The Knife Fighting Italian Gangster Who Built an Army while in Prison
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Naples, Italy, 1977.

Rafael Ecutolo has just busted out of prison for the second time, and he's about to go on a recruiting binge. He's been building a new Kimura clan from scratch, not an easy thing to do, earning quite the name for himself in the notorious Poggio Reale prison, where he's being held on a murder charge. That'll happen when you challenge a Kimura head to an old-school knife fight, and he backs down.

Kutuz played his cards right, adapted to the prison rules pretty shrewdly, and is already forming up a pretty solid crew behind bars that is incredibly loyal to him. In no time, he's going to have thousands of loyal soldiers in his nuevo Camorra organization that he's been putting together with a strict hierarchy, unlike the other, much more looser Camorra clans.

He's old school, and he's been imparting the old Kimura ways on all of his newer crews. There's a reason they call him the professor. He's also insanely charismatic, something like a natural born leader or a cult leader.

His power has been skyrocketing by this point, and he basically runs all the prisons in Naples. But that's not enough. Even though he started the organization behind bars, he's looking to expand as far as possible on the outside. And he's going to use his newly acquired freedom to spread far past Naples. He's also going to let his massive power go to his head a bit, and demand tribute from all the other Camorra clans, even those tied into the Sicilian mafia. They're not going to take it well.

And this one man, in between ripping off earthquake reconstruction funds and threatening high-level ministers in the government, is going to lead everyone into the bloodiest Camorra War in history as he looks to fully take over Naples. This is the Underworld Podcast.

Okay, ready? Yes. Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast, where every week we tell you a different story about organized crime with two reporters who've covered it all around the world. Myself, Danny Gold, and my charming British co-host, Sean Williams, who is recovering from what sounds to be like a fun weekend that he can't discuss publicly. Sean, what's your story?

Sean, it's been a week in the world. Yes. Definitely been a week. Why don't you just take a moment real quick to tell everyone something adorable your puppy did, just to kind of like, you know, set the tone we're trying to have here. Yeah, let's claw back like one, what, blob of serotonin? I don't know what they're measured in. No, no, she actually attacked another dog while I was out walking her last week, so...

Yeah, I think she's following the world in that sense. I mean, the weather's nice. Anything else? Tell me something good. Is anything good happening? That...

That's the opposite of like a dog story that I think people want to hear. But she's tiny, right? She's like eight pounds. So I guess that that's kind of cute. Yeah. Yeah. She's cute while she's doing it, but she will rip that face off. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that backfired. As always, we have bonus episodes up on our Patreon at patreon.com slash underworld podcast or on iTunes. You can pay their merch, all that underworld pod.com, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. We're doing a lot of these 60 seconds short bites. If you're on those platforms, you're

And if you would be so kind as to follow, like, subscribe, share, you know, the usual pleading that we have to do, even though we're adult men, do that if you can. Yeah, I mean, it's tough all over the world and it's cost of living and people are struggling. So we don't want to spend what little dollar you have left on the show. But if you can like, like and subscribe on Spotify, rate it, go to the YouTube, subscribe there.

I guess that's really going to help us make decisions about where we can spend our time. Is that too early? Should I do a fart joke or something? I mean, we've already done the dog, so. No. No. So yeah, we did an episode on the Camara, the crime clans out of Naples and all the history. I think that was, what, maybe five or six episodes back. If you guys want to go back and listen to that. That was the buildup with a couple of other main characters. But I like the story of Raffaele Cutolo, who they called the professor so much, I thought he needed his own episode.

And a lot of this comes from the book Blood Brotherhood, which is by John Dickey. It's a super dense history of Italy's three most powerful mafias, and it's really worth your time. Definitely buy it. And if you guys buy his book, maybe he won't get mad at us for telling the story that he pretty much wrote. Yeah. Also, I'm kind of disappointed because before we did the show, you looked up how to pronounce Raffaella.

name and you kind of didn't go the whole hog with that so I thought you were going to really give it some but I don't know man. Raffaele Raffaele Cutolo Raffaele yeah that's nowhere near come on we're just like poor Italian people having to listen to this I was going to make a joke about how like you know

We can ignore everything else going on in the world right now for this hour just to tell a story about guys named Giuseppe killing each other. But there's definitely some dudes in Naples right now who are like, you have no idea what the 80s were like here. How dare you make fun of Giuseppe. But that's what we're sticking with. Anyway, Cthulhu.

