ROSELANE NONATO came to London claiming that she wanted to learn English but boasted how illegal immigrants could get most things for free in “gullible Britain”.

However, within months of arriving in 1998, it was the gullible Brazilian who had unwittingly fallen in love with the Mafia serial killer who was to shape her future.

When they met at a London nightclub, the former canteen porter was dazzled by Sokol Drenova’s designer clothes and chiselled good looks and comforted by their apparent shared Roman Catholic faith.

Drenova, 12 year her junior, beguiled her with tales of fleeing war-torn Kosovo after his parents were killed in “ethnic cleansing”. He had stowed away on a ferry to Dover and was granted refugee status.

After a whirlwind romance, the couple married at Barnet Register Office in April 1999. But the marriage was based on an outrageous lie: Drenova was actually Mane Driza, a violent member of the Mafia who had committed murders in three countries. Driza, an Albanian Muslim and not a Kosovan Catholic, was responsible for a series of savage murders, some linked to his role in trafficking Eastern European prostitutes around the world. He had arrived in Britain while on the run from Italian police.

The new Mrs Driza claimed that she realised the truth only when she wondered how a stonemason’s assistant earning just a few hundred pounds a month could afford designer label clothing. She also noticed how he carried an array of mobile telephones and used fake names in conversations with his contacts.

Two months after their humble ceremony they separated, although Driza kept her husband’s last name.

The same month, police believe that her husband murdered a man in London before fleeing abroad. Detectives believe that he stabbed to death Bledar Mone, a 24-year-old Kosovan, in a flat in Sudbury, northwest London.

He is serving a 20-year sentence in Italy for the murder of a fellow Albanian in Sicily.

After the truth about her husband emerged, Driza said: “I was tempted to kill myself, but how can I do that if I believe in God? My mother, who is a pastor, and my father are very respectable and all my life I have been very respectable. Not now,” she said in a newspaper interview.

She was to prove disastrously unlucky in love once again, as her next lover was murdered by two men in Plaistow, East London.

But friends claim that Driza had learnt from her husband how to get what she wanted from her adopted homeland.

One woman, who said that she, too, had been a victim of Driza’s obsessive harassment, said: “She’s a very malicious and cruel person.She tells everyone ‘make yourself a victim — exaggerate, make yourself depressed and you can get anything. People in this country are so gullible.’ ”

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