According to the investigative news website TransCrime, while Italian courts indicted only one female boss in 1989, they indicted 89 of them in 1995. These limitations, along with the increase of bosses sent to prison, induced the Mafia to transfer its illicit funds and control of criminal rackets increasingly to women. The rules include no phone use and tight restrictions on prison visits and recreation to restrain communication. Another imposes precise rules on selected prison inmates convicted of murder, extortion or other Mafia-type crimes. One national statute gives the government the right to seize the assets of suspects who intimidate, exploit or use codes of silence to obtain businesses, or to sway elections. In Italy, where its ubiquitous organized crime is seemly entrenched for good, this reality has presented opportunities for a number of women to substitute for or replace men as crime bosses.Īnti-Mafia crackdowns by Italian police started in the 1980s with stringent new laws. These men receive lengthy prison terms, creating the demand for outside help to run their rackets.

However, that history has changed to a limited but important degree within the past couple of decades, as law enforcement agencies across the globe arrest more and more male Mob bosses and drug kingpins. American crime families have been men-only clubs, and women can’t be “made.” In Mob movies, females typically portray mothers, wives, siblings, girlfriends, “molls” and, at best, crime-wise, low-level smugglers. America’s La Cosa Nostra and Sicily’s Mafia are old-style patriarchies. They traditionally relegated women to servile roles as prostitutes, shills, dancers and servers. Men have dominated the history of organized crime as bosses, capos, soldiers and associates.

Women of mafia 2