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The Women in the Mafia and Organized Crime Their primary role is to indoctrinate this way of life into their children, their teach, their children wrong from right that you don't turn the other cheek, you slap the other cheek.

♪♪ Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe' Welcome to To the Contrary, A discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

This week, if you thought the Mafia was a quintessential boys club, well, think again.

Our woman thought leader this week is Barbie Latza Nadeau, an investigative journalist who wrote Godmother, Murder, Vengeance and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women.

Welcome to the program, Barbie.

How are you?

Thank you.

Thank you for having.

I'm great.

Happy to have you.

So let's jump right into it.

Tell us why you wrote this book.

Why were you drawn to this topic at this time?

And is it just recently we saw Queen of the South which is about a Central American drug queen running a cartel, and also House of Gucci, which is about a woman who engages in Mafia like techniques.

Is there an outpouring of interest in this topic right now?

Well, I think more than an outpouring in an interest.

I think that it's just time to discuss women as bad people.

You know, it's time to give them their due.

And when I first started researching this book, I was determined I was going to write it about the good women, about the women who had turned against the Mafia, who had testified against it, and who had been really instrumental in sort of getting arrests and things like that.

But the bad women were so much more interesting, and I felt that they really underscored what the Mafia is really like today.

So I focus on them.

You look at women's involvement by looking at women who kind of led some of the gangs.

The first one you profiled is quite a character.

When you meet her, she's a senescent grandmother.

But she at the age of 18, she went and pregnant.

She went and killed the guy who killed her husband, who was a mafia don.

That's right.

You know, she was really the first women in the woman in the history of the Italian organized crime syndicates and the mafia who carried out a vendetta on her own.

And she was 18 years old.

She was in she was six months pregnant.

And someone had just killed her husband, who was an up and coming mafia don in the Neapolitan Camorra.

And when I talked to her and she said this in court, too, when she was convicted of the murder, where she gave birth to her child, she said that she did it not because she felt necessarily that she had to you know, she wanted to kill the man who killed her husband, but she didn't want to become the, quote unquote, trophy wife, because if someone else would have carried out that vendetta on behalf of the of the clan, she would have been the prize.

She would have gone to automatically the person who carried out the vendetta.

And she said, I didn't want to be that.

I wanted to do it myself.

I wanted to write my own narrative.

I wanted to be in control of my future.

And so she took it at 18, very young.

It took it into her own hands and pumped 29 bullets into the man who ordered the murder of her husband.

She had a son and then she had twin sons.

Did you ask her as a as a woman, as a giver of life, what it felt like to take life?

How do they how do they deal with that dichotomy?

When you talk to criminals in this, not just the mafia, when you talk to other people who committed murders.

There seems to be this strange justification why they do it.

And certainly in this case, she said, I killed for love.

Now, she was also accused of two other murders which were not for love.

We can get into that a little bit later.

Those were revenge and things like that.

But she felt that she had to do it and I think when you grow up in organized crime syndicate, her father was a it was a gangster as well.

You learn wrong from right.

You are taught like we are the right way to do things, a legal way to do things.

You're taught about revenge, you're taught about vendetta.

You're taught about loyalty.

And you're taught about unforgiveness.

And I think that that's just something is very hard for that, for us to understand if we didn't grow up in that.

But when you talk to Mafia women, they all share the same idea that wrong is right and that that's what drives them forward.

That iand survival.

What is it that confines them to this life?

I mean, is it basically lack of education?

They have nowhere else to go.

Well, it's more lack of alternative.

I mean, you can leave an organized crime syndicate in a police car away, which means you've you've you've gone against your family or you leave in a coffin because it means you were going to leave and they kill you.

There just aren't alternatives.

Now, if you think of someone like Maresca, the woman who killed her husband's killer, had she gone out into the legitimate world, what is her resume say?

Three murders, some money laundering.

You know, some other aspects of her life.

They're not exactly hirable outside of the criminal world, because if you grow up in a crime family, you're part of a crime family.

