Speaker 1: A note to listeners, this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence.
Speaker 2: There is corruption everywhere in the world, literally everywhere and
Speaker 2: at every level. The difference is that in Malta people
Speaker 2: have a corrupt attitude towards corruption. They blanket they tolerate it.
Speaker 2: The powers are not really separate institutions a week. The
Speaker 2: police operate as an extension of the government. Judges and
Speaker 2: magistrates are politically appointed. It's a dreadful situation, ripe and
Speaker 2: designed for abuse and corruption.
Speaker 3: So Manuel, where are we? What we're looking at?
Speaker 1: We're in the very middle of the Live Island, the
Speaker 1: small hamlet of Bignia, about one hundred farmers this year.
Speaker 3: I mean it's dry here, but the tree feels it
Speaker 3: was quite a busy road, a line of houses on
Speaker 3: the ridge and then the ridges bare.
Speaker 1: John and I are in maltawn on a country road
Speaker 1: about half an hour's drive from the capital, Valletta. At
Speaker 1: the end of the last episode, we heard how a
Speaker 1: team of contract killers were here watching Daphne through her
Speaker 1: windows with her rifle. But on that evening they didn't fire.
Speaker 1: At the very last minute. Their plan hit a snack.
Speaker 1: According to courtrum testimony, just Before the shot could be taken,
Speaker 1: getaway driver Chinese George de Georgio, learned there was a
Speaker 1: roadblock on some of the roads leading to Dafani's home.
Speaker 1: An escape by car suddenly seemed too risky, so the
Speaker 1: plan is aborted.
Speaker 3: Instead, they decide they will carry out the hit using
Speaker 3: a different method, but just as deadly. Over to our
Speaker 3: left can see the sea, and then just there there's
Speaker 3: a police box.
Speaker 1: Who lives here, well, definitely Carmegality. I lived here, her
Speaker 1: family still lives here. It's a house that overlooks the
Speaker 1: valley within the sort of the center of the island.
Speaker 1: This little hamlet is mostly a farming community, and she
Speaker 1: had the last house on the.
Speaker 3: Ridge, So this ridge here, Where were the spots.
Speaker 1: Is They're right across so through the trees in a
Speaker 1: way that wouldn't be visible to us from here, but
Speaker 1: they could see us from there. She was being spotted
Speaker 1: and watched by the people who are planning to kill her.
Speaker 3: And it's punishingly hot. We're actually standing in the shade,
Speaker 3: but it feels like thirty degrees now, yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think you're seeing just the atmosphere that would
Speaker 1: have been there on the day sixteenth October twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: It was a hot day like this. October is the
Speaker 1: tail end of summer, but the landscape is dry, the
Speaker 1: heat is on, and Dephnely was running an afternoon errand
Speaker 1: on a day just like today.
Speaker 3: From my hard podcast topic Studios in Vespucci.
Speaker 1: I'm John Sweeney and I'm Manuel Delia and this is
Speaker 1: Crooks Everywhere, Episode two.
Speaker 3: The woman who spoke out.
Speaker 4: Ter Daphne was a year older. She's the eldest of
Speaker 4: us four. We used to share a bedroom when we
Speaker 4: were children and up to about the age of twelve
Speaker 4: thirteen on.
Speaker 1: A small island. A lot of people thought they knew
Speaker 1: a big personal little like Daphne, but her sister Corinne
Speaker 1: saw a different side.
Speaker 4: The strongest memory I think books and reading writing. She
Speaker 4: didn't care for much else, you know, especially at school.
Speaker 4: She just loved reading and writing.
Speaker 1: This would be the mid seventies definitely, as a young teenager.
Speaker 1: Deafney's son Paul has written a biography of his mother.
Speaker 1: It describes her so hungry for reading matter that she
Speaker 1: forms her own book club in school, sharing British children's
Speaker 1: literature like Enid Blyton Exotic Adventures from afar off Land.
Speaker 4: But the other thing I suppose, rather than books alone,
Speaker 4: was that she really loved magazines, and she always said,
Speaker 4: you know, if you want to know what's going on,
Speaker 4: you ought to keep in touch with the world magazines
Speaker 4: well the way I mean it's a spre internet. Of course.
Speaker 1: Deafnely was born the same year that Malta stopped being
Speaker 1: a British colony nineteen sixty four. Let's say a more traditional.
