The Godmother, page 20
Marilena Natale, who lives and reports from Caserta in the heart of Camorra country, was given a police escort after anti-mafia authorities overheard clansmen discussing ways to silence her. She kept the escort for a while but then ultimately gave it up, fearing that they, too, could die. “If the Camorra wants to kill me it is not fair that my bodyguards must also die with me,” she told Women’s News Network. “I didn’t choose to be a journalist focused on crime news. The crime news chose me. When I started to investigate and I saw with my own eyes injustices, I couldn’t stop myself to know more and give to my readers what I discovered.”
There are more than a thousand Italy-based journalists who have received death threats from the country’s various organized crime groups. Just 15 percent of those are women, which underscores the dominance of men in investigative journalism, often because editors overlook women out of fear they aren’t up to the job. But the number of women who risk their lives to expose Italy’s rotten underbelly is growing.
It is not by coincidence that this book on mafia women has only a few stand-out examples of a woman fighting the mob. The press is always eager to entertain the whims of “mafia women” and give them a platform to call out “unfair persecution” and “archaic laws” they blame for their legal trouble. It is enticing clickbait to write about these women, glamorizing their lives. The heroics of the rare female prosecutor or journalist who risks her life to fight the mob are considerably less sexy.
Time and again, Pupetta personally went to the press—even holding two press conferences to call out Raffaele Cutolo’s NCO and another to stick up for her brother Ciro’s innocence. During the latter, she appeared dressed in an overtly provocative getup—leather and fur—that she knew would hold the press’s attention and guarantee her coverage, no matter what she said. Pupetta continued to understand both the allure of the “mafia woman” mystique and how to exploit it, especially for the media. After the short press conference in which she stood up for her brother—an accomplice in her first murder—she pandered to various journalists she hoped would write favorably about her. In the end, as she could have predicted, the press instead focused on what she wore and her oversexualized demeanor. Nevertheless, she made the front pages of all the Italian national papers then, and again when she died.
It is easy to blame mafia women for normalizing criminality and using society’s recognized fascination and titillation with all things “mafia” to their advantage. But as I sit with all of the women I’ve interviewed, mesmerized by every detail they feed me, eagerly recounting each experience to anyone who will listen, I cannot help wondering who is truly at fault for romanticizing the mafia.
Shortly before her death, I reached out once again to Pupetta, hoping for one last meeting—one last hit of what had come to give me an incredible sensation of risk and excitement. She was nowhere to be found, the number I had used now suddenly dead. I called a police source to see where she might be, and she told me that last she heard Pupetta was in a casa di riposo, or nursing home, which made no sense given that in Italy children take care of their elderly parents. In fact, it wasn’t true at all, just one more fabrication to fit the circumstances. The letter Pupetta wrote to ask for help in employing her son in the Camorra’s businesses was now a central part of an investigation that clearly wouldn’t have been easy to try if Pupetta was somehow deemed infirm. I imagined she instead went into hiding, perhaps on a terrace in Sorrento where she still owned a property.
But less than two months after I last tried to reach her, she died in her sleep at home. Wherever she had been, she drew her last breath in the apartment where I had come to know her. I wonder what clothes she was buried in. I would like to think someone had dressed her in a low-cut, animal-print blouse and choker, pulled her hair back, and set her mouth into a sort of Mona Lisa smile. I want to remember her that way. I am sure that is also how she would like to be remembered.
By few standards of measure could Pupetta be described as a good person. She was involved in a criminal industry that ruins thousands of lives each year. But she was smart, courageous in ways both good and bad, and an exceptional self-made woman loved by many in spite of her obvious flaws. She was incredibly loyal to the Camorra, a doting parent (if you don’t count not avenging the murder of her son), a dutiful wife (if helping commit murder defines that), and a role model to hundreds of mafia women who have followed her. And even though I know that I should not, I can’t help but admire how she—like many women in Italy—managed to find her way around all the obstacles in this male-driven society and come out on top.
Acknowledgments
The scourge of organized crime in my adopted country cannot be understated. Popular culture has romanticized the Italian mafia for decades, which has normalized a phenomenon that ruins lives and local economies every single day. This book does not seek to glamorize such criminality even as it explores the stories of women who have had no choice but to stay in crime families.
I thank first and foremost the women portrayed in this book who trusted me—to the extent they trust anyone—with their stories, as tragic as they are. These women who end up on the front lines of crime families are usually born or married into it. It has often been said the only way out of these families is in a police car or a coffin, and I will never underestimate the difficulty of these women’s circumstances.
I thank Pupetta especially for allowing me a glimpse into her complicated world, complete with many cups of coffee and warm—if not often disturbingly dark—humor. I dreaded what she would think about this book as much as I looked forward to handing her a signed copy. That she would be the first mafia woman ever to be banned from having a public funeral proved to me that she was the right focus for a project such as this.
The hardest part about writing this book was how much I really liked all those I met. I often wonder who they would be had they not been born destined for a life of crime as much as I wonder how any of us would behave had we been born in their circumstances.