You're complicit even your last name alone is enough to get people to always associate you with that.

But they can't leave.

That's more of the thing.

They can't leave.

If they leave, they have to go to police, have to convince police that they're not just there to set a trap.

They have to every four years under witness protection, their case is studied again just to make sure that they're you know, they're still on the side of the law.

And it's very difficult and it's difficult for prosecutors to keep women and men, especially women, to be collaborators with the law.

Well, they can't leave if they stay in Italy, that's for sure.

Could they go to Central America somewhere and start a new life?

Was that ever an option for any of them?

It's not an option because all of Italy's crime syndicates, especially the (inaudible) the Cosa Nostra, have infiltrated so many other countries.

So they wouldn't be safe anywhere.

They could possibly, if they had police protection, be placed in another country.

We've seen big mafia turncoats, even in the United States where they're, you know, given witness protection and the Italian government pays for their protection.

But it's rare that they could do it on their own.

They would be found.

And every single woman who's a turncoat, every single one is testifying against her family, risks being found and killed mercilessly.

How about you?

What was the danger to you in researching particularly in person, researching, Not just looking through articles in a library somewhere, but meeting with people like her.

Was your life in danger?

I don't think so.

Of course I'm naive in some sense, I think.

No, no, I'm fine.

I'll be fine.

I made very sure that I only researched and wrote about people who had been convicted of crimes and who had criminal dossiers, who were part of witness protection.

And I did that because Roberto Saviano, a very famous Italian journalist who wrote Gomorrah in his book, which landed him a life sentence by the Camorra.

And he lives under police protection.

He name names.

He made accusations against people who the law hadn't found yet.

So I made a conscious decision to only report and try to seek out people who were already on a criminal dossier somewhere.

And I think that that definitely kept me probably safer.

I my previous book was about Nigerian gangs involved with the Camorra and sex trafficking of Nigerian women.

And that was more dangerous because I was potentially robbing them of their of their chief moneymaking scheme and my tires were slashed and my motorcycle was cut up and things like that.

So I was in more danger than this one, I think.

I felt that the women talked to me because they wanted people to understand their stories.

So I don't feel knock on wood, I don't feel that there's any threat against.

You did talk to two younger women, though, who you know, you had to walk out on a roof and cross like a cargo bin that had made it into a bridge roof from one house to another.

And and you talk to these two young women, and presumably they were still going to have to spend their life as drug runners and low level mules for various mock mafia functions.

They weren't afraid to talk to you.

They were interesting women because I met them through an organization that was helping them get on their feet after they got out of prison.

And the organization said, No, you can talk to these women.

We'll you know, they have all of them are back in prison for drug offenses now.

So they didn't make it on the clean side very long.

You know, I think it would be impossible to go up to someone who you think might be involved in the Mafia and ask a couple of questions.

You have to go through the various channels, whether it's the lawyers, whether it's the the groups that sort of help try to help people who've been convicted of these crimes.

You know, I wondered at the time why these women were willing to talk to me.

And then at the end of the day, they just wanted to be understood, because I think a lot of people think that we Americans especially glamorize the Mafia, that everyone's a Carmela Soprano.

And I think that there is this this understanding that people who are involved in organized crime are there because they don't have a choice.

But also they sort of feel like there's some kind of Robin Hood aspect that they're taking, filling the gap with the government, especially in Italy, where the government follows every year and a half or so that they're filling in the gap, they're giving the loans, they're helping the people there is that it's a kind of strange sense, like you don't understand the Mafia because you think that we're all bad, but we're not.

We do good for the people.

All right, let's go back temporarily to your protagonist, Papetta who became known as Lady Camorra, the region, the gang, the Mafia Club that she ran.

She was sent to prison for 15 years, as I recall, for the murder of her husband's assassin.

And she went to this place called (inaudible), really, which was a women's prison, one of the few at the time.

What was thatl like?

You know, she described the prison in almost romantic terms at a certain point because she was sort of the she lorded over, ladied over all of the other prisoners because she had committed a crime that only men commit.

