2 cases · Organized Crime
Convicted: Maria Licciardi
When Italian police raided what they believed was Maria Licciardi's hideout in June 2001, they expected a spartan fugitive's den. Instead, they found marble floors, a grand piano, and an outsize Jacuzzi — all tucked inside an attic bristling with surveillance cameras. The most powerful woman in the Neapolitan underworld had vanished again, as she always did, slipping back into the maze of streets where she had been born fifty years earlier. A fellow mafioso once told investigators that Maria Licciardi was more dangerous than Sicily's most-wanted fugitive, Matteo Messina Denaro. Italy's Interior Ministry called her the 'strategic head' of a criminal confederation controlling twenty rival Camorra clans. She brokered peace between warring gangsters, dispatched kill orders through a pentito who later testified that 'talking with Maria was the same as talking with Gennaro, the boss,' and in 1999 recalled an entire heroin shipment on quality-control grounds — a decision the Lo Russo clan defied, triggering at least eleven overdose deaths in a single month. She earned three nicknames: La Madrina, La Piccolina, and La Principessa. She earned each of them. This is the story of the woman who ran Naples.
Convicted: Stephanie St. Clair (also known as Stephanie Saint-Clair; later Stephanie St. Clair Hamid)
On October 23, 1935, a Bronx gangster named Dutch Schultz lay bleeding from four bullet wounds in a Newark chophouse, the victim of a Murder Inc. hit ordered by Lucky Luciano. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, a telegram arrived at his hospital bedside. It read: 'As ye sow, so shall ye reap.' It was signed 'Madame Queen of Policy.' The woman who sent it had survived a murder contract, a cellar full of coal dust, and a decade of all-out war with the most dangerous mobster in New York. She had done it all without the backing of any organized crime family, without the protection of the law, and without the privilege that white men in her industry took for granted. Stephanie St. Clair was a Black woman from Guadeloupe who had arrived in Harlem with nothing and built a half-million-dollar criminal empire, educated her neighbors about their constitutional rights, and exposed a corrupt police department before the world. She was, by any measure, one of the most remarkable figures in American organized crime history. Almost nobody knows her name.
