Mob women dead in shootout
In a rare display of Italian women’s role in organised crime, a shootout involving wives and other female relatives of feuding mob bosses has left three women dead and five people wounded in a tiny village near Naples.
The women began shooting it out after a car chase in Lauro, about 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of Naples, Sunday night.
“Never before had women pointed guns at each other and never before had they played leading roles in a shootout,” Corriere della Sera, a Milan daily, wrote Monday in a report from Lauro.
In one of the two cars involved in the shootout were women of the Cava family, which belongs to the Camorra crime syndicate, the Neapolitan version of the Mafia, police said.
Aboard the other one was Salvatore Graziano, the reputed boss of a rival clan, with three female relatives.
Investigators said it appeared that the Graziano family opened fire first, possibly with the help of other people aboard a third car.
Two women in the car carrying the Cavas – the wife of one family boss and the sister of another one – died at the scene, apparently shot several times in the face. The 16 year-old girl died at the hospital later.
The four other women aboard the two cars were also injured, and so was Graziano, news reports said.
The two families have been fighting for the control of the territory for about three decades.
Women have traditionally kept a low-profile in Italian organised crime activities, although investigators say mobsters’ wives, sisters and mothers have long provided logistical support, such as delivering messages in and out of prisons where their men are jailed.
