Mafia Women

"Mafia Women is a great piece of journalism and another one of those rare books on the mafia written by an outsider that commands respect in Italy. It picks on an issue that is fascinating and historically very important—it’s about what the mafia does to women and the role that they have. We’re all fascinated by the figure of the female gangster, but Longrigg shows that there are many more dimensions to women’s roles within Italy’s criminal organisations. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . When you look up close, it’s not the active gun-toting women who are the most fascinating—it’s the women whose existence is dominated by the task of breeding mafia sons and passing on to them the values of honour and violence when their fathers are in prison or dead. They live under extraordinary psychological pressure and it’s a story that we have only just begun to find out about. The basis of it is stories about individual women, some of whom are as much victims as perpetrators. One that sticks in the mind as powerfully moving is the story of Rita Atria. She was a daughter of a mafioso and her brothers were mafiosi. She turned state’s evidence after her brother was killed. She was only a teenager at the time and had to unlearn the mafia brainwashing that she had undergone since birth. A number of mafiosi were convicted on the basis of her evidence. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter While going through this whole process she attached herself very closely to Paolo Borsellino, who became something of a surrogate father to her. Tragically, exactly a week after Borsellino was killed in July 1992, Rita Atria jumped to her death from the window of her safe house. It’s a horrible story that just gives a sense of the extraordinary stakes involved in being a woman inside that mafia culture. I get my students to watch Gomorrah (the movie, not the book or the TV series). It’s a film that gives a very powerful sense of the disorientating, semi-chaotic world of the Neapolitan Camorra. It does it by challenging some of the cinematic clichés that we owe to Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy—clichés that have ended up glamourizing the mafia. Gomorrah tells us that we have to change our lens if we really want to understand the reality of organized crime."