The Godmother, page 6
One can only imagine a figure like Pupetta in the age of Instagram. She was able to create an alluring image of a woman in complete control, with her leather dresses, choke collars, and lowcut blouses, without a single follower or like. She often said to me, “Tell the Americans this,” when she told me a story. I often thought she would love the idea that people outside Italy would read about her.
She could summon the press, attract multiple men, and make decisions people listened to, despite the fact that she was a woman who nobody believed could actually be part of the mafia. As prosecutor Cerreti saw it, though, Pupetta was an early influencer of her own. She knew well that the image of the brazen “mafia woman” would carry some clout in the outside world, even if she possessed little in the way of organizational authority to back it up. “She is a self-made woman in many ways, both when she committed murder and how she chooses to portray herself today,” Cerreti told me.
A few years after Pupetta’s release in 1965, one of the women she had befriended in prison set her up on a blind date with Umberto Ammaturo, a square-jawed Camorra underboss with dark wavy hair. He groomed his thick sideburns to perfection with a straight razor he is rumored to have used to carve up more than one enemy. He was not her beloved Pasqualone, but he was sexy, and after all that time in prison Pupetta was lonely. More important, he was a Camorra underboss—meaning that settling on him would not result in her stepping backward from Pasqualone’s standing. That said, she might have taken Ammaturo’s nickname, ’o pazzo, “the crazy one,” as a warning of what was to come.
As handler of the Camorra’s emerging cocaine routes in and out of South America, Umberto was fluent in Spanish. He was also hotheaded. He had a short temper that Pupetta said often turned to violent outbursts against her and Pasqualino, who had moved back in with her when she left prison.
Umberto had started his criminal career as a guaglione, essentially a street kid who pickpocketed tourists and stood as a lookout for cops in order to warn the bigger criminals. He caught the eye of more seasoned men, who admired his deviance. He quickly climbed the criminal ladder, advancing to a full-time cigarette smuggler for the Camorra in the early 1960s.
He had connections to Tommaso Buscetta,[1] one of the Sicilian Mafia’s most notable turncoats, who is personally responsible for the dismantling of the Cosa Nostra in the 1990s by testifying in Italy’s so-called Maxi Trials. After Buscetta died of cancer, it was revealed that he and his family had gone to live in Florida under new identities with full police protection for many years. Buscetta had testified against some of the biggest mobsters in Sicily and the United States in epic hearings that ran from February 10, 1986, to January 30, 1992.
Those trials led to a number of American mafia arrests and launched the career of one young district attorney in New York named Rudolph Giuliani. Thanks to Buscetta and another turncoat’s testimony, 338 people were convicted and sentenced to a total of 2,665 years in prison. (Giuliani went on to become one of the most successful anti-mafia prosecutors in US history and brought hundreds of criminals to justice.)
Umberto and Pupetta hit it off immediately. A few months after they started a relationship, Pupetta, at the age of thirty-one, was pregnant with twins. Not long after Antonella and Roberto were born, Umberto was arrested in Naples with the Camorra’s top man, who lorded over the various emerging criminal enterprises in northern Italy. The two were charged with smuggling cocaine from Latin America via the diplomatic mail pouch of Panama’s consulate in Milan. During the ensuing trial, Umberto faked a number of health conditions, including insanity, with the help of the Camorra-friendly forensic psychiatrist Aldo Semerari. Thanks to the crooked doc, Umberto ultimately escaped hard jail time and was sentenced to an psychiatric hospital—from which he quickly escaped.
Pupetta and Umberto never married, but they worked hard to elevate their joint criminal interests during their first years together. In November 1967, Pupetta was convicted of receiving stolen goods when a hundred shirts mysteriously arrived at the clothing shop she had recently opened in Naples without an invoice or purchase order, either of which would have required her to pay tax. She was acquitted of delinquent activity and never served her three-month sentence. She was investigated numerous times throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s and frequently found herself on the periphery of a variety of crimes.
