Raffaele Cutolo founded and led the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO), the Camorra group that dominated much of the Naples region in the late 1970s and early 1980s and fought a war with rival clans that cost hundreds of lives. He was born in 1941 in Ottaviano, a town at the foot of Vesuvius, and he was convicted of murder in 1963. He spent more than fifty-seven years behind bars, with only short periods at liberty, and he directed his organization largely from inside prison.
The courts later convicted him, as instigator, of the murders of three men between 1978 and 1981: Pasquale Cappuccio, a councillor in Ottaviano; Marcello Torre, the mayor of Pagani; and Giuseppe Salvia, a deputy prison director in Naples. He was also tried for the murder of a fourth man, Domenico Beneventano. In 1981 he took part, from prison, in negotiations with state officials over the release of Ciro Cirillo, a Christian Democrat regional councillor kidnapped by the Red Brigades, and a Naples court later sentenced him in a related case. He never cooperated with investigators. He was held under the strict 41-bis regime for many years and died in custody on February 17, 2021, aged 79.
Cutolo was born on November 4, 1941 in Ottaviano, in the province of Naples. He had only an elementary school certificate.
In 1963 Cutolo, then in his early twenties, killed a man named Mario Viscito, who was 33.
He was convicted of murder and sentenced at first instance to life imprisonment (ergastolo). On appeal the sentence was reduced to a fixed term, because the court excluded the aggravating circumstance of futili motivi, trivial motives. The reduced term was 22 years. He began serving it in the main prison in Naples.
The Naples prison was where Cutolo built his reputation. Inside the prison he presented himself as a protector of other inmates, and he challenged Antonio Spavone, an established Camorra boss, to a duel; Spavone did not appear.
His detention term expired in 1970 and he was released. He went into cigarette smuggling, which brought him into contact with the Apulian mafia and with clans of the 'Ndrangheta. He was arrested again in 1971 and returned to the Naples prison, and it was there that he conceived the organization that became the Nuova Camorra Organizzata.
The NCO was built as a pyramid. It had ranks, including the picciotto, the camorrista and the capozona, and initiation rituals with Masonic influences, and it formed a cult around its leader. It gave its members salaries, protection, an internal tribunal and support for the families of prisoners. The 1993 report of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission described these features in detail. Cutolo gave the organization a regional, rebellious ideology of the south, and it relied on a businessman who handled the money of the organization and multiplied its proceeds. Its paramilitary base was made up of young, ruthless recruits from the poorest districts.
In 1977 a Court of Appeal recognized Cutolo's mental infirmity, and he was transferred to a judicial psychiatric institution. On February 5, 1978 he escaped and became a fugitive for about fifteen months. A later ruling of the Naples Court of Appeal, on October 27, 1981, recognized him as partially mentally ill (seminfermità mentale); the Anti-Mafia Commission report found no proof that this ruling was linked to the Cirillo negotiations.
The months on the run were the period of the NCO's expansion. After his escape Cutolo extended his power into the Stabia and Nocera areas and into the province of Salerno. By 1980 the organization had about 7,000 members. Its influence was strongest inside several prisons of the region. On the outside it held towns such as Ottaviano and Palma Campania, Marcianise near Caserta, and much of the Salerno area. Other Camorra groups paid him dues, and at one point he imposed a levy on rival clans.
The first killing for which a court later held Cutolo responsible as instigator took place in September 1978, while he was a fugitive. The victim was Pasquale Cappuccio, a councillor in Ottaviano who had repeatedly denounced criminal interference in public contracts and building speculation in the town. Investigators turned to Cutolo's group early, but years passed before anyone was tried.
On November 1, 1988 the Corte di Assise di Napoli, after about four hours of deliberation, found Cutolo to be the mandante, the instigator, of the murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The press at the time called it his eighth life sentence. One of the two men named as killers received a life sentence in the same trial. The verdict was criticized for leaving unexplained who else had benefited from the silence in Ottaviano after the killing, and the court's written reasons were not yet available at the time of the verdict.
Domenico Beneventano, a Communist party group leader on the Ottaviano municipal council, was killed in 1980. The Anti-Mafia Commission later wrote that he had been killed because he attacked Cutolo publicly in the council chamber.
Cutolo and others were charged with the murder. In May 1986 the trial, before a court presided over by Sergio Lanni, was adjourned to a new date so that an expert examination could be completed. Pretrial detention for some of the defendants was about to expire, and Cutolo was to remain in custody because he was accused or convicted of other offenses.