There are so many people I cannot thank by name due to the danger it would put them in, but this book could have never been written without the cooperation of various magistrates, police, lawyers, and advocates working on behalf of and against the unforgivable crimes of these mafia women.
I also thank Felia Allum and Clare Longrigg, who have both done amazing research on this topic. It paved the way for me to better understand so much before I started my own research.
This book would not be possible without the undying support of my agent and friend Vicki Satlow, with whom I spent hours and bottles of prosecco hashing over this project. Her belief in this book, her determination to see it to print, and her support in the writing process have been second to none.
Random House Canada editor Craig Pyette not only inspired me to write better, he also taught me so much about what makes a good book. His insightful, detailed attention to this project has made me a better writer on so many levels. I cannot thank him enough for his obsession with this topic and professionalism and for pushing me beyond what I could have done on my own. Thank you also to the amazing team at Penguin Random House for their enthusiasm, fabulous book cover, and constant support in making this project the best it can be.
Thank you to Erin Friar McDermott, my coconspirator, friend, and editor at The Daily Beast, who painstakingly went over this manuscript more than once to make it better and who never balked at my ridiculous questions. I am also forever indebted to my sister Sherri Latza Stekl, who read the manuscript so many times she must surely have it memorized, and whose brutal honesty has always served me so well. I trust no one’s honest advice more than hers.
Thank you to my editors at The Daily Beast, who give me space to write about organized crime and who support me in my external projects, especially Katie Baker, Tracy Connor, Nico Hines, and my late friend Chris Dickey, who died far too soon in July 2020 and to whom this book is dedicated. And to my colleagues at CNN, who have always been supportive of my projects.
My sons, Nicholas and Matthew, have always worried about my work and rarely as much as with this project. I thank them for giving up so much of the time I should have spent with them to pursue my journalistic goals—not just now but throughout their whole lives. They have given more for the success of my career than anyone, and while I can never give them back the time, I am so proud of the young men they are.
And finally, I could never succeed in my professional dreams without such amazing personal friends including the Cocktail Philosophy Club members, my journalist friends, and the various sentimental companions in my life throughout this project who have all provided invaluable inspiration.
Reporting Notes
For the purpose of this book, “mafia women” refers primarily to daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives of mafia men. There are rare exceptions of women who enter into a criminal family who have not in some way grown up somehow affiliated with one.
I refer to all Italian organized-crime syndicates in this book as “mafia” organizations, crime syndicates, or criminal organizations interchangeably. By definition there is only one true Mafia and that is the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. But even Italy’s judiciary uses the lowercase term “mafia” more generally, charging men and women across all groups with mafia-related crimes under the Article 41-bis law, which allows for life sentences for mafia offenses unless the criminal cooperates with authorities, becoming a turncoat or male pentito or female pentita. The law is under review after the European Court of Human Rights found it violated human rights, and Italy’s own Constitutional Court found it unconstitutional.
The ’Ndrangheta (pronounced en-DRAN-get-ha) is based farther south in Calabria at the toe of Italy’s boot, and is made up of ’ndrina or ’ndrine (pronounced en-DREEN-ah or the plural en-DREEN-eh), which are groups that are often family based.
The Cosa Nostra, “Our Thing,” is also referred to as the Sicilian Mafia and is the best known of Italy’s groups. Based on the island of Sicily, it is run by a boss of bosses at the top of a pyramid structure who controls hierarchical levels of cosca, or family clans. It is tied to the main crime families in the United States, though the ’Ndrangheta has also recently infiltrated many countries including the United States, Canada, and Germany with great success.
The Mafia Capitale (Capital Mafia) in Rome is an unorganized cluster of criminals that, despite the name, the Italian judiciary does not yet recognize as a mafia group. As such, it cannot use mafia-related legislation against them, even though their crimes mirror the work of the other groups.
I also mention other criminal groups, including the Sacra Corona (or what’s left of it), which is based in Puglia at the heel of Italy’s boot on the Adriatic Coast; and there are other groups in Italy, including the Albanian mafia, which is present in southern Italy; the Chinese mafia, which is present in the garment industry in central Italy; and the Nigerian mafia, which works with the Camorra in the drug-smuggling sector.
There is no mafia #MeToo movement—women may be doing the killing and leading the clans, but they are still often victims of unthinkable domestic violence, sexual harassment, and exploitation. While they have reached levels of notoriety, even the most powerful women bosses have not yet reached true equality when it comes to respect, and perhaps never will. They can order a man to be killed, for instance, but they cannot divorce their husbands without being killed themselves.
This book focuses on the women who have been empowered within the male-dominated system and climbed the criminal ladder to the upper echelons of criminality. I have written here about women who found “success” within their corrupted family and societal structures, those who have found power in what is still very much a man’s world—and, in most cases, have lived to tell about it or in other cases, died trying to get out of it.
