The Godmother, page 8
Nikita’s talk was haunting in the way she normalized such blatant criminality, and her conversation on the pier with me was candid, though I dare not believe it was totally honest. She described her life as Perrella’s armed guard, in charge of both guarding him physically but also in arranging the logistical details behind attacks he carried out. “I had my own group, we were four,” she said. “Everyone was dealing with a specific thing: drugs, weapons, settling of scores.”
Perrella inspired Nikita by telling her he wanted to read about her work in the newspapers, which served to push her to make him proud. “When I shot, I felt even more powerful than I wanted to feel,” she explained. “We were trained, like soldiers, when you are in the Camorra you change everything about you: the way you speak, move, behave.”
By the end of her talk, she had come around to understand how badly she had been misled. “When you are part of a criminal group, you have the feeling of being stronger and stronger, but you don’t realize that that power is never yours,” she said. But despite admitting fully her involvement in the Camorra and its various crimes, she fervently denies ever being a boss or even in charge of the other militant guards, insisting that the idea of female mafiosi is a joke. She says women who were given “temporary power” when their husbands or brothers went to jail squandered the opportunity to be true leaders. “They are like children,” she says. “Untrained and undisciplined.”
I asked Nikita about Pupetta, to which she said simply, “That was a brave woman. She did a man’s job.”
Though they almost always deny having attained power, these women’s drive to reach the upper echelon of criminal syndicates is clear. I often think back to my Italian friend who advised me that the only way to combat the sexism was to ignore it or harness it, that by flying under the radar one could make much more ground.
An anti-mafia investigator in Naples told me the best example he had seen of a mafia woman’s relentless ambition to succeed was the story of Teresa De Luca Bossa,[7] who is serving multiple sentences for the activities she signed off on as a Camorra clan boss.
Teresa came to power after her brother, a Camorra boss, was imprisoned. Teresa’s time at the helm was fruitful for the clan. She was able to bury the hatchet with a rival clan and carry out lucrative deals for the group, which won her accolades, expanding her clan to become one of the Camorra’s most powerful.
After a brief stint in jail during which she made valuable contacts, Teresa escaped and hid out with ’Ndrangheta friends in Calabria, giving orders to her clan from there even as police started closing in. She was arrested in 2010 in the swimming pool of a luxury glamping spot in southern Campania near the ancient ruins of Paestum. The undercover police were dressed in bikinis and Speedos and posed as tourists.
Teresa was the first woman to be sentenced under the Article 41-bis legislation for mafia crimes, meaning even the investigators recognized her power, in stark contrast to historical cases when they thought women couldn’t possibly have climbed the criminal ladder. Three years later, Teresa’s daughter, Anna, who had filled the power vacuum after her mother’s arrest, survived an assassination attempt after a hit man pumped seven bullets into her pelvis and thighs. Anna’s oldest son had been murdered by a rival gang and Anna had intended to carry out the vendetta personally—Pupetta style. She was even caught on a wiretap invoking Pupetta’s name, and ultimately lived up to the example of the woman who inspired her. After Anna’s wounds healed, she was sentenced to life in prison for her role in the double homicide of two rival clansmen who killed her son, which she is believed to have ordered from her hospital bed.
Teresa and Anna both denied true clan involvement and have courted the press incessantly, giving prison interviews that cite the fact that since women cannot be inducted into the criminal group, the prosecutors exhibited unfairness in trying them for mafia-affiliation crimes. If they aren’t allowed to be officially part of the mafia, how can they be charged as mafia women?
Pupetta dismissed and confirmed her own involvement at the same time. She kept a scrapbook of yellowed newspaper clippings about the crimes she and those close to her committed. She had hundreds about her trial for the murder of Antonio Esposito, the man who ordered the hit on her husband when they were newlyweds—and whom she readily admitted killing when she was just eighteen years old and pregnant. “People used to send these to me,” she told me of the clippings as she leafed through them. “I don’t know why I keep them,” she then said, smiling, making it clear why she did.
