Maria Licciardi

On 26 June 2019, Licciardi managed to escape from an huge anti-Camorra operation against the Secondigliano Alliance, becoming a fugitive.

On 12 July 2019, the Court of Naples annulled the preventive detention against Licciardi, sharing the legal questions raised by her lawyer, Dario Vannetiello. Licciardi is considered a free woman, despite her known role as the head of the Secondigliano Alliance, one of the most powerful criminal organization in the Campania region.

In 2009, Licciardi was released from prison after almost 8 years.

When the senior prosecutor Luigi Bobbio began making successful prosecutions against her clan, Licciardi felt that he was getting closer to discovering her whereabouts. In January 2001, she bombed Bobbio's office building. The bombing was delivered as a warning to stop the investigation of her clan's activities and also to stop any further prosecution of her clan members. However, the bombing did not stop Bobbio from continuing his investigations. On the contrary, he was put under police protection and continued his prosecutions against the clan undeterred. Over 70 members of the Licciardi clan were arrested. Loyal to their boss, they refused to cooperate, preferring to serve their prison term instead.

On 9 June 2001, several hundred heavily armed officers, backed by helicopter spotters, launched an intensive search operation in and around Secondigliano. Acting on a tip-off, they stormed a dilapidated building that she had been known to use as a hide-out. Licciardi was nowhere to be found, but police discovered that inside an attic guarded by surveillance cameras she had installed marble floors, a grand piano and an outsize Jacuzzi. Her repeated successes in evading capture by the police inspired local journalists to dub her "The Scarlet Pimpernel of Italy".

On 14 June 2001, Licciardi was arrested by the Naples' police while traveling with a married couple on board a car around Melito, near Naples. She didn't resist arrest and was promptly taken into custody. The man accused of aiding her was arrested as well, whereas his wife was released due to her being a mother of a child. After her arrest, police noticed she looked just like the popular mugshot of her that was released years earlier. After her arrest, her brother Vincenzo Licciardi took over as the head of the clan. Vincenzo was himself eventually arrested on 7 February 2008, after having been included on the list of most wanted fugitives in Italy since 2004.

The police made many fruitless efforts to catch Licciardi. In April 2000, the Carabinieri arrested 13 Camorra bosses who were holding a summit around a table in a rural farmhouse between the districts of Qualiano and Giugliano. The group was allegedly discussing how to invest its funds in a network of furniture and children's clothing stores. However, Licciardi was not among them.

The reign of Maria Licciardi ran smoothly for many years, until a disagreement arose over a consignment of pure, unrefined heroin. In the spring of 1999, a large consignment of heroin arrived from Istanbul, Turkey. Licciardi decreed it should not be sold, as it was too pure and strong for the average user, and would thus kill those who purchased it, harming the alliance's large customer base of drug users. However, the Lo Russo clan, who had always chafed under her leadership, disagreed and packaged the shipment for sale on the street. The sale of the packets of unrefined heroin resulted in the deaths of many drug addicts across Naples, eleven of whom died in April 1999 alone. This caused great public outrage and resulted in massive police crackdowns on the Camorra clans. Many Camorristi were arrested and subsequently imprisoned.

On January, 1998, Maria Licciardi was stopped in a car with her sister, Assunta, and her sister-in-law with around 300 million lire, which the prosecutors believe was her purported payment to him. She refused to disclose as to what the money was for and she faded into obscurity immediately after lawyers secured her release.

Licciardi was born and raised in the Neapolitan suburb of Secondigliano, a traditional stronghold of the Licciardi clan, where a local parish priest once reportedly said that the "people have the culture of the Camorra in their bones." Her entire family belonged to the Camorra. Her father was a well known guappo or local boss. One of her brothers, Gennaro Licciardi known as "'a Scigna" (The Monkey) was a very powerful guappo, who later became the head of the clan and a founding member of the Secondigliano Alliance (Italian: Alleanza di Secondigliano), a coalition of powerful Camorra clans which controlled drug trafficking and the extortion rackets in many suburbs of Naples. Gennaro died from blood poisoning while in the Voghera prison on August 3, 1994. Her husband, Antonio Teghemié was also a Camorrista.

Maria Licciardi (Italian pronunciation: [maˈriːa litˈtʃardi] ; born 24 March 1951) is an Italian criminal affiliated with the Camorra, head of the Licciardi clan, and one of the bosses of the Secondigliano Alliance. She was the undisputed most powerful boss of the Camorra in the city of Naples from 1993 until her arrest in 2001.