Speaker 4: Time, such as the time of austerity. In a postcolonial
Speaker 4: we couldn't travel much, you know, people didn't at that time.
Speaker 4: It just didn't happen. I mean, we grew up in
Speaker 4: a neighborhood where you know, my mom had grown up
Speaker 4: in the same street. It is a seaside town, so
Speaker 4: it is a tourist destination, but when we were children,
Speaker 4: tourism wasn't very well developed.
Speaker 1: Back in the seventies and eighties. Who are still a
Speaker 1: fairly poor nation and also living under a mild form
Speaker 1: of socialism, which made luxuries like foreign travel or teenage
Speaker 1: fashion feel exotic and precious. Even Enid Blyton was a
Speaker 1: form of escapism. Daphnie's was a family that was fairly
Speaker 1: prosperous and successful part of the English speaking educated middle class,
Speaker 1: the kind of people sometimes seen as more British than
Speaker 1: the British, the kind of people who don't have great
Speaker 1: socialist credentials, and that can cause resentment, as we will
Speaker 1: hear down.
Speaker 3: With the British Empire and all that. I mean, no
Speaker 3: one likes to be associated with all that gasslyl colonial nonsense, right.
Speaker 1: Right, and these things matter. There are deep social and
Speaker 1: cultural divides that still run through our whole culture and
Speaker 1: through Daphne's story even today.
Speaker 3: The way her sister Koran tells it, even as a teenager,
Speaker 3: young Daphne was already looking outside Maulta for inspiration, a
Speaker 3: world that was outside her grasp, listening to Adam Ants
Speaker 3: and Bob Marley, reading British teenage magazines, and it.
Speaker 4: Was a particular one called Jackie, which was aimed at
Speaker 4: teenage girls, you know, dealing with fashion and romance. You know,
Speaker 4: the typical problem page you get for teenage girls, that
Speaker 4: sort of thing. That was a magazine definitely used to
Speaker 4: like very much. I remember that she used to buy
Speaker 4: it regularly. My parents used to buy lots of magazines,
Speaker 4: you know, Life magazine, Spectator magazine, Newsweek. So there was
Speaker 4: that connection, and I do remember this sense of the
Speaker 4: wider world.
Speaker 1: And the way the country was run at the time
Speaker 1: wasn't making things easier for teenagers.
Speaker 4: It wasn't, let's say, a time of opportunity for teenage girls.
Speaker 4: That way, education beyond the mandatory first years of education
Speaker 4: wasn't greatly encouraged.
Speaker 1: At that time, the socialist government was attempting to force
Speaker 1: a Catholic schools to abolish fees, effectively forcing them out
Speaker 1: of existence. The authorities saw church schools as religious and elitist,
Speaker 1: definitely not part of a socialist Malta the kind of
Speaker 1: schools that many middle class families like Dafni's used, and
Speaker 1: maybe the notion of a church school makes you think
Speaker 1: of xalatory and conservatism, but at that time these schools
Speaker 1: were a rare spot of independent thinking that the government
Speaker 1: could not control. They felt threatened by that. Forcing church
Speaker 1: schools out of business became a mission for a government
Speaker 1: that wanted to monopolize education and, as they put it,
Speaker 1: to cultivate future generations of socialists. And so while Daphne
Speaker 1: is reading Jackie magazine and listening to Damant, her classmates
Speaker 1: are beginning to join protest marches to keep their school open.
Speaker 3: So this is an unusual coalition. Teenage rebellion meets the
Speaker 3: Catholic church.
Speaker 1: Deafhney was nineteen at this time and not really political yet.
Speaker 4: You know, huge crowds of people marched through the streets.
Speaker 4: And there was a time when there was a protest
Speaker 4: in our own hometown. For some reason, I hadn't gone
Speaker 4: to that one, but I remember definitely had gone there
Speaker 4: with her friends out in the street, a few streets
Speaker 4: away from our home, and then the police moved in.
Speaker 1: Back then, Maltese police were not known for their life
Speaker 1: touch and.
Speaker 4: Remember one of them punched deafnely and then she and
Speaker 4: her friends were arrested. And then, you know, it's not
Speaker 4: like anyone reads you or your rights, and so they knew. Basically,
Speaker 4: they knew they could do whatever they liked. Human rights
Speaker 4: as a concept didn't exist for many people. Mike was right.