A moment later she lit a cigarette and adamantly denied details of her life as reported in the thousands of press accounts written about her. She ranted about how journalists have wronged her over the years, even though she has been one of the most accessible “falsely imprisoned” women in Italy. She admitted to murdering Esposito but remained defiant about her prison sentence. “I should have never served a day in jail for that after he destroyed my family,” she said, appearing to forget, at least for a moment, that she had remained with the father of her other children long after he was thought to have killed the son she had with Pasqualone.
The fact remains that Pupetta was an attention seeker. She has appeared in films, called into radio and television programs, and in her younger days even held press conferences when local reporters got it “wrong” about her family members or when her rivals were given a pass. And as she sat with me during my earliest visits, I couldn’t help wonder what she hoped to get out of it.
“Americans haven’t written much about me,” she told me. “They might be interested.” In fact, news of her death was reported all over the world. “Lady Camorra,” the “first female crime boss,” was dead. Some stories wildly exaggerated her power and influence, but I know she would have loved it, carefully clipping and placing each article about her in her scrapbook.
4
Sex and Honor
Pupetta once described sex appeal and the use of blatant flirtation as a sort of flammable oil that makes tricky situations go smoother, but that can ultimately blow up and turn deadly.
While the riddling of Antonio Esposito with twenty-nine bullets in a public space was a horrific crime, there was something terribly sexy about Pupetta’s act of vengeance. It wasn’t so much the love and devotion to Pasqualone that drove her to carry out the vendetta that people—especially Umberto—admired. It was that she had the balls to do it at a time when women were seen as weak and incapable. The female yearning for equality and sexual freedom that was bubbling under the surface in the United States at the time never fully reached Italy, and certainly in the 1950s, a woman carrying out such a brazen murder as Pupetta did—while pregnant—was seen as astonishing. It was also inspiring to many younger women who were watching their peers elsewhere in the world escape the miseries inflicted on them by abusive men, and who wished they, too, had what it took to carry out such an act, especially against men who were abusing them.
At the time Pupetta committed her first murder, men in Italy were permitted by law to carry out honor killings if their wife betrayed them. It wouldn’t be until the 1990s that murder inspired by a raptus—the Latin word for “seized,” often referring to jealousy caused by the woman’s blatant action—was outlawed. Rarely is a man’s lack of control over his feelings of ownership of a woman mentioned. Even in 2021, femicide in Italy is rampant, with one woman murdered by a man she had previously loved every three days. In December 2020, a seventy-year-old man was absolved from murdering his sixty-two-year-old wife, who was a high school teacher in the northern town of Brescia. The judge ruled that he had suffered a delirio di gelosia, “delirium of jealousy,” over her young male students. The judge felt he was mentally incapacitated by his jealous rage and thus forgiven for taking his wife’s life. According to court documents, he first knocked her out cold with a rolling pin and then slit her throat.
Rarely do women take their own form of revenge, and when they do, they are described as hysterical. Pupetta was ahead of her time in many ways, acting as few women have felt empowered to do until recently. There are those exceptions, like Nikita whose fearlessness was admirable, but it has taken women in crime circles a long time to even reach the glass ceiling.
The Italian director Francesco Rosi saw the artistic potential of Pupetta’s strength—albeit admittedly misguided by the standards of civilized society. He memorialized her story in his late 1950s film La Sfida, which roughly translates to The Challenge. The role of Pupetta was played by the siren of the moment, Rosanna Schiaffino, a cover model who went on to make forty-five largely forgettable movies. The film won the Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1958, around the time Pupetta’s infamy was reaching its peak. Even the movie poster shows the actress playing Pupetta in a sort of Anita Ekberg–esque pout. It was a risky attempt to glamorize Pupetta’s brazen act of violence, and it worked. It also underscores just how normalized the mafia has long been in Italy.
