Mafia Princess

Eddie: "She's a mafia princess. She's too close to know the truth."

—Grounded for Life

A girl's boyfriend or father just lavishes love, attention and gifts on her. Especially gifts. Jewelry, dresses, fur coats, vacations, and it all seems to come from...

Um, where does he afford that? He claims to have a job that puts him in a tax bracket way too low to afford all this.

If she brings up her suspicions to her father or boyfriend, of course he's going to deny this. He'll even twist her words to make her look wrong for even bringing that up. A Spoiled Brat may ignore it completely, a Dragon Lady may join up, while a Spoiled Sweet girl may end up just getting on with her life and making it clear she doesn't want in the family business - though it's never that easy.

This is the life of a Mafia Princess, with varying degrees of Truth in Television. One of the ways not everything is better with princesses.

If the story is from a heroic point of view, the hero will fall in love with a mafioso's girlfriend or daughter. Both of them could be in danger for their lives.

In more idealistic stories, the scary mobsters make an exception from scariness for her. If they like her father, they love and cherish her, pamper her and protect her with their lives. Their behavior might be interpreted as them seeing her as a symbol of innocence and gentle emotions, all the things these hardened criminals have lost. Additionally, the Boss probably wouldn't be happy if something happened that they could've prevented. Plus he might genuinely not want her to get involved in this world, since Evil Parents Want Good Kids.

The Japanese variant of this trope is the Yakuza princess; the female heir (or the daughter of the current heir) of a Yakuza clan who is both fully aware of the nature of the family enterprise and is often fully supportive of it.

Compare The Don, Daddy's Little Villain, Dark Mistress.

Examples of Mafia Princess include:

