In Barbie Latza Nadeau’s “The Godmother,” we meet the women who have run the mob, and the new generation poised to take over.
THE GODMOTHER: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women, by Barbie Latza Nadeau
How could Pasquale Simonetti — Pasqualone to his pals — not fall hard for Assunta Maresca?
She was a teenage eye-catcher, winner of a beauty pageant in her corner of southern Italy and known to all as Pupetta. Little Doll. She would make a dream wife for an up-and-coming mobster like Pasqualone, and not just because of her looks. Pupetta was herself born into a crime family known for its deftness with switchblades. She was skilled with a gun and boasted that she “could hit any target between the eyes.”
Not long after Pasqualone married her in 1955, he was shot dead in a central square of Naples. Pupetta, a few months pregnant, vowed to avenge him. She tailed the crime boss who had ordered the hit as he left a coffee bar and pumped him with enough lead — 29 rounds in all, the police said — to fill a couple of Triple-A batteries. “I killed for love,” she later shouted at a court hearing.
Her act of vengeance landed her in prison for nearly a decade. But it made her a hero among Napless criminal elite, and even beyond. She had stood by her man and stood her ground. As Barbie Latza Nadeau recalls in “The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women,” Pupetta came to be known also as Lady Camorra, a reference to the criminal group that has the Neapolitan region in a vise. “Local Camorristi,” Nadeau writes,“started throwing flowers onto her police van roof as it traveled between the jail and tribunal, as if she were royalty passing by in a horse-drawn carriage.”
Pupetta, who died last December at 86, may be the star but she is hardly the only engaging figure in this crisply written, dutifully researched book exploring the role of women in a sector of Italian society not noted for its embrace of a #MeToo ethos. Criminal groups — be it the Camorra, the Sicily-based Mafia, the Calabria-rooted ’Ndrangheta or newcomers like the Rome-focused Mafia Capitale and assorted Nigerian arrivals — hardly feel bound by Title IX imperatives. Still, Nadeau observes, women in an organization like the Camorra “are making far more progress climbing the ladder and being treated as equals than their law-abiding peers.”