Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  • She should not get the death penalty

  • Her gang remaining members should not get more than eight years in prison

  • Her brother should be given permanent employment

  • Her father should be given his own plot of land

  • Her whole family should be escorted to the surrender ceremony

  Eventually, the government feigned to agree to her terms and an unarmed police officer arranged to meet Phoolan at Chambal. They walked to Bhind, where she laid her rifle before pictures of Gandhi and Durga watched by over 10,000 people and 300 police. Phoolan was charged with forty-eight crimes, including murder, banditry and kidnapping, but her trial was delayed for eleven years, during which time she remained in custody. The remainder of her terms were totally ignored.

  Phoolin Devin was finally released on parole in 1994. She married Umed Singh, her sister’s husband, and joined the regional Samajwadi Party, which represented the Hindu lower-castes. She became famous for her feisty, blunt-spoken public speaking and always managed to draw large crowds. Although she was elected as a Member of Parliament in 1966 for the Samajwadi Party, she proved to be rather ineffective and was defeated in the 1998 elections. During her election campaigns, which she ran with the same ruthlessness and passion that she used to run her gang, she was frequently criticised by the widows of the men she had killed in Behmai. Her supporters, on the other hand, hailed her as a larger-than-life heroine who fought for the rights of downtrodden women.

  murder

  Phoolan Devi did not trust anyone – her gang members, her lawyers, not even her husband – and told her friends that she had had a premonition about her death. She said that the thakurs of Behmai refused to leave her alone, and that she was living in constant fear, always having to watch her back.

  On July 25, 2001, three assassins gunned down Phoolan Devi in broad daylight as she was about to enter her house in the Indian capital of Delhi. She had just walked home from a morning session in parliament, and was going to have some lunch. The leader of the assassins was a man named Sher Singh Rana, who admitted he had killed Phoolan as retribution for the Behmai massacre. However, there were also rumours that her husband, Umed Singh, wanted her dead because she had threatened to cut him out of her will.

  However, when her husband was eventually questioned by the police, he was adamant that the murder of his wife had been part of a complex conspiracy. Umed Singh said he was convinced the key suspect in the murder, Sher Singh Rana, was just small fry and there was a much larger organisation behind the killing of his wife.

  ‘This was no ordinary murder. There is a deep conspiracy behind it. The real killers have not been exposed by the police,’ Singh said. ‘She was my wife, but the whole world was her family. She was an MP and she was killed with such ease. It is no joke. I cannot take it lying down any more.’

  On February 17, 2004, Sher Singh Rana, the prime suspect in the Phoolan Devi murder case, made a daring escape from the high-security Tihar jail. Despite the efforts of the police force’s elite departments, the crime branch and special cell, they failed to track down Rana. Although special cell claimed to have cracked the case with the arrest of Rana’s brother, they still failed to lay their hands on the mastermind until 2006. He was eventually re-arrested in April by a special cell of the Delhi police at Dharamtalla in Kolkata. He was tracked down and picked up from his hotel room, carrying a passport that bore his picture but which had been issued in the name of Sanjay Gupta. The case is still ongoing which means that over six years later the Phoolan Devi story is still not over.

  As for her arch rival, Sri Ram, who mercilessly tortured Phoolan, she had the satisfaction of receiving a note from his brother Lala, shortly before she surrendered in 1983. Lala told her that her enemy was now dead. Lala had killed his own brother when they had quarrelled over a woman.

  Maria Licciardi

  Although the Mafia is by tradition a masculine-dominated organisation, some of the most feared operators in the modern Mafia are the Madrinas, or Godmothers. Over the past century, Mafia woman have been portrayed as the loyal, loving wife and mother, while their gun-toting husbands carried out their Cosa Nostra business. However, across Italy today, times are changing and women are penetrating the male world and are taking an increasingly high-profile role in Mafia activities. The first arrest of a woman suspected to be involved with the Mafia came in 1990, but by 1995 this had escalated to eighty-nine such indictments.

