1869, Ep. 157 with Felia Allum, author of Women of the Mafia

7:23PM Jan 27, 2025

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Felia Allum

Keywords:

Neapolitan Camorra

Women in Mafia

Felia Allum

Agency

Criminality

Gender Roles

Organized Crime

Comparative Analysis

COVID Impact

Italian Judiciary

Patriarchy

Public vs Private Sphere

Stereotypes

Transnational Groups

Law Enforcement.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Felia Allum, author of the new book Women of the Mafia: Power and Influence in the Neapolitan Camorra. Felia Allum is professor in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on organized crime, Italian mafias, criminal mobility, gender and political corruption. She is the award winning author of The invisible Camorra. We spoke to philia about why the conventional wisdom that all women are victims of a male only mafia that excludes them is false. How women's criminal activities within the mafia of Naples Italy are hidden for a variety of reasons, and why in the private sphere, women are actually the key to the power of the Neapolitan Camorra and are its very backbone. Hello, Felia, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure. I look forward to talking to you about your new book, Women of the Mafia: Power and Influence in the Neapolitan Camorra. Tell us, how did this book come to be?

So this is a really interesting question, in the sense that I started looking at the Neapolitan mafia as an undergraduate. My undergraduate dissertation was on this, and then I did not write my master's dissertation on this, because I thought I would have more to say when I came to look at it, but look at it again and in my PhD. So I've been looking at this kind of group and this region for the last 30 years, and different kind of aspects and different kind of dimensions. And women have always been there. But it wasn't something that necessarily attracted my attention straight away. And I kind of followed the discussion in Italy. I followed the discussion in other literature, like gangs and girls in America, and then in 2018 I got lucky. I got really lucky. I got a huge grant to do a challenging piece of work, which I'm still trying to get my head around, which is a comparative analysis of domestic groups in three countries, France, UK and Italy, and transnational groups, and look at women within these groups. And I started to play around with the Italian dimension, and wanted to look at, obviously, the Sicilian Mafia, the Neapolitan Camorra and the andrangata, but I had so much material on the Neapolitan Camorra that I just didn't feel it would do it justice, just to sort of slip it in there on the Italian chapter. And I kind of started having a headache about, what do I do with this? And then COVID hit. And COVID hit me at a point where I was starting to interview women in different types of criminality in the UK, and I found myself all of a sudden, shut at home thinking, What do I do with my time? And so I went back and had a look at the material I had, and I kind of, I knew I would have to write this book sooner or later. It just happened at that particular time. And I don't know whether I'm kind of, I still think of it as a work in progress. I sort of think that, you know, there's never a full answer, or it's, I'm still thinking about it. So this kind of comparative project allowed me to think in a different way, but also comparatively. And then COVID gave me time to concentrate and think, Okay, what is it you're trying to say, how do you see this situation? So it's kind of always been with me, and I knew that sooner or later, I would have to do with it, and then that's why it happened when it happened.

Interesting. Well, thanks. Thanks for COVID. That's one thing we can thank COVID for. What's, I think, fascinating, thanks for doing this deep dive into the subject. What I think is fascinating. You have a great analogy at the beginning of the book about how to view women in the mafia, particularly in the Neapolitan Camorra. You say another way of looking at this is to think about a photograph of organized crime. It depicts members of the criminal underworld, and the only visible clear faces and shapes are male. The men are the principal and only focus of the photograph, while the women are there, but their voices, faces, shapes blur into the background, into the shadows and edges of the photograph, in this way, becoming invisible and hidden so clearly you as an outsider to this culture coming in with eyes that are able to see things that the culture can't see. And the conventional wisdom is that the women are somehow victims, and they're not. They don't have any agency. You found that not to be the case. So you you interviewed six women. Tell us about these women, tell us about what you found.

