ROME — The police in Naples arrested the wife of a jailed Mafia boss Wednesday, a fresh sign that Italian women have broken through the glass ceiling of the organized crime business at least.
The woman, Carmela Marzano, whose husband, Luigi Giuliano, was a top boss of a clan inside the Camorra crime network until he was jailed in the early 1990s, appears to have taken over some of her husband's duties in his absence. Marzano was charged with threatening the widow of a rival mobster who wanted to testify against Marzano's son-in-law and two associates who were accused of murdering the woman's husband in 1999. Marzano's daughter, Marianna, was also arrested.
The arrest of Marzano came only a few weeks after that of a reputedly even more powerful female boss, Erminia Giuliano, the sister of Marzano's husband. Investigators say she took over the Giuliano family crime business after all five of her brothers were arrested. When her arrest was announced, Italy's minister of the interior, Enzo Bianco called it, "a lovely Christmas present for the security of Naples."
But one of her chief rivals, Maria Licciardi, the sister and heir-apparent of a deceased Camorra crime boss, remains a fugitive. Locally, Licciardi is known as the Camorra Princess.
The stereotype of the Mafia wife — loyal, deferential and tight-lipped — began changing when the role of women in organized crime became more prominent, most noticeably as targets of Mafia-style hits as old honor codes protecting women and children broke down.
In Naples, the sudden emergence of women bosses is less a reflection of their new empowerment and ruthlessness than of a drain of manpower. Women relatives are being drafted to replace male relatives who are in jail or who were killed in clan rivalries.
The nature of the Camorra organization, a welter of competing clans that is far less structured and centralized than the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, is another reason. Without a strong cupola, or top man, to impose order, clans fall back on close relatives, even wives and sisters, to fill power vacuums. But not without some gender warfare.