He's born in 1941, you know, during wartime in Italy, in the mountains or hinterlands of Naples. And he grows up poor in a very religious family with no connections actually to the Camorra. But I feel like when you say religious family in Italy in the 1940s, it's pretty much like it's redundant, right? It's like every family there.

His father is a farm worker, and despite him being nicknamed the professor, he is a terrible student and is always running around with the young hooligans at age 12 doing petty crimes. I don't think they were like four people on a Vespa back then, like stealing cell phones, but basically they were doing that except for the 1950s.

He really gets in trouble at 21 after what sounds like a prank goes wrong. He's driving his car towards a group of young women, and he breaks at the last second, and they yell at him, and he gets out of the car, and he kind of, I think, slaps or beats up one of the women, just a class act all around. So a fireman sees this happening.

And he intervenes. He gets into a fight with Cotolo. And then Cotolo shoots and kills him. And he gets convicted of murder. And he gets sentenced to life, I think, at first. But then after appealing, he gets sentenced to 24 years. Yeah, I mean, another nail in the coffin for prank humor. But I thought waving and hand gesturing and like, eee, was Italy's way of avoiding road rage. But...

I don't know. This guy pretty much sounds like a psychopath straight off the bat. So yeah, I think he, he really is, but you're right. I didn't draw the connection between dispensing justice against prank YouTubers. Like remember that? I don't know if you've seen the video of the guy who got shot in the mall and, uh, yeah, look, it needs to happen, right? Someone needs to stop these people. Victimless crime. Yeah. Someone needs to stop these people. Uh, and I think what this guy is like, he ends up actually basically spending most of his life in prison, uh,

But that's kind of really where his story actually begins because he's going to go on to lead the biggest Camorra clan in history, thousands of members, and have total control over much of the Italian prison system from Naples to beyond. In prison, Cattolo, he mixes this toughness that he has with this charming charisma. And people, you know, the way they talk about him, he just had that sort of like leadership cult-like quality that people naturally followed, right?

He pays his tribute to the powerful bosses inside, he abides by all the codes, and he starts making a name for himself.

And he starts gathering actually a small number of prisoners to kind of start forming his squad. It's kind of off topic a little, but I read a recent piece in, I think it was Bloomberg Business Week, and it was really good. It was about these commandments going back, sort of back to these times that we're talking about now. And they're still so strong that they've led to this kind of race war in prison between the Mafia and the Nigerian confraternity gangs, kind of like an Aryan Brotherhood, Latin Kings thing, prison race war.

But yeah, I'll stick on the reading. This is really interesting. And we definitely have to go back to the Nigerians because they are really building up a presence in Italy right now. And I actually listened back to a bit of our show. I think it's like show number one.

or two about the Nigerian stuff that I'd done years ago and it sounded like I was reading off a hostage script so we need to go back to that yeah we've been doing this thing three years now and I'm still saving up cash to buy a fleece so that's nice isn't it did I mention I went out on Saturday and yeah have fun

Yeah, anyway, you cut off for part of that, but whatever it is, I'm sure it was fascinating and interesting for all the listeners. Yeah, I remember reading stories about that and never expecting them to have the kind of power to take on any of those, whether it was Gamora or Sicilians. And I think that's even a plot point, right? In the first season of the show, Gamora. I'm not allowed to say it on this show, but I haven't watched Gamora. Fuck.

I mean, was what you were reading, did it kind of seem like they actually had the power to take on the Italian organized crime goods? Because that's kind of shocking to me. Yeah, I mean, that's how they're framing it. But I think it's more the government is right-wing and they're like, whoa, they're trying to big it up as well. So I think there's a little bit of...

I don't know. Bit of propaganda around it. Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of years later, he gets temporarily freed while waiting for a ruling from a higher court. He goes on the run. This is about 1970. And that's when he really gets involved with the Camorra, starting to kind of rise in the ranks of a clan. He's involved with the usual stuff, drug trafficking, extortion. But soon enough, after getting into a firefight with the police, he's captured and he's sent to this infamous prison in Italy, Cappuccino.

called, yeah, this is going to be bad, Poggio Real Prison. And this is where he starts to build up the Nuova Camorra Organizzazio, which is what he forms. It's also known as the NCO. It's actually a pretty simple idea that he starts with. They offer protection to these first-time younger prisoners who weren't affiliated with any gangs or groups and were scared.

And once the young men got outside, they would kick back a percentage of their earnings to Cotolo, basically from their day jobs. And he would in turn take that money and send it to relatives of other prisoners, corrupt prison officials and administrators, pay for lawyers, medical visits. It really kind of reminds me of how the huge Brazilian prison gangs formed. Their methods of basically, we'll take care of you in here. When you get outside, you feed it back. But I guess that's how a lot of prison gangs work. Right.

But it was really something that they were dedicated to. And he basically takes care of these guys, especially the poor ones, even doing things like buying them food from whatever the Italian version of commissary is and things like that. But of course, it's not just like young guys getting a couple of year of bids, right? He has his core team of just like killers and he starts recruiting as well. It's like the opposite of that teacher guy has a fish thing, right? You just give him a Mars bar from the commissary and he's yours for life. Yeah, it works. So-

he starts getting extremely powerful. His influence grows in the prison. And soon, he's powerful enough where he can arrange transfers for all prisoners, the different things. His organization starts growing in other prisons, and he gets a ton of members on the outside.

By 1974, he already earned the nickname the King of Pozo Real and was involved in a major drug trafficking ring with the senior guys in the Andrangheta and the Sicilian Mafia. How about that? How about that pronunciation right there? Oh, yeah. I know. It didn't go unnoticed. That wasn't bad. You got to give me some credit for that one. So...

he's just, he's really good at form. I don't want to say and then I'll get to again, cause I'm going to mess it up, but I did anyway. He's really good at forming these sorts of alliances with that, with the end on get the, not so much the Sicilians, I think in the beginning, but, uh, but yeah, he, he just is a notch. I mean, he's one of these natural leaders, the kind of guy that you think if he wasn't a psychopath, he'd be the CEO of, um, I don't know. What's a big Italian company, Vespa. Anyway, uh,

When a prominent Kimura boss by the name of Antonio Spavoni, who is also known as O Malamo, which translates to the bad man, which is a solid, like simple, but a solid mafia nickname. Yeah, good. Comes to the prison in 1975. Cattolo challenges him to a traditional knife fight in the courtyard, like the Kimura apparently did in the old days, which is known as a Zumpata. When the bad man refuses...

We get a new Batman, as is the way, and his legend grows. And I think the guy, the older guy says something like, why are young men so eager to die when he refuses? Which is kind of a movie-worthy quote from an old mobster. But when he gets out of prison, Cthulhu has him shot in the face. He actually survives, but he's all damaged. And then he steps down, no longer wanting a part in any of it.

Yeah, you could probably call getting shot in the face a bit of a wake-up call, eh? Yeah, I feel like there's... I mean, he literally didn't bring a gun to a knife fight, so yeah, I think he needs to get out and go. I was expecting a really terrible pun from you in that situation, but that'll work too. You got it in the end. Yeah, so Cattolo is just, he's really good at the things that you need to be a boss. Organization, logistics, he's super charismatic, everything.

And he always knows what to do. And soon this cult of personality develops around him. His clan, the NCO, they're very strong with loyalty, which I guess is mostly par for the course for organized crime groups in Italy. But they have this sort of ideology too, even more so than the traditional Italian criminal organizations. It's a highly centralized organization with clear hierarchy, which is different to a lot of the usual Comor setup. It's kind of more comparable to the Sicilian mafia in that sense.