So, so I have a kind of very intimate relationship with the region. I visit it regularly, and I kind of try to formulate how I position myself, because my position obviously, I'm not Neapolitan. I'm a white European woman who kind of has had this relationship with this region and this city since I was about 15 years of age. I'm now 54 so it gives you a kind of very long and intricate relationship with the space, but also the people, and also families, Neapolitan families. So I have this kind of, I don't know whether it's a privileged position, but when I came to look at women, a lot of the literature kind of kept going on and fitting into this idea that, you know, women were victims. Women were not in control of their destiny. They were kind of in this kind of patriarchal vacuum where they were kind of just zombied around and not really having control over their lives. And I kind of didn't, I didn't know what I would find. I didn't start with this kind of position of sort of saying, right, no, I'm going to find women everywhere. I just sort of blindly try to see and say, where are they, what are they doing? And at every level, I kind of found women, and I found women to have agency, which was one, one aspect that kind of was really important for me to sort of say, what does that agency look like? And it's not necessarily a negative thing. It can also be a positive thing. So I kind of tried to rationalize and try to sort of really say, Well, what's what's going on here? Because we are obsessed with, on the one hand, women being victims. We are obsessed with women being only subordinate to men. We only see them in a specific way, and we then kind of see men everywhere. And it kind of the more I looked, the more I sort of always found women in the backgrounds and in the margins and in the kind of shadows and therefore, but what, what's been really important in my study is to not necessarily just take for granted the narrative that we are fed. Because it seemed to me very obvious that the judiciary, the police, they have one particular vision, and they have one particular job, which is to prosecute a criminal activity. And that where the women were may not have been directly linked to the criminal activity, but they were in the background, or they were close by. And therefore I tried to kind of unpack what I was what I was seeing. I tried to unpack what I was seeing, which is very different from the context that you know, the Italian judiciary try to prosecute these mafias, which they see as male, which they don't see necessarily as female. The literature that I was reading was saying, well, there are women, but they live in this dual kind of paradox, where they are there, but they're subordinate. They don't have their own agenda. They're kind of not really kind of involved. And what I kept seeing was actually something very, very different. And so for me, it was really important to talk to women directly, not only to observe, not only to kind of spend time looking at the city, but also getting their own insider perspective. So I was very lucky. I didn't it took some time to have access to these six different women, which I don't make the center of the book. They are there. Their voices are there, but they're not the main focus. And spending time with them in different locations when they knew that I was coming to talk to them about their involvement and to try and unpack how they'd lived their lives, what their choices were about, where they saw themselves. And it was fascinating, because actually, the majority of those six women weren't born within criminal families. They were actually outsiders who'd fallen in love, who decided to work for these places, who who came across somebody, you know, so it wasn't your traditional kind of, oh, they're born, and therefore they're educated into the ideology. But there were choices and decisions and agencies. And I kind of came, I was very I was confronted with very strong women, women who kind of weren't these kind of victims, weren't these zombies. Weren't these kind of subordinate they had something to say. And there was one in particular that struck me where, you know, time and time again, we're told, Oh, you know, the women in Italy have become important because the men are either dead or in prison. So this idea, which I I'd accepted, I did. I even wrote an article about the idea of a reserve army that, you know, women are there on the edges waiting to, sort of, you know, play football and be a substitute, or, you know, be part of a reserve army. And this young woman who was the daughter of a little clan in a certain kind of towards caseta, sort of said, you know, it's one thing for my dad to tell me what to do. It's another when I go out and actually do it. In other words, you know, the narrative is, yes, we give orders, we give instructions. And yet the women were saying, well, actually, they can think they do that, and they can have their you know, they think that they control the whole situation, but the minute I'm outside, it's my life. I have to deal with the day to day operations of the group. And therefore I decide what I want to do. So there are these kind of different realities that I started to unpack. And as you said at the beginning, it's kind of, you know, there's what Italian society wants to see, there's what Neapolitan society wants to see, but then there's this kind of reality, the nitty gritty of living day to day and surviving. And it's not just about women being kind of undervalued and women not being important. They are just as important, but it's just we're not seeing them, or we're not interested in them.