When Pasqualino reached his teens, there was tension in the house. Pupetta’s firstborn was handsome and built like his robust dad, and Pupetta often reminisced about her dead husband when her son turned a certain way or smiled just so. Pasqualino started to rebel and compete with Umberto, who didn’t like the constant reminder of Pupetta’s previous life. Pasqualino’s temperament didn’t help, and he often lashed out about how his mother’s lover would never be a replacement for his own dead father—a man Pasqualino had never met.
When he started mouthing off to Umberto and eventually threatened to avenge the death of his father—a job his mother had taken care of just fine—the tension in the household reached a boiling point.
In 1972, a few days after Pasqualino’s eighteenth birthday, Umberto set up an appointment with him under the guise of a truce, offering to help the budding criminal develop some of his own contacts within the construction arm of the Camorra. The two made plans to meet at a dusty Neapolitan construction site where a new tangenziale, toll bypass, was being built. The superhighway would allow travelers to skirt the stifling Neapolitan gridlock to reach the Amalfi Coast and deep southern provinces more quickly. It would also line the pockets of dozens of Camorra clans that had infiltrated nearly every aspect of the project.
The meeting happened to be on the day that crews were pouring the cement foundation for the supporting pillars of the massive four-lane highway. There were more than a dozen mixer trucks working furiously to set the steel framework into deep pockets that had been dug into the lower foothills of Mount Vesuvius. The hot wind blew thick clouds of dust through the site as the noisy trucks rolled in and out.
Pasqualino was never seen again after that day, in a vanishing act that had all the markings of what the Camorra calls a lupara bianca—an assassination carried out with such precision that there is no trace of the body left at all.
As is so often the case in crime families, life becomes a sort of currency that can be easily spent or saved depending on a variety of circumstances. Pupetta would not talk to me about the disappearance and presumed murder of her son by her lover, brushing off each question with the flick of her black-manicured hand, assuring me that I can look it up. “I’ve talked about it too much already,” she said.
Without a confession—which, until her death, she still hoped would one day come from a turncoat—she had no choice but to assume her son’s grave is under the base of the tangenziale pillar. She would not confirm to me whether she was responsible for the flowers that appeared there every year on Pasqualino’s birthday—until the area became a rogue dumping ground for the mob’s toxic garbage enterprise.
Despite the assumptions Pupetta harbored, she and Umberto still went on to forge a criminal coupledom that eventually landed them a joint conviction for the murder and decapitation of Aldo Semerari, the shady shrink who helped spring Umberto from prison by signing off on his phony mental illness years earlier.
Semerari disappeared under suspicious circumstances from the Royal Hotel in Naples in late March 1982. His body, from the neck down, was found a week later in the trunk of a burned-out car with his decapitated head on the front seat. He had been tortured, based on the broken bones and cuts, and hung upside down to bleed out, undoubtedly while he was still alive—an extra cruel touch that was meant as a warning for others. When I asked a forensic scientist how difficult it would have been for Pupetta and Umberto, working separately or together, to behead the doctor, I was told they would likely have needed to use an electric saw, which cuts through bone much more easily than a blade. The fact that Semerari had no blood left in his body would also have made it an easier—and cleaner—job.
A day later, Semerari’s personal assistant, Fiorella Carrara, was found dead in her home with a Magnum .357 sticking out of her mouth. Her death was classified as a suicide, even though her fingerprints were not on the gun and she left no note, and three days after her body was discovered her home was ransacked and storage boxes were mysteriously removed from her attic. The investigation into Semerari’s decapitation initially focused on his political ties, but quickly turned to Pupetta and Umberto as primary suspects.