Marcello Torre was born in Pagani, in the province of Salerno, on June 9, 1923. He was elected mayor of Pagani on August 7, 1980 as an independent in a Christian Democrat council, and he held the office for about four months. The earthquake of November 23, 1980 had created large public contracts for the removal of rubble, and the Anti-Mafia Commission later wrote that Torre was killed because he would not favor the criminal group in awarding them. He was killed in Pagani on December 11, 1980, at the age of 57.
Cutolo was sentenced to life imprisonment as the instigator. The sentence was issued by the Corte di Assise di Appello di Salerno, and the Court of Cassation confirmed it on June 4, 2002, more than twenty-one years after the killing.
Giuseppe Salvia was born on Capri in 1943 and was appointed deputy director of the main prison in Naples in 1973, at the age of 30. He held the post for eight years. In 1980 Cutolo refused a routine personal check after a court appearance, and Salvia carried it out himself. Salvia had opposed the privileges that Cutolo demanded inside the prison, among them entering his own cell without the checks applied to other prisoners.
Salvia was killed in Naples on April 14, 1981, when he was 38. An informant who had belonged to the clan named Cutolo as the instigator, and in 1993, after a long trial, Cutolo was sentenced to life imprisonment as the mastermind; members of the clan received heavy sentences for their part. Cutolo always denied responsibility. By 2021 all of his convictions had become final.
On April 27, 1981 the Red Brigades kidnapped Ciro Cirillo, a Christian Democrat regional councillor for public works, in Torre del Greco. The next day officials of the civil intelligence service, SISDE, visited Cutolo in prison, and Cutolo's deputy took part in the contact. The military intelligence service later took over the negotiation. Cirillo was freed on July 24, 1981 after a ransom of about 1.5 billion lire had been paid.
The Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission concluded in 1993 that Cutolo had acted as an intermediary and had sought favorable treatment for himself and his organization, including judicial benefits and transfers. He described the episode only vaguely, calling it the first negotiation between the state and the mafia. The commission listed the negotiations among the events that led to the destruction of the NCO.
The courts reached narrower findings. On October 25, 1989 a Naples criminal section sentenced Cutolo to 2 years and 10 months for attempted extortion by means of a false document concerning the affair. The same judgment convicted a prison director and three guards over falsified prison registers. On July 15, 1993 the Naples Court of Appeal acquitted Cutolo of extortion against the Christian Democratic party. An investigating judge, Carlo Alemi, had set out the case in an order of July 28, 1988.
The war between the NCO and its rivals reached its height between 1979 and 1983. The Nuova Famiglia, an alliance of clans formed between 1979 and 1981 to oppose Cutolo, was backed by Cosa Nostra. The Anti-Mafia Commission recorded that the period of the NCO's rule had the highest number of homicides in Campania, about 900 between 1979 and 1983. Other estimates put the deaths of the war between 1978 and 1983 at about 1,500, with more than 250 murders in 1982 alone.
Cutolo was transferred in 1982 to an island prison off Sardinia, after President Sandro Pertini pressed for it. An inspection in 1983 later found that in his previous prison he had enjoyed a dominant position owing to tolerance on the part of the management. He stayed on the island for four years and was moved to the mainland in 1986. The transfer sharply weakened the organization: members began to disperse and some turned informant. In April 1982 a businessman who had managed the money of the clan was killed, and on January 29, 1983 Cutolo's deputy was killed in Rome. The NCO was dismantled between about 1982 and 1985, and the Nuova Famiglia clans consolidated their hold on the territory afterward.
The end of Cutolo's organization did not end the groups that carried its name. A parliamentary report of 1990 on organized crime in Caserta described the early 1980s as a period of open conflict between the NCO and the Nuova Famiglia, a grouping whose main unifying aim was to end Cutolo's dominance, and it noted that the Carabinieri of Caserta still placed the NCO in the Marcianise and Caserta area, while the Nuova Famiglia prevailed in the Agro Aversano and along the Domitian coast. In the Caserta province the Casalesi clan fought the Cutolo followers and largely wiped them out.
A commission document of October 2000 still named Marcianise as one of the principal strongholds of the NCO and recorded a revival of NCO-linked groups in the Salerno area. In 2020 the Bologna Surveillance Court found that groups invoking the name of the NCO still existed and that Cutolo remained a symbol for them. In 1981, at the height of his influence, the commission had recorded that the NCO's violence against rival clans was increasing and that Cutolo's organization controlled the area of Torre del Greco, the town where Cirillo was kidnapped.
