SHE looks like any other grandmother who fills her days with fitness classes, having coffee with friends and doting on her grandchildren, but appearances are deceptive when it comes to Deborah Mason.
Until the law caught up with her, Deborah, 65, headed up a crime clan which shifted £80million of cocaine in a single eight-month period and The Sun can reveal, the grey-haired grandma isn’t the only unlikely top-level gangster terrorising the UK and beyond.
From a community hero operating as a secret heroin kingpin to a grey-haired cat lover who oversaw a million-pound cocaine empire, women are increasingly active across all levels of the crime hierarchy – and they’re good at what they do.
The rise is according to Europol’s 2025 EU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment, which has discovered how the ‘DNA of organised crime’ is changing, with females gaining more prominent roles in global gang networks.
Many of these top-level matriarchs use their femininity to fly under the radar of the police for decades as they operate as some of the underworld’s most feared figures behind the scenes.
Criminologist Alex Iszatt tells The Sun: “Gangster women have always existed within organised crime structures, but they have rarely been recognised as central figures of power and that long-standing misjudgement has been consistently exploited.
“In a family-run criminal enterprise, the older woman is often the central pillar of power – her authority doesn’t come from physical intimidation but from total control over family loyalty, shared history, secrets, and obligation.
“When she asks for something to be done, it’s framed as family duty rather than a criminal order and refusing her doesn’t feel like defiance; it feels like betraying your own blood.
“It creates a psychological grip stronger than fear alone, where shame, guilt, and the threat of emotional exclusion become tools of control.”
Nicknamed Queen Bee or Gangster Debs, Mason certainly seems to have had an iron grip over her family, recruiting her sister, three daughters and son, along with two of their partners and a family friend, to transport cocaine to dealers across the country, from Bradford to Bristol.
The drug-dealing granny richly rewarded her loved ones, who each earned more than £1,000 a day, and she enjoyed the cream of the spoils too, holidaying in Dubai and Bahrain and buying her expensive Bengal cat Ghost a £400 Gucci collar with a nine-carat gold name tag.
From her pad in Tufnell Park, North London, greedy Mason brazenly claimed benefits while splashing out on designer goods funded by her illegal operation, which trafficked a ton of cocaine with a street value of £80million between April and November 2023.
But detectives from the Metropolitan Police caught up with the illegal operation, and the unlikely OCG was jailed for 20 years at London’s Woolwich Crown Court last July.
CPS prosecutor Robert Hutchinson said: “Instead of nurturing and caring for her relatives, Deborah Mason recruited them to establish an extraordinarily profitable criminal enterprise that would ultimately put them all behind bars.”
Grannies ‘don’t need to hide’
Mason was brazen enough to feign surprise when police detained her in a dawn raid, telling officers: “Me? No, come on!”
Another improbable drug baron is Morag Yorston, a drug-dealing crime gang boss who flooded the streets of Dundee with heroin and cocaine.
Between July and October 2018, Operation Boost saw officers seize six kilograms of heroin and one kilogram of cocaine, with a combined street value of over £380,000, plus £12,000 in cash.
The grandma gangster was jailed for five years and 11 months in 2020, but only when she was hauled back to the UK after fleeing to Bulgaria in a bid to escape justice.
The following year, with Yorston safely behind bars, cops seized more than £100,000 of her assets.
As women age, they also become largely invisible in society and particularly to law enforcement. Police attention remains fixed on younger, violent men
Former Crime Scene Examiner Alex
Detective Chief Inspector Scott Fotheringham said: “Operation Boost was a complex and protracted investigation which identified Yorston as playing a significant role in an organised crime group intent on bringing misery to our communities.”
With her bobbed hair and modest scarf, Yorston is another matriarch far away from the stereotypical image of a drug kingpin, something former Crime Scene Examiner Alex believes worked in her favour.
“As women age, they also become largely invisible in society and particularly to law enforcement. Police attention remains fixed on younger, violent men, which creates a blind spot that older women can operate within,” she says.
“They don’t need to hide, they can exist openly as the face of an organisation precisely because they aren’t seen as threatening.
“This allows them to handle large amounts of money, manage logistics, settle internal disputes and keep operations running while projecting an image of harmless respectability.”
Known as Big Mags, Margaret Haney was both a community hero and a feared high-end heroin dealer.
The gran from Stirling, Scotland, had led anti-paedophile marches in her hometown but was later jailed for 12 years for making hundreds of thousands of pounds dealing the highly-addictive substance that destroys lives, alongside her daughter, son and cousin.
“Two things can be true at one time,” said Haney’s granddaughter Cassie, following her death from cancer in 2013.
You can be a drug dealer who has sold drugs that have potentially killed people but you can also still be a loving grandmother and a good person
Margaret Haney’s granddaughter Cassie
“You can be a drug dealer who has sold drugs that have potentially killed people but you can also still be a loving grandmother and a good person.”
What on earth could make a seemingly respectable grandmother turn to a life of crime? Is money the sole motivator?
“Motivation isn’t limited to greed or power – many of these women have spent decades inside criminal environments, learning how operations function while being kept out of formal leadership,” says criminologist Alex.
“When male figures are imprisoned, killed, or removed, the matriarch often becomes the only person with the authority and experience to hold things together; for some, taking control is about survival or protecting family interests.
“For others, it is about finally claiming power in a system they have long supported from the background.”
Mafia matriarchs
Beauty queen turned mob boss Assunta Maresca shot dead Antontio Esposito, the mafia boss nicknamed Little Doll, who had ordered the execution of her late husband, on the streets of Naples at the age of just 18 and defiantly told her subsequent murder trial: “I’d do it again”.
With her position in the criminal underworld cemented, ruthless Maresca later became the first female leader of the Camorras, the powerful, clan-based Italian criminal organisation known for drug-trafficking, money laundering and extortion.
Another feared mob grandma is Maria Licciardi, known as Bloody Mary, who controlled the Secondigliano Alliance, a cartel of Camorra clans specialising in counterfeiting designer goods and drug trafficking.
Licciardi, who died in 2021 aged 70, was said to have been responsible for 100 murders, as rival drug gangs waged war on the streets of Naples, which was littered with bloody corpses almost daily at its height.
“It’s not surprising that more ‘grannies’ are being arrested, but it isn’t because there is suddenly a rise in older women taking on criminal enterprises, it’s that law enforcement has finally begun to see that power can lie in women,” says Alex.
“In leadership, they are often contrasted with men who rely on visible violence, but many of these women understand how to enforce loyalty through psychological pressure.
“They use manipulation, emotional reward, and calculated instability to keep people dependent and compliant.
“This often produces organisations that are harder to disrupt than those led by volatile, ego-driven figures.
“Violence is still present, but it is usually delegated rather than displayed, protecting the leadership while maintaining control with a focus less on dominance and more on continuity, profit, and managing risk.”
This low-key approach to leadership has seen mob grandmothers rise to the top of crime clans across the globe – and despite their sweet and unassuming appearances, it’s best not to cross them.
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