And so and she'd had her baby in prison at the time.

You could give birth and keep the baby in your cell till they were four years old.

And her the child she'd had with the man, the husband, her husband who was murdered, stayed with her.

And she had all these other inmates changing the diapers, taking them to play, walking him, all these sorts of things.

She was sort of the queen inside, too, and she made friends inside.

And one of the friends she made inside introduced you to the man she would eventually have twins with.

And that is the man who has largely thought to be the person who killed her first son, who disappeared on his 18th birthday because he would have been the spawn of another rival clans then, even though he was dead.

And I always found it an interesting sacrifice that Perpetua made to continue with a man she knows kills her first son.

The loyalty to the organized crime syndicate was greater than the loyalty to her own blood.

She avenges the murder of her husband, but she sleeps with the murder of her son.

I mean, it is impossible for a normal human being to understand that equation.

But tell me more about the women's prison.

And she did have birth in jail.

It sounded like a really disgusting, totally filthy environment.

How did she make it through birth in a place like that?

It was a terrible place.

People in Chilean prisons, even today, are horrific places where they don't have a lunch service.

You know, you have a family bring in all your food for you and they bring in your clothing and they, you know, they can take care of you.

It's really a family based.

But she described I mean, the prison still exists as a male prison and it's overcrowded.

And there are dungeons and there are torture rooms and there's very little light in the sewage is bad.

And she described the smell of, you know, vomit and urine and and as that the permeating background of her child's upbringing.

The other thing I thought about when I was reading this was this kid stayed in utter darkness, essentially, till he was four years old.

How good is that for a child's psychological development?

Well, there's something about the Italian culture that believes as a mother is the one who has to take care of the child.

That's why a lot of women don't work for the first time (Bonnie) in most cultures.

Yeah, right.

Exactly.

And especially in the Italian culture, women are expected to be the mother before they are to be a career woman or anything like that.

And so I think the culture just dictates that she had to take care of the child.

She's the one that has risen.

There was really no one else until he was four.

And then they took him out of the prison cell.

But of course, it couldn't have been good for him.

But nobody died.

He disappeared off the face of the earth on his 18th birthday.

His body was never found.

Undoubtedly, it's buried beneath the pillar of a of the ring road that was being built around Naples at the time, which is where he was when he disappeared.

Last seen.

You know, she people who people for whom criminality is their way of life don't know better.

They don't know.

They don't know.

Right from wrong.

They know wrong from right.

They know exactly how they're taught things are supposed to be.

And so she just assumed she would raise her child in prison because people she knew had done so around her and people after her did the same thing.

I just find it really interesting how women in the criminal world, women who kill, women who launder money, women who torture, women who order murders or do drug dealing and things like that, how they square it with themselves and their children, the women in the Mafia and organized crime.

Their primary role is to indoctrinate this way of life into their children, their teach, their children wrong from right that you don't turn the other cheek, you slap the other cheek.

These are the sorts of things that their responsibility is.

And so how do they know what we believe is right?

They don't.

And so I think showing them as human beings is is the sort of idea in the book is that they're there, they have no other choice, but they're human beings making decisions that they think are the right and the best for their families, that we can judge and say, absolutely, that's the wrong way to do it.

But they don't know.

To me in the book, she didn't come off as very intelligent.

Now, maybe it was just because she was totally uneducated.

But were you able to tease out which one it was?

I think that she was manipulative and wanted to she wanted to control the narrative being written about her.

Now, she kept saying to me, Make sure you write, tell the Americans this, write this down.

Make sure the Americans know this, all these sorts of things.

It was like the (Bonnie: Only Americans?.

Well, because the Italians have written about her before.

You know, they have she's she's as movies have been made about her in Italy.

She's not widely known outside of the Italian mafia culture, let's say.

But she was such an egomaniac and she was such a liar.

She would tell me things and I would go look them up in the criminal file or in an article that was written blatantly.