Wow, that's so interesting, so interesting. So there is, there's a focus on the public sphere versus the private sphere. And I'm interested in that, but I want to step back for one second. There was a great line in your book that you were saying that women in the mafia do not like women investigators looking into what's going on, because they clearly see women criminals for what they are, whereas male prosecutors still have difficulties in untangling women's apparent traditional roles and their sexual power from The real criminal and economic influence. So you as a woman author as well, you have this ability to see beyond these cultural blinders. Tell us what the cultural blinders do with this public versus private sphere issue?

Well,

Well, I think in Italy, perhaps, and I don't want to make it just about Italy, because I think that what I found actually applies across the board, but within the Italian context, there are different things that we need to sort of reflect upon. One is that for a very long time, the law dismissed the role of women as relatives, and therefore, because they were relatives to men, they were dismissed as not particularly being capable or participating directly in the criminality of the men. So already, you know, you've got that lens of sort of saying, Well, we're distinguishing because actually the fact that you're part of the private sphere, you're part of the family, dismisses you from actually having any active involvement. So already, that's one lens that we need to take into account. The second lens we need to take into account is that actually the first women prosecutors and judges came into the Italian judiciary in 1965 if I remember correctly, and that's quite late to sort of start to have a different way of thinking and have a different perspective on different issues. So you've got that kind of slowly, women are starting to have these roles where they're not going to fall into the trap of saying, oh, you know, actually, it's all him, and the woman who's there just doesn't know what she's doing. So there's that to take into account. And I think the context of the Catholic Church, although the Catholic Church is also declining in importance, there is this kind of sense of, you know, the mother, the virgin, the Madonna, which is the kind of, you know, family. Although, as I say, Catholicism, perhaps, is not what it once was. There's this respect for the family in the private sphere, which is kind of still untouchable. I think things are changing. I think that the family and the extended family is not what it was. I think that, you know, that is starting again, also to decline. The solidarity of the family network is starting to decline. But you've got these three aspects, which can I think, if we think about it, explain why we look at the public sphere, we look at the projection of the man the patriarchy, when actually there's a lot of hidden stuff, and by not,not acknowledging that we're missing the picture. And I think I came across an author who talked about the ideology of the separation of the public and private sphere, that there's a choice that we kind of keep them separate, and we kind of forget about the public we concentrate on the public sphere, and we forget the private sphere, and that sort of kind of ideological choice, rather than perhaps looking at them as kind of more overlapping and complex. And that's where the power, for me, of the domestic sphere we need to investigate and see, because we have powerful mothers who have intricate relationships with their children, whether it's the girls or the boys. We've got this, you know, the role of the father in the family, which might be less important than we think. We think of a powerful patriarch, but actually, perhaps in the family home, that's different. So we've kind of, I'm not saying got blinkers, but we've accepted certain things. And I think that in the book, what I want to do is to sort of say, let's revisit that. Let's perhaps think about things differently. Because ultimately, and I don't know whether I say it clearly enough in the book, I think that up until now, the history of organized crime has been a male history of organized crime. Because when we look at women, we look at women like we look at cyber crime as though it's something extra and not something actually part of the picture. And I think that's really problematic that, you know, we've got to say, Hang on a second. All these wonderful studies have just not taken into account the women and that for that reason, I think they are kind of still not really that helpful, because it's a male perspective, and it's a male crime, and yet women are there.

Yeah, yeah. That's brilliant. It's brilliant. So, so your research, going back to that photo analogy again, yeah. For the longest time, due to cultural blinders, due to just tradition and the patriarchy and the this, what you were mentioning, with the focus on the public versus the private. Women criminals were in the background. It was blurry. You're bringing them into focus. I know that you said that these six women aren't necessarily like the center piece of the book, like the throughout the book, but, but tell us. Tell us a little bit about some of these women. Are there any stories that you'd like to share and things that were shocking to or surprising? How did they get involved? Why did they leave? What? What were their values, things like that?

