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Women Step Out of Kitchen and Into Mafia

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The headline news Monday was sadly familiar for most Italians -- a high speed car chase in southern Italy ends in a deadly shootout between rival Mafia families. But these were not the usual suspects.


The gun-toting clan leaders Sunday night were 50-something Italian mamas and teenage girls, police said.

"Obviously things are changing even in these feuds," the Corriere della Sera newspaper wrote Monday.

The protagonists in Sunday's bloodbath were the wives and granddaughters of Camorra gangster families, the Mafia organization that operates in and around the southern Italian city of Naples.

One car full of Cava family women and another car with Camorra boss Salvatore Graziano, his granddaughters and their mother showered each other with bullets in the prolonged shootout in Lauro, a town east of Naples. Two middle-aged mothers and a 16-year-old girl were killed.

"Yesterday's 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," Corriere wrote.

Mafia women, especially in Sicily's "Cosa Nostra," are traditionally not allowed to get mixed up in men's business. Instead, the black-skirted women shuttle between the kitchen and the church, selflessly grieving for their fallen loved ones.

But in Naples, the battle of the sexes has taken on new meaning with the "madrina," or godmother, muscling in on territory of the traditional godfather.

One woman even allegedly ran one of Naples' most powerful criminal families while her brother was in prison.

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