The Godmother

Starred review from July 4, 2022
In this engrossing account, Nadeau (Roadmap to Hell: Sex, Drugs and Guns on the Mafia Coast) combines diligent research, hours of personal interviews, and vivid prose to immerse the reader in the world of Italian Mafia women. Nadeau tells the stories of those who defected and turned evidence against the mob, such as wives who betrayed their husbands, but she focuses on the unrepentant women, Assanta “Pupetta” Maresca chief among them. Born into a crime family in 1935, she married a mobster who was assassinated when she was 18 and pregnant. To retaliate, Maresca pumped 29 bullets into the man who ordered the hit and spent the next 10 years in prison, where she gave birth to her son, before being pardoned for the murder in 1965. She went on to remarry a mob underboss, but was sent back to prison in 1978 for another murder, which was overturned on appeal four years later. Maresca spent the 1980s wielding enormous influence in the crime organization, revered as the godmother and the Lady of Camorra. Even in her old age, she was celebrated as a self-made woman and was the first Mafia woman to be banned from having a public funeral due to her bloodthirsty life, when she died on New Year’s Eve 2021. This look at the “feminine” side of the Mafia is a must for true crime fans.

August 1, 2022
A glancing account of women's roles in the making of the Italian underworld. There are few women with the polish of Carmela Soprano in Rome-based journalist Nadeau's account of their role in the Camorra, the Naples-centered branch of the organized crime system that thrives on "fear and complacency" and infiltrates "every layer of Italian life." Hundreds of such women are involved, some in central positions of power but most relegated to subsidiary roles in an old-fashioned, patriarchal business. The author focuses, a little too much, on one character, Assunta Maresca (1935-2021). Known as Pupetta, or "little doll," Maresca evinced a murderous streak and, at the end of her long life, a fierce lack of repentance for any of her crimes. Indeed, she was a pioneer in the criminal world. Now, writes the author, "in the Camorra especially, where Pupetta thrived, women are making far more progress climbing the ladder and being treated as equals than their law-abiding peers." Most of them were born into the business, and those who were not tend to serve in lesser roles as drug mules or street hustlers. Some of those whom Nadeau interviews are knowing--one warns her not to take the elevator in a recently built structure since the Camorra-riddled construction trade takes many shortcuts in building safety--while others feign ignorance. A problem with the book is that Nadeau's data set is much too small, sociologically speaking. It's more anecdotal than empirical, though she does produce some useful statistics--e.g., more than 150 women are now in Italy's prisons for Mafia-related crimes, "the highest number ever recorded." Also valuable are Nadeau's accounts of mob wives and daughters who have cashed in on "mafia chic." But those are the lucky ones, as "hundreds of women in mafia families have been brutally murdered over the years." A good choice for Mafia completists and students of international crime.

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August 1, 2022

Rome-based investigative journalist Nadeau (Roadmap to Hell) writes an account of one woman's rise to power in the Neapolitan Mafia. Pupetta Maresca married into a Mafia family as a teenager, then found herself pregnant, widowed, and in prison for murder within six months of her wedding. Nadeau writes that Maresca's power and reputation in the Mafia grew until she was infamous as a ruthless leader of the Camorra. Maresca, however, is not the norm for Mafia women, Nadeau writes. She interweaves Maresca's tale with absorbing stories of other Mafia women whose lives were much darker and deadlier than Pupetta's, plus details of an Italian culture that is rarely shown. Using personal interviews with women in the Mafia, along with other research, Nadeau argues that real Mafia women are vastly different from the archetypes portrayed in film and TV. VERDICT Fans of Mafia-related pop culture and history will enjoy Nadeau's book, even as it overturns everything we thought we knew about the Mafia.--Leah Fitzgerald

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