Raffaele Cutolo
Raffaele Cutolo was an Italian crime boss and leader of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, an organisation he built to renew the Camorra. Cutolo had a variety of nicknames including
Early years
Cutolo, the youngest of three, was born in Ottaviano, a town in the hinterland of Naples, into a close-knit Catholic peasant family with no prior ties to the Camorra. After a happy childhood, he did well at primary school and was an altar boy, he lost his father prematurely in 1953 at the age of twelve. His father, an agricultural labourer, had worked for years as a sharecropper to support the family. One day, the landowner informed him that the field would be repurposed the following year and that his services would no longer be needed. In desperation, Cutolo’s father turned to the local Camorra boss, whose influence was absolute in the village. The boss invited the Cutolo family to his home and promised to resolve the matter. Shortly thereafter, the landowner reversed his decision and renewed the contract. After his father's death, he was raised by his elder sister Rosetta Cutolo.Cutolo was a poor student, and he was violent, inattentive, and prone to trouble. By the age of 12, he was already running with a gang of teenagers, committing petty thefts and extorting local shopkeepers. As soon as he was old enough to drive, he bought a car; not only for status, but also for the mobility it gave him during his raids. At 21, on February 24, 1963, he committed his first murder. The victim was an innocent firefighter that helped a girl Cutolo had slapped following an alleged insult. During the confrontation that followed, Cutolo pulled out a gun and shot the man dead. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, which was later reduced to 24 years on appeal. He was sent to Poggioreale prison in Naples.
Cutolo had established himself as a ringleader, when Antonio Spavone, known as "
Cutolo was soon able to gather under him a small group of prisoners, the nucleus of which would later become the leadership of the NCO. They were Antonino Cuomo known as "
Nuova Camorra Organizzata
From within Naples' Poggioreale prison Cutolo built a new organisation: the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. He began by befriending young inmates unfamiliar with jail, giving them a sense of identity and worth, so much so that when they were released they would send Cutolo 'flowers', which enabled him to increase his network. He helped poorer prisoners by buying food for them from the jail store, or arranging for food to be sent in from outside. In such ways Cutolo created many 'debts' or 'rain cheques' which he would cash at the opportune moment. As his following grew, he also began to exercise a monopoly of violence within a number of prisons, thus increasing his power. By the early seventies, Cutolo had become so powerful that he was able to decide which of his followers would be moved to which jails, use a prison governor's telephone to make calls anywhere in the world, and allegedly even slap the prison governor on one occasion for daring to search his cell. Another key bond Cutolo created was regular payments to the families of NCO members sent to prison, thereby guaranteeing the allegiance of both prisoners and their families.What is unusual about Cutolo is that he has a kind of ideology, another factor that appealed to rootless and badly educated youths. He founded the NCO in his home town Ottaviano on 24 October 1970, the day of Cutolo's patron saint, San Raffaele. In such a way Cutolo created the most powerful organization ever to exist in the Neapolitan hinterland. Using his personal appeal and almost magic charisma, he was able to achieve this single-handedly. Cutolo had strong ties with the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta. According to some pentiti, Cutolo's career started with his affiliation with the 'Ndrangheta, supported by important bosses such as Piromalli, Paolo De Stefano, and Mammoliti. Cutolo based his organisation of the NCO on the model of the 'Ndrangheta, its internal codes and rituals.
The NCO strongholds were the towns to the east of Naples, such as Ottaviano, and Cutolo appealed to a Campanian rather than Neapolitan sense of identity, perhaps as a result of his poor peasant background. For instance, Cutolo is once reported as having said: "The day when the people of Campania understand that it is better to eat a slice of bread as a free man than to eat a steak as a slave is the day when Campania will win".
The organisation was unique in the history of the Camorra in that it was highly centralised and possessed a rudimentary form of ideology. For example, he publicly declared that children were not to be kidnapped or mistreated and allegedly arranged the assassination of at least one kidnapper. Perhaps the most potent ideological weapon was the cult of violence, which sometimes bordered on a kind of death wish, as Cutolo once wrote: "the value of a life doesn’t consist of its length but in the use made of it; often people live a long time without living very much. Consider this, my friends, as long as you are on this earth everything depends on your will-power, not on the number of years you have lived."