Mafia expert and journalist Clare Longrigg wrote the First Testament of the mafia women’s bible in her 1995 book Mafia Women,[1] in which she gave women the credit they deserved. Through her research, she exposed the females who climbed the criminal ladder and became forces to be reckoned with. Before that, mafia women weren’t seriously studied outside of the academic realm and were often portrayed as caricatures created in the minds of men or written about as pure infotainment.
My own well-worn copy of Clare’s book has served me well over the years, and she inspired me to revisit Pupetta, a much younger and more vibrant version of whom she interviewed in the 1990s, when the mob doyenne lived in sunny Sorrento. I ran into Clare at a Christmas party in the London suburb of Islington in 2019, a few months after she edited the Guardian Long Read excerpt of my book Roadmap to Hell: Sex, Drugs and Guns on the Mafia Coast, which documented the Nigerian women who are trafficked for sex in the heart of Neapolitan Camorra territory near Naples. Meeting her was like meeting any idol, and I was thrilled when she kindly agreed to read an early draft of this book.
Her reporting was the first to shine an international light on women in the mafia. She was also one of the first to bring mafia stories to English speakers, long before any had heard of Roberto Saviano or any of the journalists who followed the Gomorrah author.
I have used Felia Allum’s three distinct periods of the evolution of mafia women as my guide. From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, Allum says women were primarily part of support systems in families and wider communities. From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, they started defending their men in courts and elsewhere, often relying on the willing press to help spin their stories of corrupt judges and longstanding biases. From the early 1990s to today, women have become the actual criminals, taking part in everything from moneylaundering and white-collar crimes to murder and extortion.
This book does not have a happy ending. The mafia is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people every year either directly through homicidal acts or indirectly through the various trafficking entities and general corruption they have engaged in for so long. But this book will introduce you to the women who have earned respect in their particular field, and who will accept nothing less.
Notes
1. PUPETTA’S KITCHEN
Felia Allum, The Invisible Camorra: Neapolitan Crime Families Across Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1
Barbie Latza Nadeau, “Italy’s Triangle of Death: Naples Residents Blame Child Cancer Rates on Mob Disposal of Toxic Chemicals,” The Daily Beast (November 21, 2013, updated July 11, 2017), https://www.thedailybeast.com/italys-triangle-of-death-naples-residents-blame-child-cancer-rates-on-mob-disposal-of-toxic-chemicals.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2
Enrico Deaglio, Patria 1978–2010 (Milan, Italy: Il Saggiatore SPA, 2010).
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3
Allum, The Invisible Camorra.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4
Clare Longrigg, Mafia Women (London: Vintage, 1998).
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5
“ ‘Diletto per amore!’ sostiene la difesa di Pupetta Maresca,” Corriere Della Sera archive (April 4–5, 1959), https://archivio.corriere.it/Archivio/interface/view.shtml#!/MjovZXMvaXQvcmNzZGF0aWRhY2kxL0A3MDY1Nw%3D%3D.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6
“Pupetta sotto l’acusa ‘aggredisce’ la corte,” Corriere Della Sera archive (May 1959), https://archivio.corriere.it/Archivio/interface/view.shtml#!/MzovZXMvaXQvcmNzZGF0aWRhY2kxL0A2OTc0Mw%3D%3D.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7
Paul Hofmann, “ ‘Crimes of Honor’ Debated by Italy; Trial of Woman in Naples for Murder of Husband’s Rival Stirs Nation,” The New York Times (April 7, 1959).
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8
Italian Penal Code.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9
Barbie Latza Nadeau, “Coronavirus Puts Italy’s Most Vicious Mobsters Back on the Street,” The Daily Beast (April 24, 2020, updated April 30, 2020), https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-puts-italys-most-vicious-mobsters-back-on-the-street.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10
2. CRIME SCHOOL / NAPLES’ NOTORIOUS PRISON
Felia Allum and Irene Marchi, “Analyzing the Role of Women in Italian Mafias: The Case of the Neapolitan Camorra,” Qualitative Sociology, vol. 41 (2018): 361–380, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-018-9389-8.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1
Rosella Marzullo, “Mafia Children: From Future to Past. Knowing Other Realities to Learn Freedom,” Review of Social Studies (RoSS), vol. 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2016).
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2
Ombretta Ingrasci, “Women in the ’Ndrangheta: The Serraino–Di Giovine Case,” Women and the Mafia: Female Roles in Organized Crime Structures, ed. Giovanni Fiandaca (New York: Springer, 2010): 47–52.
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3
Clare Longrigg, Mafia Women (London: Vintage, 1998).
BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4
3. THE STRONG AND THE SWEET
Barbie Latza Nadeau, “Family of Most Dangerous Mafia Turncoat Ever Comes Out of Hiding: ‘Just a Call Would Kill Us All,’ ” The Daily Beast (June 15, 2019, updated June 16, 2019), https://www.thedailybeast.com/family-of-most-dangerous-mafia-turncoat-tommaso-buscetta-comes-out-of-hiding-just-a-call-would-kill-us-all.
