Barbie Latza Nadeau: The Godmother

Speaker 1 00:00:02
The women of illrepute with your hosts Wendy Mesley and Maureen Holloway, up until.

Speaker 2 00:00:08
Now are women of ill repute, haven't really been that dangerous. They've been fearless or risky or controversial yet, but not actual criminals.

Speaker 3 00:00:17
Yeah, that's true. But today is a little bit different.

Speaker 2 00:00:20
Yeah. Today we're going to talk about women who have actually committed murder and extortion and torture and other bad things. Mafia Women mobs. Mamas. Godmothers.

Speaker 1 00:00:30
Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:00:30
And there's one in particular hasn't maresca, I hope I'll probably be corrected on my pronunciation later, but she's known as Puppetta, and she's still like if you watch Italian TV series, the name comes up. It's like a huge deal. So she was known at the time as Lady Kamora, arguably the first female mob boss back in the 50s. She was pregnant, newly married, pregnant, beautiful. One of her beauty contests, the whole thing. And she gunned down the man that she believed killed her husband.

Speaker 2 00:01:00
She was 1818 and pregnant. Wow. Okay, so that's ill repute. Now, we are not talking to Papetta. She passed away not too long ago, in December 2021, relatively peacefully. I think she was in her 80s. But we do have Barbie Lassen ado with us.

Speaker 1 00:01:18
Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:01:18
So Barbie actually met her? She talked to Puppetta. She's an American journalist, she lives in Rome. She's got Canadian connections, which we can talk about. She's written about Amanda Knox, remember? I'm sure everybody remembers her. That young woman who was quite sexualized and wrongfully convicted of murdering another exchange student in Italy, in Puglia harvey has also written a book about the Italian sex traffic trade in Nigerian women, all kinds of things.

Speaker 2 00:01:45
So Barbie goes there and she spent a lot of time with Puppetta and she writes about other lady mobsters. Like, again, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, and hopefully we'll not be butchered for it. Nanetta Bhagarella, who married toto the beast, and Savaria Palazzolo, who was with Bernardo the Tractor. And of course, let's not forget Maria Laciaardi, who was known as La Picolina. And then there was Nikita. The Fisherwoman.

Speaker 3 00:02:08
I think you're making some of this stuff up.

Speaker 2 00:02:11
You know what? I'm not even making these people are real and existed. But all joking aside, writing about bad people or just even writing is scary stuff, as we found out quite recently.

Speaker 3 00:02:22
Yeah, writing can be really scary. I mean, we've just heard recently Salman Rushdie was stabbed. He was attacked after decades of living under a fat wall. The death threat for writing, which it was a satirical novel, Satanic Verses, but some people found it very offensive. Blasphemous yeah.

Speaker 2 00:02:41
So Barbie wrote that journalists covering the Mafia, especially in Italy, are often need of police protection themselves, sometimes for life.

Speaker 3 00:02:49
Yeah. So Barbie, I mean, we want to talk to her about that. She'll be here just a second. She's taking risks with this book. And the book the title is The Godmother Murder, vengeance and the Bloody Struggle of mafia women.

Speaker 2 00:03:01
Do you think we're taking any risks by talking to Barbie?

Speaker 1 00:03:04
You. Me?

Speaker 2 00:03:05
Yeah. Mafia people don't like to be talked about.

Speaker 3 00:03:08
I think we're fine.

Speaker 1 00:03:09
Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:03:10
I'll remind you that when we're sleeping with the fishes. Barbie Lassa NADO is coming up next.

Speaker 3 00:03:20
Hey, Barbie. How are you? So your enrollment, it's hot. We can see you, our audience can't see you. But, man, it looks hot.

Speaker 1 00:03:27
It's hot here. It's hot here in many senses of the word. Yes.

Speaker 2 00:03:30
Well, I want to tell you, even though we joke around a little bit, and the names, italian mob names are poetic in many ways, but we're taking this very seriously, as we probably should. And right out of the gate we mentioned Salman Rushdie. Do you worry, do you fear for yourself? As a writer and a journalist?