Anime and Manga

• Kumiko of Gokusen hits between here and Daddy's Little Villain; she has full knowledge of her Yakuza background, is proud of it, but doesn't intend to live/work as one, instead choosing to be a teacher.
• Ren from Full Metal Panic!, subverted in that her family is getting squeezed by the new gangs and so she doesn't have lots of money and material possessions appearing from nowhere. (At least in the anime.)
  • Maybe. Her house is pretty big for Japanese standard.
• Sachie Wakamura from Wild Ones had a grandfather in the mafia, and her bodyguard (and crush) was also in the mafia.
• Mion Sonozaki in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is a Yakuza example.
• Mireille Bouquet from Noir is an ex-Mafia Princess, being the last survivor of a once-great organized crime family in Corsica. Witnessing the hit that ended the rest of her family's lives drove her to become a world-renowned assassin instead.
  • However, Mireille's childhood playmate Silvana Greone is an honest-to-God Mafia princess; already unhealthily fascinated with sharp objects and fear as a child, as an adult she acquires the title "Intoccabile" ("Untouchable") and rises to become the donna of the Greone Family.
• Maria Asagi from Gungrave is the girlfriend version twice over, being unaware of both Brandon and Big Daddy's business for years.
• Yukio Washimine from Black Lagoon deconstructs the trope to Hell and back. Her people didn't want her to sacrifice her normal life to take over (and some of her "followers", like Chaka, even try to get her dead or sold into sexual slavery), she can barely keep up with other mafia factions, and both she and her protector Ginji end up dead.
• San Seto from Seto no Hanayome, who comes from a family of yakuza mermaids.
• Eve Genoard of Baccano!! is entirely unaware that most of the money her family makes isn't through their textile plants, but from the marijuana and cocaine market.
• Action Girl Anita from the Hunter X Hunter anime series is unaware that her apparently kind father is a well-known drug dealer. So when he's killed by the Zaoldyeck family, she wants her revenge...
  • As well as Neon Nostrade, who is literally a Mafia Princess, except one of her hobbies is collecting human body parts so the spoiled part gets a bit twisted.
• The flashbacks reveal that Goldie Musou in Gunsmith Cats used to be this, knowing the true nature of her family quite well, but trying to use the respect her position provided for good ends. Then her parents got murdered by an associate, and she went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge using Brainwashing and drugs to force the innocent family members of the guilty parties to kill them, or be killed in the process. By the time she was through with her revenge, she had earned herself a Complete Monster status.
• Sei from Burst Angel, thught she's associated with The Triads and the Tongs instead.
• Alice in Darker than Black is a spoiled Mafia Princess who doesn't want to have to inherit her father's empire, and as a result has her Contractor bodyguard kill most of the management.
• Futakoi Alternative: Sakurazuki Kira and Yura, two teenage twins, granddaughters of the local yakuza boss. They see the yakuza in general as a good thing, but fight against their most extreme actions.
• Tsuna from Katekyo Hitman Reborn starts out as a Mafia Prince: while his father says his job is drilling for oil, he's actually the outside advisor to the Vongola Family. The ninth boss also is like a grandfather to him when he visits, and he himself is the heir to the throne, which he only finds out at the start of the story.
• Nagi Ichinose from Nyan Koi.
• Sunmi from Tokyo Tribe 2. Her real name is Erika N. Darshia, and she's the daughter of the Archbishop, the international head of the WU-RONZ gang. If he ever found out that she was forced into prostitution by Buppa, he would have him killed.
• Genderflipped and subverted in the Bokurano TV series. Jun Ushiro's birth father Ichiro was a Yakuza heir, but after he was murdered by his enemies, little Ushiro's mother (Miho Satou aka Misumi Tanaka) left him with her middle-class cousin to protect him.)
• Hinagiku from Hanamaru Kindergarten.
• In Mezzo Forte the Yakuza Princess side is played perfectly straight by Momomi Minoi, the daughter of a powerful mob boss who happens to be more bloodthirsty and batshit crazy than even her father. Minoi's second in command has to reign her in to prevent her from killing too many of her father's employees.
• Asago of Tokyo Crazy Paradise, along with a few minor characters.
• Genderflipped and cranked Up to Eleven in Wolf Guy Wolfen Crest, where Complete Monster and Big Bad Haguro Dou is the son and heir of a Yakuza leader.
• Yoko from Tokimeki Tonight is a spoiled and mean yakuza boss's daughter.
• Uo Hakuron from Haou Airen was raised in The Triads and the Tongs, and by age 14 he became one of their top assassins. When he turns 18, he's one of their most powerful leaders already.
  • Hakuron's arranged fiancée Reilan is this, too.
• Mao Jahana from Blood+ is a Spoiled Sweet example.

Comic Books

• Part of the backstory of The DCU's Huntress (aka Helena Bertinelli) was that her father was in the mob. The Justice League series had her not know about this until one of her father's henchmen betrayed them and killed her parents in front of her.
• Benito Medici from One Hundred Bullets is a double subversion of this trope being how he's male and is fully aware of his father's illegal activities. However he still wishes to remain apart from them.
• The villainess Madame Masque of Iron Man and The Avengers fame was raised by another family on orders of her father, the James Bond-esque international crime boss Count Nefaria largely because he couldn't be bothered to raise a child. But in an subversion of this, once her adopted father died, Nefaria came calling and forced his daughter to serve as his right hand (wo)man, going so far as to out her true parentage to her politician fiancé, who dumped Madam Masque upon learning his soon to be bride's true parentage.
• Brenda from Blue Beetle ends up rescued from the grasp of her abusive father (who suffers an "accident") and taken in by her aunt, a wealthy businesswoman. What she doesn't know is that her aunt is La Dama, the head of organized crime in El Paso, and when she finds out, she doesn't take it well.
• Lola Palooza from Cherry Comics.

Fan Works

• Tsuruya-san is the Yakuza variant in Kyon: Big Damn Hero.

