Luisa Terracciano, wife of arrested clan boss Pasquale Carotenuto, is taken into custody by Carabinieri paramilitary police on May 27 on the outskirts of Naples, southern Italy. Women are playing a stronger role in the Camorra, the Naples’ area crime syndicate.

Naples, Italy ? They go by such nicknames as “Fat Cat” and “Tomboy.” Their simmering power struggles once drove them into the streets, guns blazing. They rule their crime families with steely determination, and also raise the kids and stir the pasta.

Move over, Don Corleone. Godmothers are rising in the ranks of the Camorra, the Naples’ area crime syndicate.

Women have long played a strong role in Camorra crime families, muscling, sometimes murdering, their way to the top. Their influence stretches back as far as the 1950s when a pregnant former beauty queen dubbed “pupetta” (little doll) shot dead the man who had ordered a hit on her husband, and allegedly settled into a life of crime.

Now, as the state steps up its war against the Camorra, rounding up scores of mobsters, the women are increasingly taking over the helm from their men.

“There is a growing number of women who hold executive roles” in the Camorra, Gen. Gaetano Maruccia, commander of the Carabinieri paramilitary police in the Naples area, told The Associated Press.

“They are either widows (of mob bosses) or wives of husbands who have been put in prison. They hold the reins.”

Mothers, daughters, sisters and sisters-in-law are “assuming ever-more leading roles,” Stefania Castaldi, a Naples-based prosecutor who investigates organized crime, said in an interview.

This family dimension of the Camorra finds its echo in mainstream Italian society — a family often will entrust its business to a woman relative rather than an outsider.

Camorra women still perform the more “traditional” roles of cutting and repackaging cocaine and heroin in their kitchens or tidying up the hideouts of fugitive bosses, but others are wielding power on the streets. They shake down merchants in extortion rackets and increasingly direct drug trafficking worth millions of dollars, Castaldi said.

In one of the most lurid episodes, in 2002, two carloads of women from rival Camorra clans lurched through the streets of Lauro, a town near Naples, first trading insults, and then machine-gun fire and pistol shots until two grandmothers and a 16-year-old girl were dead. The root of the bloodshed: a turf war fueled by the murder of a clan boss’ cousin.

Some of the Camorra “godmothers” rank right up there with the men in commanding clout and obedience, authorities say.

Among them is Maria Licciardi, one of the victors of the long-running blood feud between the Di Lauro and Secondigliano Alliance that left Naples littered nearly daily with bodies a few years back.

“Signora Licciardi is a true ‘madrina’ (godmother), absolutely,” Castaldi said. “She was the sister of a boss, and she sat at the table with other bosses, she made decisions with them, she was right at their level.”

Authorities are now investigating whether one of those decisions was an order to execute as many as 30 of her rivals, investigators say, speaking on condition of anonymity because Italian law prohibits officials from discussing ongoing probes.

Licciardi, a petite woman known by cohorts and enemies alike as a “piccirella” (the little one), was arrested in 2001 after she was stopped while driving her car near Naples. On the run since 1999, Licciardi at the time figured on the list of Italy’s top-30 wanted criminals.

She is one of a handful of female mobsters who are considered so top-level they are held in Italy’s stiffest prison regime, which includes isolation and severely limited contact with the outside world.

“She’s in prison, but she still commands. Prisons don’t represent a barrier” for the Camorra, said Anna Maria Zaccaria, a sociologist at Naples Federico II University who is researching women’s roles in the syndicate.

Licciardi is widely considered an able manager, particularly valued for her “powers of persuasion,” Zaccaria said in an interview. Dangling promises of cash, she is believed to have managed to persuade some Camorra mobsters who were contemplating becoming turncoats to stay loyal to the clan, the professor said.

For generations, when such mobsters were arrested, mothers and wives would descend screaming into Naples’ chaotic streets, throwing insults and sometimes punches at police arresting their men. But as investigators increasingly regard women as significant Camorra figures, handcuffs have been snapping shut around their wrists, too.