The Godmother, page 5
The prosecutor Cerreti is one of the first people to take women’s roles in the ’Ndrangheta seriously. She is a petite brunette with piercing eyes and a sharp sense of character. She can read most people she encounters in her line of work before even opening their criminal dossier.
The door to her office in the tribunal of Reggio Calabria was a bulletproof mass of solid metal, reinforced to withstand a car bomb if someone had managed to breach the fortified courthouse’s external protective barrier, a genuine fear when she became the rising star of Italy’s anti-mafia army there in 2013. She had just convinced ’Ndrangheta daughter Giuseppina “Giusy” Pesce to turn against her family, which led to the arrest and sentencing of around eighty clan thugs, including Pesce’s own father. In the courtroom, Salvatore Pesce threatened to kill Cerreti and her husband, who is conveniently an anti-mafia Carabinieri officer, which amounted to ordering a hit on the prosecutor’s life. Pesce did not threaten publicly to kill his own daughter, but it was understood that Giuseppina’s life was in danger, too.
The attention launched Cerreti to become one of the most powerful female anti-mafia prosecutors in Italy. She had cut her teeth investigating terror insurgents in Milan in 2005, just two years after the CIA and Italian secret service had snatched Egyptian cleric Abu Omar off the streets of Milan to allegedly torture him as part of the Bush administration’s “global war on terrorism.” She then moved south to take on one of the deadliest criminal syndicates anywhere in the world.
I met Cerreti in early 2021 in Milan, where she was flanked by two bodyguards. But rather than a bulletproof door, she sat behind plexiglass in her upper floor office in the Milan tribunal. Her hair had grown longer since she worked in Calabria and she wore a pink FFP2 mask. She is again focused on pulling up the deep roots of the ’Ndrangheta and Sicilian Cosa Nostra here in the wealthier north, working to chip away at the far reaches of the groups. She has been under constant police protection since Pesce’s threat.
She believes very much that women play a vital role in all of Italy’s organized crime syndicates, and knows they are the key to keeping crime families together. As such, they are also instrumental in tearing them apart, especially if Cerreti can convince them to give evidence for the sake of their children.
“A mother who acts in the interests of her children is impossible to stop,” she told me, underscoring that women who testified could tear the group apart at its seams, making female turncoats especially dangerous to crime groups.
Cerreti doesn’t look the part of the important role she plays as a strong arm in Italian justice. She is confident in the way many lawyers are, but her sense of irony and humor offer a more unguarded side than one might expect. I liked her immediately, despite the fact that she is flanked by plainclothes bodyguards with pistols strapped to their chests. She laughs easily, despite what is undoubtedly an unthinkable responsibility. Every woman she convinces to turn against the criminal family runs a risk of being murdered. There is little in the way of forgiveness for being truthful, and Cerreti is well aware of the weight of these important witnesses. But don’t call them pentiti, she said. “They are never penitent.” She prefers the term collaboratore di giustizia, “collaborator of justice.” Without exception, she says, in a statement that contradicts the machoism synonymous with mafia culture, men always collaborate to save themselves while women collaborate to save their children.
Her goal was to end what she has called a “predestination” within the criminal group that trains young boys to handle knives and firearms as preteens and young girls to accept that they will eventually be offered as nothing short of currency, traded for vendettas or married off to create alliances. “Children are the key,” she said. “But it isn’t without its challenges.”
She believes that women will continue to be considered vital components of the criminal groups in the court of law. For instance, a Milan court in 2000 was the first to convict a woman as a “sister in omertà,” finding her to be a “full-fledged ’Ndrangheta member,” [3] though even turncoats who knew her said it just wasn’t true. She had power but was never officially inducted.
That’s one of the ways women escaped judicial attention for so long. Those who study mafia groups have become somewhat blinded by the idea that only those who take part in the ritual are functioning members. The three Camorra women I met were clearly part of the organization, but by not being “initiated” into it; does that make them any less criminal?
