The Godmother, page 3
The trial, which also included the side attraction of Pasqualone’s hit man Gaetano Orlando’s case, was open to the public, and a number of Big Tony’s associates were present in the gallery to make sure that the omertà, or code of silence that extends across all of Italy’s criminal enterprises, was properly respected. Of the eighty-five witnesses called, very few said they saw anything, knew anything, or would speak of anything relevant to the court’s final deliberation.
Fulfilling the vendetta served a second by-product—and one that Pupetta never could have imagined. The act lifted her to icon status among the Neapolitan criminal elite, earning her the nickname Lady Camorra and giving her incomparable stature as an original madrina—a godmother. After just one appearance in court, local Camorristi started throwing flowers onto her police van roof as it traveled between the jail and tribunal, as if she were royalty passing by in a horse-drawn carriage.
Pupetta was quickly found guilty and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison, which was reduced on appeal to thirteen years and four months. She served less than ten years, winning a suspicious pardon in 1965 that likely grew from a deal brokered for information. She dismissed that wholeheartedly when I asked her, insisting that new evidence against Big Tony proved that she had indeed justifiably killed her husband’s assassin, and that the judge finally saw the light. Even though I had been told by an assistant to the prosecutor who helped secure her release that a deal had been cut, it made more sense not to confront her with the truth. This is a woman who has time and again shown very little respect for what Italians call the verita.
Her brother Ciro was sentenced to twelve years for his complicity, but acquitted on appeal. Rumors swirled that he had also cut a deal, handing over information about some underling who could be sacrificed to secure a shorter sentence.
The last time I interviewed her, Pupetta smiled when I called her Lady Camorra, though she wouldn’t admit she once loved the nickname so much she had the term in Italian embroidered on a throw pillow. She spoke cautiously about the years between when she was released from prison and the 1980s, when she is believed to have wielded tremendous power in her local clan.
She spoke even less candidly about the years after that. She cringed when I asked her to explain how it was that she was investigated for ordering the revenge murder of Ciro Galli, a henchman for one of her archenemies, in 1981 and investigated once more in 1985 for the beheading of criminologist and forensic psychiatrist Aldo Semerari. She was acquitted in both cases, which she said is all that needs to be discussed on either matter.
I asked Pupetta how she hoped to be remembered one day, to which she told me, “Not for these outrageous crimes.” Instead, she wanted to be remembered “as an honest woman and loving mother and grandmother.” As fate would have it, she was only remembered for the vendetta against her husband’s killer.
Felia Allum, a PhD and notable author and organized-crime expert who lectures at England’s University of Bath, has doubts that Pupetta wielded any power after the 1980s. She explained to me that misrepresentation of women in the mafia is most likely because the history of the mafia is almost always written by men who use Italy’s patriarchal society as the unquestionable guiding light of the country’s gender dynamics. Women in noncriminal Italian society are victims of the same circumstances, often overlooked or undervalued as if it’s not possible a female could be a CEO or top strategist without having slept her way into the position, or being born into a family determined to give it to her. In the Camorra especially, where Pupetta thrived, women are making far more progress climbing the ladder and being treated as equals than their law-abiding peers. As Allum says, “in many ways, women in organized crime have reached higher levels sooner than women in Italian society.”
Having spent the better part of twenty-five years in Italy myself, I can see how the record is often skewed by Italy’s patriarchal context. Just as happens with nauseating frequency in Italy’s regular society, women tied to mafia organizations aren’t often thought to be smart enough to be in charge. In the case of mafia women, for years they were rarely taken seriously in judicial circumstances, even when their names were on deeds or their fingerprints on the smoking gun. That meant they got away with murder—often literally.