Speaker 3: I can't imagine how frightening that must have been for her,
Speaker 3: but also how scared her parents must have been.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, it's a terrifying prospect, both for the person arrested,
Speaker 4: but even more terrifying if you were on the outside.
Speaker 1: Definitely claimed that she was forced to sign a pre
Speaker 1: written confession for assaulting a police officer. When it reached court,
Speaker 1: she was acquitted of all charges, and the magistrate presiding
Speaker 1: criticized the police involved, calling for their conduct to be
Speaker 1: condemned and severely censured.
Speaker 3: That is the kind of experience that scarce you for life,
Speaker 3: especially at that age, even if she did make it
Speaker 3: out in one piece.
Speaker 1: Yes, when I imagined nineen year old, definitely, this I
Speaker 1: think has to be a crossroads in her life. Some
Speaker 1: people would have learned the lesson to keep their head
Speaker 1: down from then on, but with definitely, it did the opposite.
Speaker 4: I mean, it wouldn't say radicalized her, but it also
Speaker 4: brought home in a very personal way, just how fragile
Speaker 4: you know fundamental freedoms are, How you know you need
Speaker 4: to protect, you need to fight back every day. You
Speaker 4: can't take anything for.
Speaker 1: Granted, Malta being a small place. The same young arresting
Speaker 1: officer went on to become a major multice politician, this
Speaker 1: time quarter of a century later. Definitely was determined to
Speaker 1: have her say.
Speaker 2: October seventh, twenty ten. I stand by what I have
Speaker 2: said for twenty six years. Angelou Farrugia forced me to
Speaker 2: sign a false confession which he wrote himself.
Speaker 3: Naturally, this is Daphne's version of what happened, and it
Speaker 3: should also be noted that definnely lost a libel case
Speaker 3: related to these claims, although an appeals court held that
Speaker 3: she managed to prove some of the facts.
Speaker 1: We should also note that it would have been hard
Speaker 1: for Deafney to prove her case thirty years after the fact.
Speaker 2: Malta cannot have a prime minister who, in his days
Speaker 2: as a police inspector, forced a nineteen year old girl
Speaker 2: to sign a false confession which he himself had written,
Speaker 2: telling her that if she did not do so, she
Speaker 2: would be returned to the pitch black cell with feces
Speaker 2: smeared walls and a metal bucket for a lavatory, where
Speaker 2: she had been kept for the past twenty seven hours.
Speaker 3: After young Daphney finishes school, she began also followed the
Speaker 3: expected path for someone of her background, marriage, starting a family,
Speaker 3: but also something more surprising. She becomes a journalist, Malta's
Speaker 3: first female opinion columnist.
Speaker 1: And that was surprising even for what was by then
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen nineties. I remember she started writing
Speaker 1: around the time I started reading newspapers, I obviously didn't
Speaker 1: realize how unique she was, because to me, everything on
Speaker 1: a newspaper was new. But I became a fan early on.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just that Definnely was a female journalist.
Speaker 1: It was also that she wrote openly under her own name.
Speaker 1: Until then, most columnists preferred to stay anonymous.
Speaker 3: It felt safer, but that wasn't Daphne's style.
Speaker 5: Well, I started out purely out of my own sense
Speaker 5: of frustration with the newspaper's local newspaper.
Speaker 1: Definitely spoke about this time. This is a rare recorded
Speaker 1: interview with Definitely from the nineteen ninety years before she
Speaker 1: started her blog.
Speaker 5: And I also noticed an absence of columns written by
Speaker 5: people under their own name, you know, his photograph name,
Speaker 5: as I read regularly in foreign newspapers. And that's what
Speaker 5: this is very odd. And the reason Giffen was always
Speaker 5: that such a column would be impossible in Mortar because
Speaker 5: it's such a close, closely knit society, and people are
Speaker 5: afraid to offend others are afraid of stepping on other
Speaker 5: people's toes, and obviously, if you're going to write a
Speaker 5: proper column, you're going to step on people's toes very often.
Speaker 3: Of course, on a small island, stepping on toes and
Speaker 3: making enemies can be a risky business. You never know
Speaker 3: quite who will hold a grudge, but in a small
Speaker 3: place you do know that they will be able to
Speaker 3: find you if they want to.
Speaker 1: Daphney's writing was a hit. People started to buy the
Speaker 1: paper purely to read what definitely had to say, to
Speaker 1: watch her stepping on toes.