And I would go back to her and I would say, last time you told me this, and she would say, Ah, I was testing you, or she would say, Oh, and I don't remember that.

But she wanted to have complete control over how I perceived her.

And knowing that it became a sort of game between us.

You know, she had scrapbooks of the of the news articles written about the murders that she was accused of.

She had an ego like nobody.

And when she died in December of last year, she was the first woman prohibited involved in organized crime, prohibited from having a public funeral.

And I think she would have loved that.

I think it would have been like, yes, of course, of course I was that bad.

I think she would have been so happy that that she had that honor, let's say, of of being prohibited a public funeral.

Many years ago, probably 20 or more years ago, I was researching a story on why Italy with the Vatican had one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

And I found out the answer to that was that at that point, Italian women were having like 1.2 children.

And the reason was they as a group anyway, they are highly educated.

They have the highest or had the highest percentage of PhDs in the world.

And what you find is the more educated women become, the fewer kids they have because they want children, but they don't want a lot of children who are going to tie them down and make them doing anything with their own lives impossible.

You know, I was thinking about that as I read about these women consigned to drug running and prostitution and and all and murder and violence.

What is it about Italy that it can be a place for the most the highest concentration of educated women in the world, and then also the women of the mafia who are who are basically kept to even, you know, more like mushrooms than the men are.

These are two different Italy's, you know, the legal society in Italy and the illegal society in Italy are two very different worlds.

And they exist not in spite of each other, but because of each other, I guess.

I mean, the women in the legal society in many ways have not been empowered to the same extent as women in the illegal society.

They haven't been able to climb the ladder in some ways as high as some of these mafia women have to break through the glass ceiling.

I always think that these women that are involved in organized crime.

Had they been born in the legal society, had they been the bankers or the finance directors, they would have crashed the glass ceiling.

They were driven and ambitious and courageous and it was who they are.

It just happens to be that they're there excelling in that other world.

Women in Italy's legal society are very well educated, but they're very under unemployed.

If you look at the World Economic Forum's annual statistics on gender parity, Italian women are there are very few middle managers are very educated, but they're not employable.

And a lot of that has to do with their childbearing age.

A lot of times you have to sign a resignation letter because if you get pregnant when you're employed, the maternity rights are so generous in the country that the company doesn't want you.

So you have to say, I'll quit if I get pregnant.

All of that works against the empowerment of women in the legal society.

Those constraints don't exist in the organized crime syndicate.

So those women, when their men go to jail and they're given the reins of the organization or the clan or the family, they do really well.

They're very vicious.

They're very ambitious.

And they're evil in many ways.

They know exactly how to hurt the families they've got vendettas against.

They know exactly what's going to work the most in terms of of causing the most damage to their enemies.

But that is only true of a very small percentage of them who somehow manage to break through by some miraculous act like being six months pregnant and shooting a guy 29 times, right?

Yeah.

It isn't across the board.

There's certainly a lot of of women within organized crime syndicates that have a very, very low life, you know, that are not given any power at all.

But as as Italy does make attempts to crack down on organized crime and mafia, they arrest more people and more men are in prison.

And when there are more men in prison, you have women filling the vacuum.

And that's why we're seeing more women in power positions.

There are 145 women in prison in Italy right now for mafia related crimes.

That's the highest there's ever been.

And one of the reasons that women have been underestimated for so long is I think that the investigators never took them seriously.

They thought they were too.

They weren't smart enough to be money launderers or evil enough to be killers.

And so these women flew under the radar for a long time.

All the while building power.

A woman fills in for a man who's in jail, her husband, the cousin who knows, just somebody she knows well.

And then he gets out of prison and wants his turf back.

How does she keep it from the women?

Develop their own following.

They prove themselves.

They are natural leaders.

They have built up the trust and loyalty among maybe other women and also among some of the younger men.

And they say, okay, there's a woman, especially who is involved in the dissemination of cocaine in Milan.

One of the groups had infiltrated into Milan and she was really good at it.

Her nickname was Grandma Cocaine or no Grandma heroin.

