ABSTRACT
“I am not a man, I am a woman, but only on the outside (…) Inside, I am more man than you. And here, in Naples, I rule,” declared Nunzia D’Amico, one of the highest-profile female bosses of the Camorra (Reguly and Tondo 2016). D’Amico ruled her criminal empire until October 10, 2015 when a few yards from her apartment and in broad daylight, a hooded man shot her four times. Blood sprayed the stroller where her baby slept. “The Godmother” was killed like a true godfather. She was 37. Traditionally, mafia women, especially those with young children, were considered off-limits to mafia homicide. Usually, men killed other men. But, since the mid to late 1990s, with the constant imprisonment of male mafia bosses, the wives, sisters, and daughters of these kingpins began to increasingly assume leadership roles. Women bosses rapidly ceased to be a novelty; their numbers rose dramatically within just two decades. These women know the rules of the mafia from the inside, and with the arrests of scores of male relatives, they stepped up to lead the clans. According to the Italian Ministry of Justice, more than 150 women linked to the mafia were in jail in 2017, a record high, and almost all of them had leadership positions in various Italian transnational crime (TNC) organizations including the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria, and the Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia.