That attitude of female subservience repeats itself in all layers of Italian society, both personal and professional. In my first years in Rome, I was shocked by the blatant misogyny that came in such subtle ways as asking me constantly to “send your husband,” or even once when I was younger to “send your father” to discuss problems seen as male, including buying something at a hardware shop or dealing with mechanical issues with my car.
That attitude toward women is hard to come to terms with, but early on in my time in Italy, an Italian friend explained to me that it was easier to accept it and just use their lack of respect to fly under the radar. She advised me that fighting it would be exhausting and futile, but that most Italian women have learned how to exploit it. I remember interviewing a prominent Italian politician when I was heavily pregnant with my first son during a scorching summer day. All he kept saying was that I should not be working this late into the pregnancy, asking his assistant to bring me water. He insisted I should have my feet elevated and that I needed a cushion to sit on, at times even criticizing my “American hard-nosed bosses” who would send a pregnant woman out on such a hot day. All the while I asked him questions that ended in a story full of revelations he would have surely never given me under any other circumstance.
Italians often look at American women differently than they do their own female demographic, in part because they know—or assume—that “we” won’t put up with the usual crap Italian women tolerate. When the #MeToo movement first broke the sexual-hierarchy barrier, Italians were quick to dismiss the scandal in no small part because of the role Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez played by wearing a wire to catch Harvey Weinstein, an encounter many will remember only because he jacked off in a potted plant in front of her. Italians automatically felt that the fact that Ambra had been involved somehow lessened the crime. Italian newspapers predictably responded by running story after story alongside her sultry modeling shots, as if to say that any sexual abuse against her was certainly invited, and that recording the now-disgraced Hollywood mogul couldn’t possibly have been her own clever idea.
Italy was one of the few Western countries that did not engage in a reckoning on its own sexual bias, and it is in no small part because women allow themselves to be written off, finding it easier, as my friend advised, not to rock the boat but to just work around it. Even my female Italian friends rolled their eyes at the #MeToo movement, finding it hard to believe that a woman could be forced to sleep with a boss or someone who held power over her. Not that they didn’t do it in Italy, but it was just seen as a way to exploit male stupidity.
This is true in organized crime, where, time and again, women are committing heinous crimes in the group’s name without police noticing. Even when these women earn the dubious respect that goes with their criminal success, they are discounted by law enforcement because “women don’t belong to the mafia.” Nonetheless, the increasing number of criminal investigations into women and horrific violence at their hands makes it hard to believe that just because they cannot be sworn into the boys’ club, their actions—whether murder or money laundering—don’t count. Perhaps they, too, are just playing along and using the blatant misogyny to fly under the radar.
Cerreti told me that mafia women’s primary task is to help teach the children wrong from right. Where most parents might teach a child to forgive and forget, the ’Ndrangheta mother teaches that revenge is, in fact, not only acceptable but expected. She must ingrain in her offspring the clear-cut gender roles and responsibilities to help pass down the criminal culture, and also dissuade in her children any rebellion that could lead to respect for the law and the potential betrayal of the clan.
With few exceptions, mafia women are born into or marry into crime families and can only leave in a coffin or by testifying against their parents, siblings, or husbands. They invariably normalize criminality, making excuses for heinous crimes and rationalizing everything from extortion to murder. As mothers, their chief role is to indoctrinate their children into the life of crime, essentially teaching them bad from good and that vendetta is preferable to forgiveness.
Later, when their children are grown, mafia mammas will offer them iron-clad alibis, hide their contraband under their beds, defend them publicly, and take their abuse.