  In an effort to keep the Mafia line ‘in the family’ after their husbands are either killed or incarcerated, it appears that women all over Italy have taken command of organised crime. Far from being a far gentler Mafia, these women are taking matters into their own hands, negotiating syndicate structures, clinching drug deals and ordering executions. For example, Concetta Scalisi was arrested in April 1999 on a charge of triple murder. She took over the reins, so to speak, when her father Mafia chief Antonio Scalisi, was murdered by rival mobsters in an ambush in 1982. His position was automatically passed down to his son, Salvatore, but he too was killed due to inter-clan feuding, just five years later. Concetta successfully showed herself equal to the task when she ordered the murder of three men who were seen to be a threat to the Scalisi family.

  Cappo di Tutti Cappo

  Maria Licciardi was considered to be the Cappo di Tutti Cappo (the boss of bosses) of the Camorra family based in Naples, Italy. Among Camorra women, she was respectfully known as ‘the Princess’ and has been described as a born leader with exceptional intelligence. Maria was born on March 24, 1951 in Napoli, or Naples, which is home to the Camorra family. The Camorra are thought to have got a hold on the city shortly after World War II, when they took control of the weapon and cigarette smuggling operations. Since then they have expanded into the drug trade and also control much of the real estate in the area.

  Maria knew exactly what the Camorra represented. She had grown up in a world of violence with her brothers all taking an active role. Her elder brother, Gennaro ‘the monkey’ Licciardi, had been appointed the Camorra boss and earned a considerable amount of respect. Even her husband, Antonio Teghemié, was an active member, so Maria had never known any other way of life.

  In the role of a mobster’s wife, Maria had been taught to be loyal and tight-lipped, while she looked after her husband and raised their children. However, as the Italian government closed in on the Mafia bosses and put more and more members behind bars, the role of the women started to change. With most of their men either, dead, behind bars or simply not old enough to take over from their fathers, the women had to step in to fill the vacancies in the organisation. One of the first women to take a major role was Rosetta ‘Ice Eyes’ Cutolo. She assumed leadership when her brother Raffaele was put in prison.

  Maria, however, had a much longer wait before she took control. She had to wait behind her two brothers Pietro and Vincenzo as well as her husband. It wasn’t until they were all either incarcerated or killed that she got to play a major role. Her first major hurdle was proving to other members of the Camorra that she was worthy of the role, and she did this by setting up meetings with rival Camorra gangs. She boldly told the clans that the fighting and rivalry over territory had to stop, because it was of no advantage and it meant that everyone was out of pocket. Maria advised that the clans worked together in an effort to expand their smuggling, drug dealing and racketeering and in that way they could all make a profit. The leaders of the rival gangs agreed that what she said made sense and Maria realised that she had overcome the first hurdle.

  Maria took full control of her family and made one of her first jobs to bring the Camorra into the prostitution business. Until she took over, the family had avoided the trade because of a code of honour, but under Maria that code was broken. They purchased girls from branches of the Albanian Mafia and put them on the streets, taking a high percentage of their earnings. Soon the money was rolling in. To stop the girls from trying to run away or becoming informants, Maria made sure th
ey became addicted to narcotics so they would keep returning to feed their habit. When the girls became too old to become useful, the Camorra simply had them killed off.

  Another business that turned profitable under Maria’s leadership, was drug trafficking. The Camorra employed young dealers to sell heroine and cocaine on the streets, making sure they regularly changed their locations. Under the control of Maria Licciardi, the Camorra soon reached new heights, becoming even more violent and tight-lipped. The police found it hard to penetrate their organisation, as many people protected them and worked with them against the authorities.

  overstepped the mark

  Everything was going exceptionally well for Maria Licciardi until one of her Camorra clan was not prepared to accept one of her orders. The disagreement was over a large shipment of pure, unrefined heroine, which Maria felt was too dangerous and would bring law enforcement officers flocking. She ordered that the shipment wasn’t to be sold, but the Lo Russo clan went behind her back. They prepared the drug to be sold on the streets, but their disloyalty soon backfired on them. After just a few days heroine addicts, who had bought the forbidden substance, were found dead on the streets. It was not only the law enforcement officers that clamped down on the Camorra clan, but the public as well, demanding that something was done and fast. The peace that Maria had worked so hard at achieving started to crumble around her feet, as wars between the rival clans erupted once more. As soon as a member of the Licciardi clan was attacked, Maria declared war. It is estimated that as many as 100 mobsters were killed during this period.

