The Godmother, page 10
When mourning, even older mafia women who no longer tolerate itchy, lacy thongs and push-up bras will exchange their usual garments for red slips and girdles. But this is not a nod to sexuality, as I had presumed when I had first noticed displays of these red undergarments in Neapolitan shop windows. They were not meant to entice husbands and lovers. According to a tradition that is now decades old, they are symbols of a promise to avenge the deaths of their fallen men, a promise made with the color of blood. Pupetta wore red undergarments throughout her prison term, having them sent in from her favorite Neapolitan intimate apparel shop. She never wore them after she hooked up with Umberto, “out of a sign of respect to the father of my other children.”
When mafia men are in prison, it has long been held that their wives and girlfriends are strictly prohibited from wearing makeup or even keeping their hair dyed. They are supposedly required to wear frumpy clothing to avoid giving the impression that they are dressing up for another man, or that they have eyes for anyone but their locked-up partners. Any deviance from this practice assumes betrayal, which is punishable by death and enforced by male family members who take on the incarcerated husband’s job of controlling his wife. The practice is strictly adhered to in Calabria and to a large extent in Sicily, but Camorra women are far more free-spirited, and in many ways mavericks when it comes to their independence and often glam up even if their men are behind bars.
Not all mafia folklore stands the test of time. It is still said that across all the syndicates, mafia men prefer to marry virgins they’ve known from childhood or widows of fallen collaborators, though they are said to be far less picky about their lovers. Roberto Saviano, who says his own account of life inside the Neapolitan Camorra in Gomorrah was fed by sources inside the clans he infiltrated, has perpetuated the sexual myths of women and organized crime.
Nevertheless, Saviano insists that the mob has not modernized in line with the rest of the West, and certainly not to the extent to allow female sexuality to be seen as a strength or asset. He claims that the strict Catholic mores that have guided so many mafia families for decades remain intact.
But I’ve talked to many women who live and operate on various levels of criminality, from perpetrators and turncoats to prosecutors and analysts, and I can only conclude that mafia men do like their wives to be inexperienced, but the virgin myth seems outdated. The thought of another living man with a higher ranking or one who is more amply endowed living in the memory of their woman’s sexual fantasies may be troubling for many. But in modern times, finding a virgin is not easy or, it seems, necessary.
Whether the woman of interest is a virgin or not, most mafia men marry either within their clan or into a family at the same or higher standing from another affiliate. It is virtually unheard of that someone from one mafia group would marry someone from another syndicate—unless it is a means of brokering a peace deal or a strategy for expanding territory. Either objective makes it vitally important that young women in mafia clans do not follow their hearts.
This strategic approach to marriage is exactly why Pasqualone fell for Pupetta. Her pedigree was perfect: she had grown up in a crime family, but not one that would give his own any competition. Pupetta laughed that off. “We fell in love, we started writing to each other when he was in prison and by the time he got out, the passion had built up,” she said, showing me several of his handwritten letters she kept in various boxes separated by categories she simply would not share with me.
Like so many duties that restrict and contain the lives of young mafia women, keeping them from falling in love spontaneously is the responsibility of the girl’s own family, primarily her mother, who will tirelessly preach the moral responsibility of keeping the family’s “good” reputation intact by refraining from unapproved relationships while somehow instilling in them that all the blood and chaos of the clan’s existence is morally acceptable.
Mafiosi fathers also work hard to preserve their daughters’ integrity—for the right man of his or the wider clan’s choosing. Many a mafia daughter has met her death for daring to choose her own man. In 1983, a pretty twenty-four-year-old named Annunziata Giacobbe, who was the daughter of an ’Ndrangheta underboss, was summoned to the countryside near Rosarno, in Calabria.[3] Afraid to go alone, she asked her eighteen-year-old cousin, Antonio, to go with her, expecting he would protect her. Near the meeting point, the two were jumped by four picciotti, or ’Ndrangheta apprentices, sent on the job to earn credibility to eventually take part in full initiation rites.
The young thugs peppered the cousins with bullets and ran off, but turned back after they heard Annunziata moaning in pain, having somehow survived the initial volley. They promptly slit her throat with a pruning knife and left her for dead. Police determined that the ’Ndrangheta boss Vincenzo Pesce ordered the killing because Annunziata, who was promised from birth to one of his family’s sons, had fallen in love with someone else. It was better that she was dead than to shun his son for real love.
The great contradiction, of course, is that mafia sons do as they please. A young man can have as many lovers as he wants before and even after he settles down. A mafia journalist explained to me once that younger wives in the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta insist their husbands take on foreign lovers, preferring that their men bed down with Russians, Moldovans, or Polish women instead of Italians who might be tied to other clans or in some way cause complications in the wider criminal community. The foreign women would never be true competition, he insisted, either because they are perceived to be socially inferior or because no true mafioso would ever want to risk poisoning the bloodline by introducing an ethnic mix.