Film

• Constanzia "Connie" Corleone (Talia Shire) in The Godfather may be the archetypal example of this. By the end of the first film however, when her abusive husband is murdered by her brother Michael for his role in setting up the murder of the oldest sibling Sonny, Connie finds herself quite jaded and goes into a downward spiral of debauchery and drinking to punish her brother Michael. It takes the death of her mother Carmela to get her to clean her act up, at which point she convinces Michael to reconcile with turncoat brother Fredo. By the third film, she's been upgraded to full-blown Godmother and has taken the role of adviser/Corleone Family mentor to Sonny's illegitimate son Vinnie, who has followed his father's footsteps into organized crime.
  • Michael's youngest daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola, covering up for Winona Ryder), in the third film, takes this role and is legitimately oblivious to her father's corrupt ways, also striking a romance with her cousin Vinnie. The poor kid ends up shot to death as a result of her father's crimes coming back to bite him on the ass, since an assassin sent to snipe Michael after her brother's opera debut shoots her instead by mistake; she dies in Michael's arms, and he's pushed to the Despair Event Horizon.
• Although Sharon Stone's character in Casino seems to be in on what her husband does (to an extent), their daughter fits this trope.
• The Hugh Grant movie Mickey Blue Eyes plays this from the point of view of a boyfriend getting involved with a low-level Mafia Princess. Initially, he just thinks her father just happens to be a very generous, well-off person... until the girlfriend (who knows what's really going on) exasperatedly fills him in.
  • In point of fact she is a good character who rather dislikes the family business and wants to be a Schoolmarm instead.
• The girlfriend in Johnny Dangerously may count, but his mother definitely does.
• A sub-trope of this is the Mafia wannabe who tries to get in with the Don by marrying/dating his daughter. Carlo does it to Connie in The Godfather, Vinnie does it to his cousin Mary in The Godfather 3, Jackie Aprile Jr does it to Meadow in The Sopranos, and so on.
  • What if we call this Mobster-in-law?
• Grace from Dogville turns out to be a reluctant Mafia Princess.
• Jade from Bulletproof Monk. Her father is in jail, so even if she didn't know before, she knows now.
• A couple girls from Semyon's family - his granddaughters - get plenty of attention in Eastern Promises. Not as extreme of an example as some of the others here, but the way they're treated is used for a stark contrast with how Semyon and the rest of his family treat women, even implicitly children who may be his granddaughters' ages.
• Penelope Ann-Miller's character Tina in The Freshman.
• Trish from Romeo Must Die is the "Spoiled Sweet who wants nothing to do with the family business" variety.
• In Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, the action is set in mafia-controlled beach city. As a consequence, Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo and Claire Danes' Juliet are both mafia kids, and so is John Leguizamo's Tybalt.