Unlike popular American shows like The Sopranos and even the Godfather trilogy, which glamorized the mob as a fictional set of characters, in Italy the characters are real people you might pass at a grocery store or stand next to at a coffee bar. Even in Pupetta’s betrayal, she seemed like the woman next door, because for many she was.
Italians largely view the mafia and the malavita, “dishonest lifestyle,” it produces as just another facet of the culture. They have learned to coexist with it rather than see it as a faction of Italian life that has nothing to do with them. It is no stretch to say that every single Italian has in some way rubbed shoulders with someone involved in organized crime, whether knowingly or not. When the stepson of a well-known mobster from the local Roman mob was accepted to my sons’ private international school, everyone whispered behind his back and, more tellingly, recalled the various other mobster children who had attended the school in the past, including one whose father was on trial for murder in Sicily during the boy’s senior year. Rather than using it as a teaching tool, the administration reportedly made sure no one talked about it or brought newspapers to school to avoid embarrassing him.
The success of the film gave Pupetta the acting bug and she endeavored to audition for screen roles. For a time, she dreamed of being a film star of the caliber of Sophia Loren. Born Sofia Villani Scicolone in Rome before adopting the stage name Sophia Loren, the Italian starlet is the same age as Pupetta and moved to Pozzuoli, where the women’s crime school prison is now located, outside of Naples as an infant, after her father refused to marry her mother.
Pupetta would never find acting success, and certainly not on the scale of the legendary Loren, even though she later sang a song she wrote in prison in a cameo appearance in the largely unsuccessful 1967 film Delitto a Posillipo and tried her hand acting in a couple of other disastrous productions. Her film career was short-lived, and after a few bad reviews that never quite managed to separate her appeal from her criminal past, she gave it up.
“It was fun, but it wasn’t real life,” she said of that time. She pulled out another scrapbook and paged through the many newspaper reviews of La Sfida and other articles praising her for what was described by some as an extraordinary singing talent and by others as a dismal attempt to exploit her criminal reputation.
There is a tragic insecurity that many faded beauties share, and Pupetta furrowed her painted-on eyebrows at the memory of how truly great she felt her life once was. She never shied away from bragging about her popularity among young mafiosi, either. “I had so many different men trying to visit me at one time, I had to make bookings,” she said. “Imagine that!”
Years later, in 1982, Pupetta seemed to have given up her criminal streak, save a murder conviction for the offing of the shady shrink and an investigation into another murder involving a rival clansman for which she was eventually cleared. Still, interest in her story remained strong and the late dictator Benito Mussolini’s then-nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Alessandra (who was herself a far-right member of the European Parliament until 2019, when she resigned after her husband was accused of being a patron to underage prostitutes in Rome) played Pupetta in a controversial made-for-TV film called Il Caso Pupetta Maresca, or The Case of Pupetta Maresca. The small-screen flick angered Pupetta, and she fought bitterly—and successfully—to stop it from airing, in part because she didn’t want to be played by a Mussolini, which she argued in court was “an affront to her honor.”
With Pupetta’s legal battles exhausted and the statutes of limitation running out, the film was set to air in 1994 on Italy’s state broadcaster RAI. Pupetta again dispatched her curiously abundant lawyers on the producers. This time she was joined by Alessandra Mussolini herself, who had by then launched her political career and didn’t want a film in which she played a notorious mafiosa to damage her hard-fought reputation. At the time, Mussolini—whose aunt is none other than Sophia Loren—was having a hard enough time trying to navigate a scandal tied to the August 1983 edition of Italian Playboy magazine, in which she had posed nude for the cover and centerfold. Such was the place Pupetta inhabited in the Italian public’s imagination that the politician worried her portrayal of the mafia woman twelve years earlier would give her political enemies more ammunition to use against her than would the publication of her nude photos, a more egregious affront to public morality in the 1990s than it might be considered today.