I once interviewed an ’Ndrangheta woman who had become the mistress of someone “not approved” by an older male in her family and so was made to suffer the kind of punishment prescribed for a transgression such as hers. The woman, whom I will call Monica, met me in a safe house in Rome after she’d received too many stitches to contemplate for wounds from a particularly brutal gang rape. Monica’s arms were covered with cigarette-burn scars of varying degrees of pink, which I took to indicate the wounds were inflicted over a long period of time. She had been caught having an affair with an archenemy of her husband while he was in jail. Monica told me in no uncertain terms that she deserved what she got and that, in retrospect, the rival was likely only interested in her as a means of dishonoring her husband. Her lack of self-esteem struck me as a common thread among mafia women, certainly, but also among many Italian women who have been berated and belittled and made to think they are just sex objects. It is no great secret that Italian machoism has been bolstered for generations because men have been spoon-fed ridiculous portrayals of women in Italian media. I once interviewed a CEO of a company in Milan and couldn’t take my eyes off the billboard outside his window of a woman essentially performing fellatio on a Magnum ice cream bar. Subliminal sexism keeps women from advancing. Photos are still required on résumés in Italy, and jobs can advertise age ranges, begging the question of how important it is if a new accountant or doctor is young and attractive.
Much of the sexism in Italian media originates in the television conglomerate owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. In 2010, I wrote a cover story for Newsweek magazine about Berlusconi’s “women problem” (which I’ve touched on previously in this book) and how the party-girl portrayal of women as window dressing led to Italy’s depressing ranking for equality in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap report.[4] I started the article with a description from a famous Italian television show called Striscia la Notizia, which remains both one of the smartest and stupidest programs on Berlusconi’s network. Its format involves two male presenters who introduce hard-hitting stories, including interviews with criminals, serious takes on organized crime, and exposés on corruption across the country. But the men are always accompanied by two women—a blond and a brunette—whose only purpose is to titillate. The program does not need them, I argued. The story went viral and was picked up by the Italian press. I felt for a moment that I had started a conversation, maybe even one that would lead to change. It was a naive view.
In response to the article, while I was home one evening preparing dinner for my young sons, two uniformed police officers from Italy’s elite Carabinieri military police knocked on my door to deliver a summons for criminal defamation against Berlusconi and the makers of the program. In my story, I had described how a very beautiful Black woman wearing a thong getup had slithered across the floor while one of the hosts held up a garlic strand attached to a belt that left little to the imagination in terms of its phallic reference. I had written that when she left the stage, one of the men had patted her bottom. I watched the footage over and over again and the way the woman jumped in surprise left no question in my mind that they had touched her derriere. But according to the lawsuit, the moment was scripted and there was no contact whatsoever—an alleged error that could have landed me in jail for three years since criminal defamation in Italy is a crime punishable by prison terms. Newsweek sent lawyers to defend me and the whole thing was settled out of court with the magazine running a rather comical letter by one of the show’s producers about how they respect women. It was not so much a lesson as a warning to me that freedom of the press in this country, especially when it comes to the way women are treated, is completely dictated by “superior” men. The whole episode was as shocking as it was terrifying.
It was around that time that I met Monica through an organization that helps victims of extreme domestic violence, and since the rape was carried out by her own family members, she qualified. My intent was to try to showcase these stories of extreme sexual violence against women as another way to paint a picture not only of inequality in this country but also of impotence on the part of the country’s structures to do anything to change it. What I learned through Monica was that the problem so often lies in women’s own attitudes about themselves and their place on the social spectrum. “I was weak and thought I could just have an affair like my husband had before he went to jail,” Monica told me. Shocking to me at the time, she had yet to decide if she would provide evidence against her family clan or just stay away for a while until she could “negotiate” a return, which I learned later is what she ultimately did.
If she had testified, she would have qualified to be entered into the Italian witness-protection program and given a new life. If she didn’t testify, at some point she would have been released to fend for herself. What has come to make sense to me only after many years is that Monica just didn’t believe that law enforcement could protect her or would be strong or even committed enough to stand up to the criminal group. I have no idea if she is still alive or what her sacrifice would have had to be to return to her family, but I have no reason to believe rape wasn’t part of it.
I asked Pupetta if rape is common within the circles her father and Pasqualone were part of, and if they had ever been involved in doling out that sort of punishment. She told me that it happens only when it is “deserved.” For example, if the daughter of an underboss betrays her mafioso boyfriend in a way that is publicly humiliating, it is “natural that some sort of punishment would be handed down.” She said rape would ensure that no one else would date the woman, thereby inflicting a lifelong punishing for her mistake. “No one would ever want a woman who has been raped,” Pupetta said in a way that made me realize she also agreed with the practice.
Rape is also used when mafia men are found out to be gay, which is unacceptable—in theory though not always in practice—across most of Italy’s crime syndicates (again, the Neapolitan Camorra proving itself to be the most liberal of the three). It is even taboo to say the Italian word omosessuale (homosexual) around many of the criminal elders, as if canceling the word from the local dialect somehow means same-sex attraction doesn’t exist at all.
