The Godmother, page 4
Carmela sat on a cushion in what was clearly her usual chair at the small wooden kitchen table. Her narrow shoulders looked like a wire hanger and her sharp collarbones protruded from under a silky red blouse with a pattern of tiny triangles woven into the material. She wore rings on all her fingers, including her thumbs, that seemed to possess varying degrees of value, from cheap costume jewelry to ten-carat gold.
We sat at the table and I asked her about the decor. She said she loved the country kitchen look after seeing it in a documentary about the American Midwest and that she really wanted to visit Wyoming, which she pronounced as Yie-yo-ming, one day. I didn’t correct her. As we spoke, a man came out of the back bedroom wearing a tank top and gray dress pants. He did not greet me or Carmela or the little girl. He went over to a pair of faded red wingback chairs in the sitting room. They looked like they had been fished out of a dumpster. Over the back of one was draped a neatly folded button-down shirt. He put it on and walked out without saying anything.
Carmela and I continued talking as if nothing had happened.
“How is reintegration into society?” I asked rather naively. She had not testified against anyone and had served her sentence completely, so she had no reason to worry about a vendetta or anything else, but I sensed that rehabilitation was not a goal or, more likely, an option. She explained that a lot had happened while she was inside and that she had a lot of catching up to do. Many old phone numbers now don’t work, and some people she knew had died one way or another.
Part of our agreement was that Carmela was never supposed to be the primary subject of interest in my writing. Before she had gone to prison she had once worked for a local journalist, she explained. She told me she knew what reporters were looking for. I understood that what she really wanted was to not give too much of her own story away or inadvertently incriminate herself while still making some extra cash. She served us espresso in white plastic cups while we waited for her mother to arrive to babysit the little girl.
Carmela’s mother let herself in about a half hour later. She couldn’t have been more than fifty years old. I said hello and she politely nodded my way without saying a word, clearly understanding that I was a foreigner and in a way all foreigners, no matter how fluent we are in the language, feel suddenly mute when someone squints our way as if they cannot understand a single thing we say.
She scurried to the back of the apartment with the little girl. I had not had a chance to see if there was a structure built onto the end of the shipping crate, but from the inside this curious rooftop home seemed much larger than it had looked from the outside. Months later when I went back to the building to look around, I realized that the shipping container was actually balanced between two different buildings like a makeshift bridge. I struggled to remember what the flooring of the container was like because from the street level the bottom looked very worn out, as if it might give way at any time.
With her mother out of the room, Carmela put the envelope with my money in the back of the freezer. We left the country-kitchen shipping container and took the elevator down to the ground floor. I wondered if the reason she had told me to walk up the steps and not take the lift was to make sure everyone in the building got a look at who was coming in alone and that no one recognized me as a police officer, which implies a certain complicity—or accountability—among all the tenants. I wondered who lived in those other apartments, and if she had told them she had a visitor. Did she think a stranger might be tied to police or in some way threatening? I wondered as well if she could use the time it would take me to climb the stairs to hide something or someone, or to prepare for me. Or perhaps Carmela didn’t want anyone to see her leave with me. I didn’t ask, even though I was immensely curious.
Once out of the building, I followed her through the maze of hilly, cobbled streets in the Spanish Quarter. Overhead, laundry, flags, soccer banners, and advertisements for pizza joints flapped in the sea breeze that sweeps through Naples most hours of the day.
We headed toward the base of a long stairway that leads up to the Vomero hill, where affluent Neapolitans look down over the mess of the city below and out to sweeping views of Vesuvius, Capri, and beyond. On the way there, we circled around one block at least twice, which I assumed was either to make sure I could never find Carmela’s apartment on my own or to lose someone who was trailing us.
We arrived in front of a narrow postwar high-rise. Carmela buzzed one of the plastic name buttons on the central intercom twice and then pushed through the building’s unlocked main door. We walked up two flights of stairs and a pretty woman who looked a lot like a young Sophia Loren opened the door before we could knock. She was wearing a tight, shiny electric-blue wraparound shirt and faded jeans. Her extremely long fingernails were done up in a French manicure, and she smelled like the same Chanel perfume I wear.
I agreed not to publish any of the real names of any of the Camorra ex-cons, so we will call this woman Sophia. She grew up in Pupetta’s hometown Castellammare di Stabia and said she “had a lot of respect for what she did to set the murder of her husband right.” Sophia’s dark eyes welled with tears when she explained how she, too, was pregnant when she went into prison but had a miscarriage early on. “They gave me poison and it killed my baby,” she told me without a hint of doubt. “They did that to other girls, too.”
Sophia opened a pack of Diana cigarettes and smoked one after another as she explained that her father was killed in a mafia hit when she was still an infant and that her mother remarried a couple of times, before she died of breast cancer when Sophia was twelve.
“I’ve been on my own since then,” she says. “I’ve never even had a serious boyfriend.” The father of her miscarried baby apparently didn’t count. From time to time Carmela asked me in the same Neapolitan dialect Sophia spoke if I was following what she was saying. I answered yes, but made notes to go over with Carmela to clarify anything I didn’t quite follow.
