The killing took place outside a busy coffee bar in Naples in broad daylight.

Pupetta was eighteen years old and six months pregnant when she pulled the gun from her bag.

The victim?

A man known as Big Tony who had ordered the hit on her husband just months earlier...

In this unputdownable exposé of women in the Mafia, investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau tells the stories of the women who have risen to prominence in the Italian mob, beginning with the first documented female boss, the infamous Pupetta Maresca. Through personal interviews and groundbreaking research, Nadeau gives us a jaw-dropping 360-degree view of the dark underbelly of Italian society, taking us deeper into the Mafia and its complex realities than ever before.

'Takes the reader into the little-known role of the women that underpin Italy's most ruthless mob families' Sara Gay Forden, author of House of Gucci

'An unflinching portrait of one the original divas of organised crime' Clare Longrigg, author of Mafia Women

'A must for true-crime fans' Publishers Weekly

Autorentext

Barbie Latza Nadeau

Klappentext

Pupetta Maresca committed the first of several murders when she was just 20 years old and heavily pregnant with her first child. She pumped 29 bullets into the man known as Big Tony who'd killed her husband just months earlier. In the years after her release from prison, Pupetta rose through the ranks of the criminal underworld to become the first documented female mob boss.

Investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau explores how this woman (now in her eighties) became the head of a patriarchal criminal syndicate through a life of violence and ruthless political maneuvering. Enthralling and disturbing in equal measure, it reveals how women have co-opted this seemingly all-male world, but also how women remain perpetrators and victims - sometimes in the same moment. There are no simple moral equations.

Following anti-mafia prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti as well, we get a 360-degree view of the dark underbelly of Italian society, in all its seedy glamour and systemic failings. Brutal, unnerving and utterly unputdownable, The Godmother takes us deeper into the mafia than ever before.