Speaker 5: Previously, journalists had tended to be men. In fact, the
Speaker 5: newspaper I started out with, The Sunday Times, had had
Speaker 5: a policy of never employing staff reporters who were women.
Speaker 5: It was a very absurd and antiquated policy, and the
Speaker 5: test since of course bitter the dust. I mean, it
Speaker 5: was totally absurd, but that accounted for a lot of
Speaker 5: my effect at the time.
Speaker 1: She's being very modest here. The quality of her writing
Speaker 1: and the urgency of it where what really made her
Speaker 1: stand out.
Speaker 3: But not surprisingly, the idea of a strongly opinionated female
Speaker 3: columnist didn't go down well with everyone, and.
Speaker 4: That became a very difficult time for Defne because she'd
Speaker 4: get all these ominous messages which weren't sort of avert
Speaker 4: but you get a sense that you know something creepy
Speaker 4: going on.
Speaker 1: I know this myself as a writer on news and
Speaker 1: politics in Malta. You can't prove where the hostile messages
Speaker 1: come from or whether it had anything to do with
Speaker 1: any specific piece of reporting, but people know who you are,
Speaker 1: and on an island this small, if people want to
Speaker 1: find you, they will find you. So there's a reason
Speaker 1: why it was normal for a journalists to write anonymously
Speaker 1: for their own well being.
Speaker 4: But you know when you hear something on the room,
Speaker 4: you know, on the grapevine, or someone says you'd better
Speaker 4: be careful because you know x y Z is feeling angry.
Speaker 4: That's the kind of thing that she was experiencing where
Speaker 4: you'd get these sort of not so subtle hints, And there's.
Speaker 3: A mother dafinitely did her best disguise of pressure she
Speaker 3: was coming under.
Speaker 4: After she was skilled, her son said they had to
Speaker 4: revise a lot of what they experienced when they were children.
Speaker 4: So when they were pulled out of school and taken
Speaker 4: for an impromptu holiday to Gozo, which is a neighboring island,
Speaker 4: they then realized that that was a time when definitely
Speaker 4: possibly was feeling unsafe and thought, you know, getting out
Speaker 4: of the house, getting out of their normal environment would
Speaker 4: take them out of harm's way. For a while, I never.
Speaker 6: Really thought of my mother as a woman journalist, you know,
Speaker 6: I taught of her as my mother and as this
Speaker 6: incredible writer.
Speaker 3: Definitely had three boys. Matthew is the oldest, Paul the youngest.
Speaker 3: This is Andrew, the middle son.
Speaker 6: I guess what I always found striking was that she
Speaker 6: was so different to my friend's parents, to my friend's
Speaker 6: mother's you know, in Malta, in my parents' generation, maybe
Speaker 6: twenty percent of women worked, maybe thirty percent max. And
Speaker 6: the fact that she was the sort of famous journalist
Speaker 6: was you know, it made her almost like an alien somehow.
Speaker 6: And she was able to live these two lives very effectively,
Speaker 6: you know, to be the Maltese mother who was sort
Speaker 6: of very you know, like a typical Mediterranean mother who's
Speaker 6: very sort of you know, attentive and proud of her
Speaker 6: children and just you know, very warm, but then was
Speaker 6: able to be this sort of like razor sharp journalist.
Speaker 3: And Daphne's razor sharp journalism had real world consequences for
Speaker 3: the family.
Speaker 6: So I remember coming home from school and there was
Speaker 6: you know, we had this dog. All our dogs were
Speaker 6: mongrels at the time. We used to just adopt whatever
Speaker 6: straight dogs would show up, but this one actually was different.
Speaker 6: It was a colligue, really beautiful dog called Messalina.
Speaker 3: And on this day when they get home, somethink is
Speaker 3: waiting for them on the doorstep.
Speaker 4: Its throat had been slashed, but rather than making a
Speaker 4: fuss about it, definitely just walked inside and said, you know,
Speaker 4: it must have drunk eaten some poison from the garden
Speaker 4: or something of the sort. So she played it down
Speaker 4: a lot and dealt with it that way.
Speaker 6: And obviously I believed her because I was, you know,
Speaker 6: maybe seven years old, But I remember thinking, Jesus Christ,
Speaker 6: I mean, is that what snail poisoned us? To you?
