Cartel news site ElBlogDelNarco released 40 photos of the gun-toting sicarias – or female assassins -noting their gold-plated assault rifles and form fitting gear.
Decked in stilettos and tank tops, these women re-define the term “dressed to kill.”
In 2015, one Mexican accountant climbed the ranks of the Arellano Felix cartel that was previously headed by her brothers, becoming the first cartel queen pin.
Enedina Arellano Felix became the first leader of a Mexican cartel in 2015, since then the cartel “queenpin” has normalized female participation in cartel operations.
Mike Vigil, former chief of international operations for the DEA:
“This is not an Equal Opportunity Employer. This is a male dominated field of work. There have been very few women to break that glass ceiling. The few who do have to be just as vicious and skilled as the men.”
Here are a few of the sexy pics of the “alleged” cartel boss ladies.
October 2015, Sandra Ávila Beltran, the revered “Queen of Cocaine” or “Queen of the Pacific” was released from prison.
She has spent the last seven years in confinement for money laundering, including two years in solitary confinement.
Avila, now in her early 50s, was arrested in 2007 in Mexico City with her Colombian boyfriend, Juan Diego Espinoza Ramirez, whom officials claimed was also a powerful drug-world figure.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, “Avila is believed to have been a rare figure — a powerful woman — in Latin America’s testosterone-saturated drug world, and her story has become a kind of genre to itself, particularly with the success of ‘La Reina del Sur,’ the wildly popular Telemundo telenovela to which Avila’s life is sometimes compared. (Fortune)
Sandra Ávila Beltrán at home. Photograph: Jonathan Franklin
The former Cartel queen pin gave an exclusive interview, her first in nearly a decade, from her home near Guadalajara, Mexico. In that interview she lashed out at political corruption in Mexica, mocked the futility of drug prohibition and praised Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Ávila is the stuff legends are made of – one of the few women with access to the highest levels of cartel life. She has lived, worked and loved inside the upper echelons of the Mexican drug world since the late 1970s. At the height of her career, she showed a propensity to carry suitcases with millions of dollars in crisp $100 bills.
Concetta Scalisi, one of the women wh allegedly o ran the Laudini Mafia clan, arrested in 2001. Photo: Sipa Press/SIPA Via The Guardian– Italian police have arrested dozens of suspected Mafia members in an international operation to dismantle a powerful Sicilian crime group run by women.
Over 500 officers took part in the raid on the Laudani clan in the Sicilian port of Catania, nicknamed “Mussi di ficurinia” (“Prickly pear lips”), in a sting that also involved forces in Germany and the Netherlands, Italian police told AFP.
Three women, known as the three queens of Caltagirone, a town near Catania, had ruled the clan with an iron grip as well as governing all financial matters but were brought down by the heir to the clan who began helping police.
The suspects were all wanted for Mafia association, extortion, drug trafficking and possessing illegal arms.
Of 109 arrest warrants issued on Wednesday, 86 people were detained, 23 were already serving time in prison and six are still “on the run.”
Italian authorities say Giuseppe Laudani was selected to run the clan when he was 17 after his Mafia boss father was killed but he turned to police and told how the three women, Maria Scuderi, 51, Concetta Scalisi, 60 and Paola Torrisi, 52, had raised him.
Known as “the prince”, he described a world of violence and vendettas, with the women building power after his aunt Concetta’s life was saved by his father during an attempted assassination at the end of the 1980s, Italian media reports said.
Torrisi, daughter of a mobster boss who used to manage the clan’s international drug trading, was still young when she began to organise couriers in the area around Mount Etna, the active volcano which dominates Catania.
Laudani also told police about his brother Pippo and half-brother Alberto Caruso, as well as his grandfather Sebastiano Laudini, 90, who had served time between 1986 and 2012 and is now back under house arrest.
According to prosecutor Michelangelo Patane, the clan, which had sought ties with the cocaine-running ’Nrangheta mafia in Calabria, had a huge arsenal of weapons, including two bazookas.
The rocket launchers were intended for use in hits on several Sicilian magistrates but the plan was foiled when another informer told police the weapons were hidden in a garage on the slopes of Mount Etna.
The Laudani are believed to be behind a string of violent attacks in the 1990s, including the murder of a prison warden and a lawyer who had refused to be bought.
Police said they had been hampered in their investigations by local business owners, who either lied about being the victims of attempts to extort money from them or admitted the extortion but refused to help identify those responsible.
The Sicilian Mafia, known as “Cosa Nostra” or “Our Thing”, was Italy’s most powerful organised crime syndicate in the 1980s and 1990s, but has seen its power diminish following years of probes and mass arrests.
It also faces fierce underworld competition from the increasingly powerful Naples-based Camorra and ’Ndrangheta.
The Pen Hustle With Brandy Cavalli 