Blood Brotherhoods (85 page)

Founder of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo was the most influential Italian criminal of the twentieth century.

In 1970 Cutolo was freed, pending a ruling on his case by the Supreme Court, and went on the run. He became a junior camorra boss, dealing in extortion and cocaine. Upon his recapture, after a firefight with the
Carabinieri
in March of the following year, he was sent to the infamous penitentiary at Poggioreale. There he would begin to build what became known as the NCO. By 1974 he had already earned the nickname ‘the King of Poggioreale’ and was involved in a major drug-trafficking ring with senior
mafiosi
from both Sicily and Calabria. By 1977 he had enough power to have himself transferred to the cosier surroundings of the state mental institution in Aversa near Naples. In February 1978 his men blew a wall down with TNT and he scrambled over the rubble to freedom. One plausible theory is that the breakout was staged to avoid the embarrassment that would have been caused had Cutolo merely strolled out of the main gate—as he probably
could have done. Be that as it may, the fugitive was not recaptured for fifteen months. In 1981 an appeal verdict said he could not be punished for the escape because of his mental infirmity. As Cutolo himself put it, ‘I did not “escape.” I wandered away. A little noisily.’

After his recapture, Cutolo never tasted freedom again. Thus, apart from two brief periods on the run, his entire adult life was spent in captivity. But he understood that prison was the perfect base for a criminal empire. Dominate the prison system, and you dominate the underworld. Confinement is an occupational hazard for criminals. And if they cannot go to jail without the fear of being raped in the showers or stabbed in the yard, they become acutely exposed.

In a sense, Cutolo perfected the methods used by prison camorras since the early nineteenth century. At the simplest level, the NCO offered safety in numbers to terrified youths doing their first stretch in an adult jail. Indeed Cutolo specialised in cultivating isolated youngsters who were not affiliated to other gangs. One of his fellow prisoners in Poggioreale described him as a ‘talent scout’. Once outside, those young men would kick back part of their earnings to Cutolo so he could support others by sending cash and food to relatives, by corrupting guards and administrators, and by arranging transfers, lawyers and medical visits. So began the circulation of tributes and favours that bound the NCO together. Cutolo’s organisation extended its reach from Poggioreale to many other prisons across Italy, and gained the manpower and discipline in the outside world to manage crime on an industrial scale.

The NCO engaged in all kinds of business, ranging from drug dealing and truck theft to defrauding the European Economic Community of agricultural subsidies and infiltrating government building projects. But for the NCO—as for the Sicilian mafia and for the Neapolitan Honoured Society of yesteryear—extortion was the key tool of authority. Cutolo’s rackets were run by trusted lieutenants, including his big sister Rosetta. She looked for all the world like the frumpy embroiderer her brother claimed she was. But this was a façade created in part because there were those within the NCO hierarchy who were reluctant to take orders from a woman. Many observers believe that Rosetta was one of the camorra’s most powerful female bosses. The money she sent to her brother allowed him to live out his confinement in luxury: in the course of just over a year in 1981–2, he received nearly 56 million lire (equivalent to $133,000 in 2011 values) to take care of his daily expenses; he reputedly spent over half of it on food and clothes.

Cutolo’s conspicuous consumption was intended to publicise his power, as was the transparent irony he deployed in interview. During the trial for his escape from Aversa asylum, Cutolo gave an impromptu press conference.
Surviving news footage shows him to be well groomed, with a face both weaselly and self-satisfied. He shifts his weight repeatedly from one foot to the other behind the bars of the defendants’ cage, and casts rapid, smirking glances to either side—as if he were a back-row schoolboy seeking complicity from his classmates during a scolding.

‘I’m someone who fights injustice. Me, and all my friends.’

‘A Robin Hood, so to speak?’

‘So to speak.’

‘What about the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, the NCO?’

‘I dunno. Maybe NCO means “
Non Conosco Nessuno
”—“I don’t know anyone.”’

‘Are you in charge in the prison system?’

