World'S Most Dangerous Female Gangsters

The world of gangsters has always been dominated by men. Many cartels, gangs, and criminal organizations are usually run by men and filled with the men that make up the rank and file. Despite the overwhelming presence of men in the world of organized crime.

There are a few women that have gone out of their way to prove that they can be as ruthless, calculating, and morally bankrupt as any kingpin. So here I am bringing you a list of some of the most dangerous female gangsters out there, some of whom have been thrown behind bars for years, and some of whom still walk the streets as free women.

1.     Enedina Arellano Felix de Toledo

Born April 12, 1961. She is identified as the world’s first female drug lord by the drug enforcement agency, thanks to her cold-blooded ways of taking care of business. Enedina is a Mexican drug lord, who, alongside her brothers, founded the Tijuana cartel and would play a pivotal role as a logistical accountant for the criminal organization throughout most of the 1990s the Tijuana cartel was run by her six brothers after the fall of the financial mastermind in the cartel, she would step up from her role of money laundering and financial administration to take up the position eventually leading the cartel. After the arrest of her brother Eduardo Felix in 2008. Enedina was born in Sinaloa to a family of drug traffickers as a child she never harbored dreams of running the family business, but her aspirations to normalcy were abandoned after her two brothers were declared wanted by the United States and the Mexican government.

Eventually, most of her brothers would find themselves either incarcerated or deceased, leaving Enedina to manage the financial aspect of the organization, oversee alliances and direct the myriad of crimes the Tijuana cartel would commit under her leadership, including monumental contacts with drug suppliers in Colombia. I consider Enedina to be the quintessential female drug boss, or at least significant enough to be the first entry on this list.

2.     Sandra Avila Beltran

Sandra is a Mexican cartel member and was an incredibly powerful and important player in the Mexican drug business. Dubbed “La Reina Del Pacifico” or the queen of the pacific. Mexican and US officials considered her an important link between the Sinaloa cartel, formerly run by El Chapo, and the Colombian Norte del Valle cartel. She was born on October 11, 1960, Beltran has been twice married, with both her husbands being ex-policemen, who left the service and became drug traffickers in some parts of the world. It seems that if you can’t beat them join them, because, unfortunately for both of Beltran's husbands, they would meet their end at the hands of hired assassins.

Beltran was arrested on September 28, 2007, and was charged with organized crime and conspiracy to drug trafficking. Her cover story as a housewife who made clothes for a living didn’t exactly fly. Although some of the charges were later dropped, she was still held for possession of illegal weapons and money laundering. She was extradited to the United States to answer for her criminal charges by the US government that wasn’t all the time she would experience behind bars. However, Beltran was then deported back to Mexico, where she was immediately arrested on money laundering charges and was sentenced to five more years in prison and a fine. She was released in 2015 and now lives in the city of Guadalajara. Having spent a total of seven years in prison and two years in isolation for her crimes.

3.     Judy Moran

Judy Moran was born on December 18, 1944. She is the head of the Moran family, a group of infamous criminals from Melbourne, Australia. She was married to Leslie John Cole, who was shot dead in a Sydney, drug-related gangland conflict in 1982. She had two sons, Mark Cole and Jason Moran, who she had with her second husband, Louis Moran, but life as a Moran is anything but safe or long. Her son Mark was murdered in 2000, her other son, Jason Moran was murdered in 2003 and her second husband, Louis Moran, was also killed in 2004, but that doesn’t mean Judy was innocent throughout all this. In 2009, her husband’s brother, Desmond Moran was murdered and Judy, along with three accomplices, was arrested for the murder she was charged and subsequently convicted of this murder.

Judy was sentenced in 2011 to 26 years in jail and 21 years with no parole to the Moran family. On top of having generally short, life spans were famous for being drug traffickers in Australia, Judy Moran took advantage of their popularity and published an autobiography of her experiences just under two weeks after her husband, Louis Moran’s death. That book, along with many television series they made about Judy, are pieces of media, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable consuming.