Sophia’s story is tragic but not altogether rare for this part of Italy. Girls without a proper crime family to back them will never be given a true opportunity to climb any mafia organization’s hierarchy and will forever be condemned to the dregs of the group, either as drug runners or petty criminals. And without a powerful name, she is not even marriage material because she brings no promise of alliance to the table. “I started running drugs for my friend’s dad,” she says when I ask her to tell me about what led her to prison. “When the police were onto us, I was the obvious one to take the fall since there was no one protecting me.”
Her time in jail was extremely difficult, she said. No one sent her money or brought her food or clothing, so she ended up “working” for some of the other women to make some cash for tobacco to roll her own cigarettes. “It was tough,” she says, looking down at the table. “You really are alone in moments like that.”
When I asked her what sort of “work” she could do in prison for the other women, she looked at Carmela nervously. She then explained that she had to be like a maid, washing the other women’s clothes and doing whatever they wanted. I tried to press her about rumors I’d heard of prostitution rings inside female prisons, but she wouldn’t bite.
The longer we talked, the more nervous Sophia became. She started looking at her text messages and checking the time every two or three minutes. Finally, she gave Carmela a look that prompted Carmela to tell me that it was time for us to go. I understood immediately that if we didn’t, it could be bad for Sophia, or maybe even all of us. When we opened the door to leave, I was shocked to see a man standing in the hallway just a few steps from the door. He clearly knew Carmela. He grabbed her arm very tightly and said something to her in Neapolitan dialect that was incomprehensible to me. He looked through me as if I weren’t there at all.
Carmela and I walked down the stairs without saying a word until we got out of the building. I was truly terrified but tried not to show it. I asked if we got Sophia into trouble and she told me that Sophia could handle herself. I asked her if the man was a trick or a pimp or maybe even a drug dealer or client—he fit the physical description of any of those in my mind. Carmela just looked at me like I was a child asking if Santa Claus was real.
“Who knows?” she said, even though I knew she certainly did.
We walked out of the Spanish Quarter and past the ancient San Carlo opera house and into the tony area along the Riviera di Chiaia, which offers some of the most amazing views of the good side of Vesuvius to be had anywhere in the city. It is the postcard vantage point—the exact opposite side of the volcano you see from Castellammare di Stabia. There we met a woman I’ll call Rita, who Carmela explained had been arrested as an accessory to murder after getting caught with her then-boyfriend, a Camorra hit man. Rita said she had no idea her lover was out on a hit when he asked her to drive his car alongside a truck on a back road. “He just pulled the gun out of nowhere and started shooting,” Rita said. “I was shocked.”
I asked her why she didn’t testify against him to save herself from jail, knowing full well she was lying to me. I had read the criminal dossier from her arrest and her fingerprints were on one of the weapons that she had helped reload.
“They would have killed me if I did that,” she says. Her erstwhile boyfriend is still in prison but she has no intention of getting together when he gets out. “We had only just met,” she explained. “Anyway, he was married.”
Rita now works at her aunt’s fur storage and seamstress shop, which cold-stores wealthy Neapolitans’ fox and mink stoles for the winter. Rita does finish work on hems and replaces torn-off buttons on the furs and designer clothes. “Our clients are quite wealthy,” she explained in a way I understood to mean they had benefited from various criminal enterprises. Later, I looked up the fur shop, which was registered as a dry cleaner under a man’s name.
Rita’s parents were both killed in a drive-by shooting when she was in her teens and she has lived with her aunt her whole life—which is divided into periods before and after prison. Her uncle died by suicide a few years ago.
“Pills,” she said, when I asked how he took his life. A classic mafia suicide method is a cyanide pill to avoid being arrested, but I thought it better not to ask what kind of drug he’d taken. It seemed redundant to confirm what was implied.
Rita explained that she had a series of Camorra boyfriends who “were always sweet” but never wanted to settle down. The reality was that because she, like Sophia, didn’t come from a strong mafia family, she was a convenient mistress but not exactly marriage material.
Four days after our interview, Rita was arrested for drug trafficking out of her aunt’s shop in a sting operation that netted more than a dozen Camorristi. Two months later, Sophia was back in prison for drug peddling, too. There is no real chance of rehabilitation for so many women caught up in crime. Even if they wanted to get out of a criminal organization, they would have to turn state’s evidence to leave. And for many, the risk that such good behavior carries is far too great. Carmela disappeared after our day together, too. Or at least she never answered my messages or phone calls again.
The first time I met Pietro, the ex-con and advocate for tortured inmates, I asked him if he was afraid or felt like he was in danger for helping women when they got out of tough prisons. Naturally, I assumed his group was trying to rehabilitate the ex-prisoners so they could start a clean life. “Why would I be afraid?” he said. “Everyone is very grateful I’m there to help their sons and daughters and friends get back on their feet.”