Cutolo feigns disbelief with an unpersuasive snigger. ‘I’m not in charge, the prison governor is.’ [ . . . ]

‘What about the murder of the deputy prison governor? You had previously slapped him and threatened to kill him.’

‘Yes I did. Because he was doing some really . . . ’ There follows an oily mellowing in Cutolo’s tone. ‘But he’s dead now. It’s unkind to talk ill of the dead . . . Anyway, I may be insane, but I’m not stupid-insane. I’m intelligent-insane. So I’m hardly going to slap someone, threaten to kill him, and then go ahead and murder him. I don’t fancy collecting life sentences like that.’

Even among professional criminals, there are very few with a public persona as odious as Raffaele Cutolo. Yet his distinctive trait as a boss was the adoration he inspired. The Nuova Camorra Organizzata was founded on a cult of personality and an ideological fervour that no other mafia in Italy has ever matched. At the height of Cutolo’s power, a legion of
camorristi
would gladly have died for him. What was the secret of his charisma? For one thing, he had a keen organisational intelligence and used it to construct an elaborate internal culture for the NCO. Its recruits felt they belonged, that they had a shared cause. And for the purpose of building this esprit de corps, Cutolo borrowed rituals and terminology from the Calabrian mafia. Indeed he was almost certainly affiliated into the ’ndrangheta while in prison: two
’ndranghetisti
have spoken to the authorities about how Cutolo was given his ‘second baptism’ in 1974. Later, Cutolo would put the NCO’s new recruits through a very similar ceremony. From the ’ndrangheta, Cutolo also borrowed the terminology that defined ranks within the organisation:
giovane d’onore, picciotto, cuntajuolo, contabile, santista
, etc. Cutolo it was who, on behalf of his Calabrian friends, arranged to have the triumvir
Mico Tripodo stabbed to death in Naples prison in 1976 during the First ’Ndrangheta War.

Camorra history came full circle with Raffaele Cutolo. From Calabrian gangsters, he learned rituals and terminology that the ’ndrangheta had itself inherited from the prison camorra of the early nineteenth century. He then reimported them into the Neapolitan prison system whence they had first come, and where they had died out before the First World War.

Indeed, for a crime boss, Cutolo had a quite extraordinary sense of history. He was dubbed ‘the Professor’ by his men, partly because he sought out books on camorra history in the prison library, and partly because he wrote verse and short meditations on life, love and
omertà
for his admirers. In 1980 he had his jottings published as
Poems and Thoughts
. The book was seized by the police and possessing it was treated as incriminating. It is not difficult to work out why: Cutolo does little to conceal the terror he wielded. Less obviously, the book also shows the Professor putting his time in the prison library to good use. By way of example, it is worth citing the verses written in praise of the NCO’s principal enforcer within the prison system, Pasquale Barra, known as
’o Sturente
(‘the Student’) or, more appropriately, as
’o ’Nimale
(‘the Animal’). Barra was a gaunt, darkly bearded man with a very prominent nose and eyes like a mole’s. He had been Cutolo’s devoted friend since their teenage years in Ottaviano, and was the first recruit to the NCO. His primary role was stabbing people to death on his old friend’s orders. The poem dedicated to him is called simply, ‘A Man of the Camorra’:

Pasquale Barra: in our town

He was called ‘the Student’

When it comes to a
zumpata
, no one is better

He can even face down an army

He always pulls off the same move

His knife-thrusts are totally lethal

Up under your lungs, so you start to cough

He makes you spit out a bit of red froth

He sees you fall to the ground, then leaves you . . .

In his own devious way, Cutolo was here using verse to bestow a certain literary and historical grandeur on his vicious henchman. For ‘A Man of the Camorra’ is actually cobbled together from lines stolen from a much older poem about the long-dead
camorrista
Gennarino Sbisà. The original author, journalist Ferdinando Russo (1866–1927), often celebrated individual
camorristi
, mixing just enough realistic grit into the verse to make his portraits of noble hoodlums feel authentic and dangerous. Russo it
was who penned an elegy for Ciccio Cappuccio (‘Little Lord Frankie’), the camorra boss whose lavish funeral was given such sympathetic coverage in the Neapolitan press back in 1892. In Russo’s day, the camorra—with its hierarchical management structure and its ceremonial
zumpate
, or knife duels—was very unlike the loose gangs and street-corner bosses that had dominated Neapolitan criminality for most of the twentieth century. And through his poems, Ferdinando Russo became the man most responsible for creating a popular cult around the Honoured Society of Naples.

