Raffaele “the professor” Cutolo, one of the most feared and powerful bosses of the Neapolitan Camorra, spent most of his adult life in prison. And it is Wednesday in a jail bed that he was found dead, 79 years old.
His imprisonment did not deter him from ordering murders, forging criminal ties and sparking a war that left several hundred people dead in the early 1980s. Cutolo, whose life films and songs inspired him, turned his prison cell into his criminal office, from where he recruited thousands of members of the Camorra, who had once been freed, committed murders on his orders.
“Because of his strong ties with politicians, Cutolo was part of the Italian state,” the Gomorrah writer and author said. Roberto Saviano. “He was very powerful, more than a prime minister.”
Cutolo was born in 1941 and was 22 when he committed his first murder. After a fight, he killed a young man who was making progress with his sister. He was sentenced to 24 years in prison, where his criminal career continued in the form of assault on fellow prisoners. Early on, he challenged the alleged first boss of the Camorra, Antonio Spavone, to a duel. Cutolo asked him to come armed with a paring knife to the courtyard of the Poggioreale prison, but Spavone did not show up. That tacit refusal earned Cutolo the respect of the other prisoners and strengthened his criminal credentials.
In the Poggioreale prison, in the late 70’s, Cutolo founded the New Organized Camorra (NCO) with the aim of renewing the old, rural Camorra. The boss also devised an initiation ritual that included an oath: ‘The day when the people of Campania understand that it is better to eat a slice of bread as a free man than to have a steak as eating slave is the day Campania will win. ”
“Cutolo turned the Camorra into a mass organization, which incited young people to violence,” Isaia Sales, an essayist and professor of mafia history, told the Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples. ‘Many bosses ordered out of prison, but they were already mafiosi when they entered. Cutolo entered the prison as an ordinary criminal and from there established one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world. ‘
According to the Italian Department of Justice, in 1980 the NCO could count on about 10,000 subsidiaries.
In the early 80’s Cutolo started an internal war in the Camorra. The conflict had to cause the deaths of hundreds of affiliates and dozens of innocent people.
For the ordered killings, Cutolo imposed four life sentences and would be locked up in a cell for the last decades of his life. His detention did not prevent him from having a daughter, thanks to artificial insemination approved by the Ministry of Justice in 2001 after a long legal battle.
‘I’m going to die in jail. My last wish is to give my wife a child, ‘Cutolo told the newspaper la Repubblica.
Cutolo’s life inspired films, including The Professor, by Giuseppe Tornatore, and even a song by singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André.
Cutolo likes to give interviews to the press, from the court and from prison. In an interview with journalist Enzo Biagi in 1986, he said: “The Camorra is a life choice, a party, an ideal.”
Sales said: “He was the most media-driven of the mafia bosses. In a sense, it reminds one of Al Capone. ‘
During the first wave of the pandemic, Cutolo’s lawyers asked authorities to move the detainee to house arrest to prevent him from contracting Covid, but a judge rejected the request, saying that Cutolo, despite his age, the Camorra was still able to strengthen in respect of which Cutolo fully maintained its charismatic influence ”.
During all his years of imprisonment, Cutolo never showed signs of remorse and always refused to cooperate with investigators.
“His power kept him in jail all his life,” Saviano said. “And he will take all his secret grave.”