Excuse me.

I got my drug and she was notorious.

And when her the man got out of prison that she was replacing, he just said, you keep doing it, you're much better.

You're making so much more money for the family than than I was.

So you stay in power and you know that that isn't true.

And all the syndicates, the (inaudible) for example, hasn't allowed women to evolve to the same extent that the Neapolitan Camorra has for for reasons that are probably more cultural than they are anything else but the women, when they're allowed to prosper and when they're empowered to succeed, even in this underworld that none of us agree with, when they're allowed and given the chance to do that, more times than not, they do very well.

Let's go back to Portela for a minute.

You said that she was kind of like what we think of as influencers these days and influencers online, like Tik Tok, like Twitter, you know, Facebook, what have you.

How has technology changed the m During Pupetta's time, she would have been an influence if there would have been social media when she was younger that she would have been an influencer.

She but she used to call press conferences and she would show up in like leopard skin dresses and a collared shirt collar.

And every she knew that all the media would be there and she would, during these press conferences, make a threat to a rival.

And she would make it so blatantly it would be and everybody would print it because Pupetta Maresca is giving a press conference and she's wearing leather and she's wearing leopard skin or whatever.

You know, they would she became such a popular figure and nobody missed her press conferences.

And the press then ended up being sort of the messengers of her missives and threats against rivals in a way that was really interesting.

Now now she would have tweeted it or posted about it.

What we're seeing a lot of right now in terms of of the organized crime syndicates and social media, is this battle between the old and the young and the older people are saying, don't use social media, we're in hiding.

We don't want people to know where we are because the police are looking at social media.

But what we're seeing is the use of technology and the use of cryptocurrency and the use of of of hacking it as a way for the Mafia to infiltrate even the banking structures in a way that they would they would have taken a gun to a bank before, and now they can they have people trained to hack into a system.

And we see that with falsified documents.

We see that with especially with art, you know, when you need the provenance, we see the falsification of art that they you know, the Mafia has a great pretty big art trade, is stolen art trade.

And they can legalize some of that and sell it because they're able to infiltrate this system where you keep track of those things.

So we're seeing advancements in technology when it comes to organized crime.

And a lot of times the women are much better at that as well.

But I don't want to underestimate in any of this how devastating organized crime is to Italy, how many thousands of people's lives are lost.

Their livelihoods are lost because organized crime is is allowed to continue at the rate that it is.

Why has the government never been able to grab at least the top of the mob by the throat and put them in jail forever and break the system?

There are two reasons for that.

One is because of the instability in the government.

If you have the government that falls every year and a half and there's an election September 25th, again, no one's even keeping track anymore.

These governments fall so quickly.

You don't have a system in place that allows you to pass laws and policies that would allow you to really fight against organized crime.

That's one aspect of it.

The other aspect is the Mafia has infiltrated every aspect of society.

They're investigators, the police, the judges, the government itself.

And so when you've got heavy mafia infiltration and influence from within, it's very, very hard then to fight it.

And in another sense, a lot of times, if, you know, the police are investigating and surveilling all the time organized crime syndicates, the minute they chop off the top or get rid of the middle, they're going to lose their ability to infiltrate, to do surveillance.

And so maybe it's not important to get the guy that's running the drugs from A to B, but if they're watching what's happening there, they can stop a huge shipment at the port.

And you see those sorts of big arrests a lot of times.

And that's because they allow the other entities to continue so that they can surveil them and then they can make the bigger then they can stop the arms from coming in.

They can stop the drugs from coming in to wipe out organized crime.

in the mafia in Italy would be a gigantic task.

And I don't think there's the manpower and I don't think there's the will to do it.

Alright, Thank you so much, Barbie Latza Nadeau, author of Godmother.

And thank you for talking to us about this.

And best of luck with the book.

That's it for this edition.

Please follow me on Twitter and visit our website, pbs.org slash to the contrary.

And whether you agree or think to the contrary.

See you next week.

Funding for To the Contrary i provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation The Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.