Raffaele Cutolo

Raffaele Cutolo (Italian: [raffaˈɛːle ˈkuːtolo]; 4 November 1941 – 17 February 2021) was an Italian crime boss and leader of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO), an organisation he built to renew the Camorra. Cutolo had a variety of nicknames including 'o Vangelo ("the gospel"), 'o Princepe ("the prince"), 'o Professore ("the professor") and 'o Monaco ("the monk"). Apart from 18 months on the run, Cutolo lived entirely in maximum-security prisons or psychiatric prisons after 1963. At the time of his death he was serving multiple life sentences for murder.

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.