The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women

Pupetta Maresca committed her first murder when she was just 18 years old and heavily pregnant with her first child. In broad daylight, she pumped 29 bullets into the man known as Big Tony who’d ordered the hit on her husband just months earlier. In the years after her release from prison, Pupetta rose through the ranks of the criminal underworld to become ‘Lady Camorra’, the first documented female mob boss.

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

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