Murders aside, Allum has doubts that Pupetta was as bad as she liked people to believe. Still, in 2019, police found a tranche of handwritten notes and letters she wrote to Adolfo Greco as recently as 2018, a clan boss who was charged with extortion and aggravated mafia collusion for his direct involvement in four Camorra clans. An investigation in 2021 into the financial dealings of Ciro Giordano, aka Ciruzzo ’a Varchetella found that between 1987 and 2001, a number of people from competing clans were on the same payroll. An investigator says they found “multiple checks” of large sums of old Italian lire written to Pupetta, among others. Italy switched to the single European currency in 2002, meaning all financial records would have become easier to hide. This could perhaps explain why signs of the payouts ended abruptly and yet none of the former recipients seemed to show any sign that they had suffered a loss of income.
Greco, who was one of a number of mafia thugs released from prison and put on house arrest[10] during the coronavirus pandemic, allegedly orchestrated a regional network of corrupt officials in the local government of Castellammare di Stabia and the local entities. When he was arrested, police said they found Rolexes and suitcases full of hundred-euro notes alongside Pupetta’s letters. “The pentiti have ruined me,” she wrote in one, referring to former mafiosi who turn state’s witnesses. “Please give my son a position.”
What’s most remarkable about that letter, which was presented in court during Greco’s mafia collusion trial in late 2019, is the familiarity and tone. Greco was clearly more than a little-known power broker she was asking about legitimate work for her son. If anyone could have helped her find her son work within the local Camorra circuit, it would have been Adolfo Greco—and it is clear that her familiarity with the secret hierarchy would have only come from people within the criminal realm.
In 2020, as the pandemic ravaged Italy, Pupetta said to me that her lawyer advised her to no longer speak to anyone without him—even as every lawyer whose name she gave me told me he no longer represented her—implying she was under scrutiny once again. It was then that her daughter, Antonella, very much her mother’s gatekeeper, expressed her first hint of displeasure that Pupetta was talking to a journalist, and without some guarantee of financial or other reward.
I asked the anti-mafia prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti for her thoughts on Pupetta’s infamy.
“She has created much of it herself,” she replied. Cerreti has dealt with enough bad women to know who is real and who is not, and added that there were many women in Italy with a bloodier track record than Pupetta. I would soon learn exactly what she meant. Pupetta was certainly the first, but by no means was she the worst.
2
Crime School / Naples’ Notorious Prison
“You have grandmothers, daughters, granddaughters of the same family coming through for the same crimes, all tied to the Camorra,” she said. Like correctional facilities anywhere in the world, life on the inside is often more corrupt than outside.
Pupetta gave birth to Pasqualino, or little Pasquale, while she was in what was then the women’s section of the notorious Poggioreale prison in central Naples. The women’s section closed decades ago, and the prison is now, as it was then, described as the worst correctional facility in Italy. The prison, built for just 1,600, has around 2,300 prisoners crammed into various pavilions named after beautiful Italian cities. Many of the cells have cooking facilities that amount to gas burners and a sink, which means the inmates have to cook for themselves rather than being fed in a cafeteria. The cells are jammed with as many as fifteen inmates in dank spaces built for ten, and a constant smell of sewage from backed-up toilets wafts through the humid air.
Over the years, Poggioreale has earned its nickname “crime school,” a place where people come out much more deviant than they went in. The prison is ringed by a brown stone wall and was in March 2020 the site of a fiery prison riot, when the coronavirus lockdown led to the restriction of visitors. The riot had actually begun outside the gates, started by women protesting when they were prohibited from visiting their men and bringing them their weekly supply of home-cooked meals—and undoubtedly outside information to the many mafiosi locked inside.
A court case in 2019 unveiled the horrors that took place in Poggioreale’s “cell zero,” where prisoners were beaten—sometimes to death—or tortured for what was alleged to be the guards’ pleasure. Pietro Ioia, an ex-Camorra clansman who now runs an organization called ex-DON for former Camorra detainees, showed me his scars from his time in cell zero when we first met in late 2019.
