughter if Agata testified in court.
She asked for police protection but was told that no one was available. In the end, two soldiers were sent to stand guard at the door of her home but they had no mandate to act as bodyguards. In her interview last week Agata summed up:
"I am the living dead. They'd do me a favour if they killed me ...I don't know how to go on living, I feel abandoned, completely abandoned, alone, alone, alone ... There is no state here and those bastards are everywhere."
The Prime Minister, Mr Romano Prodi, attended a "Day of Memory" in Niscemi 24 hours before Agata killed herself. The day bore witness to the courage and suffering of those who fight the Mafia. A list of the names of Mafia victims was read out. The names of Salvatore and Mimmo Frazzerto were not on the list. Agata's sense of isolation was total.
Agata's story is merely one element in a huge Mafia mosaic.
Confcommercio, the Italian Business Confederation, calculated recently that today's Mafia has a patrimony of £150 billion, that 20 to 25 per cent of all Italian bank operations are Mafia-related and that three out of 10 Italian companies are Mafia-run.
The Mafia continues to do good business; the Italian state's fight against it is ineffective and half-hearted, despite the presence of the left in power for the first time in 50 years. As Agata concluded last week, hours before killing herself: "I've been abandoned by the state ... They tell me nothing about the inquiry (into the killing of her husband and son) ... I see no one, neither politicians nor trade unionists. There's only silence."