Ladies of the Life: 10 Infamous Women in Organised Crime

Join us as we take a closer look at the women who played significant roles in the gangster lifestyle — ten of the most infamous female figures in the history of American organised crime, chosen for their notoriety, their stories and the marks they left on history.

1. Ma Barker

The bodies of Ma Barker, right, and her son Fred after losing their shootout against the FBI.

The godmother of crime, Arizona Donnie Barker — Ma Barker — was merciless despite her sweet-sounding moniker. Marrying George Barker at 19, they went on to have four sons: Herman, Lloyd, Arthur and Fred. The crime family were said to be carrying out highway robberies as early as 1910.

Murder soon became part of their repertoire. Things started to go wrong in 1927 when Herman committed suicide to avoid arrest. After the remaining sons cycled through prison, Fred was released in 1931 and he and Ma commenced a new crime spree. On 8 January 1935, FBI agents stormed their Lake Weir, Florida hideout. Both Ma and Fred were killed. J Edgar Hoover called her “The most vicious, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade.” Among the actresses to play Ma Barker was Shelley Winters in the 1970 film Bloody Mama.

2. Bonnie Parker

Bonnie Parker

Without doubt the most famous on our list. Along with her partner Clyde Barrow, it is suggested that this young woman from Rowena, Texas was involved in over a hundred felonies in the two years she was Clyde’s companion. She had previously married Roy Thornton on 25 September 1926 — six days before her 16th birthday — and was still wearing his ring when she died. They never divorced.

The legend of Bonnie and Clyde grew partly from a photoshoot near their Joplin, Missouri hideaway. Their lives were cut short in a police ambush in 1934. She was 23, he was 25. One gang member later testified he never saw Bonnie fire a shot — and the cigar? That was a playful photo. Bonnie was a cigarette smoker and never touched cigars.

3. Stephanie St. Clair

Stephanie St. Clair

Known as Queenie in Manhattan and Madame St Clair in Harlem, Stephanie St Clair was of French-African descent and fiercely protective of her neighbourhood — going as far as testifying against corrupt police officers and getting them sacked. Even more impressively, she thwarted Mafia incursion into Harlem after Prohibition ended, using Lucky Luciano as an ally and Bumpy Johnson as her enforcer.

When Dutch Schultz was assassinated in 1935, she reportedly sent a note to his deathbed: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” She handed her operation to Bumpy Johnson when she retired, and he became the Harlem Godfather. St Clair died in Harlem in 1969, a wealthy woman. She has been portrayed on screen by Novella Nelson in The Cotton Club (1984) and Cicely Tyson in Hoodlum (1997).

4. Helen Gillis

Helen Gillis

At 16 she married Lester Gillis — better known as Baby Face Nelson — and by 20 she was declared public enemy number one alongside her husband, with a shoot-to-kill order in effect. A harsh fate for a woman whose primary crime was loyalty.

She was present at the Battle of Barrington on 27 November 1934, when Nelson was fatally shot in a confrontation with FBI agents. He died in her arms hours later. Helen surrendered two days after and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison. On release, bitter over Nelson’s death, she turned informant and testified against John Paul Chase, helping secure his life sentence. She was buried next to Baby Face Nelson in Chicago’s St Joseph’s Cemetery. She died in 1987.

5. Virginia Hill

Virginia Hill

The Queen of the Gangster Molls. Virginia was born in Alabama and raised in Georgia before moving to Chicago where she worked as an accountant for Al Capone. Driven by ambitions of becoming an actress, she moved to Los Angeles where she met and fell in love with Bugsy Siegel. He named the Flamingo hotel after her — a venture that cost him his life when he was shot and killed in her Hollywood home on 20 June 1947. Hill was out of the house at the time.

She appeared before the 1951 Kefauver hearings and was widely suspected of involvement in Siegel’s death, though nothing was proven. Virginia Hill died of an overdose of sleeping pills in Austria on 24 March 1966, aged 49. She was portrayed by Dyan Cannon in a 1974 TV movie and by Annette Bening in the 1991 film Bugsy.

6. Griselda Blanco

Griselda Blanco

La Dama de la Mafia. The Godmother. The Black Widow. Every nickname Griselda Blanco collected tells the same story — here was a woman you did not cross. A key figure in the Medellín Cartel and the architect of the Miami cocaine trade in the 1970s and 1980s, she built an empire earning an estimated $80 million a month and is thought to have been responsible for up to 200 murders.

She was arrested in California in 1985 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. By the time she was murdered — shot twice in the head by a lone motorcycle assassin outside a butcher’s shop in Medellín on 3 September 2012 — her estimated net worth exceeded $2 billion. She was 69. The killing mirrored the motorcycle assassination method she had pioneered herself.

7. Arlyne Brickman

Arlyne Brickman

Born to a Jewish family on New York’s Lower East Side in 1934, Arlyne idolised Virginia Hill and followed a similar path — working for the mob as a numbers runner, drug dealer and loan shark. Her Jewish heritage was an obstacle to rising in the Sicilian-run crime syndicate, but the money kept her involved for years.

She will always be remembered as an informant. In 1986 her testimony helped convict Anthony Scarpati and several other members of the Colombo crime family. When asked at the racketeering trial what she had been doing in 1981, she replied: “I was a housewife.” The courtroom erupted with laughter. She refused the Witness Protection Programme, saying: “That’s the quickest way to get killed.” Her life was documented in Mob Girl: A Woman’s Life in the Underworld by Teresa Carpenter.

The next three women were all part of the Dillinger gang — known as the Terror Gang. First up, Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie.

8. Evelyn “Billie” Frechette

Evelyn ‘Billie’ Frechette

Born in 1907 on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin to a French and Native American family, Evelyn adopted the nickname Billie. She lived with John Dillinger and was the great love of his outlaw years. Her only criminal act was driving him to a doctor after he was shot — but in April 1934 she was arrested by FBI agent Melvin Purvis and sentenced to two years for harbouring a fugitive.

Dillinger was killed in July 1934 while she was still in prison. After her release she toured the US in a “Crime Does Not Pay” show alongside members of Dillinger’s family, then returned to the Menominee reservation where she lived until her death in 1969.

9. Opal “Mack Truck” Long

Opal ‘Mack Truck’ Long

Opal Long — Bernice to those who knew her — despised the nickname Mack Truck and was the caregiver of the Terror Gang, putting others before herself and priding herself on her loyalty. She paired up with Russell Clark until both were arrested in Tucson, Arizona on 25 January 1934.

She was later arrested on 2 June 1934 for harbouring Dillinger and John Hamilton, and received six months in prison. Despite being blamed by the gang for the St Paul apartment raid, she refused to pass any information to authorities that could have reduced her sentence — a loyalty the gang itself never returned.

10. Pearl Elliott

Pearl Elliott

Pearl Elliott was not like the other women in Dillinger’s orbit. She was very much her own woman — a Madam who ran a 21-room boarding house in Indiana for over a decade, protected by political connections through her uncle and by local police who dealt with troublesome clients no questions asked.

In 1933 Pearl became Dillinger’s accountant, holding receipts from several bank jobs during the summer and fall. Her husband Dewey Elliott used his connections with Frank Nitti to help establish the Terror Gang in Chicago. Pearl disappeared under FBI investigation after Dewey died of cancer in 1935. She remains one of mob history’s more tantalising unsolved mysteries.

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