Thanks guys
I appreciate the quick response (and the link Turnbull, thanks)
Found this too:
Tales of a 'Mafia Mamma.' The Cosa Nostra isn't exactly a bastion of women's rights, and yet, in Italy, a country that has never had a female president, prime minister or mayor of Rome, Giuseppina Vitale recently came out as its first female boss pentito-or informer. Guisy is not the first woman to turn against Italian mobsters, nor the first high-profile mafiosa. But so ingrained is the historic chauvinism of the Costra Nostra, with its conservative southern traditions, that some mafia experts -- all male -- refuse to believe Giusy's accounts. But such experts may be slow to recognize changes in the organization, report Special Correspondents Jacopo Barigazzi and Pape. About the same woman.
And this is a very interesting article, I hope it's okay to copy and paste it? It's from The Times of India Online.
[ When Harry Belafonte sang ‘Man fast, woman faster’ in Carnegie Hall in the 1960s, he could not have anticipated that the day would come when women would literally call the shots in the mafia in Italy.
This Monday’s edition of the newspaper Corriere della Sera gives a graphic account of a Sunday night car chase and shoot-out between the female family members of the Camorra and Cava gangs which rule the region in and around the southern Italian city of Naples.
Following the shoot-out at Lauro in which two middle-aged women and a 16-year-old girl were killed, the Corriere wrote, “(The) incident shows that not only bosses and their ‘soldiers’ have the duty to eliminate members of rival families; now the women, the bosses’ wives and even the daughters participate”.
So it is time for Francis Ford Coppola to direct an updated version of Godfather showing not Marlon Brando but Diane Keaton as the main character. To avoid any confusion with Godfather and Godfather II, the updated version should be titled ‘Godmother’.
The principal character could even be appropriately dressed in dark shades like Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black. The only catch, of course, is that a film titled Godmother could run into copyright problems of a sort in India.
Shabana Azmi has already starred in a Bollywood film called Godmother where the principal character dies gracefully in the end so as to prove — if proof were required — that crime doesn’t pay unless it is shot in 70 mm.
To avoid any such copyright problem, Coppola’s updated version could be released in India under the title of ‘Madrina’, Italian for godmother. There is a real-life precedent in Naples where one madrina has muscled in on the territory of a godfather and another has successfully run the family ‘business’ while her brother was in jail. In the wake of the recent shoot-out, assumptions like “women can’t shoot straight” are not only archaic but also inaccurate. ]
I was in Naples a few weeks ago and I stayed right in the Camorra territory, La Forcella. Some of those girls... I mean no offence to any Neapolitans who may post here, but I wouldn't mess with them!
), though it's pretty obvious that lots of Mafia wifes and goumads are tons smarter than the made guys, and are probably the real powers.