Literature

• The term may or may not have originated with the early 1980s book Mafia Princess: Growing Up in Sam Giancana's Family, and the resulting TV movie.
• A plot point in Ronja the Robbers Daughter is the titular character finding out that she is a robber's daughter - and what exactly "robber" means. This is one of the reasons she runs away from home. In the end, she finds a better source of income.
• In the Andrew Vachss novel Strega, unlicensed private eye Burke does a job for the title character, the crazy flame-haired relative of a Mafia boss, who wields a mysterious power over men. It later turns out the Mafia boss molested her as a little girl; when Strega told her father she was beaten for telling 'lies', teaching her an early lesson in the use of power that she later puts to use.
• Lila Zacharov from The Curse Workers trilogy by Holly Black
• In Time to Depart, by Lindsey Davis, crime boss Balbinus Pius is given 'time to depart'- he is exiled from Rome and its territories. However, a power vacuum creates in his absence, and a new boss emerges- his son-in-law, married to his daughter, the Mafia Princess Balbina Milvia, who ends up having an affair with the main character's best friend... who happens to be the guy who exiled her father. Oops. He almost loses his job, and his life at that.
• Jackie Collins' character, Lucky Santangelo, in the eponymous book, Lucky.
• Partially subverted in the Garrett P.I. novels. Although kingpin Chodo Contague did pamper his daughter Belinda, he was always truthful with her about what line of business he was in. And he paid the price for his honesty when Belinda took over the Outfit after his stroke, putting her own words in the mouth of her father's comatose body.
• Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson. Kumiko Yanaka, a 13-year old Japanese girl, daughter of a fearsomely powerful Yakuza boss, suffers for being a Mafia Princess. She a life of powerless, lifeless, luxury. All her relationships are with smooth, cold, servants of her father. She would be far too valuable in the hands of his enemies for him to risk giving her freedom.
• The Lies of Locke Lamora features a subversion in the form of Nazca Brasavi; while she grows up in the lap of the luxury, she knows from a young age exactly what her father does, and is even groomed to serve as his heir. At least, until a rival kills her off in a horrifying fashion to deliver a message to her father...
• In the manga adaptation of Romeo and Juliet the story is transplanted to modern Tokyo and the two families are Yakuza clans, thus Juliet is one of these.
• The title character of Son of the Mob is a fairly straight gender flip, although he, not his innocent love interest, is the protagonist. He figured out his father's real profession fairly early on, but he's balanced between being really loyal and really, really law-abiding, so he does his best to stay out of things.
  • Though the family knows that he's really, really law abiding...and therefore just has him "help" without his knowledge, like in the start of Son of the Mob 2 where they switched his "clothes for college" suitcase with an identical one containing ill-gotten money so he'd unknowingly take it across state lines for them (leading to a switch at an airport that caused mass chaos). He and his innocent (but also an FBI agnet's daughter) love interest are not happy. His best friend thought it was cool and wanted to keep "their take."
• In The Mysteries of Pittsburgh Art Bechenstein is also another gender-flipped variant who struggles to keep his friends separate from his father's life as a senior Mafioso.
• Carrie Asai's "Samurai Girl" series and the ABC miniseries based off it are all about the main character Heaven discovering her father's a Yakuza boss, and subsequently fighting off assassins and generally kicking ass...
• In All These Things I've Done by Gabrielle Zevin, Anya Balanchine is a Mafiya princess, only in this dystopian future (around 2083), the contraband they sell is chocolate. Her father was shot to death in front of her because of a deal gone bad. She is aware of what they do, but doesn't know much of the details. Anya ends up falling in love with the District Attorney's son, which causes problems for their relationship.
• Terisa Morgan's backstory in Mordant's Need appears to be something like this - her father is probably on the right side of the law, but seems to have a surprising amount of Mooks hanging around and spends much of his considerable income "buying influence." She seems convinced he's doing something very shady, if not strictly illegal.
• Jenna Caddrick of Time Scout is aware her father's a bastard, but not how big a bastard.