Yeah. I mean, they were very different kind of group, as I said. You know, first thing that struck me was that they weren't your traditional kind of just born and brought up. So for already, that, for me, was interesting because it meant that they've made decisions about, you know, why and how they were moving into this, this, this area. I think one thing that struck me was the fact that they have difficulty actually articulating their role in their position. And I found that when I pushed them. And maybe I did too much to sort of say, you know, what was your role? What did you do? How did you do it? They had difficulty, you know, one of them said, Well, I was just the mother. I wasn't involved. And not kind of, you know, able to say, what does that actually mean? Or, you know,another one was kind of saying, you know, we acted like men. And I sort of said, well, again, what does that mean, that you acted like men? You know, because there was this kind of idea that the men could do better than the women, and yet, actually the group was actually dominated by women. So in order to explain that, the rationale was we were like men, rather than actually acknowledge that women are just as good, and perhaps that gender segregation is something, again, that we need to challenge. So there were a very different group of women, and I think, you know, on the one hand, they were reallyinterested in sharing, sharing their truth. I mean, I'm aware, as a researcher, that they're not giving me a truth. They're giving me what they want me to listen to and to hear. And it was interesting to sort of try and, you know, there were moments of great intimacy when, you know, they shared some of their kind of, more kind of inner truths. And in one case, I just turned the recorder off because I just didn't think it was appropriate when one, when one of them started talking about, you know, abuse and kind of, you know, having lovers and all this kind of thing. So I just thought they were kind of, they'd kind of, in their own way, come a long way in the sense that they've been involved in criminality, they've made decisions about surviving within that context. But at the same time, they were intelligent. They were intelligent because they understood when was the right moment to stop. They were intelligent in terms of using, using not only the criminal world, but also the state to their benefit. And I think that was one of the common themes that get coming back, was like, you know, we're more intelligent than the men. The women. Know how to beat the system. We know how to be a step ahead. And therefore I found that they were kind of, actually, that's where it was happening. Is kind of, you know, the men can get distracted. But these women who, you know, haven't gone to university, were very kind of, you know, street wise. But that street wise kind of came across in an intelligence and a humanity of of their own lives and and also, I suppose, but I don't think it's only about women, where women decide to step away for the children. And I found that men also step away for the children, but we make a kind of big deal about about the women and the mothers wanting to save their children. And I think that men do as well, but I just found that they were kind of, you know, tender in kind of wanting to share, but also very lucid about where they wanted to be and how they dealt with it. So, you know, they were, they were very honest, and they kind of, for me, also were able to break down some of the stereotypes. Like, you know, women can't be violent. And one of them was a was a street wise drug dealer, and she recounts this occasion where she was heavily pregnant and a young kind of drug the drug addict comes to her and sort of tries to,

tries to get, kind of, you know, a reduced price. And obviously she's being observed, because this is happening in the street, and the bosses, her kind of superiors, are observing the situation. And she's sort of staying under her breath, just go away. Just go away. And he insists. And says, no, no, I want a discount. I want a discount. I want a discount on my dose. And she kept saying, Just go away. I can't give it to you. And he keeps insisting. And in that situation, it was like, you know, survival for her to sort of show that she, you know, could dominate the situation, even though she was heavily pregnant, and that she was the powerful one. And so she had to beat him up. And she said it was a horrible situation where I had to beat him to in order to be able to be seen to be doing my job properly, when all I wanted him to do was to go away, and I would have given him a discount later, but because he she was being observed by the leadership, you know, who were there, obviously looking and seeing that she was doing her job properly. So there's all these kind of. You know, survival strategies, you know, and intelligence, of being able to be one step ahead. And, you know, they recounted all these different kinds of stories, but as I said, what struck me, and that's why the message for me in the book, was this idea of agency. And some of my Italian colleagues have talked about agency, but again, they've talked about agency in terms of always being subordinate to the men. You know, even the idea of pseudo emancipation, the idea of kind of constrained agency, and I just sort of don't think that that's helpful, because I still think that that means we place women, and we locate women at the edges of that photograph. We're not saying women are here, and let's take a closer look. Interesting.

