Dangerous Dames: Top 5 Notable Women in the Mob

The mob may be heavily male focused, but women in organised crime could play just as significant a role. From Harlem numbers queens to Colombian cocaine empresses, these five women left a mark on criminal history that rivals any of the men. Here is the countdown.

5. Helen Gillis

Helen Gillis

Helen was born in 1911 and died in 1987. She was most famous for being the wife of Prohibition-era bank robber Baby Face Nelson, who was gunned down in dramatic style in 1934 after a gun battle with FBI agents. In 1931 Gillis was declared public enemy number one with a shoot-to-kill order in effect — harsh treatment for a woman whose primary crime was loyalty.

She was present at the Battle of Barrington in Illinois on 27 November 1934, when Nelson was fatally shot in a confrontation with FBI agents. Nelson died in her arms hours later. Helen surrendered two days after and was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison.

After the death of Dillinger in July 1934 and her husband in November 1934, she turned informant and her testimony helped bring down fellow gang member John Paul Chase. She died in 1987 and was buried next to Baby Face Nelson at St Joseph’s Cemetery in Chicago.

4. Griselda Blanco

Griselda Blanco

Griselda Blanco went by many nicknames — the Black Widow, La Madrina, the Godmother — but all of them point to the same truth: she was the most feared woman in the history of the drug trade. Queen of Narcotics in Colombia, she only passed away in 2012, aged 69 — not through natural causes, but through a drive-by shooting outside a butcher’s shop in Medellín.

She built a cocaine distribution network connecting Colombia and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s that was earning an estimated $80 million a month at its peak. Her methods were extraordinarily violent — she is thought to have been responsible for up to 200 murders.

Pursued by US authorities, she was captured in California in 1985 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. By the time she was murdered in 2012, her estimated net worth exceeded $2 billion.

3. Ma Barker

Ma Barker

Arizona Donnie Barker — Ma Barker — had a friendly, warming name that concealed a woman at the centre of one of America’s most violent criminal families. The Barker gang committed numerous bank robberies and murders from the early 1920s onwards and became household names in Depression-era America. J Edgar Hoover described her as:

“the most vicious, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade.”

On 8 January 1935, FBI agents stormed the Barker gang’s hideout at Lake Weir, Florida. After a prolonged shootout that drew spectators to the police perimeter, Ma Barker and her son Fred were both found dead inside, a Tommy Gun between them. Whether Ma was truly the criminal mastermind Hoover claimed, or a convenient justification for her killing, remains debated by historians to this day.

2. Stephanie St. Clair

Stephanie St. Clair

Queenie, as she was known on the streets of Manhattan — Madame St Clair in Harlem — was one of the most remarkable figures in the history of American organised crime. Of French-African descent, she ran a successful numbers racket in Harlem throughout the 1920s and 1930s, resisted Mafia pressure after Prohibition ended, and was one of the very few independent operators who never fell under Mafia control.

With Lucky Luciano as an unlikely ally and Bumpy Johnson as her chief enforcer, she kept the likes of Dutch Schultz away from her businesses. When Schultz was assassinated in 1935, legend has it she sent him a note as he lay dying: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

She eventually handed her operation to Bumpy Johnson, who 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).

1. Virginia Hill

Virginia Hill

No other woman in mob history commands the same recognition as Virginia Hill. The Queen of the Gangster Molls was born into poverty in Alabama but clawed her way to the centre of American organised crime through ambition, intelligence and an extraordinary force of personality. She worked as an accountant for Al Capone in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles where she met, worked for and fell in love with Bugsy Siegel.

He named the Flamingo — his legendary Las Vegas hotel — after her. The venture brought an end to his career and cost him his life: he was shot and killed in Hill’s Hollywood home on 20 June 1947. Hill was coincidentally out of the house at the time.

She appeared before the 1951 Kefauver hearings and was widely considered a suspect in Siegel’s death, though nothing was ever proven. Virginia Hill died of an overdose of sleeping pills in Austria on 24 March 1966. She was 49. Some have suggested her death was not suicide.

Frequently Asked Questions