Karen Mcveigh

Two toddlers sit on a rusting grille platform built on bamboo stilts at the entrance to one of Bangladesh’s fastest-growing housing developments. Three feet below them lies a festering mound of rubbish, into which a gushing waste pipe from a nearby factory discharges. Beyond them are rows and rows of windowless, airless, corrugated iron rooms, stacked on top of each other like chicken coops.

She was, quite literally, married to the mob. But despite being convicted of Mafia association earlier this month, Ann Hathaway, a former dancer from Rochdale who spent 20 years wed to one of Sicily’s most notorious Mafia bosses, claims on Monday night she knew nothing of her husband’s criminal activities.