4.     Thelma Wright

Thelma Write’s foray into the Philadelphia drug scene began when her husband, Jackie Wright, a major player in the drug game, was murdered an event that would lead to her becoming the gangster queen of Philadelphia transporting cocaine and heroin Between Los Angeles and Philadelphia, Thelma met her husband, Jackie Wright, when she was in her early twenties and after his murder. She had two choices: live life on the straight and narrow, or pick up where her husband left off. Unfortunately, Wright wasn’t one to give up the prospect of easy and plentiful money, so she began transporting drugs across the United States.

Her turning point would occur when she found herself in a life-or-death shootout. That moment would change her life forever. She would turn her life around and give up her crown as the gangster queen of Philadelphia. Thelma was raised in south Philadelphia and enrolled at temple university, where she studied real estate management. So at least she had a life to fall back on after Wright left her life of crime behind for good. In 1991, she published a memoir a decade later called with eyes from both sides living my life in and out of the game. You don’t hear about the prison system, changing many hardened criminals so drastically, or at least I don’t.

5.     Maria Leon

Maria Leon ruled over a criminal empire with connections to a human smuggling ring while being the mother of 13 children. She wasn’t just involved in human trafficking, though she would also smuggle drugs and undertake contract killings among several other crimes. Maria sat like the queen spider in a web spun across north and south America. She had strong ties with the Mexican mafia and terrorized northeast Los Angeles for two decades. At least that is until she was sentenced to more than eight years in a united states federal prison with orders for deportation immediately upon release. Maria’s reign as the much-feared head of a drug-dealing dynasty would come to an end thanks to the death of one of her children, Danny Leon, he had died in a shootout with the police while wielding an AK-47 back in 2008.

Her problem started when she decided to attend his funeral in the United States. She would enlist the support of the Mexican mafia joining the ranks of some of the most dangerous gangsters, in Los Angeles, since she was banned from entering the US, she decided to be taken there by a less than legal route. Unfortunately, for her, the members of her gang were already under police surveillance, so it wasn’t exactly challenging to arrest her and her accomplices. The real tragedy, I think, other than the several victims of her crimes, of course, is Maria, never getting to mourn her son properly before being whisked off to prison.

6.     Maria Licciardi

Maria Licciardi was born on March 24, 1951, and is an Italian criminal affiliated with Camorra. She rose to power and took over as the head of the Licciardi clan after her two brothers and her husband were arrested.

She was the first woman to become the boss of the Licciardi clan and took over as head of the second Igliano alliance. She brought together a fragile informal coalition of 20 Camorra clans to expand control of the city’s most lucrative rackets. Maria would commit several crimes from drugs and cigarette smuggling to protection and prostitution playing a key role in expanding the city’s drug trade market.

Under her leadership, the second Igliano alliance would become more organized, sophisticated, and powerful. Maria introduced revolutionary changes to the clan. Expanding the depths of their criminal activities even further, the most important among these changes was their involvement in the prostitution trade. Before Maria’s leadership, the Camorra had a code of conduct that forbade them from profiting from prostitution.

However, Maria wouldn’t just break this code under her leadership, the Camorra would buy women and miners from the Albanian mafia for two thousand dollars. Many of them were deceived with the promise of legitimate work and a chance to escape the crushing poverty of their homeland. Only to be enslaved, drugged, and forced into prostitution, thankfully Maria’s reign of terror would come to an end when she was arrested in 2001.

7.     Rosetta Cutolo

Rosetta Cutolo was born in 1937 Rosetta lived alone for years with her mother in Otaviano near Naples. She was the power behind her brother. The famous criminal and former head of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata for over 15 years, she would pass on his orders from jail and cultivate his devoted followers on the outside, while her brother would create one scandal after another. Giving interviews and making speeches in the courtroom Rosetta would keep a low profile without her the NCO simply would not have survived.

She ruled in the headquarters of the NCO called the castle Mediceo, a massive 16th-century palace worth 7 billion Lira. It came with 365 rooms that featured amenities like a large park, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. Rosetta was incredibly instrumental to the organization she negotiated with south American cocaine barons and participated in a high-level meeting with representatives of the Sicilian, mafia, and Camorra clans, and almost successfully blew up a police station in 1981. Police would raid her stronghold while she was presiding over a meeting of the NCO she would manage to escape and go into hiding for over 10 years. By 1993, she would give herself up after police found her hideout. She simply walked out saying I am tired of being a fugitive.

