The Godmother, page 7
The Camorra’s looser structure also makes it easier for women to take a more central command because there is less of a line of succession, and harder to sidestep women with a high criminal acumen—especially if they are given a man’s blessing to take the helm.
Allum says that after the era in which Rosetta Cutolo reigned in secret, the Camorra’s structure eventually allowed women to become true protagonists “in their own right, either out of necessity or with criminal intent.”
The Camorra’s schizophrenic mentality and drifting allegiances eventually led to the demise of Cutolo’s NCO, which fizzled out after most of its top leaders went to prison or were killed off in assassinations. The NF, supported by Pupetta and her allies, admitted to more than five hundred murders during its bloody war with the NCO between 1981 and 1983. But the victory was short-lived, and the NF also faded away after internal battles among member clans. The final insult arrived when Pupetta’s dear friend Alfieri and other supporters eventually became pentiti.
Umberto and Pupetta were jointly convicted of Semerari’s murder, but not before Umberto escaped—first to Africa and then Peru—leaving Pupetta on her own to face justice and raise their twins. Pupetta tried to run, too, but she was arrested as she left her home dressed like a Roma nomad—and with around $2 million in her handbag. Where the money came from is debatable, but the fact that she had it implies access to funds beyond her income, which at the time was officially negligible. She spent four more years in prison until both she and Umberto were acquitted on appeal in 1982, which led him to testify against his former clan. She grew bitter toward Umberto as the years passed and used her power to convince her twins, then just entering their teens, to turn their backs on their father, too.
The fact that Umberto left Pupetta alone to face criminal charges was not entirely uncommon among criminal couples. Women regularly took the fall for their men through elaborate schemes that would keep their husbands out of jail. Before the 1990s, authorities often saw through that but had little faith that mafia wives or daughters had the intellect or courage to cooperate in such schemes of their own volition. So women were often given lighter sentences and a chance to testify against their husbands, though few ever did.
Yet, time and again, even today, male authors and mafia experts write that women cannot belong to the groups because they don’t take part in the traditional rituals of entry, even though they are demonstrably very much part of these groups, conducting business, running families, and acting as complicit confidantes to the most powerful bosses. The blindness of the mafia’s misogyny in failing to recognize the contributions of women strangely seems to give rise to an equal blindness in those tasked with making sense of the mafia’s rigidly codified history. And it is just that—history.
“Criminal organizations are changing,” mafia analyst Ernesto Savona of the Catholic University of Milan says, making them “more appealing” to women. “They’re producing less violence. They’re transforming the hierarchical organization into a more flexible one. That means you’ll get more women having managerial roles. We call them ‘sweet criminal organizations.’ ”
Savona’s point—that mafia organizations now rely on women because they need secretaries rather than killers—reveals that the blindness of misogyny runs deep. The derogatory take suggests that women are no more considered equals in cruelty than they are in intellect. That women who order heinous deaths and brutal maimings, and mastermind torture of unthinkable savagery are still considered “sweet” falls in line with the patriarchal nature of Italy, where sexism is accepted from the halls of power to the playgrounds. There are no exceptions. Pope Francis, an Argentinian born to Italian parents, who leads the second most influential organization in Italy after the mafia, made headlines when he invited female theologians to a conference not long after he was elected pope, only to call them the “cherries on the cake” when asked about their contributions. Silvio Berlusconi, well-known for his misogynist spectacles, once told an international conference that they should invest in Italy because of the “beautiful secretaries” and once asked the country’s minister of equal opportunity—a former topless model he appointed to the role—to marry him during a parliamentary session, seemingly forgetting he was already married. It’s often a maddening place to be female, knowing that many, many men truly do not believe you can do a job as well (or better) than they can.
Cerreti made clear to me just how well mafia women really do measure on the scale of brutality. Women, she explained, are far crueler than men when it comes to enacting vendettas, and their judgments seem to be less filtered through established criminal conventions. “Even when they have no direct role in a murder, it is often the woman who suggests that the children of someone who has betrayed the family be killed,” she says. They think about things differently, they know exactly what will hurt someone the most.
Roberto Saviano’s views of women are perhaps the most often quoted. “Apart from a few rare exceptions, the mafiosa exists only in relation to her man,” he told Vice in an interview in 2015. “Without him, she’s like an inanimate being—only half a person. That’s why mob wives appear so unkempt and disheveled when accompanying their men to court—it’s a cultivated look meant to underscore their fidelity.”
Saviano has also told the story of Immacolata Capone, a Camorra woman who rose through the ranks and was killed for it in 2004. He wrote recently that while the police “never discovered a motive for the murder,” he surmised that it had to have been because “the clans may not have appreciated her attempt to climb the ranks. Her fierce ambition may have frightened them, and given her business acumen, she might have even attempted to undertake a big deal on her own, independently of the Casalese family.” He goes on to applaud her for her strength, as if the characteristic was rare in a female. “The only thing we know for sure is that Capone had successfully navigated the pressures, limitations, and expectations put on women to leave her mark on mob history.”
