Raffaele Cutolo, the historic leader of the Neapolitan mafia who came to live in a medieval castle, has died

Raffaele cutolo, who was the great chief of the New Camorra organized, A powerful Neapolitan mafia clan died on Wednesday in a prison hospital in Parma after a long illness, Italian media reported.

Cutolo, nicknamed “The Professor”, I was in prison since the 80s under maximum security this prevented him from having any kind of contact with the outside world.

He was born in 1941 in the municipality of Ottaviano, in the province of Naples, and has been seriously ill for a long time, according to the same sources.

He died in a hospital in Parma prison where he was serving several life sentences.

Cutolo founded in the 70s the call New Camorra organized, with which he started a bloody war of the Camorra with the other clans, which were grouped together in the New family oppose it, and it ended in hundreds of deaths.

During his last years of life, he had been transferred to hospital several times due to his health problems, but Italian justice established in June 2020 that he must remain in prison, even despite the coronavirus pandemic. , because his eventual departure could strengthen criminal groups that still worshiped his name.

Sentenced to life imprisonment several times, he committed his first murder in 1963 when he was only 22 years old. Except for 18 months during which he was on the run, he has since been arrested in various maximum security prisons or psychiatric facilities.

However, nothing in so many years of detention had softened Cutolo. On the contrary, it was in prison – Especially in the Neapolitan prison of Poggioreale –where his power and charisma emerged. No more than eight months ago, he even gave an interview to the newspaper The morning of Naples, which forced the then Minister of Justice Alfonso Bonafede to intervene. An interview in which he sent messages to his followers: it would never become regrettable, despite the pressures he claimed to become one.

In another famous interview with Enzo Biagi in 1986, he said that the Camorra “is a choice of life, a celebration, an ideal. The real mafia, the real Camorra, is in Rome ”.

In 1970, after being released, he began smuggling cigarettes, a profitable business that put him in contact with the Apulian and Calabrian mafias. Arrested in 1971, again in the Neapolitan prison of Poggioreale, he created the new organized Camorra, which copied the hierarchical mechanisms (picciotto, brawler, sgarrista, zone manager and santista) of the Cosa Nostra and the ‘Ndrangheta, with affiliation through rituals of Masonic inspiration and cult of the personality of the leader.

The new paramilitary organization had a base of picciotti, ruthless young brawlers recruited from the poorest classes in search of easy money. A system that continues to operate today.

“If to do good, to help the weak, to affirm the most elementary values ​​and human rights, if to redeem the dignity of a people and to completely want a true sense of justice by risking life for that is the Camorra , so that label looks good to me, ”Cutolo told historian Isaia Sales.

In 1977, justice recognized him as a mental patient, for which Cutolo was transferred to the Aversa Judicial Psychiatric Hospital. From there he escaped the following year with a charge of nitroglycerin placed to penetrate the walls of the building. In this moment the new Camorra organized, ally of the criminal gangs of Rome and Milan and the Calabrian Ndragheta, entered the cocaine business, which invaded the Campania region penetrating all sectors of the regional economy with the support of politics.

In 1980 Cutolo bought a castle, the Medici Castle in Ottaviano, seized in 1991 and now owned by the municipality.

In the eighties, Cutolo’s Nueva Camorra also took on the cartel of rival alliance Nueva Familia. The war has bloodied the province of Naples, with dozens of dead and wounded in ambush.

During the same period, Cutolo has strengthened its relations with the Italian secret services. The brawler starred in one of the most controversial political plots in Italian history. This is the case of Ciro Cirillo, a politician from Democracy Cristina kidnapped in April 1981 by the Red Brigades and in whose liberation the intervention of the head of the mafia was fundamental.

As the Italian press reminds us, as many political leaders as Italian secret service officials visited Cutolo in prison and they asked him to negotiate Cirillo’s release with other members of the Red Brigades with whom he shared a prison.

We suspect that in return, Cutolo would have called for a relaxation of police operations against the Camorra, as well as a reduction in his sentence and a psychiatric test that would exempt him from his actions.

“The Professor” has been a source of inspiration for cinematographic and literary works and is very present in the popular imagination. “El Camorrista”, his fictional biography written by Giuseppe Marrazzo and edited by Pironti, was a bestseller and inspired the film of the same name, the first feature film by Giuseppe Tornatore. Don Raffaé, famous song by Fabrizio De André, is also inspired by the figure of Cutolo.

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