Speaker 1 00:03:49
I think you would be foolish not to be aware that there are risks when it comes to covering things like the Mafia, things like sex trafficking, even things like murder. But I think if you let that fear consume you, you won't do your job as a journalist. You have to think, journalists are the people going to the earthquake when Mount Vesuvius erupts, I'll be with the line of people heading that way where everyone else is evacuating. We do this because we like the adrenaline buzz, because we think the stories need to be told. And I think if you sort of succumb to the fear, you won't do it anymore. And so, as of yet, I haven't succumbed to the fear.

Speaker 3 00:04:22
It's funny, maureen and I had this conversation just yesterday because I'm a journalist and I've never been a foreign correspondent. I've covered a couple of scary things and being afraid a few times, but I have a lot of colleagues who have risked their lives to tell stories, whether it's in war or it's about police or whatever. And I don't know, I just find it so difficult when people these days talk about journalists as being reported that they can't be trusted, that they're all manipulative. And I'm sorry, but I know people who have risked their lives. It's a serious it's a serious thing. But how do you talk about facing risk? And the stories have to be told. You've got two kids. How do you deal with the risk?

Speaker 1 00:05:04
My children hate my job. I mean, they're older now, so they deal with it better. But when they were younger, they would say, what are you covering now? What are you doing now? Finally, when they're in their 20s, they're allowed to read my books because before I would hide them. I didn't want them to read. I was writing about sex, and in the case of Amanda Knox, I was writing about sex. In the case of the Nigerian sex traffic to women. You deal with risk, I think, or you deal with the fact that you put yourself at risk in different ways. I collect typewriters and I garden. I do things like that to sort of relax. We all do things outside of our job. We are people outside of our job. I'm a mother outside of my job. I was on the PTA. I did lots and lots of things, and lots of other mothers thought, what do you do? And I would always say, oh, I'm just a journalist. But I remember vividly when one of my kids was very young and I would always close my office door when I went into my study to write or to work. And the laundry, the washing machine was in there too. And he said, do you do laundry for a living? And I thought, yeah, something like that.

Speaker 2 00:06:05
Barbie the laundrous.

Speaker 1 00:06:07
But if you think about it, though, there's a risk in everything. If you live in a country where you live in America, you get shot going to the grocery store. So that might be more risky than perhaps covering the Mafia or something like that. I just think you have to be aware, and I think that the stories need to be told. And if you're willing to tell them and there's an audience, these are stories that are important. So as long as there's someone to tell them, or people that want their stories told or allow their stories to be told, I think those of us who are too stupid to take these risks to just keep doing it.

Speaker 3 00:06:38
But then Salman Rushdie, 30 years later, or whatever, is attacked. When you read about he's alive, thank goodness, but when you read about that, does it make you think, like, oh, my God, this is really dangerous. I mean, I know he's a writer. He wasn't writing about the mob, he was writing a satirical novel. But I just wonder how much you think about it. Way too heavy.

Speaker 1 00:07:01
It's an interesting question because when it happened, I didn't think of myself. I thought of someone like Roberto Saviano, who is a journalist here in Italy who's been under police protection for years and years. He's a friend of mine who I've interviewed many times, and I thought, wow, I bet he's really nervous because there is a known death threat against him. And I think, of course you think about that. You think that there could just be someone. There have been journalists killed for no reason. There have been people. There was a woman. I don't remember exactly where it was. She was shot on air by some jealous boyfriend, I think it was. There are lots and lots of situations that happen. You don't have to be covering something dangerous if you put yourself out there and someone recognizes you, hates the media. I mean, I think you're probably a little bit more vulnerable. If you were covering Donald Trump, then you probably were covering them off.

Speaker 2 00:07:45
Yet at a certain point, let's talk about puppeteer. A person I didn't even know existed. And now I'm just so enthralled with her story. What attracted you to her in the first place?