Live Action TV

• Meadow Soprano. At first subverted then embraced: Meadow knows full well that her dad is a mobster, going so far as to out their father to her younger brother AJ when kids at his school start dropping anvils about how AJ could not be bullied because of the fact that the bullies feared what AJ's dad would do to them and their families if they tormented him. However, when Meadow finally confronts her father during a road trip to visit a college, Tony lies and Meadow believes him, even as Tony lies to her about him sneaking out during one of their nights away in order to kill an in-hiding mob snitch they had encountered by chance. When her mob-connected boyfriend dies (on orders of her father), Meadow is pulled aside by her mother and given a Stepford Smiler speech ordering her to make her vow never to believe the idea that her father ordered Jackie Jr.'s death. This is the turning point, as she ends up having no trouble living the lie, even chiding a fellow mafia princess for speaking of it in front of an outsider, and by the finale ends up telling her father that she is proud of what her father does and curses the government for "tormenting" the family in it's quest to bust her father. She even announces she's going to become a mob lawyer, though she puts it in much more idealistic terms than that.
  • Subverted, in the same show, by Adriana, who grew up in the mob, fully understands how her boyfriend makes his money, and is proud of him and her "uncles". At least, until she turns to the FBI in large part due to them forcing her to face up to the fact that one of her uncles was killed by Tony.
• The mother on Grounded for Life eventually learns her uncle is in the mob, after her husband and bother-in-law blow a favor for him (fortunately not a big favor).
• Akira Mimasaka's little sisters in the j-Drama continuity of Hana Yori Dango. Also, Akira himself could possibly be considered a male version of the trope; while he knows his parents are Yakuza bosses, he never seems to suffer any negative consequences or have any participation in the less palatable aspects of the family business and has large enough prestige and access to money and luxury goods to make him one of the four most wealthy and powerful students at a school that (with one exception) has no students that aren't fabulously rich.
• On 3rd Rock from the Sun, Sally started acting like one when she dated Sammy "The Butcher" Marchetti. He turned out to be a literal butcher.
• Sun from Lost is a South Korean version but she does not approve of her father's actions. She will however make use of the business contact when she wants to badass it up a little.
• Irene Zuko in Due South.
• Jeanne Benoit in NCIS whose father wasn't mafia precisely but was notorious as an illegal Arms Dealer.
• Catherine Willows on CSI might qualify. Her estranged father, Sam Braun, did not marry her mother and Willows was not aware that Braun was her father until she was an adult. Braun was a casino owner but it was strongly implied he had organized crime connections.
• "Let It Bleed", an episode of CSI had a local Mafia Princess as the victim. Everyone involved with the events leading up to her death is convinced that her father will kill them for allowing this to happen, despite the fact that her death was an accident and that the drugs she had willfully been taking at the time played a major part in it. A montage at the end of the episode shows that he in fact, did have everyone killed, including the two idiots who had inadvertently caused her death, the club owner who had supplied the drugs, her best friend, who she had ditched to acquire said drugs, and her aunt/guardian, whose house she had snuck out of to begin with.
• A mafia princess was the Body of the Week on Law and Order: Criminal Intent. At first it seems like she was killed over her upcoming tell-all book, but digging a bit further reveals a much more complicated plot.
• Princess was even Eastenders' Den Watt's famous pet name for his adopted daughter Sharon whom he spoiled rotten. Den wasn't exactly a gangster but had a habit of being used as something of a Butt Monkey for the local Firm. He ends up being shot by the Firm and Sharon is left grieving only to have her dad come back to life fourteen years later, having just faked his death to hide from the Firm all along. Hello Princess indeed. His love-child Vicky may also qualify, at least in the 80's when Den actually loved both his daughters.
  • Played up more with Ruby Allen who's father Johnny was actually a Mafia boss. Unlike Sharon though, Ruby wasn't initially her father's top priority and it's implied he favored her sister, Scarlet, whom he named his nightclub after. But after the house fire which killed both Ruby's mother and Scarlet, Johnny sent Ruby off to boarding school and barely sees her again until she tracks him down in Walford. It turns out that Johnny saved Ruby from the fire but only because he mistook her for Scarlet as the sisters had swapped beds. They do reconcile and Ruby becomes more true to the trope, even after she discovers her father is more than just a 'business' man.
• General Hospital with Lily Rivera. Her mobster father separates her from her boyfriend by threatening the young man's life, then takes their child away from her as soon as it's born. Needless to say, she's repulsed and frightened by him—until he nearly dies from pneumonia, at which point she forgives him. Ironically, she soon falls in love with mafia kingpin Sonny Corinthos and fits perfectly into his world because she knows not to ask questions about his business, and soon uses her father's mob powers to engineer a marriage to him. It backfires when she's killed by a car bomb meant for Sonny—planted by her father, incensed that Sonny has refused to stop seeing his ex.
• Tatum Novak from Crownies. She claims her father went straight when he married her mother, but the connection is still enough to attract the attention of the police.

