The Godmother by Barbie Latza Nadeau book review
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 center 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 18 years old 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. Both Sophia and Maresca describe the hierarchal power that exists inside prisons: The former needed to work for other incarcerated women while the latter was so well respected that she and her infant son, who was born in prison and allowed to live with her until he was 4, were given special treatment by guards and by other imprisoned women.
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. In her acknowledgments, Nadeau writes that she believes Italian organized crime has been romanticized by pop culture, “which has normalized a phenomenon that ruins lives and local economies every single day.” Her book, she continues, “does not seek to glamorize such criminality even as it explores the stories of women who have had no choice but to stay in crime families.”
But “The Godmother” reads like an overcorrection, and Nadeau — who clearly likes her subjects — still seems invested in the dichotomy between the capital “B” Bad mafia and capital “G” Good anti-mafia police and prosecutors. This is especially strange as Nadeau admits several times that the various syndicates continue to operate successfully precisely because they’re involved in the highest echelons of legitimate state power. The Italian state — which, Nadeau acknowledges, fails to support its struggling citizens — and the parallel state that encompasses the mafia don’t seem that separate. This makes it all the more troubling that Nadeau relies far more heavily on the opinions and speculations of those most interested in punishing mafia women than on the women’s testimonies, which she often concludes are full of lies and omissions anyway.
Confusingly, Nadeau stoops to the very contempt toward women that she’s criticizing, often describing a women’s physical appearance as if it’s noteworthy. Antonietta Bagarella, for example, is described as “a once-slender, dark-eyed beauty” who “surely should have known what she was getting into” when she married a high-tier Cosa Nostra boss because she was raised by a mid-tier one. A couple of pages later, Bagarella has “faded into a dowdy Sicilian nonna.” Bagarella, who spent years in hiding with her fugitive husband, was brought in by police a few times but always wriggled away from imprisonment, in part, by playing the part of a weak woman. That she got away seems to rankle Nadeau, who concludes that Bagarella might have been more involved than police thought. Not that there’s clear proof, only conjecture. Elsewhere, Nadeau declares that the Italian prisons are essentially “crime schools,” leading this reader to wonder why, in that case, she’s so invested in the mafiosa being sent there. Similarly, she implies that women don’t have a choice when they remain inside the mafia social circles they’re born into, but she also implies that they are to blame for staying when they could turn to the state for help — and then describes children being tortured to punish mothers who betray their families.
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.
Ilana Masad is a critic and the author of “All My Mother’s Lovers.”
The Godmother
Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women
By Barbie Latza Nadeau
Penguin. 256 pp. $16.99
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