There are few women with a stronger will to fight back than Maria Angela Di Trapani,[5] the forty-nine-year-old wife of Sicilian Mafia kingpin and serial beheader Salvatore “dagli occhi di ghiaccio” (Salvino eyes of ice) Madonia, who was arrested in Sicily in 2017. Maria Angela took over the organization when her husband was handed down consecutive life sentences. He died in prison in 2007 and was defiant until the end. While it took a few anti-mafia agents to apprehend him at the height of his notoriety, it took two hundred armed police, five special canine units, and several helicopters to make sure Maria Angela didn’t get away. It was soon all too clear that while her husband was in jail and with longtime boss of bosses Totò Riina freshly in his grave, she was in charge of reorganizing the entire Sicilian Cosa Nostra. The court documents read something like a Godfather screenplay, with several witnesses saying “she acts like a real man,” and that her punishments of errant foot soldiers and foes alike were far more vicious than those doled out by most of her male criminal peers.
Women can be charged under Italy’s Article 41-bis law, as Trapani was, which allows strict sentences for “mafia association” unless the accused become pentiti, or as Ceretti prefers to call them, collaborators of justice because “they are rarely penitent.” The state recognizes them as mafia members even if their own mafia organizations do not. And while many women have unarguable power, they still cannot come into that power without a man allowing them to do so.
When I put the question about equality to Pupetta, she was coy. “Women most certainly know their roles and how to best work the system,” she said. Pupetta was more succinct about those who betray her or the system she was so much a part of. She kept what she described as a “detailed diary” of the events of her life, written in dialect. It contains a long list of those who betrayed her. “Not a hit list,” she told me when I asked, though every deed for which she is publicly known was built on avenging betrayals.
To say I was worried that she would see my telling of her story as a betrayal is an understatement. I was in France with a friend the day she died, spending a relaxing New Year’s weekend exploring the Loire Valley. Suddenly my phone blew up with messages, calls, emails. “Pupetta is dead,” most said, sending me Italian news links. Claire Longrigg called me for an interview for a story she was writing. She was the first English-speaking journalist to interview Pupetta. I was the last. To say I didn’t feel a sense of relief about her death would be a lie. I felt at once appreciative that I had the opportunity to get to know this woman and sad that she had died, but overwhelmingly I was relieved that Lady Camorra couldn’t come after me.
Cristina Pinto, a curly-haired Neapolitan brunette whose teeth have been worn thin at the roots by years of chain-smoking, perfectly affects her nickname, Nikita, after the assassin in Luc Besson’s 1990 film La Femme Nikita. Pinto served twenty-three years of a thirty-year sentence for crimes she doesn’t exactly deny committing as the head of a female motorcycle gang that acted as bodyguards to a powerful Camorra boss named Mario Perrella. By having women lead his trained assassins, Perrella often escaped capture because authorities didn’t suspect they were protecting him. And because the women were not thought to be in charge, they often escaped prosecution if they were found lying for him or hiding him. Nikita tells of essentially interviewing for the job. “The competition was fierce among the women, one as tough as the next, we were all trying to outdo each other, to be the worst,” she said. “I gave it my best and he chose me.”
Nikita was trained as a sharpshooter at the age of seventeen. Later, she and her fellow bodyguards underwent brutal training in what amounted to a boot camp where each was taught a special skill, from weapons assembly to car mechanics. Her childhood had been difficult; her father beat her and police records suggest she was sexually assaulted by several family members. Now, at the age of forty-nine, she works on a fishing boat in the town of Pozzuoli, a few miles north of Naples. Pozzuoli, home to Italy’s primary women’s prison now that Poggioreale’s female-only section is closed, is a rough town by any standard of measure, and its prison a crime school every bit as successful in turning out seasoned criminals as its predecessor. It is the gateway to the Via Domitiana, a stretch of Camorra-controlled highway where thousands of Nigerian migrant women have been trafficked for sex by factions of the Nigerian mafia[6] and the Camorra for years.
The area where Nikita feels most at home is the Campi Flegrei, or Phlegraean Fields, also called the burning fields. It is one of the largest supervolcanoes in the world, which periodically rumbles, causing the rise and fall of the terrain. Buildings have deep vertical fissures from the earth’s moving crust, and the main square has a sunken garden with pillars that are marked by stains from the rising soil and sea level over the centuries. Nikita dismisses the danger of living in a place that could erupt with little notice as nothing short of symbolic. She shows me scars on the sunken walls of the port where the water level has left its mark and I can’t help but think she sees herself in the same way: scarred, strong, and a survivor.
Nikita does not give interviews after what she calls “bad press” from a TV movie in 2018 that painted her as a lesbian tomboy and launched her to a cult-like notoriety. “I dissociated myself in order to start my life again,” she says when I try to prompt her to reflect on her violent youth. “I do not think with hindsight; it is useless to wonder if today I would do things differently.”
But she will engage in conversations if you help with the fishing nets.
Her hands are rough and calloused from the fishing work, and her auburn curls are badly dyed and tied back with a pink scrunchie like you’d see on a child. She says fishing keeps her out of jail, though police records show that her boat is often stopped and searched by police looking for contraband.