The prosecutions of the NCO began in 1983, when members of the organization broke their silence and gave information to the police. A maxi-trial of about 640 alleged Camorra members opened in Naples in early 1985, held in three groups in a hall at the Naples prison converted for the purpose. The first group of 252 prisoners began hearings in February 1985. Cutolo's own convictions came in separate proceedings between 1988 and 2002. By 2021 his convictions were final.
Cutolo served his sentences under the 41-bis regime, a strict form of detention introduced by decree-law no. 306 of 1992 for prisoners convicted of serious crimes such as mafia-type association. It is applied by decree of the Minister of Justice and has no fixed limit; the reasons for keeping a prisoner under it are tied to his dangerousness, which the authorities assess mainly by the operational strength of his organization in its territory and his role within it. Visits are limited to close relatives and take place in the presence of prison staff, and contact with the outside is restricted. Extensions can be challenged within 20 days.
Cutolo repeatedly criticized the regime, arguing that it violated human rights. A hearing before the surveillance court in Rome on his challenge to the regime was set for October 2, 2020. In September 2015, consultants to the Anti-Mafia Commission heard statements that he made at his place of detention, though not in a formal interrogation. He hinted at revelations but never gave any. In 1994 he appeared ready to yield, but he stayed silent, and he never repented or cooperated.
By 2020 Cutolo was 78 and had spent about 55 years in prison. In May 2020 a surveillance magistrate in Reggio Emilia rejected a request that he serve his sentence outside prison. On June 10, 2020 the Bologna Surveillance Court rejected a renewed request. The court said that despite his age and long detention he remained a symbol for criminal groups that still invoked the NCO, that his presence could strengthen them, and that he had shown no distance from his past choices, including in a 2019 interview in which he defended some of them.
Raffaele Cutolo died in custody on February 17, 2021, aged 79.
The southern Italian earthquake of November 23, 1980 killed almost 3,000 people in Irpinia and the surrounding area. It brought a flow of public money into reconstruction and rubble removal, and through middlemen Cutolo's organization secured major contracts for the rebuilding of Irpinia.
The Camorra of those years was not yet treated by the courts as a mafia in the full legal sense. In 1981 a Naples court ruled that the anti-mafia prevention measures could not be applied to it. The NCO's model, with its hierarchy, rituals and personality cult, was giving way to the looser, business-oriented model of the Nuova Famiglia clans, led by entrepreneurs. The Anti-Mafia Commission approved its report on the Camorra on December 21, 1993, with Luciano Violante as rapporteur, and presented it on February 15, 1994.
The killings of the NCO war, hundreds in number, are attributed to his organization, but the convictions against him personally concern four deaths: Viscito, Cappuccio, Salvia and Torre.
The Cirillo affair has been described as never fully clarified, and what Cutolo received for his part in it is not settled by any judgment. The rulings of 1989 and 1993 concern only attempted extortion and extortion against a political party. Cutolo said he had more to tell and never did.
November 4, 1941: Cutolo is born in Ottaviano.
1963: Mario Viscito is killed; Cutolo is sentenced to life at first instance, later reduced on appeal to a fixed term.
1970: released when his detention term expires.
1971: arrested again; the NCO is conceived in prison.
1977: a Court of Appeal recognizes mental infirmity.
February 5, 1978: he escapes and becomes a fugitive.
September 1978: Pasquale Cappuccio is killed in Ottaviano.
1979: he is back in custody after about fifteen months.
1980: Domenico Beneventano is killed; November 23, the Irpinia earthquake.
December 11, 1980: Marcello Torre is killed in Pagani.
April 14, 1981: Giuseppe Salvia is killed in Naples.
April 27, 1981: Ciro Cirillo is kidnapped; April 28, contact with Cutolo in prison; July 24, Cirillo is freed.
October 27, 1981: the Naples Court of Appeal recognizes partial mental illness.
1982: transferred to an island prison; April, a businessman of the clan is killed.
January 29, 1983: Cutolo's deputy is killed in Rome.
February 1985: the Naples maxi-trial of alleged Camorra members begins.
May 1986: the Beneventano trial is adjourned.
July 28, 1988: investigating judge Carlo Alemi issues his order in the Cirillo case.
November 1, 1988: Cutolo is sentenced to life as instigator of the Cappuccio murder.
October 25, 1989: a Naples court sentences him to 2 years 10 months in the Cirillo case.
1993: sentenced to life as instigator of the Salvia murder; July 15, acquitted on appeal of extortion against the Christian Democratic party.
June 4, 2002: the Court of Cassation confirms the Torre sentence.
May 12 and June 10, 2020: requests to serve his sentence outside prison are refused.
February 17, 2021: Cutolo dies in custody, aged 79.