Susan Travers’s service in the Foreign Legion during WWII included not only lots of fighting but also love affairs with married men, so she didn’t want to tell her story while the people who were in it were still alive. She had to wait until she was 91.
With dozens of Camorra bosses killed or in prison in Italy, their widows, wives and sisters are rising up to the challenge and becoming madrinas, or godmothers. And they are just as tough and ruthless as the men:
Carabinieri arrested 11 women for drug trafficking in a raid on Naples’ Sarno crime clan in July. A mother and her two adult daughters were arrested on organised-crime charges, including extortion.
“There is a growing number of women who hold executive roles,” said Gen Gaetano Maruccia, commander of the Carabinieri paramilitary police in the Naples area.
“They are either widows or wives of husbands who have been put in prison. They hold the reins. They’re very good at mapping out strategy, even sharper (than the men).”
Some Camorra women still perform the more traditional roles of cutting and repackaging cocaine and heroin in their kitchens or paying teenagers to act as lookouts, others are wielding power on the streets.
Women also extort businesses and shop owners for “pizzo” or protection money and control multi-million pound drug trafficking operations.
And without “excessive retouching or complicated styling”. I wonder how much retouching is OK before they deem it excessive. A good retouching job plus some uncomplicated but skillful styling can more than make up for a lack of makeup.
And I have now idea what the last woman is doing in a lineup of supermodels.
“We celebrate our heritage, drawing strength from our foremothers all the way from Africa to our modern day sheroes, Oprah to Michelle Obama, we celebrate black women.”
Celebrating whiteness: racism. Celebrating blackness: empowerment, embracing uniqueness, and many other wonderful things.
Their union will get what it wants. It’s not like we still live in an era when businesses could demand that their employees’ appearance make for a pleasant customer experience. The existence of fat flight attendants attests to that.