Traditional Role Of Mafia Women Changes With Times

PALERMO, Sicily - The Mafia kept her back in the shadows and away from its secrets. If she knew, she didn't tell. She washed clothes bloodied by killings and bore the next generation of killers.

For centuries, the "Mafia Woman" - wife, mother, sister - knew her place.

But the Mafia's world is changing, and so are its women.

Often it is the Mafiosi's women who are giving their men the courage to break with the mob and confess crimes to investigators. The swelling numbers of turncoats - a development unthinkable a decade ago - have proved a key weapon in the uphill war against organized crime.

Still, while some women repudiate the Mafia way of violence and vendetta, others are using their autonomy to carve out new roles.

By tradition, only men could take the blood oath that seals entrance into the Honored Society, as the Mafia calls itself. But turncoats say that ceremony is held no more, and evidence is building that many women are now as much a part of the Mafia as their men.

A Palermo criminologist, Giorgio Chinnici, said the changes are most obvious in eastern Sicily, especially in the Catania area, where the Mafia's reach across the island was last to take hold.

"We're discovering that some women have taken the place of their arrested husbands, taking over businesses, directing rackets," Chinnici said.

While traditional Mafia wives stayed home when their husbands went underground, turncoats told police that if they ever captured Cosa Nostra's reputed No. 2 man, they would surely find his wife at his side because she was so bound up in the life of crime.

They were right. When dozens of police burst into a farmhouse hideout outside Catania in 1993 to capture Nitto Santapaola, sleeping next to him was his wife, Carmela Minniti.

Investigators say she started her life of crime early, accompanying Santapaola as he cased jewelry stores.

Two years after her husband's capture, killers posing as policemen rang her bell, pushed past her daughter and fatally shot her in the chest.

"She ran his affairs," said Liliana Madeo, author of a book on the Mafia's new women. "If she was just the little woman, she wouldn't have been killed."

Increasingly, women are lending their "clean" names to money-laundering businesses, said Palermo prosecutor Guido Lo Forte. It is the same technique Colombia drug cartel bosses use to protect their riches.

Cosa Nostra is using its women more and more to slip messages in and out of high-security prisons, Lo Forte said. Under a state crackdown, top bosses now do time on tiny islands or other out of the way places, and wives, mothers and daughters are sometimes the only ones allowed to see them.

"No longer can we go on saying women are not part of the Mafia," Lo Forte said.

In 1983, Palermo police sought court orders to send five women, suspected of helping their Mafiosi husbands, into "internal" exile in northern towns. The judge refused, arguing that Sicilian women weren't liberated enough to work for the Mafia.

Partly for pride, partly for practicality, Mafiosi perpetuated the myth that their women knew nothing.

But Piera Aiello, who married into a Mafia family, told the Italian weekly Venerdi: "If you ask your Mafia husband something, he won't respond. But if you're good and quiet, those fools - like all men are - will confide in you, because that makes them feel important,"

Her husband was gunned down in a pizzeria after a failed attempt to avenge his father's slaying. She is one of a growing number of women who are defying their families to collaborate with the law. Many are young. Aiello began talking to police when she was in her 20s.

Others try to persuade their men to turn "pentito," or turncoat.

"Sometimes the women come to us and say, `Help us make this decision,' " said Liliana Ferraro, a former justice-ministry official and close aide to Giovanni Falcone, the Palermo prosecutor who pioneered the "pentiti" protection program and was killed by a Mafia bomb in 1992.

But Mafia women's new independence can mean deciding to stay behind when husbands and brothers go over to the side of the law.

These women have gone to TV stations and newspapers to repudiate their men's decisions. Some show up in court, when their husbands testify, to shout out their allegiance to Cosa Nostra.

"They speak out so the Mafia will protect them, so they can stay where they live, their kids can continue to go to school," Madeo said.

Mafia women also can send clear messages without saying a word.

Three years ago, police captured the man investigators say is Cosa Nostra's Numero Uno, Salvatore "Toto" Riina, after 23 years as a fugitive. Two days later, his wife, Antonietta, and their four children came out of hiding and returned to the family's hometown in Corleone.

Investigators said Antonietta Riina's return was a clear signal to the Mafia that her husband wasn't about to squeal.