He wrote a book and screenplay and acted in a local theater production that ran in Naples and Rome, each about the torture. His book, La Cella Zero: Morte e Rinascita di un Uomo in Gabbia (Cell Zero: Death and Rebirth of a Man in a Cage), which is a favorite among Camorra members, led to a court case against a dozen prison guards; proceedings have been sidelined by the pandemic. I first met Pietro at a dank café during a torrential rainstorm outside the Poggioreale prison in 2019 while he was waiting for a prisoner jailed for affiliation with the Neapolitan Camorra to be released. We could barely hear each other over the sound of the rain pelting the plastic tent that covered the outdoor seating area on the sidewalk, which quickly flooded due to the blocked gutters, leaving our feet soaked.
He had brought with him a woman named “Maria” who dealt with female prisoners. In my years in Italy, I have come to be suspicious of anyone named Maria who doesn’t give her last name, which was the case with this Maria. She explained the various ways in which I could essentially embed with women who were being released following imprisonment for Camorra-related crimes. All my options involved some sort of payment. Eventually, we agreed that I could hire one of the women as a “fixer” to guide me into this particular underworld, much the same way I would hire someone in Greece, for example, to help set up interviews and translate while chasing a story. I explained that I would give a fiscal receipt and she could determine whether to claim it for her taxes or not, knowing fully that she never would.
Pietro painted a vivid picture of the Neapolitan prison system, explaining that his scars had come from the guards torturing him after being convicted of drug crimes related to the Camorra. He explained that the guards often used wet towels to whip inmates and made them flex their muscles before they struck so the bruises were deeper. Pietro says they stripped the prisoners down and used sharp objects and ropes to carry out hours of torture before leaving them to whimper alone in the cold, dark cell for days on end, often writhing in pain amid their own blood and urine in an area of the prison where there were no CCTV cameras. There was a time early in my career in Italy when I would have flinched at his descriptions, taking them at face value. But as he spoke, I couldn’t help but try to instead weigh how truthful he was and to what extent he was embellishing the details to try to embarrass the state.
The “crime school” has a reputation for turning even light offenders into hardened criminals, and as a place where drugs and sex are usually easy to come by. Many inmates who have been released say it’s easy to buy cocaine and other drugs that are delivered to the cells by corrupt guards for the right price. It is also easy to pay to be taken to a room where a prostitute will happily give a blow job for a few euros. That the story is repeated countless times, of course, does not prove it is true—nor does it prove that it is not.
Poggioreale prison no longer has a women’s section; the Casa Circondariale Femminile in the seaside town of Pozzuoli is where many of the Camorra women now end up. The female lineages of entire families pass through that prison, an administrator told me. “You have grandmothers, daughters, granddaughters of the same family coming through for the same crimes, all tied to the Camorra,” she said. Like hardened correctional facilities anywhere in the world, life on the inside is often more corrupt than outside.
In late 2019, by way of a series of contacts, Maria introduced me to several women in their early thirties who had each just been released from different women’s prisons. All had served around ten years for drug smuggling and other crimes tied to Camorra activities. Italy has five dedicated women’s prisons: Pozzuoli near Naples, Trani in Puglia, Rebibbia in Rome, Empoli near Florence, and Giudecca in Venice, each notorious for reasons of their own. Several other prisons have “female sections,” especially in sparsely populated areas.
As agreed with Maria, I talked to one of the ex-cons, whom we’ll call “Carmela,” about working as my fixer—I would need her to translate not just the language for me but the context in which the stories I’d hear took place. As an added bonus—at least as far as I was concerned—she would protect me, even though she was a petite woman much smaller than I am. I offered her what I would pay any fixer in similar circumstances, and after a tough negotiation, she agreed after I showed her emails and receipts of fixers I had hired elsewhere.