Some argue that the main reason there are so many more women associated with organized crime today is that only now do police recognize and arrest them. Others argue[1] that as organized-crime syndicates have evolved, they have moved away from sheer violence and added more white-collar crimes to their portfolios, which has driven a need for a more educated criminal. Women in southern Italy tend to stay in school longer, and in cases of mafia families, some of the females are sent to be educated abroad. While abroad, they have ended up casing out the local culture to see if there was a weak spot for infiltration, all while appearing to be removed from their criminal families back home.
Whatever is driving up the numbers, at the time of publication, the Italian Ministry of Justice confirms there are more than 150 women in Italy’s prisons serving time for mafia crimes—the highest number ever recorded.
Joining an organized-crime group is not like signing up for a club you can try out and eventually leave if you don’t like it or if membership isn’t quite what you had expected. Nor can you just choose to join. If someone is not born into a crime family, they must be chosen and recommended, which is mirrored in other aspects of Italian society in which the best jobs are given to those with a raccomandata, or weighty recommendation. Interested men who do not come from a criminal family are sponsored, and if they mess up, the sponsor is without exception killed first. Most sons and daughters of mafiosi don’t actively decide whether continuing the criminal life is for them. The only choice to be made is if one day they want to leave, and that’s generally only by death or with the help of police.
Though by now a household name, the ’Ndrangheta syndicate is a relative newcomer on the global organized-crime scene, transitioning from a largely rural mafia that made money on extortion, kidnapping, and small-scale smuggling in the 1990s when it entered the international drug-smuggling market. The group calls its clusters ’ndrine (singular ’ndrina) and not “clans,” as the Neapolitan Camorra refers to its groups. Its horizontal power structure is similar to that of the Neapolitan group, with lots of bosses of groups of families holding the same level of power instead of everyone under one big don. Family bloodlines are key, and traditionally we have been told that women are largely kept out of the most important decisions, though there are several notable exceptions that point to a more important role than perhaps experts have been willing to admit, especially in the context of southern Italy where misogyny is rampant. Alessandra Cerreti says that the role of women within the criminal groups is as different as the groups themselves. In the Camorra, which she says is far more liberal, there are even lesbian bosses. In the ’Ndrangheta, women are instead mostly charged with indoctrinating the children to keep the force of evil alive.
Italy has often been called a country that feminism forgot, and it is apparent in nearly every sector of life. I spent a great deal of time with Laura Boldrini when she spoke at a Women in the World event in New York City on the heels of the #MeToo movement. She was there as one of the most vocal female Italian politicians, having served as speaker of the lower house of parliament, to date the highest-ranking role a woman has ever held on Italy’s political spectrum. But what she was there to discuss was the horrific abuse she had faced for speaking out about how women are treated. She was receiving death and rape threats on social media that she then re-upped to expose the senders. But instead of acting as a deterrent, revealing the abuse just made it worse. Even the then interior minister Matteo Salvini of the far-right Lega party got into the act, taking a blow-up sex doll on stage during a rally and saying it looked like Boldrini’s twin.
Fewer than half of Italian women work outside the home, and when they do they are met with job titles and descriptions that show a preference for males—there are no feminine versions of the words minister or lawyer, for example, which Boldrini says is because women were excluded from the job market for so long. “Feminism is a dirty word in Italy,” she says. “People are afraid to use it, as if it is somehow threatening to be seen as a feminist.”
In the southern regions of Italy, this is especially true, and women are often stifled both inside the home and in the workplace. The ’Ndrangheta family dynamics are complicated to parse, but it is clear that as the crime group has established itself as an international criminal entity, women are an integral part of the puzzle.
The ’Ndrangheta’s first real headlines outside of Italy came when they were ultimately held responsible for the 1973 kidnapping of American oil baron John Paul Getty’s grandson for a ransom of $17 million, which they had hoped would be easier to get than it was. The elder Getty assumed his wayward grandson, who had decamped in Rome with his mother, was trying to swindle money out of him, never believing that the ’Ndrangheta existed or, if they did, that they actually had him until they sent the boy’s mother the top of his ear. Eventually, Getty talked the mobsters down to a sum of around $2 million and the boy was released.
The scenes depicted in a 2017 film about the case, All the Money in the World, do little justice to the depths of brutality most of the ’Ndrangheta’s kidnapping victims suffer as the gang tries to bargain for their ransom. Many kidnapping victims whose families couldn’t pay, or refused to pay, were literally picked apart as punishment or dissolved in acid limb by limb until they died. Although Getty losing his ear is a true story, it is tame compared to what really goes on. John Paul Getty’s grandson either suffered more than he ever admitted or the group went easy on him, perhaps because a behind-the-scenes deal had been made.
Daughters in the ’Ndrangheta are often forced into arranged marriages between like-minded family ’ndrine, sometimes put forward by fathers as a peace or truce offering to settle a feud.[2] This keeps the women in what may appear to be subservient roles. While many mafia historians have not seen advancements for women in the ’Ndrangheta as often as in other criminal groups in the country, women do play a key role in keeping up the criminal cycle.