Speaker 1 00:07:56
Well. When I was working on my last book. Which was to chronicle the Kamora. Which is a neapolitan mafia. And their hold on the migrants. The Nigerian women who are coming into the country as migrants and trafficking them for sex. I was spending a lot of time in the ugliest city in Italy called Castlehol Toronto. Which is a really kind of horrible place. But it's sort of the ground zero for the sex trafficking of Nigerian women. And I was going around with an undercover police officer and we were trying to look at all these houses and these places where the women were being kept and the drugs were being dealt and things like that. And there was this bizarre little beach house. And he said, oh, do you know who you still live there? And I said, I don't know. And he said, let's go look at it. And so it had been given sequestered by the state and given to a cooperative that was dealing with the Nigerian women. And it had been turned into sort of a sewing factory for these Nigerian women. And it was filled with these beautiful fabrics brought in from Senegal and Nigeria. And it was this beautiful little beach house. And he said, this used to belong to Pupetta Maresca Puppete. It's called Little Doll. That's her nickname. It was a sunta Puppet de Maresca, but I'll call her Puppete because that's how I knew her. So he took me into the house and he showed me where all the they're keeping the material in the basement. They used to be where they kept the cocaine or they hit fugitives. And she had this beautiful sort of mosaic fireplace and she had PM kind of engraved in the mosaic. And he said, oh, Puppet Mooresca. And she lived here in the beautiful garden. And I thought, who is this woman? Who's this interesting woman? So I started doing some research and I thought, my next book is going to be on Poopata Moscow, because she was such an interesting person. And there's a big struggle when you like a bad person or when you sort of I try really hard not to glamorize the Mafia, and I think there's no Carmela Soprano in my book, I can guarantee you that. But there's something of an inner conflict when you kind of like these bad girls. And all these women I met, the worse they were. I was like, wow, that's kind of she's good at what she does. She broke through the glass ceiling in the Mafia. And I liked Perpetu. She was a liar and she was a murderous and she was all sorts of things and she lied to me all the time. But I liked her.

Speaker 3 00:10:02
Yeah, it's so interesting you write about how you first started out, thinking you're going to write a book about people who had, like, women who had been in the mob and then decided to go against it. But then it sounds like you got blown away by propeta, which is interesting. I mean, Maureen and I talk about this a lot. Women of ill repute. What does that mean? And I think maybe we don't admire everything that prepared us, but we do have this fascination with women who have succeeded or who have broken through barriers, and that's what she did.

Speaker 2 00:10:34
But let's not forget that Puppetta is charming and as charismatic as she was. And as you found her, barbie also was responsible for murder and torture and dissolving body parts and acid charm can only take you so far. And yet there is a fascination with this kind of brutality, especially from women. And this is why your book is so riveting, that they can be mothers, and they are often our mothers and passionate about their children. And in fact, you mentioned that's one of the ways that many women are coerced into being informants and working within the Mafia. They don't necessarily end up being leaders, but they are almost emotionally blackmailed because of their children.

Speaker 1 00:11:16
That's right. And I say it many times in the book, but it's very well known fact. Obviously, if you're born into a Mafia family, you leave in a police car or a coffin. It's not like you can just decide one day to say, I'm done with this. I want to do something legitimate. It doesn't exist. The Mafia and organized crime is such an integral part of Italian society, and that's something a lot of people don't understand. I've lived here for 25 years now, and you really see how it affects government entities. It affects just basic logistical aspects of society, but it affects mentality, too. And so people accept that the Mafia is something that no one can do anything about. And people who are in it, people were born into it. Women, especially men to a lesser extent, who I think find men less interesting in this context because they've been written about and studied so much. But women have a real struggle. Their job, essentially, if their mother, is to indoctrinate bad into their children, to teach them bad from good to say, no, actually, vendetta is the right thing to do. Not turn the other cheek. No, shoot the other cheek, whatever. Their job is to make their children unforgivable, and they do that. And as their children get older, and maybe they're boys and they become strong and powerful, they're proud of them. They're proud. It's such a weird thing. If you took Mafia women, the people I wrote about, and put them in a context of, say, banking, we'd be celebrating these women because they've broken through the barriers of this patriarchal society in Italy, where men do everything and women can't do anything. And somehow in the mob and organized crime, women are doing far better than they are in the legal society, which is another conversation. But the women have an obligation that they're born into or that they marry into, but it's not one of choice. It takes a lot of courage to stay on some level, but it takes way more courage to leave.