A few days after we agreed on a price, she gave me a date and time along with an address in the crime-ridden Spanish Quarter of Naples. She told me not to wear any flashy jewelry or expensive-looking clothes, and to just walk up the central staircase to the top floor and knock. Just don’t use the elevator, she advised. The building was recent by Italian standards, likely constructed in the 1950s when post–World War II money and the fall of Benito Mussolini had fed the coffers of the Camorra. Concrete patchwork on the outside of the building spoke to any number of maintenance issues. Loose wires hung like clotheslines between the building and the one nearby, likely carrying electricity from a paying customer to those inside.
Out of an abundance of what I thought at the time was caution but was actually stupidity, I left everything but a phone, a little cash, and an unmarked envelope containing her payment. I had even swapped my usual iPhone for an older model I keep on hand for reporting on natural disasters and other assignments where a nice phone might get damaged. Everything else stayed behind in my hotel room, meaning I went to the appointment without any identification at all. In retrospect, that was probably not smart. Had there been a drug bust while I was in the apartment, it would have been convenient to have an ID to be able to prove who I was.
The faint sound of radios or televisions—it was hard to tell the difference—provided the only hint of life behind the closed doors that marked each floor of the dusty, rundown building. The echo of my footsteps on the cold marble stairs triggered an angry dog that started howling and scratching as I passed by a dark door on one floor and heard what sounded like the flutter of birds from behind another door on the next floor up. I thought I could feel wary eyes looking out behind peepholes the higher I ascended, as if the animals had served as a warning that a stranger was in the building. On the way up, it struck me that I probably should have given someone the address for where I was meeting Carmela, but it seemed like it might raise an unnecessary alarm to send it now from the stairwell.
In these many years of covering stories like this, it had become easier not to tell any nonjournalist friends what I was doing because they often thought I was foolish for taking risks. And telling another journalist you are going somewhere dangerous was like preaching to the choir and garnered little concern. So no one knew where I was and, in fact, neither did I.
The landing on the fifth and final floor led out to the building’s flat rooftop. To my immediate right, I could see a doorway under a corrugated plastic sheet, darkened by a thick layer of bird shit, that was balancing on two walls to create a little awning. Farther along the rooftop was what appeared to be an old rusting shipping container (there was a port nearby). Its windowless door looked about two inches taller than the opening it was meant to cover. The container had been for some reason hoisted on top of the building, likely long after the original structure was completed, or perhaps left there during construction.
Across the wide expanse of the rooftop was a twisted labyrinth of clotheslines, water pipes, and tangled cables from satellite dishes and TV antennas, but no other doors that I could see. Graffiti was scribbled all along the low brick wall that lined the edge but would not have kept anyone from falling—or being pushed—over. Blackened spots from fires scarred the tile floor.
I walked to the shipping container and knocked once on its oversized door. After a few minutes of muffled voices that sounded like a hushed argument coming from inside, a little girl dressed in a pretty pink tracksuit who couldn’t have been more than five years old opened the door. She said nothing as she turned to go back inside, so I followed her into the shipping container and closed the door behind me. She led me down a short hallway that opened to a dark sitting room on the left that looked like it had been added on to the container, and a brightly lit kitchen on the right that was decorated in Americana country kitsch. The walls were covered with peeling blue calico print wallpaper. White cotton curtains tied back with pretty bows revealed windows cut out of the old shipping crate. Every few feet, appliqués of chickens and roosters were plastered onto the surfaces.
The counters were lined with containers in the shape of chickens. The big ones were labeled for flour and smaller ones for sugar. The dish towels all had the same poultry motif. There were wooden signs with “Welcome” and “Kitchen” in English, like you might see in a house where I grew up in South Dakota. I asked the little girl where her “mamma” was and she told me she wasn’t home but that her “nonna” was. That caught me off guard. I was under the impression the woman I was about to meet was much younger than I would expect a grandmother to be. I heard a toilet flush down the hall and then Carmela, who had just celebrated her thirtieth birthday on her day of release, walked into the room. “Nonna,” the little girl said. “The signora is here.”
