Tag: Gangsters Wives

El Chapo’s Female Financial Operator Arrested In Mexico

Valencia, also known as La Patrona, is accused of being in charge of cash for the Sinaloa drugs cartel.

The woman who is allegedly El Chapo’s financial operator was arrested in Mexico and charged with being in charge of cartel operations.

The alleged queen pin also known as ‘La Patrona’ was arrested in Culiacan in Sinaloa state, where El Chapo, whose real name is Joaquin Guzman, was captured in January after escaping a maximum security prison.

Guadalupe Fernandez Valencia, 55, is wanted in America after being accused of trafficking cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into the country as well as money laundering.

She was also added to the kingpin list by the U.S. Treasury Department, meaning any assets she holds in American can be seized.

Italian Police Dismantle Female ‘Black Widow’ Mafia Syndicate

 

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.

French Gangster Wife Turned Author: Elina Feriel

  
Elina Feriel is a 34-year-old author and former ‘gangster’s wife’, whose first book is causing a stir in France.

Feriel has appeared in the French press in recent days promoting her first book “Au bout de la violence” (After the Violence).

It’s a memoir of her years as the self-confessed wife of a drug dealer and career criminal in the violent and poverty-stricken northern district of Marseille, France’s second-largest city.

Over the course of just a few years, Feriel lost the three most important men in her life to violent crime.

Her husband, her older brother, and her new partner were all shot dead on the streets of Marseille in gangland killings.

Feriel is only just emerging in the French psyche now, but she’s already making an impression.

Her story – guns, drugs, bling, young love and the pain of repeated tragedy – is a fascinating one.

But it’s her personality as much as anything else which is making her a favourite on TV and radio talk shows.

Feriel is brutally honest and very passionate. She is critical of failures among her own people – the Arab community in Marseille – but scathing about the ignorance and hypocrisy of France’s Parisian establishment, which in her view claims to care about Marseille’s monumental problems, but actually does little to help.

She grew up in the northern district of Marseille, with an absent mother and an alcoholic father. “I was raised by the streets. I used to go around like a little boy,” she told France Info radio.

A distracted trouble-maker at school, Feriel married her husband Sabri when she was still in her late teens. She had fallen for his rough charm, and the two quickly started a family of three children.

He showered her with expensive gifts, the proceeds of his drug-dealing, but as Sabri rose through the ranks to become a top gangster in the city’s northern district, his paranoia and abusiveness increased.

Living in constant fear, Sabri began to beat Feriel, and their life spiralled out of control until he was finally shot down with a machine gun while riding his scooter.

Then, incredibly, Feriel’s older brother, who had been convicted of a bag-snatching, as well as her new partner Sam, who was “in with a bad crowd”, were both shot dead over the next few years.

Feriel says her book is not the start of a career in politics, but just to “get things off her chest.”

I’m not an activist or a spokeswoman…I just felt the need to write this to get things of my chest. It’s crucial. And if it helps to change things, all the better. 

she told Elle magazine.

After everything that has happened, Feriel has moved “far away” from Marseille’s northern district, and lives with her three children.

Feriel is sharp, witty, and very sassy. It’s clear there is some hurt, and even bitterness behind her words.

However, with the writing and publication of her memoirs, she gives the impression of someone who is prematurely wise and eager to share what she has learned (the hard way) about poverty, violence, and the allure of glamour.

After the death of my husband, some people would have preferred if I just stuffed myself full of Prozac and shut myself off in silent mourning. But I’m a bigmouth, and I do the opposite of what people expect from me. 

she told Elle magazine in a recent interview.

I try to pass down to my children an open-mindedness, and a trust that didn’t exist where I came from. But I also want them to toughen up, and to know that the world that’s out there waiting for them, it’s not all Care Bears.

Source | The Local (France)  

Original Publication Date: March, 2013