Gomorrah - Chapter 5, Women

Excerpt 1:
You can’t trust your eyes. After a Camorra war there are no ruins of buildings, and the sawdust soon soaks up the blood. It’s as if you were the only one to see or suffer, as if someone were ready to point a finger at you and say, “It’s not true.”

Excerpt 2:
To avoid leaving clues on people’s bank records, the money is almost always hand-delivered by a “submarine”—so called because he slithers along the bottom of the streets without ever letting himself be seen. He always takes a different route to get to the same house, surfacing suddenly so that he won’t be trailed—precautions against being blackmailed, robbed, or compromised.

Excerpt 3:
One such historic figure is Anna Mazza. Widow of the godfather of Afragola, she headed one of the most powerful criminal and business organizations and was one of the first women in Italy to be found guilty of Mafia-related crimes. At first Anna Mazza capitalized on the aura of her husband, Gennaro Moccia, who was killed in the 1970s. The “black widow of the Camorra,” as she came to be known, was the brain behind the Moccia clan for more than twenty years. She had a talent for extending her power everywhere; when the court required her to relocate to the north, near Treviso, in the 1990s, she attempted to consolidate her network of power even in total isolation and—according to investigations—made contact with the Brenta Mafia. She was accused of arming her twelve-year-old son immediately after her husband’s murder to kill the person who ordered his death, but was let go for lack of proof. Anna Mazza had an oligarchic managerial style and was strongly opposed to armed uprisings. She held sway over her entire territory, as the dissolution of the Afragola city council in 1999 for Camorra infiltration shows. Politicians followed her lead and sought her support. Anna Mazza was a pioneer.

Excerpt 4:
Anna Mazza continued constructing a sort of Camorra matriarchy: the women as the real power center and the men as soldiers, mediators, and managers who obeyed the women’s orders. The important decisions, both military and economic, were up to the black widow.

Excerpt 5:
The driver had on yellow sunglasses and the other a bright yellow T-shirt. A yellow that could not have been chosen by chance, a combination that could not have been a mere coincidence. A professional touch. The same yellow as Uma Thurman’s motorcycle outfit in Kill Bill, the Quentin Tarantino film in which for the first time women are first-rate criminal stars. The same yellow that Uma Thurman wears in the ad for the film, with her bloody samurai sword