Semerari had ties to Italy’s far-right movement, which was involved in a string of nationwide terrorist attacks during a two-decade period referred to as the Years of Lead, so called for the sheer number of bullets used in terrorist attacks during the late 1960s to the 1980s. At the time, extreme right-wing and left-wing organizations were waging a war on the establishment—and on each other. The unrest wasn’t mafia related, but there were a number of people like Semerari who had their fingers in both pools of blood. Semerari was also a member of the Propaganda Due Masonic lodge, which included several of Italy’s most prestigious secret service members. It included a few holdout Americans who were stationed in Italy after the war to keep communism at bay, and also had charter lodges in Brazil and Argentina. The lodge counted up-and-coming politician Silvio Berlusconi, who would later become one of Italy’s longest-serving prime ministers, on its roster. The Freemasons—much like the mafia and even the Catholic Church—didn’t allow women to be members, but many were loosely associated, albeit on the periphery. The many alliances forged by the lodge likely kept Semerari out of jail, and many initially assumed they led to his death.
Pupetta adamantly denies any role in murdering and decapitating Semerari, though she did describe Carrara to me as a putana, “whore.” She described Semerari as a traitor for helping their rival Raffaele Cutolo, underscoring the extent to which she and Umberto had a motive to kill him. Betrayal in crime circles is without question the greatest unforgiveable sin, and even though Umberto eventually betrayed Pupetta and the larger circle, he, too, found Semerari’s betrayal in helping Cutolo a step too far.
Cutolo, nicknamed the Professor for his elegant demeanor, had threatened Pupetta and Umberto’s criminal livelihood when he launched the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, or New Camorra Organization, known as the NCO, on October 24, 1970. She spoke of him with the type of hatred one might associate with an unfaithful ex-husband. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth pursed as she said his name.
Cutolo’s new group was a conglomerate of clans that was perfectly positioned to wipe out Pupetta and Umberto’s various enterprises when he launched it, a sort of direct hit from within on their criminal success, which allegedly included managing extortion rings, collecting the pizzo, or protection money, and money laundering. The fact that the group had sprung from within the Camorra itself made the couple’s sense of betrayal far worse than a push into their business by the rival Cosa Nostra or even ’Ndrangheta. The Camorra clans were notorious for their infighting, but Cutolo’s threat to the cohesion of the crime group was worse because he threatened to take his clans to form another group. Cutolo fancied himself something of a cross between Jesus Christ and the magician David Copperfield, insisting that he could both forgive sins and read minds, which somehow enticed clansmen to follow him. (When Semerari’s burned-out Fiat was found, it was parked in front of the house of Cutolo’s driver—no doubt left as a message for anyone else thinking of switching alliances.)
Semerari, a balding stick figure of a man, betrayed Pupetta and Umberto by writing a series of fake diagnoses that allowed Cutolo to escape a prison term, exactly as he once had done for Umberto. Had Cutolo been put away, his NCO would have more easily been kept from interfering with Pupetta and Umberto’s trajectory, which he undermined by sending his own clans to do work they were doing. Instead, thanks to Semerari, Cutolo served his term in a minimum-security psychiatric hospital from where he could—and easily did—run most aspects of the new criminal enterprise.
Visitors could come and go as they pleased, and Cutolo could have also easily walked out, given that it was a minimum security setting and he had furlough rights, but he chose instead to escape by blasting through one of the asylum’s unfortified brick walls a few months before his scheduled release date.
Cutolo’s NCO was in a bitter and bloody civil war with another new conglomerate of clans that had popped up to hold his group at bay. The Nuova Famiglia, or New Family, known as NF, was made up of some of the Camorra’s hardest fighters, and staunchly supported by a dear friend of Pupetta’s named Carmine Alfieri. Though he looked like a strict high school principal, Alfieri supported the old-style Camorra lawlessness—the physical threats and vendettas that neither Pupetta nor Umberto wanted to see replaced.
Nicknamed o ’Ntufato, “angry one,” Alfieri supported the NF and helped it join forces with a faction in Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, which gave it strategic regional power that included a large swath of southern Italy.[2] The NF was also supported by the Camorra’s powerful Casalesi clan, the most well-known outside of Italy, and which is still considered the strongest of the Neapolitan clans. Where Cutolo’s NCO was able to “employ” disgruntled youth and stragglers and build up an army of thugs who could fight, the NF focused on loftier membership, like luring in politicians and police who could ultimately protect its members and insulate its criminal pursuits.