Wow, wow. So, so continuing with this photograph. So what's next for you? Like, what are you you've we have one photo of the Neapolitan camara you can now. Where's your research going to next? So,

so, as I said at the beginning, this is kind of for me. This is kind of still not a work in progress, but I'm still thinking about, you know, whether my explanation works, for the moment it works. But obviously the more you think, the more your ideas develop. And I suppose that you know, for the photograph, I'm trying to put different photographs together. I'm looking, as I said before, I've been looking at the British landscape, the British criminal landscape, to understand where the women are in that landscape. I'm also interested in looking at the other Italian mafias, because a lot of people make a distinction between the fact that the Neapolitan Kimura, because of its structure, gives more space to women, and I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think that, you know, I think that Sicilian women are very, very strong and very powerful, but we don't see them the same with the collaborating women. And I need to kind of work out where they are in the photograph, and I think that they are very, very present, but how I put that together, and then the more challenging work is to try and unpack the role of women in transnational organized crime groups. One group is the Nigerian, the Nigerian cult groups, or brotherhood, as they're called, or or Nigerian mashes, as the Italian called me, and then the Albanian West Balkan groups, and how they are moving, or where they end up, in France, the UK and Italy. And to try and understand and see one of the major obstacles is, again, there's very little gender specific data. So a lot of these police forces are not picking up on what the women are doing, or where they're where they're at, and that makes it more difficult for researchers, so we need to find different strategies to sort of locate them, which is going and interviewing people who are involved communities, to try and get a different perspective. Because law enforcement, you know, as you said from the beginning, is kind of with blinkers on, not only the Italian but many, and I say majority of law enforcement are still not looking at the women at all, and therefore there's not gender specific data being picked up, and therefore we don't really have a sense of what they're doing.

One final question, I guess it's like big picture. I mean, that is big picture. But like, challenges, like, I would think a lot of people would be a little concerned going to interview people within criminal enterprises. Like, are you concerned about your safety when you this time to start?

I mean, I think that I've been very lucky in the Neapolitan, in the Neopolitan case, to have low access in that way. And it's been over. It's been over 10 years. So it wasn't kind of, you know, within a year I was going to have access to all these different people for these other contexts. I've had more difficulty as well. There's a kind of reluctance, quite rightly, to share, you know, with an outsider. So I've kind of tried to sort of collect and talk to different individuals. And I've been lucky to a certain extent, I've been able to interview two or three women in the British context who were former members of gangs, to get that kind of perspective of what it was like and how they kind of survived those kind of to see whether there are similarities and and differences with my Neapolitan women, but also Italian women from from Sicily, and also the Nigerian cults. Because, you know, again, the Nigerian cults are really interesting, but the majority of the investigations we've got are actually kind of made by Italian law enforcement. So again, I've got two or three, I've got two or three. I've got two or three investigations on on groups in Rome, the women aren't present, according to the judicial document, but if you take a closer look, they're all married with wives. All the wives are involved in the human trafficking networks. And therefore it's, again, it's kind of trying to break those barriers and and I realized that sometimes the material is very, very limited, but even within the limited material, I try and sort of try and put the puzzle together to say, okay, even if I've only got this, what does it tell us? And recently, I read a really interesting article about, you know, the absences and what is missing. We need to concentrate more on what is missing, rather than taking it for granted that it's missing and it's not part of the story and it. Makes so much sense to sort of women, because they're missing everywhere, and we're not questioning why they're missing. And I think you know, when you were before talking about these different stories and saying, what are the different stories of these women? I suppose my story is the fact that I'm shocked that we're just not interested in women. We're still not interested in women, and yet, you know, we're in 2024 going into 2025 the lack of interest in women or young girls who are involved in organized crime, in groups and gangs, is shocking. I find that really, I didn't expect that. I didn't expect that lack of concern and that lack of interest. Because if we're not interested, then how can we help? How can we change the system? Yeah,

that's it's so backwards. I mean, even from a law like a traditional law enforcement perspective, you want to catch the criminal, and if you're ignoring the criminals, there's a problem, absolutely,