Speaker 6: How much poison do you need to kill a snail?
Speaker 3: And yeah, And then things moved beyond even warnings like that.
Speaker 6: And then there was when our front door set on fire.
Speaker 6: The explanation was that we left the candle out that night,
Speaker 6: so so sort of semi plausible for a child, but
Speaker 6: over time, you know, you realize, okay, that that obviously
Speaker 6: was not true. The door was completely black and then
Speaker 6: obviously as we grew older, we you know, our parents
Speaker 6: stopped pretending.
Speaker 3: The family decided they needed more protection, so they built
Speaker 3: the first of several walls around the property. Sadly, that
Speaker 3: was still no guarantee of safety.
Speaker 4: And there was another ugly incident which came later on.
Speaker 4: So they were asleep in their own beds and somebody
Speaker 4: crawled across the fields at the back of the house,
Speaker 4: piled rubber tires at the back of the house, filled
Speaker 4: them with fuel and set them alight. And this was
Speaker 4: in the early hours of the morning, so they had
Speaker 4: obviously been watching the house and waiting for the lights
Speaker 4: to go out, which was a signal everybody was actually
Speaker 4: in bed.
Speaker 6: And petrol obviously is explosive, so the idea was that
Speaker 6: the petrol would would blast through the glass and the
Speaker 6: fire would spread into the house. But luckily my younger
Speaker 6: brother came home. So this was about three in the morning.
Speaker 6: We were teenagers, were going out all the time. It
Speaker 6: was a weekend, and Paul came home maybe ten or
Speaker 6: fifteen minutes after the fire was started and saw the
Speaker 6: smoke and woke up the family and they were able
Speaker 6: to put it out, But otherwise it would have been Yeah,
Speaker 6: it would have been completely I mean, my mother was
Speaker 6: in no doubt that, yeah, it was an attempted murder.
Speaker 3: There were other measures that could have been taken, but
Speaker 3: somehow that would have felt like giving in.
Speaker 6: I would often see these kind of anonymous houses in
Speaker 6: Malta covered in security cameras and alarms and things like that.
Speaker 6: But in comparison, my parents were on the sort of yeah.
Speaker 6: The philosophy was, we need to feel good in our home,
Speaker 6: you know, our home. Our home shouldn't be a prison.
Speaker 6: You know, if someone wants to kill my mother, they're gonna,
Speaker 6: you know, a sort of off the shelf alarm isn't
Speaker 6: going to stop them.
Speaker 3: But for all this, Daphne's writing doesn't change. Nothing deters
Speaker 3: her from writing difficult troops, whether biting gossip or hard
Speaker 3: hitting stories about those with power and money.
Speaker 1: And by this time many of Dephanie's regarding themes had
Speaker 1: clearly emerged. One of them is what she sees as
Speaker 1: more as deep cultural divisions, our culture war, what definitely
Speaker 1: called the Maltas.
Speaker 3: Daphnie is, Molta is fatally divided into two opposing camps,
Speaker 3: a country cut in half by education, language, and politics.
Speaker 1: On one side, there are the professional classes with a
Speaker 1: preference for the English language, people who have the skills
Speaker 1: and resources to maybe work or study in Britain or
Speaker 1: elsewhere in Europe. On people with an international outlook, people
Speaker 1: who might have marched for the right of private schools
Speaker 1: to stay open back in the seventies, people like Dafnie.
Speaker 1: And on the other side of the barricades, there is
Speaker 1: the other Malta, a more blue collar, working class culture,
Speaker 1: people with less interest in the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: According to Dafnie, they might be making a lot of
Speaker 1: money in today's world, and they might be buying fleshy,
Speaker 1: designer cloaths and going on short trips to Sicily in
Speaker 1: their boats, but they would be culturally hostile to Daphnie's Malta.
Speaker 5: But start off it, I'd like to say that I
Speaker 5: believe the greatest problem and moret is society is that
Speaker 5: it's a clash of two cultures, and because it's such
Speaker 5: a small population and the territory is so limited, those
Speaker 5: cultures on head on confrontation.
Speaker 1: The same interview from nineteen ninety eight, you can see
Speaker 1: she doesn't make any effort to hide her view that
Speaker 1: her side of the culture war is superior.