  Law enforcement officers started closing in and before long Maria Licciardi was on the ‘thirty most wanted Italians’ list. She decided it would be safer for her to go into hiding, but even from her retreat she still managed to control her family. As soon as Maria felt that prosecutor Luigi Bobbio and his men were getting too close, she decided to take appropriate action. In January 2001, she sent Bobbio a warning by bombing his office building. It didn’t have the desired effect – in fact it had the reverse reaction – and Bobbio increased his forces and gradually started to break through the Licciardi wall. Bobbio arrested seventy Licciardi men, who all maintained a code of silence, accepting a term of imprisonment instead. Maria herself seemed untouchable and, apart from one photograph, the police really had no idea what she looked like. Bobbio felt sure that she would have changed her appearance while in hiding and they really were unsure of what to look for. However, he kept up the pressure and eventually Bobbio discovered the whereabouts of her hideout.

  On June 14, 2001, the police raided a house and found Maria Licciardi looking exactly the same as the photograph they had recently distributed. Maria, who was now fifty years old, decided it was hopeless to try and resist arrest and she was taken into custody. Maria Licciardi’s reign as the Camorra boss was now officially over.

  erminia giuliano

  Another Camorra woman to take over the lead of a clan, was Erminia Giuliano. She took over the role as boss of the syndicate when her brothers Guglielmo Carmine ‘the Lion’ and ‘Little Liugi’ Guglielmo were both arrested. She was nicknamed the ‘Queen of the Clan’ and showed the qualities of a true leader usually associated with crime godfathers. At the age of forty-five, the matriarch reorganised the syndicate’s structure and daily operations and she eventually became one of the most dangerous criminals wanted by the Italian police.

  When law enforcement agents got too close for comfort, Erminia went into hiding in her daughter’s flat in the Forcella quarter of Naples, which was the heartland of the Giuliano clan. She managed to avoid arrest for ten months, but eventually the police managed to track down her hideout. They stormed the house just after midnight, destroying the front door as they charged into the flat. The flat had been used as a base to build a drugs, counterfeiting, extortion and gambling empire. Erminia was discovered hiding in a secret room, which was concealed behind a kitchen cupboard and a sliding wall panel. She was no wilting wallflower, and as the officers placed handcuffs on her wrists, Erminia told her daughter, ‘I am counting on you now . . . I have taught you all the true values in life.’

  Ironically, before she would leave the flat, Erminia told the officers she wanted a beautician to come and attend to her hair and makeup. She eventually walked out looking immaculate in her leopard-print coat and stiletto heels.

  It took a while for Italians to realise the danger that women posed within the Mafia. However, they are now only too aware that women have become entrenched in mafia values just like their male counter­parts. They have proved to be just as ferocious and ruthless as men – if not even more.