In 2013, another made-for-TV film garnered an entirely different reception. Pupetta: The Courage and the Passion was released without incident, and Pupetta even cooperated with the publicity, posing on the film set with Manuela Arcuri, the tall, thin actress who portrayed her murdering Antonio Esposito.[1] “Think about what I went through then, that I really shot, what I thought at that moment, the blind terror, my trembling hands, I was hidden behind the car. I was sure they would kill me,” Pupetta said in an interview tied to the release. “Manuela found my spirit, she embodied the passion of that moment in my life perfectly.”
What Pupetta undoubtedly liked most about Manuela’s portrayal of her was the starlet’s raw sex appeal, which she wielded like a weapon. Pupetta once described sex appeal and the use of blatant flirtation as a sort of flammable oil that makes tricky situations go more smoothly, but that can ultimately blow up and turn deadly. When Pupetta died, Arcuri drew scorn for honoring her in an Instagram post that was later removed, in which she called Pupetta a “courageous, strong, fearless woman” who “acted impetuously” and sometimes “made mistakes.”
In the 1950s and ’60s, there was no sexual revolution in Italy. Instead, the Catholic Church was clamping down on sex outside of marriage even as women in the rest of the world were burning bras, popping birth control pills, and exploring their sexuality. In Italy, the pill was introduced in the late 1960s, but pharmacies were not authorized to sell it. Abortion became legal in 1978, but many hospitals and doctors affiliated with the Vatican still refuse to perform the procedure. As a result, sex in Italy for Pupetta’s generation came only with the promise of marriage. She insisted she had never had a one-night stand or slept with anyone she did not truly and wholly love at the time. “It’s wrong to do that,” she said. “Young women today just give their pussies away for free, without thought to the power they can have.”
The absurd sexual morality in mafia organizations has always been tied to the sense of religious devotion to which many of the most notorious criminals faithfully adhere. Sigmund Freud’s Madonna-whore complex perfectly captures how this attitude translates into the mafia’s treatment of women—women are thought of only as holy Madonna figures or sluts, never both and nothing in between. Mafia experts often describe top bosses as pious, having “conservative sex” with their wives as a form of respect, saving the more adventurous interludes for their lovers or prostitutes (even as it is also often said that a real mafioso will never have to spend a penny for sex), a description shared by journalist Girolamo Lo Verso, who parsed the Sicilian mafia mentality in his 2017 book The Mafia Psychopathology.
The Sicilian proverb “Cummannari è meglio di futtiri” (Commanding is better than fucking) is a long-held adage, according to Lo Verso, who says that the risk that an emotional attachment could lead to compromise or weakness is far too great to allow long-running extramarital affairs. “Sexuality in this world is generally limited to fleeting sexual relations with wives and the company of women of loose morals as an external show of virility,” he says.[2] “The mafioso must respect his wife—who is fundamentally sexually repressed—which means that he must have no other public relationships. This means that the power over life and death held by Cosa Nostra is more important than erotic-affective relationships.”
Like so many other Italianisms that seep from normal society into the underworld, infidelity is hard to avoid. The popular saying “non c’è due senza tre” (in two there are always three)—said with a wink—implies that all enduring coupledoms survive only because of lovers who keep them from getting bored with their spouses. Across all the syndicates, women take lovers, too—though at a much greater risk than their husbands.
In 2016, a Cosa Nostra kingpin named Mariano Marchese ordered the brutal beating to death of an unfaithful mafia wife whose much-older husband had just gone to prison for life for the usual crimes of murder, coersion, and collusion. Police intercepted a number of phone calls between the seventy-six-year-old cuckolded husband and Marchese and his associates as they hashed out what they should do to his much-younger wife after discovering she had taken up with a local barista who had nothing to do with the crime syndicate but who would have clearly known who she was married to. “She is showing a lack of respect to all of us,” Marchese was heard telling those he tasked with her murder on a wiretap that was released to the press by investigators. “It’s a question of respect for our dignity.”