The echoes of that popular cult still resounded in the 1970s. Cutolo devoured the dewy-eyed fables about the old-time bosses such as Salvatore De Crescenzo and Ciccio Cappuccio—the same
camorristi
once celebrated in the puppet theatres of Naples. As both plagiarising poet and gangster, the Professor was bent on bringing the camorra’s historical memory back to life. He explicitly sold the NCO to recruits as a revival of a proud gangster tradition. To be a
cutoliano
was to have roots in the past.

On one intriguing occasion, Cutolo even stage-managed a violent close encounter with camorra history—as personified by Antonio Spavone. Born in 1926 into a family of fishermen in the Mergellina quarter, Spavone and his older brother led a band of black marketeers during the chaos of Allied Military Government in 1943–5 that had launched so many criminal careers. When Spavone’s brother was killed during a feud with a rival outfit, Antonio took vengeance in spectacular fashion, by raiding a family celebration in a restaurant and stabbing the opposing gang leader to death in front of a crowd. His gesture earned him both a long prison sentence and the right to inherit his brother’s simple but effective nickname:
’o Malommo
—‘the Bad Man’.

At some point in 1975, when both
’o Malommo
and Cutolo were in Poggioreale prison, the younger man chose to issue a challenge to a
zumpata
, a knife duel—just like the
camorristi
of the old days. This may well have been a deliberately archaic gesture: the equivalent of slapping
’o Malommo
in the face with a glove. Cutolo’s challenge was refused, either because
’o Malommo
was about to be released, or because he did not want to dignify the uppity young hoodlum’s impudence with a response. Recalling the episode much later, a prisoner who was in Poggioreale at the time gave a shrewd analysis of how Cutolo managed the prison rumour-machine:

Nobody witnessed the episode. It was a completely ‘virtual’ event. Somebody, maybe Cutolo himself, put the rumour into circulation that the duel had not happened because of
’o Malommo
’s cowardice. In cases like this, different versions do the rounds—versions that always suit one side or the other. Cutolo went a long way thanks to a fame that was often built on made-up events. He was skilful at making exploits that never existed seem credible and legendary. He had an extraordinary talent for promoting his own image.

Even within the straitened confines of a prison, organised crime—however organised it may be—is a domain where information circulates in a confused and fragmentary form. The Professor was a master at making the gaps in any story work for him, in writing his own history.

Cutolo’s
Poems and Thoughts
are repulsive, and often trite and clumsy. But they would be much less dangerous if all they did was prompt fake duels in prison corridors or trumpet a killer’s feats of savage dexterity. Cutolo’s writings did much more. Copies circulated among his acolytes like the scriptures of a new messiah, and provided a seductive emotional script for the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. Analysing that script brings us to the heart of the Professor’s charismatic appeal.

Nihilism is the base note of the Cutolo philosophy. We are all beasts, ready to tear one another apart for filthy money. Man is the most treacherous and cruel of all the animals; he ought not to exist. But the psychological trick that the Professor pulls off in
Poems and Thoughts
is to create a criminal value-system that seems redemptive when set against this background of fear and despair.

A good portion of Cutolo’s verse voices a prisoner’s yearning for his freedom, his mum, and the sights, sounds and smells of home. All of which may seem self-pitying. But it shows that Cutolo was a smart enough leader to identify with the underlying mental vulnerability of his fellow cons. His mawkishness was the first means to a very unsentimental end: moulding a disciplined criminal army.

The sentence: life imprisonment

As a youth

You entered

The tomb-like cell

The silent cell