Speaker 3 00:13:10
Your book is fairly similar to all the TV shows where we're talking about Sopranos or Gamora or, I don't know, The Godfather. Your book talks a lot about family ties and loyalty and poverty and about how people don't have any choices. And yet shooting your best friend's kid or dissolving your ex wife and whatever, it's hard for people to imagine. Why are we all so fascinated by this and by women in particular, like that movie about la Femme Nikita and the idealization of women as Madonnas or horrors. We just seem to be fascinated by all of this. Do you understand why we're so fascinated?

Speaker 1 00:13:53
Well, I mean, I'm obviously fascinated by it. So it's hard for me to look in the mirror and justify maybe on some level. But I think that we're fascinated by it. We, as women are more fascinated by it probably than men are. Men are probably looking at these women in a more sexual life, perhaps, and that's generalizing. But I've raised two boys and I understand the male psyche. I think that women look at, or at least I look at these women are these people in these situations and think, if I had been born into that situation which, who knows, any of us could have been would have I been as baldy or would have I been as strong? Or what have I done the right thing? Or what have I been really good at the bad thing? And I think that when you can't remove these women's experiences from our context of knowing right from wrong, from the law, from what we know is right, we know it's not right to dissolve someone, an asset. We know that. We are absolutely sure of that. But in the context in which they exist where if you don't do it, it will be you in the acid, what are you going to do? If Puppete hadn't shot the man who ordered the murder of her husband she would have been essentially forced to marry someone else and forced into this other life because she was hot merchandise. The man who was killed, her husband, Pascalone, was a big deal. And so the Vendetta, whoever would have carried out that Vendetta would have gotten Puppete. She didn't want that. She wanted control of her life. So she took it. And she took it in a way that I suppose not many of us would at 18 well, maybe not. I don't know. We can talk about Puppetee with a gun at 18, pregnant and not talk about gun violence in other parts of the world all we want. But it's not entirely uncommon for someone to pick up a gun and shoot someone. It was just completely uncommon at that time. In the 1950s, she was pregnant. Women didn't do that. Women were so they were not empowered. They're still not empowered in Italy, but they were certainly not empowered at that time. And she did it because she had the courage to do it. Now, I don't agree with it, obviously. I think all of us can agree that shooting someone is wrong. But she went to the police and she said, I know who ordered the hit on my husband. I know who's responsible for this. And they said, well, it's a family affair. You guys deal with it your own way sort of thing. We're not going to investigate him. And she was mad. She trusted that the police would do the right thing, and they didn't, because by the police in many cases, and I found this with the book on sex trafficking. Why didn't they rescue those girls off the street? You know why? Because if you take away something that represents the status quo, you upset it all. And you don't have control with the women and the sex trafficked women, which is also part of the Mafia and so on and so forth. If there were no women on the street, the police knew that there was some sort of thing going on underground. They knew that there was some battle or some turf war or something like that. It's the same with Mafia families. He's been dead. If somebody killed her husband, the police weren't going to go find that man, because they're watching the dynamic. They've got their own spies. They're seeing who's going to step into the power vacuum that was created by the loss of him and who's going to do this. They're watching it. And so in many ways, they're using and exploiting the women more than the men to understand the greater dynamic of organized crime, because it's so powerful in this country. So what? You sacrifice someone, someone dies. And you can watch a lot, you can learn a lot. You can use it as a tool to do your job as an anti Mafia prosecutor or investigator, you know, maybe where hideout is going to be or whether drugs are kept because of that. The propeller wasn't going to let her husband die in vain. She wanted that murder avenged, and she did it.

Speaker 3 00:17:27
It's not just her. Now, I mean, you're right about all these women. And partly it's because they need secretaries, they need white collar criminals. Not just people are going to go beat somebody up and women are great, that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 00:17:41
I just want to read you back something on it that really struck me, and I want to point out that this book is not just about puppete back in the 50s. This is an ongoing situation, and it's a real eye opener on how the Mafia controlled regions live cheek by jowl with beautiful resorts like Sorrento and the Mafia coast. And so on this is shocking, the whole issue with toxic waste being buried. But another contemporary idea that has not found root in Italy, at least according to Barbie's account, and I don't doubt it for a second, is the Me Too movement. And I just want to read you back. This made me chuckle a little bit. ruthfully even my female Italian friends writes, barbie rolled their eyes at the MeToo movement, finding it hard to believe that a woman could be forced to sleep with a boss or someone who held power over her. Not that they didn't do it in Italy, but it was Justine as a way to exploit male stupidity. That's a notion that hasn't really taken root here, that, yeah, sure, I'll sleep with you because I'm going to get something out of it, and you're the one being exploited. So that is a real belief, yes.