Those maternal roles are clear, but it is increasingly evident that women are more than mothers in these syndicates. If prisons can be crime schools that develop hardened criminals, then the mafia family home is the kindergarten where the groundwork is carefully laid to enculturate tomorrow’s men of honor. A forty-six-year-old ’Ndrangheta dad named Agostino Cambareri was arrested in 2019 for making his eight-year-old son cut cocaine and bag up marijuana for sale. Police say the boy also reportedly helped spread dirt on at least one shallow grave of a man his father had killed. There was reportedly no coffin involved in the burial, according to a turncoat who was there. If Cambareri had not been arrested, it could have been another ten years of learning at his father’s knee before the child was old enough to be truly initiated.
Consider, too, ’Ndrangheta daughter Rita Di Giovine (whose disastrous family history we will get to later), who was forced from an early age to stuff precise heroin doses into shampoo bottles for her criminal mother. Rita, one of the most important and penitent witnesses in the ’Ndrangheta, was arrested while holding a thousand ecstasy tablets she was being forced to smuggle. Her mafia mom couldn’t be initiated, but does that make her any less a criminal than Agostino Cambareri?
Pupetta’s first son, Pasqualino, disappeared without a trace after he was supposed to meet his mother’s new lover, Umberto Ammaturo. The man had promised to indoctrinate Pasqualino into the Camorra. Pupetta, for all her documented faults, would have done anything for the boy—and for all her children—except collaborate with law enforcement to get justice for her son.
She would not speak to me about Pasqualino’s fate. Each time we met I asked and each time she stopped the conversation with a look of angst that didn’t quite reach remorse but could have been regret of some sort. “It’s too painful to remember that period,” she said. But in the mid-1990s, she did tell journalist Clare Longrigg[4] that she was sure Ammaturo, with whom she had twins, was ultimately responsible for her first son’s death, and that the only thing she wanted to know for sure was where her then lover had buried him. It seems impossible to imagine the level of brainwashing it would take to remain silent for decades about the fact that the father of your younger children likely killed your eldest. And did so why? Because the boy was the son of a rival clan member who had been dead for more than two decades.
Time and again, women like Cerreti—who butt their heads against a loyalty stronger than common sense—try to chip away at the tradition of protecting evil. Any gains she makes can come at a terrible cost for the women who betray their criminal families, but if this toxic bond can be broken, she knows the fissure can lead to arrests and convictions and ultimately save lives.
3
The Strong and the Sweet
“I dissociated myself in order to start my life again. I do not think with hindsight; it is useless to wonder if today I would do things differently.”
While Pupetta sat in prison for killing her first husband’s assassin, her guards had to play traffic cop to the many suitors who clamored to visit her. Love songs and poetry were written about this brave and beautiful murderess, and she reveled in the attention she says helped her bide the time.
Pupetta shuddered when I asked her about raising a baby in Naples’ notorious Poggioreale prison. She was allowed to keep him in her dark corner cell until he turned four. I told her about my own children, both sons, and she asked to see photos of them. As I scrolled through some old ones I kept on my phone, she seemed grandmotherly. I explained to her that my children were raised in Italy while their grandparents lived in the United States and Canada, and that they had just a passing relationship with them, which had always made me sad. She then told me about her own grandmother’s disappointment that she had married Pasqualone, how her grandmother had hoped that Pupetta might meet someone outside the usual crowd, which I took to mean the criminal underworld.
“I disappointed her,” Pupetta said. “I have never been judgmental about what my own children choose to do because I was so hurt that she didn’t respect my choices.”
After I left her house, I looked up her family history to learn that both of her grandmothers had died in the 1940s, long before Pupetta would have ever met Pasqualone. What was the purpose of the lie, I wondered. Was it to get me to trust her, or had she confused the grandmother with an aunt or other female relative she held in high esteem? At the time I thought that maybe she just wanted to be relatable, but surely she knew I would check her every story. When I went back for what at the time I did not know would be our final visit before her daughter, Antonella, told me never to come back, I asked Pupetta whether the grandmother who had disliked Pasqualone was maternal or paternal—I hadn’t asked at the time. She looked at me and smiled and quickly dismissed the subject.