Rosetta was sentenced to only five years in prison and was somehow acquitted on nine murder charges. Despite being instrumental in running her brother’s criminal organization, she managed to persuade the authorities she was harmless. I can only imagine how mentally exhausting it must be to be on the run for over a decade. By the time the police found her, she must have looked like a sweet old lady.

8.     Jemeker Thompson

She was the queen pin of the cocaine trade in the 1980s, Los Angeles, although she was based in south-central Los Angeles, she had cocaine distributors in many cities across the United States working for her Thompson's life of crime began in high school. She would sell between three and four kilos of cocaine a week. She married her high school boyfriend, Anthony Mosely, and would sell drugs alongside him, Thompson's drug dealing, business, boomed, and together with her husband, they would move to California and have a son.

Unfortunately, there was no happily ever after for her as her husband would be murdered not long after, but this didn’t stifle Thompson. She would continue drug dealing and by 1984 she would grow her business by recruiting distributors around the US, even getting cocaine shipments directly from producers. In Colombia, at the age of 26, she opened a hair distribution business that authorities pegged as an operation for laundering drug money.

Thompson’s eventual downfall came when Percy Bratton, her business partner was arrested with kilos of cocaine in his car. He was quick to make a deal with investigators, providing them with enough evidence to indict Thompson.

She was captured at the age of 31 and arrested at her son’s sixth-grade graduation ceremony. The charge was a conspiracy to distribute cocaine and five counts of money laundering. Thompson was sentenced to 15 years in prison, of which he served 12, and came out a changed person, certainly.

9.     Raffaella d’Alterio

The most tragic arrest on the list so far, Raffaella d’Alterio, nicknamed the big kitten Raffaella, was the head of the Camorra Clan Pianese d’Alterio. She took over the reins of her clan after her husband, Nicola Pianese was gunned down by rivals. She was arrested in 2012, along with another 65 suspects in a series of raids by officers using every arm of the law to bring her down including helicopters and sniffer dogs. Police in Naples would reveal that more than 10 million euros worth of cars and property were seized in the raid, including a flaming red Ferrari, with a solid gold number plate. Make no mistake: Raffaella wasn’t just a ruthlessly dangerous crime lord. She was ruthlessly successful as well who says crime doesn’t pay.

Raffaella wasn’t the only one making bank either it was a proper family business. Her son Raffaella, who once tried to murder the family lawyer, and her daughters, Katarina and Costanza, who were among the people arrested in the raids, ran the Camorra clan together and shared the ill-gotten spoils. As a family, Raffaella d’Alterio was held on allegations of extortion possessing illegal arms robbery, and dealing drugs.

According to some estimates, her gang was responsible for more than 4 000 murders in the last 30 years.

10.  Anna Gristina

Next, we have the vice queen from Scotland who ran a multi-million dollar prostitution empire in new york. The mother of four Anna Gristina started her life of crime from rather humble beginnings after a breakup that left her and her young children without any support, Anna would find herself working for her cousin at a massage parlor known for happy endings. After learning the ropes she would branch out on her own establishing a high-end new york escorts service that would match beautiful young women with some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the city. Anna would go undetected for years as she scouted for the most beautiful women to introduce to her client base of celebs sports stars and businessmen ensuring to keep a dossier of her most high-profile customers as insurance at the height of her power. Anna’s escort service was raking in two thousand dollars an hour.

The FBI would continue to monitor her ring, hoping to use the chance to catch a big fish among her customers. Unfortunately, her empire would fall apart in 2012, when she pleaded guilty to a single count of promoting prostitution to avoid a protracted trial on allegations that she served as a high-end Madam, she also pleaded guilty to arranging a *** show for an undercover police officer and was consequently sentenced to six months in prison and five years on probation. They even made a movie about her life, and I just know it’s the kind of movie I’d be dissecting for every possible era so which one of these women, you think, is the most dangerous fugitive of them all?

Thank you for Reading.