Speaker 5: So you have, on the one hand, you have people
Speaker 5: who are subjected to I won't call it Western democratic culture,
Speaker 5: but I suppose that's what it really is, through exposure
Speaker 5: to foreign news media, particularly magazines, newspapers and so on.
Speaker 5: So they're continuously reading and absorbing American, British, Italian, French
Speaker 5: ideas and they get used to that way of doing things.
Speaker 1: And you can also understand why some people saw heretitudes
Speaker 1: to the rest of Malta the other Molta as s petronizing,
Speaker 1: almost colonial.
Speaker 5: Then on the other hand you have the other cultural block,
Speaker 5: which Perhabs, which is raised in a culture of not
Speaker 5: reading but listening to the radio, are watching the television.
Speaker 5: Once again, it's part of the conflict of cultures. Basic
Speaker 5: Multis culture fundamentally is quite primitive and quite savage, and
Speaker 5: with a total lack of concern for other people. All
Speaker 5: that counts as the family. No absolutely no civic conscience whatsoever.
Speaker 5: It's totally totally alien to Northern European culture. The nearest
Speaker 5: comparison I can make is to backwater Sicilian culture. We
Speaker 5: see the same problems.
Speaker 1: It's the afternoon of Monday, sixteenth October twenty seventeen, the
Speaker 1: end of the long multie summer, two of the hitmen
Speaker 1: are back overlooking Daphnese house in Benea.
Speaker 3: As before, we've taken evidence heard in the courtroom and
Speaker 3: dramatized what happened, providing color in places without changing any
Speaker 3: of the material facts or allegations.
Speaker 1: After the plan to kill Daphanie with a sniper shot
Speaker 1: was abandoned, the killers have come up with a plan B,
Speaker 1: a new method of murder, and they know they needed
Speaker 1: to work this time.
Speaker 3: They're getting pressure from their handler to get the job finished,
Speaker 3: so over the last few weeks they've been practicing and
Speaker 3: rehearsing intensively, all the while finding off impatiently inquiries from management.
Speaker 3: And on this day, everything finally seems to be coming together.
Speaker 1: From a hideout across the shallow valley, Alfred Deban and
Speaker 1: Vincent de Kov are watching Daphne's driveway through binoculars or
Speaker 1: a telescope. They've already been here nearly eight hours since
Speaker 1: before dawn, lying watching and waiting, waiting for the moment
Speaker 1: when the compound door might open.
Speaker 3: Alfred's brother, Chinese George, is a few miles away, also waiting.
Speaker 3: He's on his own in a small boat that belongs
Speaker 3: to him and his brother, waiting somewhere not far from
Speaker 3: the letter harbor, close to the shore, close enough to
Speaker 3: sue will be within mobile phone coverage. He will be
Speaker 3: the trigger man, the one who will activate the murder weapon.
Speaker 1: Inside. Completely unaware, Daphne is at her kitchen table finishing
Speaker 1: a blog post about the Prime Minister's chief of staff,
Speaker 1: Keach Cambri Husha calls a crook.
Speaker 3: At two thirty five pm. She posts the article. It
Speaker 3: will be the last thing she ever publishes.
Speaker 1: A few minutes later, through the binoculars, Vincent Koff sees
Speaker 1: a light come on above the outer gate to the
Speaker 1: garden as sign that someone is coming out. First to
Speaker 1: Alfred that this could be the moment they've been waiting for.
Speaker 1: Alfred de Bean calls Chinese George on the boat and
Speaker 1: tells him to get ready. The moment has come.
Speaker 3: While Stephane gets in the car, the trap will be sprung.
Speaker 1: But then, at the very last moment, Vincent the cough
Speaker 1: and Alfred de Bean watched Stephanie hesitate, turn around and
Speaker 1: re enter the house a false alarm.
Speaker 3: And then one minute later she returns she's forgotten her checkbook.
Speaker 3: This time, Jephaney does get in the car. She starts
Speaker 3: Ignition and begins driving along the short dusty path to
Speaker 3: the main road.
Speaker 1: And at that moment, once the car is in motion,
Speaker 1: Alfred de Bean calls his brother on the boat again
Speaker 1: and tells him that everything is ready. The plan is
Speaker 1: back on out at sea.
Speaker 3: Chinese George acknowledges the message and uses a different phone
Speaker 3: to send a specially coded text to a SIM card,
Speaker 3: a SIM card attached to an explosive device underneath Daphne's
Speaker 3: car seat.