Raising a child in a prison as hard as Poggioreale gave Pupetta certain perks other inmates didn’t have, even though the circumstances made the experience anything but joyful. Unlike the general female population, who lived in large dormitory-style rooms with triple bunk beds and a single toilet in the corner, incarcerated mothers were given single- or double-occupancy cells with wooden boxes on the floor beside their beds, inlaid with tiny mattresses for their babies. Pasqualino had a small selection of toys and a few books, and she got to take him out to play in the prison playground once or twice a day. But Pupetta mostly made up games to play or sang to him as they sat together on the cold cement floor of her cell.
Pasqualino’s first friends were the children of other incarcerated mafia women, many of whom were serving short sentences as accomplices or accessories to crimes committed by their men. After they got out, they didn’t forget the godmother in the corner cell. Pupetta laughed as she recounted some of the things her former inmate girlfriends snuck into Poggioreale when they visited her, from local white wine to truffles. She was the rare female inmate locked up in the 1950s for murder. Her long sentence gave her seniority, and her crime garnered automatic respect from all the new inmates.
She had done a man’s job by avenging her husband’s death and there were no other women who could say the same. In a crime school like this, she was both valedictorian and class bully. The other inmates did her bidding, and even changed Pasqualino’s soiled diapers during open recreation time or babysat when she needed a break from his crying. The stories of her incarceration that were published at the time vary in remarkable ways from her own memory, or the stories she chooses to tell. Undoubtedly it is one’s right to recast their own story—even one that has been lived in crime dockets like Pupetta’s—but the ease with which she chooses to rewrite hers entirely is sometimes mind-boggling.
What is known for sure is that during her incarceration, wedding proposals and gifts floated in from the outside almost daily, mostly from Camorristi who wanted to latch on to her rising star when she got out. But it was inside where she flexed her muscle as she ruled the top of the hierarchy among the imprisoned wives and girlfriends. She set up a system inside much like her late husband’s on the outside, in which she doled out “favors” to inmates who could then source information from their own visitors about what was happening on the outside, which Pupetta would pass along to favorable clansmen of her choice.
On Pasqualino’s fourth birthday, he was taken from Pupetta’s jail cell to start school and live with her mother. By the time Pupetta got out of prison, when Pasqualino was ten, he was calling his grandmother “Mamma.”
Freed, Pupetta was clearly ready to move on and start her new life, describing her release from prison as something of a rebirth. At the time she sought out the press, gave interviews to show that she was back, and courted various directors, trying to carve out a new career in film. “It was both terrifying and liberating,” she explained to me. She gave a number of interviews in which she berated the prison system, its treatment of her and other inmates, even though she had earned a number of special privileges during her final years inside. After so many years away at “crime school,” rehabilitation was not to be part of that new beginning, even though she says she had fully intended to live a cleaner life when she got out of prison. She felt no remorse whatsoever for the murder she’d committed, in fact she has always said she would do it again, even now in her eighties. She felt that it was her duty, which was a mix of her father’s principles and her newlywed husband’s influence over her. Had she not killed Big Tony, she would have likely been shuffled off to marry an associate, forgotten forever, reduced to being just another Camorristi wife. Pupetta wanted a different legacy. She did not need to avenge her husband’s death. Society did not demand it of her, especially in the 1950s. Without the influence of social media and the Internet, she acted in a vacuum and could have easily gotten away, quite literally, with murder.
There was a sense in the way she presented herself both in person and in recent media interviews that she had even fewer regrets in old age, that somehow her life had been well lived. There is no question that she enjoyed her notorious legacy, and I am completely convinced she would have reveled in the fact that the police in Naples prohibited a public funeral for her when she died. When I went to her gravesite to lay flowers, I was told I could not, that her life could not be celebrated, that too many “mafiosi” are sent off gloriously. I know she would have loved to be considered too important to be celebrated publicly. I left the flowers on a nearby grave.