Speaker 1 00:18:44
When the MeToo movement was exploding in the United States, and I was watching it here as an American, as an American, I think of myself as a feminist. I think of myself as angry about all the men who probably did the wrong thing with me when I was early in my career. I think of the newsrooms where creepy men said horrible things, and we all put up with a lot before these brave women stopped it. But in Italy, it's not like that. You are not allowed to be so hard for me to explain it. I remember after living in Italy for the first couple of years, and I would go home to the United States, or I would go to Canada with my husband's family, and I would think to myself, oh, these women, they're dressed in more masculine clothes in Italy. Everyone's sexy and everyone's half undressed. And I was thinking, Why is that? I remember it being a really strange thing and thinking, well, because in the United States, we have to be equal to men. We can't be dressed as this or that. We can't be too seductive. And then I realized, as the longer I lived here or I have Stockholm syndrome or whatever, that women dress seductively and sexy because it's a way to have power over men. It's not to titillate them. It's like, oh, I know how to get you. I know how to manipulate you. I'll get a discount. Yeah, unbutton a button sort of thing. It's a strange mentality, but it's because in schools and starting when they're very young, there's such a differentiation between the genders. And I saw with my two sons growing up as macho man in Italy, I remember thinking, my husband didn't ever drive. I always drove. And I remember my kids saying, why can you just let dad drive? And I'm like, Well, I'm a better driver first, so I'm going to drive. And he didn't like to drive in the wrong traffic. And the boys were just like, mom, my mom is the only one that drives. Kind of thing like, what are you doing? Why are you bucking the system here? But they also were taught from a very early age that they opened the door for a woman, they're going to pay for a date. They're going to do all these sorts of things that I think last time in the United States and Canada, certainly for many, many years. But when my older son went to Vancouver, to university, and he asked a girl out on a date, and I remember him calling me and him saying, I said, how was the date? It was nice. And he said, no, she didn't dress up. She was wearing, like, sweatpants. And I thought, okay, this is a teaching moment. I don't know what it is, but I'm sure I'm supposed to say the right thing. And I said, well, she's in Canada. She doesn't have to dress up in Italy. He said, but I dressed up. I looked really nice. And then she wanted to split. She wouldn't let me pay because then she thought, I'd expect something. And he's going on and on about all the things he had learned in the society in which people take for granted as sort of the male role and the female role here and all of that. And I thought he really learned it despite being a family where mom drove and worked and chased him off yet and went to earthquakes and all these sorts of things. It was ingrained in him because of the playground activities, because of the way they spoke, because of going out, because of all those things. But when you look at it in other contexts, italians, you will never see an Italian guy try to get a girl's arm to take advantage of her. It's just like a weird respect in that you'll never see the kind of things you see in North America in that context. You'll see a young man opening the door for a woman and he doesn't know an older woman carrying the groceries up the stairs. They do this sort of thing, which maybe we can look at as a weakness, but you have to look at it from where I'm coming from as the way society is built, and that's the context in which this operates. And so when you look at Mafia women or any other sort of sector here, you have to look at the greater context. We can't put our North American, canadian American glasses on to look at Italy. You have to say, okay, this is Italy, and this is where it's happening. And I tried to do that in the book in the sense that when you talk about the Me Too movement within the Mafia and with organized crime, you can't separate it from in general, you can't separate it from the Italian greater society, which is just the way it is, and it's not going to change. It's been here a lot longer than many other societies the women of ill repute.

Speaker 2 00:22:49
So this is interesting. Barbie shared with us just before she left us, left the interview, by the way. She's still very much with us. So her book is coming out in Canadian version, British version and the American version. And she showed us the covers, and.

Speaker 3 00:23:05
Each one is different.

Speaker 2 00:23:06
The American version, there's a picture of puppeteer and her husband, their wedding photograph. The American version has four bullet holes on the cover, like, not real ones, obviously.