absolutely, although some people would argue that, you know, the women might not be doing the criminality, and again, you know, it's like women might not be doing the violence, and that's one of the ongoing the ongoing arguments, that women are involved in these things, because they can't be violent and they're not violent, but then that suggests that we're only limiting our understanding of violence to physical violence when it can also be psychological violence. So we've got to have a kind of holistic approach, but also a kind of more general approach to try and unpack. So when it comes to women, you know, how are they influencing the men? Are they do they necessarily have to undertake the criminal act? Or what is their role in influencing and being around and and helping and supporting and cheering on the criminal the criminal activities? I think we need to have a more holistic approach, perhaps one which is less based on very strict narrow categories, because by having those and continuing to use those, we just are not capturing and looking and and noticing, you know, what the women are up to. And I think that that's a shame. And I suppose one of the fears that I had when I started out was to say, Oh, am I really kind of, you know, am I being Am I betraying the feminist cause? Because basically I'm saying, you know, women are criminals too, and I don't think I am. I just think that in order to be able to understand and help these women, the women who are actively involved in criminality, we need to recognize that they're there and society isn't. And that obviously helps the crime groups like it helps the business associates, because nobody thinks that women are front names at all, and yet they all are. So I think that, yeah, we still need a lot. We still need to do a lot. We still need to complete that photograph. And I think that that was a really kind of, for me, a very powerful kind of way of putting it. One of the things that I didn't kind of bring into our discussion was the role of stereotypes, which is a bit, I suppose, the starting point, you know that we have these kind of stereotypes of, you know, Mafia male only. And it's kind of a starting point, I suppose, for when I when I teach my students, it's one of the first things they say, oh, you know, mafias are about men and men only. And I'm like, Are you sure? And then all of a sudden, they like, Oh, my God, you know, I hadn't thought about the women. And all of a sudden, you know, they go away, and they look at films, and all of a sudden they say, Oh, you're right, there's this kind of comes back to these kind of images of victims and then super sexy women. And, you know, not really kind of seeing that they're the hard graphs. They're the ones who will kind of not risk that they're risk averse. So they're much more intelligent in their thinking. And I think stereotypes are really unhelpful, because it means we have this massive blind spot. And I think, yeah, I didn't stress that enough, perhaps in my answers to you about how stereotypes and our obsession, you're quite right. There's obsession with gangsters, but it's male gangsters and their trophy wives who are just seen as kind of, you know, a kind of extra without necessarily being able to participate. So our stereotypes don't help us again, they kind of block us, and our obstacles to our understanding,

and that, in a way, kind of, suppose, is kind of one of the problems, again, about law enforcement. They're also kind of, you know, living normal lives and coming across normal kind of culture and stereotypes. So why would they look at the women? Why would they suggest that there's a strong woman behind there who's working it all out, or who's being violent when necessary? Because society is telling us that women are weak, women are irrelevant, women are stupid. So it's kind of those stereotypes are constantly kind of feeding, feeding and reinforcing our kind of, you know, I suppose, our agenda, our gender assumptions, and our kind of very strong, easy, binary results, you know, men are strong and women are weak.

Wow. Well, this is amazing. You're doing amazing work. And I know what's what's that I said, You're very kind. Jonathan, oh, well, but it's real. And then what you're bringing to the table is reality versus this thing that we don't want to see or as invisible. And so we all know that, particularly in the West, there is a fascination with the mafia. And there's, there's stories and cultures about organized crime. And I, I really want to congratulate you on going into the shadows, going into the people don't see, and saying, Look, you guys are missing half the picture, you know. And so anyone that's interested in the mafia, we would strongly encourage you to pick up her new book, Women of the Mafia: Power and Influence in the Neapolitan Camorra. It was a pleasure talking with you.

Thank you very much.

That was Felia Allum, author of the new book, Women of the Mafia: Power and Influence in the Neapolitan Camorra. You can purchase Felia's new book on our website, at Cornell press@cornell.edu and use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off if you live in the UK. Use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk.Thank you for listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast.