Women in The Godmother as fearsome as the men
The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women Barbie Latza Nadeau Penguin
The term “mafia” evokes specific images: men wearing nice suits and hats wielding guns. These associations arise mostly from popular culture, including The Godfather, The Sopranos and, for true fans, the Italian series Gomorrah.
Women, though, are never front and centre in these depictions and, as journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau explains in her new book, The Godmother, they are rarely discussed by those who study the mafia. And yet, as Nadeau demonstrates, these women exist and act within the various crime syndicates that the Italian government considers to be mafias, including the “only one true Mafia ... the Cosa Nostra in Sicily.”
The other major crime groups are the `Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Neapolitan Camorra in Campania.
The character meant to tie Nadeau's book together is Assunta “Pupetta” Maresca, who was barely out of her teens and six months pregnant in the summer of 1955, when she shot and killed the man who had ordered her husband's murder.
This act of revenge, of a type usually carried out by men, won her “icon status among the Neapolitan criminal elite,” Nadeau writes, “earning her the nickname Lady Camorra and giving her incomparable stature as an original madrina — a godmother.”
Before Maresca's death in 2021, Nadeau interviewed her, and she certainly does make for an interesting main character. Well into her 80s, Maresca is still entirely comfortable with the murder she committed while also downplaying her agency within the Camorra.
Another woman, whom
Nadeau calls Sophia, grew up in Castellammare di Stabia, which has a long history with the Camorra and which the church considered so morally decayed that in 2015 a local priest sprinkled holy water from a helicopter above the town to exorcise the evil within. (It didn't work.) Much of the town's business, according to Nadeau, involves money laundering and the sale of drugs and other contraband. To support herself, Sophia started running drugs for a friend's dad and was eventually caught and sentenced to prison.
Nadeau describes well the culture of normalized misogyny in Italy, as well as how “the mafia and the malavita, `dishonest lifestyle,' it produces are just another facet of the culture.”
The trouble is that the book's tone is all over the place, going from a kind of girl bossification of mafia women to a celebration of anti-mafia prosecutors for imprisoning them — sometimes on the same page.
The nuance is there to be gleaned in The Godmother if one goes looking for it. But because Nadeau's wrestling with the complexity of her material reads more accidental than intentional, it may leave readers confused as to her sweeping conclusions and assumptions.