"An unprecedented look inside a ruthless and obscenely wealthy branch of the Italian Mafia and the electrifying story of the brave women who decided to fight back"--

"The untold stories of the women who have risen to prominence and notoriety in the male-led culture of the Italian Mafia. For as long as it has gripped our imaginations, the Mafia has been tied to an ingrained image of masculinity. We read about "made men," "wiseguys," and "goodfellas" leading criminal organizations whose culture prizes machismo, with women as ancillary and often-powerless characters: trivialized mistresses and long-suffering mob...

The role of women in the Italian mafias has long been overlooked. So who are they? Pure and virtuous Madonnas or dangerous Godmothers?Reduced to victim status and relegated to domestic life, women serve as the mafia's respectable facade: virtuous and docile. But, as Milka Kahn and Anne Veron reveal in this absorbing book, women have always been at the heart of Italy's criminal organisations. While the men are behind bars or on the run, it is left...

"Two deaths lead Inspector Montalbano into investigations of corruption and power in the twentieth installment of the New York Times bestselling series. Montalbano investigates a robbery at a supermarket, a standard case that takes a spin when manager Guido Borsellino is later found hanging in his office. Was it a suicide? The inspector and the coroner have their doubts, and further investigation leads to the director of a powerful local company....

"Take away love and you will have hell," you told me, Father Pino. "Give love and you will have what hell is not." Federico is a privileged teenager from Palermo. He is preparing to spend a summer learning English in Oxford when his teacher, Father Pino, asks him to help out at a youth centre in an area of Palermo dominated by mafia and misery. To his parents' dismay, Federico decides to follow Father Pino into the darkness of Palermo's alleyways....

Fernando Di Leo was a prolific filmmaker who explored the political extremism and mafia corruption in Italy during the 1970's. Master of garish, intricately plotted, ultra-violent stories about pimps and petty gangsters, Di Leo has perfected the genre with an uncanny accuracy. Di Leo's films demonstrate the degradation of the working classes and how the mafia corrupted them. Though he slipped out of public consciousness after his death in 2003, his...

A talented young runner, Santino, lives in Palermo, Sicily - a beautiful region of Italy that's dominated by the Mafia. With Santino's first communion approaching, his father and grandfather carry out a theft to pay for the party - but they steal from the wrong people. A young, cocky, Mafioso summons them to a meeting, and they bring the boy. As Santino wanders off into the old abandoned neighborhood, he hears shots and runs back to see two armed...

Through the warm-hearted, perceptive, and principled Commissario Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon has brought us Venice in all its aspects. Now Leon returns to one of her signature subjects: the environment, which has reached a crisis in Italy. In Venice, with the polluted waters of the canals, the issue is significant. For Brunetti, it becomes so when an investigator from the Carabiniere, looking into the illegal hauling of garbage, asks for a favor. (Bestseller)...

An improbable tale of espionage and crime recounts the Allied war effort's clandestine coalition between the Mafia and the U.S. government to protect New York Harbor against sabotage and assist in the 1943 U.S. invasion of Sicily. In 1942, New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage. The U.S. Navy needs a recourse to secure it. Naval intelligence officer Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden had the solution: recruit members of La Cosa Nostra. The...