She was arrested in 1992 on her way into hiding with her three-year-old daughter, a child who resulted from a secret affair with a clansman. After a hit ordered by Perrella went terribly wrong, the crime boss was arrested and decided to collaborate with authorities. He subsequently threw Nikita and the other women under the bus, telling investigators that while, yes, he had paid them to carry out the murder, Nikita could have refused but instead led her gang of women into battle.
The second condition of my conversation with Nikita, in which I was neither allowed nor able to take notes due to the untangling of the slimy nets, was that I not discuss Perrella, of whom she seemed oddly protective. It seems perhaps counterintuitive for a journalist to agree on allowable topics in an interview, but it is often easier to go deeper on the subjects that remain in play if you agree to the boundaries. I have met so many criminals who, despite their lives being part of extensive dossiers and court cases, are hyperprotective of their privacy. Part of it is undoubtedly a desperate desire for control over lives spun out of control; but I always feel that the bigger issue is an attempt to control or even rewrite the narrative. Mixing and mingling with liars and villains hardens one to what the real truth is.
But almost every lie I’ve been told as part of my crime reporting contains some truth. Nikita is perhaps one of the most skilled interviewees I have ever spoken with. She presents as paranoid, but she is actually in total control of the conversation at all times. She has what seem to be rehearsed movements, a flip of her super curly hair and the raising of one eyebrow don’t strike me as entirely spontaneous. I wondered even if they are signals of some sort. At one point as we were at work on the dock, I was convinced someone was watching us, and she was sending them signals with her movements. Other fishermen seemed to ignore her intentionally—perhaps too much so.
Without taking notes, it is hard to quote Nikita directly from our day at the dock. She discussed being part of the motorcycle gang as a decoy for police who would have thought they were just a female riding club, telling me they were among the few who wore helmets on Italian roads before a helmet law came into effect in 1999. They did it not for their safety but so they couldn’t be identified. They were also all trained by a skilled assassin who would berate them if they couldn’t shoot and hit the bull’seye painted onto posters of anti-mafia judges. But one thing she said is forever emblazoned into my mind. “Don’t for a minute mistake women who fear they will be killed for a simple misstep as weak,” she told me. “There is no way someone outside this world would ever understand the courage it takes to stay.” It was the first time I had heard it put that way. Usually people who have left organized crime groups talk about the courage to leave.
I first met Nikita at an International Investigative Journalism conference in 2016 when she was a keynote speaker around a docudrama that featured her unusual life. She told the audience about how she was inducted into Perrella’s “family” by being handed a .38 caliber pistol when she was just twenty-two. She clarified that the two were never lovers, as had been rumored for years. “I liked his way of doing things,” she said. “When he talked about the Camorra his eyes lit up.”
He also saw something in her and hired her immediately, she said. “I was already known in the criminal circles, there was no ceremony for the oath, those are things that the ’Ndrangheta does not the Camorra,” she said. “Mario put that .38 caliber and 500,000 lire in my hand, which in a few days became one million a week.”
She was mesmerizing as she spoke about her choice to join this elite band of killers as if she were discussing becoming the CEO of a business. She was less convincing when she described her decision to change her life. Ultimately, after hemming and hawing about what drove her decision to leave the Camorra when she got out of prison, she first said it was for her daughter, who was just three when she was placed into custody. Then she expressed her disappointment in the group. “The Camorra isn’t like it used to be,” she said. “They were all very different than what I was expecting. I was hoping there would be a complicity, a higher form of friendship, even loyalty. I was expecting too much from them, so I had to leave.”
She says she left the Camorra without having to collaborate with anti-mafia prosecutors. She says, “fortunately they let me go,” and held no grudge or remorse. “None of my family have had to suffer extortion or pay a price for me leaving,” she said, which is wholly incredible given the long history of those who could only leave organized crime groups in a coffin. It’s hard not to think she might still have one foot in the clubhouse, but I dared not ask her directly.
Covering crime often means developing a somewhat skewed view of good and evil. In the case of someone like Nikita—whose rap sheet includes arms procurement, kidnapping, and organizing more than a dozen murders, including the death of an eleven-year-old boy—those of us in the audience when she spoke at the journalism festival couldn’t help but be starstruck. The first time I felt this sensation of being totally mesmerized by listening to the confessions of a very bad person was early on in my career when I covered the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, who was repeatedly raped by her father, Josef, who kept her in a dungeon. Her father eventually confessed to rape, slavery, and murdering one of the eight children he fathered in the twenty-four years he kept his daughter captive. As his confession played out in the courtroom in Sankt Poelten, Austria, many people held their hands over their ears or covered their faces. The crime journalists in the room instead could not get enough of the details.
Covering crime is never about the actual assault, murder, or beating—it is about the psyche behind these transgressive acts. People like Fritzl and Nikita offer a window into the mind of such a sick person, a view that helps unravel the story and makes us better storytellers, though it is arguable that we who do this for a living are in some way scarred by it.
