KEY POINTS:
In the end the Palermo prosecutors gave Ann Hathaway the benefit of the doubt: she was just short of money, as she had claimed, they decided.
Wire taps of conversations between the Lancashire-born wife of Antonio Rinzivillo, a Sicilian gangster with numerous murders under his belt, and some of his fellow-criminals, revealed her asking them for funds. The prosecutors decided that here was another of the "bosses in skirts", the active-service Mafia Godmothers who have cropped up in Palermo in the past few years, taking over the running of the business once their husbands or brothers go to jail. Perhaps she was and perhaps she wasn't. Luckily for her and her daughters, aged 5 and 19, the prosecutors chose to take her at her word. Hathaway's trial for Mafia association, which could have seen her sent to jail in Italy for the rest of her life, concluded with a plea bargain, a two-year suspended sentence and a return to Lancashire.
Hathaway, now 44, met Rinzivillo when she went to Italy as a cabaret dancer. They married in 1987 in a Rochdale registry office and settled in Sicily. How soon she discovered her Latin lover's true profession is unclear - but the fidelity with which she has stood by him through the 10 years in which they lived together, as well as the many more during which he was in jail, suggests she digested the code of omerta well. Or perhaps it was just Lancashire grit - or true love. When Italian reporters asked her, on her release from Agrigento prison last week, if she would do it all over again, knowing what she knows now, she retorted: "Certainly I'd do it again. I adore my husband. He's the father of my girls."
How deeply she was implicated in the family business may never be known for certain. But her case throws into focus the extraordinary ways in which the Sicilian Mafia, the most conservative and macho-ridden institution in an island that has never been a citadel of women's lib, has been forced to change with the times.
All the Mafia bosses, both those in jail and those still at work outside, are men. When they become decrepit or go to jail for life they will hand over to their oldest or brightest or most brutal son. None of the daughters will ever get a look in.
Mamma is in the kitchen cooking as usual, watching over the bambini, keeping the home spick and span. Traditionally, part of the Mafia code is to keep the wives and mothers out of the loop of confidences for their own safety and because the mother, in these devoutly Catholic zones, is the Madonna, the pure being; one reason mobsters take mistresses is to have a woman they feel free to confide in.
That at least is the stereotype. But slowly, even in the sinister villages south of Palermo, the Cosa Nostra heartland, the mores of society are on the move.
Dr Ombretta Ingrasci, author of a new book on women and the Mafia published in Italy this month with the title Donne d'onore (Women of Honour), said: "The role of women in the Mafia has changed a lot in the past 30 years - and in the past 15 years in particular. Women are much more active in criminal organisations in various sectors, and in particular in drugs."
Girls began to get an education, whether their fathers liked it or not. So the first tasks that began to come the way of Mafia wives was book-keeping: unglamorous, un-bloody, but vital for the success of the gang.
Women also became vital as messengers, able to move around with far more freedom, even in times of heightened police activity, far more secure than any telephone or postal service. Of course, giving women messages to transmit meant you had to confide in them; as with the accountancy chores, steadily they became privy to the mob's deepest secrets.
Then came the blitzkrieg. The Mafia was in violent flux during the 1980s. As the Italian state began to take organised crime seriously for the first time, staging a succession of "maxi-trials" involving hundreds of gangsters, the very survival of the crime families came into question. Under the leadership of Toto Riina the Mafia struck back with outrageous violence, detonating huge car bombs, butchering one high-profile target after another.
But Riina had fatally over-reached himself. He had declared war on the Italian state - and after years of seedy deals and compromises with the gangs, the state finally answered in kind. Dozens of arrests followed, including that of Riina himself.
Now the danger of collapse stared even the most feared of the gangs in the face. And the women were ready to step into the breach. There was nothing in the code of honour to justify it. And no sign was given to the outside world that women had taken effective power. Yet here and there - as prosecutors and investigators slowly began to discover - it started to happen.
With the bosses and many of their underlings in jail, with those who had evaded the police in flight and the whole organisation in a shambles, the women were sometimes the only people left to hold it all together: women such as Giuseppina Vitale, who took over the Vitale gang, Catena Cammarata, who took over the Riesi family, and many others, some of whom we may never learn about.
Yet the limitations remain, says Ingrasci. "All the women who are involved in Mafia gangs at a high level are in the role of substitutes for husbands or brothers who are in prison or on the run.
"They take up an important role in the organisation when there is a vacuum. It's a recognition by the gangs that these women are useful, they know everything about the gang's activities and they provide continuity in the gang's criminal work. They have what I call delegate or substitute power, especially in the'Ndrangheta, the Mafia of the region of Calabria."
But the Godmothers' rise to power does not portend real structural change, says Ingrasci. "In my view, there are limits to the transformation the gangs have undergone. Despite the changes that have occurred, there are no women who are Mafia leaders in their own right, by virtue of their own leadership qualities; their position in power must always be legitimised by the family. They always support their men. The Mafia remains a profoundly macho society, and women are still exploited within it."
- INDEPENDENT