A twenty-year-old gay man serving time for mafia-related crimes in 2007 in the Piazza Lanza prison in Catania, Sicily, was so brutally gang-raped by eight Cosa Nostra prisoners that he required multiple anal stitches. His lawyer, Antonio Fiumefreddo, told me in an interview that many of the bosses across the syndicates are gay but would never admit to it. “My client was honest, and he was punished for it,” he said. “The rest live a double life until they get caught.”
There are countless similar stories of terrifying and even deadly homophobia. One Camorra prisoner in the Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison in Naples was found hanged in the prison rec yard simply because an inmate in a cell next door thought he heard the man’s Tunisian cellmate giving him a blow job. In Sicily, it’s not just gay men who are shunned—if there is a gay person in an aspiring mafia member’s family, the whole family cannot join the Cosa Nostra.[5] The same goes for any candidates whose parents are divorced.
Still, there are exceptions. In 2009, anti-mafia police in Naples swept in to arrest twenty-seven members of a powerful clan[6] tied to a growing drug and prostitution ring. The leader was Ugo “Kitty” Gabriele, the first known transgender mafia clan boss—or member for that matter—to be taken into custody in Italy. Kitty was ahead of her time, able to command the faction of her clan with total respect, which was doubly impressive given that she identified and dressed as a woman during a period when women were not always given credit as bosses. The arrest garnered transphobic sarcastic headlines in the local and international press undoubtedly because it was a full decade before global acceptance of transgender rights strived to put an end to such shaming.
Another case didn’t end up with the same tolerance. Giovanna “Gió” Arrivoli was born female but identified as a male from a very young age. The forty-one-year-old aspiring Camorra clan boss had started undergoing gender-reassignment surgeries when he was tortured and fatally shot in 2016, reportedly after fellow clansmen learned he was trans. He was tortured for days and then killed with two shots to the heart and one in the brain and buried with only his head interred in the ground, which signified to police that it was a vengeance act for betrayal. His live-in girlfriend said he also had immense drug and gambling debts, which are rare among these criminals because they tend to be debt collectors rather than the ones taking on debt. But a police officer I asked about the crime told me he felt it was more likely he was killed for his gender identity.
It could also be that Gió’s “deception” wasn’t so much the problem as was the fact that his case angered many who are uninformed about gender issues, still shockingly common in Italy. The country has a poor record with trans rights in particular, and with the exception of a popular trans politician named Vladimir Luxuria, who never went through sex-reassignment surgery but whose insistence that she deserved to be respected as a woman despite being born male led to the Italian parliament installing a separate bathroom just for her. Lawmakers have since made it possible for people to change their names on legal documents, but changing one’s gender remains a point of great debate and is decided on a case-by-case basis. It is also nearly impossible to list both names of same-sex parents on a birth certificate, or for same-sex couples to adopt children. Heterosexual couples can adopt stepchildren who are biologically connected to one of the parents, but gay couples still cannot. Even in cases of surrogacy or same-sex couples, only one parent can be named on the birth certificate.
Of course, for crime syndicates, there is one gray area: not all same-sex kisses are romantic. Few mafia observers will forget the startling image of twenty-seven-year-old Daniele D’Agnese, a key figure with one of the Camorra’s most notorious clans, giving passionate full-on lip kisses to two younger male associates when they were arrested in Naples in 2011.[7] Many outsiders wondered what exactly it meant, but a key mafia analyst told me at the time that the kiss was a signal that the younger associates, who weren’t yet bona fide clansmen, would not be left to defend themselves and, as such, ought not think about turning against the clan and cooperating with police.
“It was a sign to the weaker members of the group telling them, ‘We’ll continue to be a group; we’ll command the same territory and whatever happens, you won’t be abandoned,’ ” the analyst told me. Essentially, their oath was sealed with a kiss.
Less intimate kisses between the mafia’s homophobic men have long held varying meanings. In Sicily, a kiss on the lips is a signal that the recipient is going to be killed. A kiss on the cheek in Naples is a sign of earned respect, and in Puglia, a kiss of the ring is a sign of submission in line with cardinals and bishops kissing the ring of a pope.
Some mafia dons to this day behave like men of God, spouting scripture and passing judgment by day and carrying out bloody raids or selling drugs that kill thousands of people at night. They pour money into church coffers, adhering to the strictest of Catholic commandments, with the apparent exceptions of “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit murder,” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” In exchange they are given God’s blessing from the local priests who baptize their children, pray at their funerals, and forgive their sins.
I once interviewed a priest in truly godforsaken Castel Volturno, where the Camorra and Nigerian mafia engage in some of the worst criminality in all of Italy. The beach town was exploited by the Camorra-backed Coppola family in a post–World War II attempt to develop an Italian Miami Beach. The carcasses of apartment blocks confiscated and then abandoned by the state have become the stage for Nigerian sex trafficking and the heroin trade.
The priest, who volunteered at a center that tried to get the sex-trafficked Nigerian women off the streets, did his best to explain the complexities of the relationship between the Catholic Church in southern Italy and its various mafia groups, insisting that they both got from each other something no other entity could give: mafiosi can ask for blanket forgiveness for any manner of sins, and the church’s coffers are often lined with blood money.