Through his book of thoughts and poems, Poesie e pensieri and his many interviews with journalists, Cutolo was able to create a strong sense of identity among his members. The book was published in Naples in 1980, but never distributed to the public. The book, containing 235 pages of poems and pictures, was seized by the police and censored as an "apology of a criminal organization". According to the Justice department, this book was viewed by NCO members as the "Bible of the NCO" and was particularly popular in prison, due to Cutolo's own distribution by mail. Even though his book was impounded by magistrates within days of its publication, many prisoners, alienated from society both inside and outside jail, wrote to Cutolo and other NCO leaders asking for a copy. Its possession alone would later be considered incriminating evidence.
Cutolo openly supported the young inmates, who were confronted with abuse, brutality, physical aggression and rape. He provided them with advice and protection from the brutalities of other inmates. At the same time they learned how to behave as a good picciotto, the lowest entry level into the Camorra. Cutolo challenged the old Camorra bosses and gave the youngsters a structure to belong to: "The new Camorra must have a statute, a structure, an oath, a complete ceremony, a ritual that must excite people to the point that they would risk their lives for this organization". Cutolo was revered by his soldiers. They called him Prince and kissed his left hand as if he were a bishop.
Cutolo spent a great amount of time researching the 19th century Camorra and reconstructed the old Camorristic ritual of initiation. He took great care in making the ritual a binding social practice. In his cell, he created a ceremony in which the initiate received the award of the primo regalo, also called abbraccio or fiore. He infused the old Camorristic traditions with Catholicism and reconstituted the ritual of initiation of the traditional Camorra.
Sister running the business
In Poggioreale, where on average there were 25 prisoners to a cell, Cutolo managed to obtain a cell to himself with a shower, while Giovanni Pandico, his own personal cook and underwriter occupied the cell next door so that he could serve dishes on request. When he was transferred to a smaller penitentiary in Ascoli Piceno, he requested that Pandico follow him, and his request was promptly granted by the prison authorities. Cutolo referred to the prison as "the state of Poggioreale" and is once reported to have stated, "I am the king of the Camorra. I take from the rich and give to the poor." As a prisoner, he dressed impeccably with ties and designer shirts, a gold watch and shoes of crocodile skin. His daily meals consisted of lobster and champagne.The Justice Department found out that between 5 March 1981 and 18 April 1982, Cutolo received money orders for an amount of 55,962,000 lire to take care of his daily expenses, of which he reportedly spent half on food and clothes. As Cutolo spent most of his time in prison from where he sent out his instructions, the everyday running of the enterprise was entrusted to his elder sister Rosetta Cutolo. Her nickname was "Occh'egghiaccio", meaning Ice Eyes.
Rosetta, a grey-haired, pious-looking woman, lived alone for years, tending her roses. She ruled in the Castle Mediceo, the headquarters of the organisation: a vast 16th-century palace with 365 rooms and a large park with tennis courts and swimming pool. The castle was bought for several billion lire, and provided direct contact for Cutolo from the prisons of Poggioreale and Ascoli Piceno. Brilliant with figures, Rosetta Cutolo negotiated with South American cocaine barons, narrowly failed to blow up a police headquarters and was glamorised in a film, The Professor.
After her plan to blow up a police headquarters narrowly failed, her stronghold was raided; Cutolo escaped under a rug in a car driven past checkpoints by the neighbourhood priest. She then went underground, remaining at liberty for the next 10 years. In 1993 she gave herself up and was charged only with mafia association: prosecutors alleged she had been running her brother's organisation. She was acquitted nine times of murder. Rosetta had persuaded the authorities she was harmless, which was helped by her frumpy image.
However, Raffaele Cutolo has always maintained that Rosetta knew nothing of his criminal activities and did only what he asked: "Rosetta has never been a Camorrista... She only listened to me and sent me a few suitcases of money to prisoners like I told her to". Nevertheless, it is clear that Cutolo had always wanted to maintain a male-only organization based on principles such as criminal fraternity and so could never be seen giving a role to his sister. It could be argued that he did not want to implicate her and therefore, always insisted that she was innocent.
Moreover, many important members did not believe that she held an important role because she was a woman. For instance, former NCO lieutenant and pentiti, Pasquale Barra argued: "What has Rosa Cutolo got to do with it? What have woman got to do with the Camorra?".
Raffaele Cutolo decided to expand the Camorra to Apulia. The outcome was not what he had planned. At first local criminals were managing the illegal trades while the Camorra lent financial resources and support demanding 40% of all profits derived from illegal activities. This arrangement proved to be an unstable one: soon the local criminals tried to free themselves from the masters. In 1981, one of them, Giuseppe Rogoli, founded the Sacra Corona Unita, a new Mafia invoking the regional Pugliese identity against the intrusion of the foreign Neapolitans.