The strength of Cutolo’s NCO came in part from another woman who flew under the radar because of her gender but who had outsized influence in the mafia, regardless. Cutolo’s sister, Rosetta, secretly ran many of the meetings among clansmen while her brother was in prison. It is believed that he gave her general guidelines but trusted her enough to let her know how to conduct business on his behalf.
Rosetta, whose nickname was Occh’egghiaccio, “Ice Eyes,” was clearly in control of her brother’s affairs during his multiple incarcerations, which started in the 1960s and continue today. While in prison he has fathered two children, including one through artificial insemination with fresh sperm sneaked out by his wife during a visit. Pupetta despised Rosetta as well, describing her to me as a whore and insinuating that she slept with her brother, which in crime circles is punishable by death.
The fact was that Rosetta was her brother’s most loyal supporter and his greatest critic, often chastising him for giving fiery speeches to journalists from his prison cell. Anti-mafia prosecutor Antonio Laudati was the first to prove that it was really Rosetta who was in charge. “Her brother has always been under the power of her forceful personality,” he told Clare Longrigg. “He’s been in prison for thirty years; during that time she became director of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata in her own right.”
For the first fifteen years that she was running her incarcerated brother’s business, she lived with her mother and took care of the family’s substantial rose garden, all the while taking messages from her delinquent brother to various clan members she hosted in her mother’s home. Her rise to power was in many ways aided by Pupetta, whose own trajectory, despite her being a woman, seemed unstoppable. Rosetta was the key negotiator with South American cocaine cartel leaders and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra—who, according to a turncoat who spoke to prosecutors, respected her cunning business acumen even as they refused to recognize her as anything but her brother’s mouthpiece. But the truth of the matter was that she was making key decisions and informing him of them, not the other way around. She was brilliantly depicted as the mastermind she was in the 1986 film about the NCO, Il Camorrista—a role no one has ever publicly denied.
She was under constant surveillance by police, even though her brother insisted she was not involved at all in the clan’s activities. The denial worked to some extent. But no amount of her brother’s dismissal of her involvement, even as she fronted drug negotiations and peace talks with rival clans, could prevent her from eventually landing in trouble with the law. She lived as a fugitive after authorities tried her in absentia and sentenced her to nine years in prison for mafia-related crimes (though acquitted her on nine murder charges) in the late 1980s. She was arrested while hiding out in a convent in 1993 and served six years of her sentence. She told authorities at the time that she was tired of being a fugitive. She now lives in her hometown but refused to be interviewed.
In 2002, the academic Felia Allum interviewed Alfonso Ferrara Rosanova, the pentito son of an NCO clan boss, and the subject of Rosetta came up. He told her that Rosetta was fiercely protected by her brother, which he said “by no means excludes the determination and skills she deployed in achieving the NCO’s goals.” [3] He also told Allum that she was “no subordinate or passive bystander, but fully involved in the clan’s activities and enabled it to survive while Raffaele was in prison.”
Allum adds: “Rosetta demonstrates the limits of power conceded to Camorra women during this stage because the clan relied on her but did not want her to be seen as being involved or visibly active.” In essence, Rosetta was the last of her kind of secret weapon before women became criminal protagonists in their own right.
The Cutolo siblings’ NCO quickly dominated the Neapolitan crimescape, at one time supporting an estimated seven thousand members and their families.[4] Unlike other syndicates that have clear lines of power, Camorra bosses rule only those who will listen to them, with clans composed of group members who recognize a particular boss’s leadership. It is the underbosses and smaller criminals who give power to the clan boss, but this dynamic also paves the way for lower-level criminals to change alliances and facilitates a lot of wasted time and loss of life as the lower-level criminals jockey for position.