Speaker 1: Daphne's eldest son, Matthew, is in the family house when
Speaker 1: he hears the bomb. Immediately he runs out in his
Speaker 1: bare feet to find out what is going on. Outside,
Speaker 1: he sees the burning car in a field by the
Speaker 1: road and tries to save his mother, but it is hopeless.
Speaker 1: Pieces of Daphne's body are strewn across the bomb site.
Speaker 1: Then two cops in a passing patrol car get out,
Speaker 1: one of them holding a pitifully small fire extinguisher. Matthew
Speaker 1: screams at them to do something, but it's too late.
Speaker 1: There is nothing they can do. A neighbor and a
Speaker 1: passing cars gets out starts videoing the scene with his
Speaker 1: mobile phone. Outrage, Matthew seeses his phone and smashes it
Speaker 1: across the valley. Alfred de Bean and Vincent de Cough
Speaker 1: are leaving the observation post and making their way as
Speaker 1: quickly as possible to a car parked close by, but
Speaker 1: Alfred de Bean has blundered. They had a strict rule
Speaker 1: on site to put every piece of letter, every cigarette
Speaker 1: butt at the observation point in a bottle to be
Speaker 1: taken away to avoid leaving any race. But perhaps in
Speaker 1: the excitement or just in a moment of carelessness after
Speaker 1: all the long hours waiting in the sun, Alfred de
Speaker 1: Bean has let a cigarette butt fall.
Speaker 3: The cigarette carries irrefusable DNA evidence of his presence at
Speaker 3: the scene of the crime. The killers are making it
Speaker 3: so very easy for the investigators, if that is the
Speaker 3: authorities choose to investigate.
Speaker 1: And out at sea in his fishing boat, Chinese George
Speaker 1: has also made a fatal error. Earlier in the day,
Speaker 1: he realized that one of his Berner phones was short
Speaker 1: on credit. If he can't make or received calls, the
Speaker 1: whole murder plot will fail.
Speaker 3: But he's in a boat out at sea, he can't
Speaker 3: get a top.
Speaker 4: Up, so oh I was being smaspituality credit for a
Speaker 4: telephone lip.
Speaker 1: Up tamil litop up. That means can you top me up?
Speaker 1: He calls friends, a couple of friends until someone agrees
Speaker 1: to top up his burner phone account, and he makes
Speaker 1: those calls on his personal legit phone.
Speaker 3: But Chinese George doesn't seem too concerned. After he hears
Speaker 3: that the car bomb has been successfully detonated, he's in
Speaker 3: a relax, celebrate removed. He steers the boat backs through
Speaker 3: the quayside, and he sends another TEX on his personal
Speaker 3: phone to his Romanian girlfriend.
Speaker 1: Open a bottle of wine for me, baby.
Speaker 3: It's good to let a wine breathe before you drink it.
Speaker 3: No point rushing.
Speaker 1: It just in time for the first sip. He reaches
Speaker 1: the shore a job well.
Speaker 3: Done, or so he thinks. That's next time.
Speaker 1: Crooks Everywhere is a production of iHeart Podcasts, Topic Studios
Speaker 1: and Vespucci. It's reported and hosted by me Manuel Delia
Speaker 1: and John Sweeney. The singer producer is Leo Hornack. The
Speaker 1: producer is Maddi Hickish. Krish Denesh Kumar is the assistant producer.
Speaker 1: The story editors are Emma Ederill, Matt Willis and Philippa Geering.
Speaker 1: The managing producers are Thomas Curry and Rachel Byrne. The
Speaker 1: voice of Dafnie Karvana Galizia is played by Ciena Miller,
Speaker 1: acting direction by Christopher Houghten, Maltese voices by Mikhail Basmajan
Speaker 1: and Pierre Staffrach. The executive producers are Johnny Galvin and
Speaker 1: Daniel Turken at Vespucci, Christi Gressman at Topic Studios, Katina
Speaker 1: Norvel and Niki Etoor at iHeart Podcasts, and Cienna Miller.
Speaker 1: Marketing leader is David Wassermann. Audio recording by Tom Berry
Speaker 1: at Wardoor Studios. Audio mix and sound design by Joel Cox.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Andrew Botchcardona, Alessandra di Crespo, Eddie Isles,
Speaker 1: and Andrew Krvana Galizia