I was playing a Mafia-themed board game the other day (FTR: Nostra City) and noticed that some of the mobsters were women! Is this fanciful on the part of the designer and publisher or are there really some women in the Mob?
Why wouldn’t there be women in the mob?
Because it’s a heavily male-dominated crime group having origins in one of the historically most male-dominated parts of Europe?
I have never heard of a woman being admitted as a soldier, capo, whatever to any of the LCN/Sicilian crime gangs.
I can more readily imagine a world in which designers of content for fanboys (no offense to anyone) find it profitable to introduce badass female characters for said fanboys to fap to than can I understand the Sicilian/American mafia granting signficant/official leadership roles to women. They’ve (the designers have, not the mob) certainly profited from pandering to fanboy fantasies in all the martial arts, etc. video games, Charlie’s Angels, etc.
Stephen King wrote an excellent non-horror story about a band playing at a wedding of a Mob boss’s incredibly ugly daughter. Violence ensues, and the boss is killed – whereupon the daughter takes command of the family and wreaks total war on the families responsible.
Just a story, no idea if anything like this could have happened in real life.
If you’re talking about the Mafia itself, as far as I have ever heard it is necessary to be male (and of Italian descent) to become a full member (a “made man”). People who do not fulfill these qualifications may become mob associates, but are not considered members. It is possible that a woman could become an associate, in a role such as a loan shark or bagman, though I have never heard of this (although one such character was depicted in The Sopranos).
In the Sopranos also was a female boss, back in Italy.
There was also a female captain/someone special, among the NY team Lorraine something…
Lorraine Calluzzo, who is the one I mentioned above. She was not a captain, but a shylock/loan shark.
She was only the de facto boss. Her husband, the actual boss, was in prison. Note Tony Soprano’s amazement at seeing that they’re taking orders from a woman.
I googled about this topic and hit an Italian newspaper article talking about women now moving up the ranks. It said the first one officially arrested for mob activity was in 1999.
Women in the mob? Fuhgeddaboudit!
I heard an interview with David Chase in which he stated that Tony’s mother was based on an article he had read about a woman in Philadelphia essentially running a mob family. She was the strong mother of a weak mob boss and essentially ran things for him unofficially while the son was the official head of the family. I don’t have a link because it was something I saw on TV years ago.