Speaker 3 00:23:16
And the Canadian one has none at all. What does that say about us? Or what does it say about the Americans?

Speaker 2 00:23:22
And only one on the British because they're restrained. So that's interesting in itself.

Speaker 3 00:23:28
Yeah, but what are we I mean, we have none at all. Anyway, she won't acknowledge being brave. She does acknowledge taking risks and that you got to do this stuff. And she gives it a very journalistic answers to that, which is if you've made a choice to do that with your life. And I so respect that. Obviously, I have friends who have risked their life to tell stories, but she didn't want to share with us, I suppose, like the nasty emails she must be getting, or maybe she's not. I mean, they even have special billy clubs. It says in her books to beat up reporters who tell stories.

Speaker 2 00:24:01
Oh, for sure, yeah, she plays it down. And you know what? I didn't really understand it. I mean, I always thought that journalists who endangered themselves were ones that embedded themselves and went to battle. I never really thought about the rep. And then the Salmon Rushdie thing happened. And he's not even a journalist, he's a fiction writer, which is absolutely appalling. But, yeah, Barbie took a risk, and as a mother and as just a human being, she puts herself out there. And as I mentioned, this is not a story. Back in the 50s, she goes right up to the contemporary situation of the Mafia in Italy. And as you pointed out, Toronto is the largest Italian population of any city outside of Italy. And Montreal and Vancouver. Also big Italian communities. This is going to have repercussions probably farther than any of us realized.

Speaker 3 00:24:51
Yeah, I'm a big whistle. I didn't mention the name of the family that she said is so involved in Toronto. And there was a big shakedown.

Speaker 2 00:24:58
Well, don't do it now.

Speaker 3 00:25:01
Anyway. No, I thought it was fascinating. And also with the question that you asked her about between The Sopranos and The Godfather or whatever, and she said, Ozark is the best portrayal of Mafia women. And it's so true because I watched that series. The women are ruthless.

Speaker 2 00:25:17
They run the show and the women.

Speaker 3 00:25:19
Are ruthless and cut through in her book. That took her lots of years of research to unearth them all because it's taken a while in Italy. But wow. Ozark.

Speaker 2 00:25:29
Ozark.

Speaker 1 00:25:30
Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:25:30
Ozark is the best Mafia movie or. TV show out there. So listen. The Godmother Murder Ventures and the bloody struggle of Mafia women by Barbie Lassa NADO. It's on sale, the first here in Canada, September 6. And yeah, you'll have to go to the States to get your bullet riddled cover if that's what you want to do.

Speaker 3 00:25:50
It was one thing I wish that I'd asked her about because I'm watching the series Gamora, which she writes about in her book and subaru or something, sort of the newer series about the mob. And it's fascinating because the people in it, they all live in these slums, which she talks about. What choice do you have when you're raised in poverty, you're going to try and advance yourself the way that you can, which is true crime. But then they show these funerals and the grave sites and the cemeteries and they're beautiful and people spend like a gazillion dollars on they have no money to feed their kids. But they spend all this money on caskets and a plaque on the wall and it reminded me of it's almost like the police think there are special rules about funerals too. Because as a journalist in Montreal a thousand years ago. I remember going to mob whatever funerals and everyone would come out and you would go and we would stand back and we would get shots of all of these mob figures that would never appear in real life anyway. It's just so fascinating to sort of like living so close to death and yet sort of revering the commitment that somebody has made when they die. So I just wish that we talked there's so many things to talk to her.

Speaker 2 00:26:58
So many things. We haven't even got around to our mob name.

Speaker 3 00:27:01
Oh, do you have one?

Speaker 2 00:27:02
I don't have, like, Mo the chin, that pinky pesa. I don't know, Wendy.

Speaker 3 00:27:10
The forehead.

Speaker 2 00:27:12
Well, the chin and Windy the forehead signing out.

Speaker 3 00:27:15
I don't think we have much of a career.

Speaker 1 00:27:19
The women of ill repute were wet. Andy Mesley and Maureen Holloway. Available on Apple Podcasts spotify Google Podcasts or@womenofailreputecom produced and distributed by the Sound of Media Company.