  PART THREE: Organised Crime

  The Mafia

  The Mafia, a secret criminal society, developed in Sicily in the second half of the nineteenth century, and later became prevalent on the East Coast of the USA after Sicilian immigrants settled there. The term ‘Mafia’ was first coined in 1863, in a play called I Mafiusi di la Vicaria, by Guiseppe Rizzotto and Gaetano Mosca, about the criminal gangs that were operating in the prison at Palermo. At the time, these gangs were a new phenomenon in Sicilian society, so the name was used to describe this new social group. Although its members were violent men engaged in organised crime, the Mafia were distinguished from common criminals by the importance they were given in Sicilian society. These men were the heads of large, often wealthy families, and as such held an important position: they often had connections with leading figures in the world of business, politics and local authority administration, and they saw themselves as patriarchs. They took it upon themselves to protect the weak in society, given that very little protection was forthcoming from the state, and liked to see themselves as benefactors of the community. Family values were held in high regard, and their members were governed by a vow of silence known as ‘omerta’. Anyone, even a rival gang, found breaking the vow – ie. reporting criminal activities to the police, or collaborating in any way with the forces of justice – would be dealt with in the most brutal way, often tortured and murdered.

  Code of honour

  Thus, although their business interests of drug running, prostitution, gambling and so on were much the same as those of any other common criminals, the Mafia were governed by a code of honour that they regarded as elevating them above the level of the ordinary crook. As the Sicilian ethnographer, Giuseppe Pitrè, put it:

  Mafia is the consciousness of one’s own worth, the exaggerated concept of individual force as the sole arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of interests or ideas.

  However, as became clear during the twentieth century and into the new millennium, the Mafia contained the seeds of its own destruction. The constant warring between the different families over territory led to a high rate of murder, with many of the leading figures in the Mafia being killed. While the members valued blood ties, they were not able in many cases to protect their families, even their children, who were often killed in revenge attacks. In addition, the corruption the Mafia introduced into the state bureaucracy, whether at central or local authority level, was not sustainable. Not only were there numerous clashes of interest, but in Sicily many high-ranking government officials were killed, and public services deteriorated to the point of chaos. Thus, the lawless reign of the Mafia in Sicily, and to a lesser degree on the East Coast of the USA, was unworkable, even within its own terms, causing the deaths of its own leaders and their families, as well as making life intolerable for those in the communities they professed to serve.

  Another name for the Mafia – regarded by many of its members as the real name – is the Cosa Nostra, meaning ‘our thing’. The name signifies adherence to a set of beliefs, traditions and values. Like many other secret societies, rituals are practised to initiate new members into it. In one such ritual, the young man is brought to meet three elders of the family. The oldest of the three tells him that he must protect the weak against the strong, and pricks his finger, spilling the blood onto the image of a saint. The image is then
lit, and the initiate must hold it in his hands until it burns up, withstanding the pain as best he can, and swearing to uphold the principles of the Cosa Nostra.

  The Boss of All Bosses

  In order to regulate its business interests, the Cosa Nostra has a chain of command known as ‘The Honoured Society’, which imitates the corporate structure of a modern business empire. At the top of the command is the ‘Capo di Tutti Capi’ (the ‘Boss of all Bosses’). Next in importance is the ‘Capo di Capi Re’ (the ‘King Boss of Bosses’), who is usually a retired member. The ‘Capo Crimine’, known as the Don, and his right-hand man the ‘Capo Bastone’, lead the crime families and are involved in the day-to-day administration of illegal business dealings. The ‘Consigliere’ is the advisor, while the ‘Caporegime’ commands a group of ‘Sgarrista’, foot soldiers. At the bottom is the ‘Picciotto’, or ‘little man’, who is an enforcer, and the ‘Giovane D’Onore’, a person who is not of Italian origin but is associated with the organisation.

  The history of the Mafia is a complex one, but essentially it arose out of the disruption caused by revolutions in Italy during the nineteenth century, and was initially concerned with cattle rustling, protection rackets and bribery of state officials. In addition, the Mafia styled itself as a Catholic organisation, in contrast to the secular state, gaining some adherents among the peasantry of Sicily. During the twentieth century, the Fascist regime began to prosecute Mafia members, so many fled to the USA and set up business there. In the wake of the war, Mafia leader ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who had been imprisoned in the USA, helped the US military to invade Italy by providing intelligence information, and helped to build up the organisation in Italy as a bulwark against the state. An additional benefit, as the USA saw it, was that many of the Mafia’s members were violently anticommunist.