Assunta Maresca, first female boss in Camorra mafia, dies aged 86
A former beauty queen who shot to fame when she killed her husband’s killer in Naples at the age of 18 and went on to become the first female boss in Italy’s powerful Camorra mafia clan has died aged 86.
Assunta Maresca, better known as Pupetta, or “Little Doll”, was the daughter of a notorious black marketeer. In the mid-1950s, 18 years old and six months pregnant, she tracked down Antonio Esposito, the Camorra boss who had ordered the killing of her husband, and shot him dead in broad daylight on a street in Naples.
Investigators believed there had been more than one shooter on the scene, but keen to establish her status and defend her position in the Naples underworld, Maresca always insisted she was solely responsible.
During her trial for murder in 1959 she defiantly told the court: “I would do it again!”
Maresca gave birth in prison, and after her release 14 years later was reunited with her son, Pasqualino. In the years after leaving prison she acted in a film that was inspired by her life and opened two clothes shops in Naples.
But her private life continued to be turbulent. She moved in with the drug trafficker and arms dealer Umberto Ammaturo, and they had twins. But Ammaturo was jealous of Pasqualino, who had ambitions to rise in the Camorra.
When Pasqualino was 18, in January 1974, he went to meet Ammaturo on a construction site for the Naples flyover, and disappeared. His mother suspected her lover had murdered the boy and buried his body in cement. As she told the Guardian in an interview in 1995, she questioned her lover to tell her what he had done. But although they fought viciously, her priority was protecting the twins, and she did not leave him.
Maresca was later accused of being behind the killing of Ciro Galli, a member of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, an organisation formed by Raffaele Cutolo in an attempt to renew the Camorra. In 1982, Maresca openly challenged Cutolo during a press conference and in the same year was arrested alongside Ammuturo for the murder of Aldo Semerari, a forensic scientist and well-known neo-fascist. Maresca served four years in prison before being acquitted.
The only girl in a family of four brothers, Maresca reportedly showed violent traits as a child and attacked a classmate, causing serious injuries, according to Corriere della Sera.
She won a local beauty contest in 1953 and was crowned Miss Rovegliano. Maresca died at her home in Castellammare di Stabia, near Pompeii, after an illness.
Naples godmothers have always had a higher profile than their counterparts in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. In the 1970s and 80s, Rosetta Cutolo, “Eyes of Ice”, sister of the serial killer and mafia boss Raffaele, was rumoured to run her brother’s criminal organisation while he was in prison. Anna Mazza, known as the Black Widow, was accused of training her four sons to be killers. Erminia Giuliano, known as “Celeste” because of her pale blue eyes, of the celebrated family based in the Forcella district, took over as boss of the Giuliano clan after her brother Luigi’s arrest, before she too was arrested in 2000.