Video Games

• Mitsuru Kirijo from Persona 3, of the Yakuza Princess (or more accurately the Shadowy Corporation Princess) type.
• Viola Cadaverini in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was the granddaughter of a Mafia boss and the girlfriend/accomplice of a loan shark who was also in the organized crime business.
  • Apollo Justice got a girl purposefully marrying the son of the local godfather. She did this with the knowledge that he had a botched operation covered up, causing "the wheel of fate" of the bullet lodged near his heart to cause his death soon, so she would inherit everything.
• In indie game Hot Dog King, you can hire the daughter of a mafia boss for free, mistreat her by overwork or by making her wear clothes she feel uncomfortable in and well...lets just say your empire will fall...
• Other than the fact that her grandfather is a Yakuza boss, Taiga Fujimura doesn't display any of the other traits found in this trope.
• You save one of these in the second Paper Mario game, and help her get married to one of Don Pianta's goons. Did we mention that this was the Pianta mafia?
• Midori, a character exclusive to Chie's route in Kira Kira, is one of these, but she doesn't get along with her parents and repeatedly runs away from home. Even once she's made her own life for herself, though, she still has yakuza minions doing her bidding...
• Miyu in Red Steel is the Yakuza variant.
• Strongly hinted at in The Idolmaster that Yukiho's father is a yakuza boss.
• In Katawa Shoujo, Kenji thinks Lilly is this, having seen her getting into a car with a "man in a pinstripe suit" (actually her Bifauxnen older sister Akira), and reasoning because she is half-foreign and wealthy, she must be part of it.

Web Comics

• Subverted by Crossroad, a rogue superheroine in Antihero for Hire. She knows exactly what her family's up to, and it pisses her off.
• Cora May from Bomango, whom Hector asked out after being "immunized" to rejection by Gogo seems to be one. If having a huge bodyguard/chauffeur attached is any indication, "the nature of her family's affairs grows possibly ominous, but for our story's purposes, we shall consider that dad - and by extension, daughter - don't mess around". She turned out to be not as much of Ice Queen as she looks, just a very no-nonsense lady.

Web Original

• Blake Belladona from RWBY. At the end of the second volume of the series, she tells Sun Wukong she was "born to [the White Fang]" (a political movement turned terrorist organization), and through the "Black" Trailer we saw that she is the former partner and love interest of a mid-level leader of the White Fang. In V4E5 we learn that she is the daughter of the original leader/founder of the White Fang, who stepped down five years before the start of the show.

Western Animation

• Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman features Kathleen Duquesne, daughter of crimelord Carlton Duquesne.
• Borderline Deconstruction in Dani of Danny Phantom, whose "dad" led her on and treated her quite badly.
• Wanda in The Fairly OddParents, as revealed in the episode where her father goes missing and she has to take over the family's "perfectly legitimate" garbage collection empire. She ends up making so many outrageous changes (including painting all the trucks pink and insisting on using lace doilies everywhere) that the men take her to "the butcher" as payback. Literally--they take her out to dinner at a nice steakhouse to thank her. Bonus points for the horse head in Cosmo's bed; it's a stuffed animal that he sleeps with.

Real Life

• Although not connected to The Mafia: actress Anne Hathaway, whose boyfriend Raffaello Follieri ran a charity that turned out to be a scheme for fleecing investors out of millions of dollars. Some of that money went toward Hathaway's lavish lifestyle. When she found out where the fancy clothes were actually coming from, it didn't take long for her to break up with him.
  • She joked about this when she hosted Saturday Night Live, by saying her new boyfriend is a Nigerian prince.
• Francine Lucas, the daughter of real life American Gangster Frank Lucas. Although he was caught when she was still very young, she recalls wearing lots of furs coats and expensive toys, and daddy hiding money in her teddy bears because there was more than they had hiding places for. She thought that he was in "the candy business". Now that is a good euphemism!
• Shoko Tendo, mild-mannered Japanese author whose entire body is covered in Yakuza tattoos. Her father was the boss of a yakuza clan, and she said in one interview that she once saw daddy forcing another man to cut his finger off.
  • In an interesting inversion she claims in her memoirs to having been teased as a result of her father.
• Al Capone lavished his son with expensive birthday parties.
• While not Mafia, Lucrezia Borgia's male relatives; Pope Alexander IV, Cesare and Giovanni were the renaissance Italian equivalent - and they all doted on little Lucrezia despite an unfortunate tendency to murder her husbands.
• Second Generation daughters from families involved in profitable trades that were either illegal, like customs-dodging (the Hamiltons and Rothschilds, for example), or just plain creepy as well as illegal (say, opium running in China, like the Forbes and Jardines and several others) could count for this though we don't think about it that way.