And he ends up borrowing a lot of rituals and terminology from the Andrangheta, which itself had taken the terminology and rituals from the old school Kimura that we talked about in that episode a couple episodes back. Two former Andrangheta members, they actually say they gave Kutolo his second baptism, they call it, in 1974, and then he started giving his new recruits the same ritual going forward. The NCO was also forbidden from harming children through kidnapping or other abuse, and

And one time, Cattolo supposedly had a kidnapper assassinated the show that he meant business, which if you know about the other Italian organized crime groups, you know, children, wives, family members, they're far from off limits. These guys are kind of scumbags when it comes to that. And then he kind of sells the NCO as almost a fellowship of the downtrodden against the hostile world. Just a group of friends, you know, bounding together and committing industrial size crime. And then I feel like this is a cliche.

And all supposedly genius crime leaders. I've talked about this before, I think, on the show when we talk about these people. But he gets nicknamed the professor because he read a lot in prison, like a lot of history books, especially about the Kimura. Which I don't know why a prison won't have history books about the criminal organizations in it, but more power to them. He also got nicknamed the monk. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like the bar on people sort of quietly reading Da Vinci Code in prison is pretty low.

Maybe, yeah. It's always like Machiavelli and the art of war and all that. And no, those books don't help anyone. No one's like reading the 40 laws of power and being like, oh, I'm going to apply this in real life. No one's ever applied that in real life. Okay. You read it. You think it's interesting for like three days and you forget about it. I don't care what 50 cents says. We're never getting on Rogan. You know that.

No, definitely not. He also, he wrote short meditations on life, on love, on Omerta and poetry. He was like, you know, a bad Instagram influencer, one of those how to live your life podcasters, basically. Here's one of his poems, the sentence, life imprisonment. As a youth, you entered that tomb-like cell, the silent cell, the suffering cell. You felt alone.

and lost. It's very, very, very allegorical. I feel like I needed some bongos there. Yeah. I mean, we shouldn't make fun of this guy. It was all, no, we should. I mean, it was awful. It sounds like, but like, you're not really trying with that. Like that is, that is some half-assed poetry. If I've ever heard poetry before.

Anyway, one of his books on life and love and all that becomes a sort of Bible for all the NCO guys. It gets passed around, abandoned the prison and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, Sean, you used to write poetry a lot, right? And try to get women to come to your dorm room so you could read them your poems.

Do you remember any off the top of your head of your poems that you wrote all the time? I mean, I wouldn't like to go into them too much. Nothing on that level, like Jordan Peterson tweet level. But yeah, I mean, I basically had and still have no discernible skills. So it's mostly a John Peel playlist, a cheap blunt, and some chat about Arthur Miller or...

Just the usual king shit. I mean, I guess you cracked out the acoustic and played some Tracy Chapman, right? No, but Tracy Chapman went to my college and I don't know how to play any music. And I was definitely against that Belushi style. So it's the poetry then, yeah? Yeah. I think the way you picked up women or you tried to and failed miserably was you turned your wind amp speakers really loudly when you played whatever Little John song was super popular in that era. I might be dating myself right now. Never worked.

But, uh, I think we, I think in that era, we all firmly believed that if you just played rap music loud enough, it was like a siren, siren song, you know, didn't, didn't work. But, uh, really, really had this episode out. It's a short one. So you guys are getting some, uh, I don't even know what you would call it. Yeah. Yeah. Some insights. Behind the curtain. Yeah.

The NCO engages in the usual criminal activity that we talked about, drug dealing, extortion, truck hijackings, but they're also more sophisticated and they do stuff like getting involved in infiltrating government building projects and defrauding the European economic community of agricultural subsidies. Okay, what?

Yeah. I mean, it's like I always tell the young guys that I know. It's like selling cocaine isn't even worth it for the time you'll get. Credit card scamming is passe. The money is and always will be in just fraudulently convincing the government that you're growing a ton of arugula and just getting that subsidy money. Talk to every gangster you know, every kid on the corner that you know. Let them know. Get into subsidies. Grow grapes. No, fake it. And get into agricultural subsidies because...

These guys know. Interestingly, the professor, his sister gets involved in running these scams. And it's kind of like, you know, when Tony visits Naples, they take orders from a woman. And again, we always support Mafia DEI on this podcast, and we always will. In 1977, he's powerful enough to get himself transferred to the mental ward. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that later because that's obviously a fascinating story.

The following year, he escapes again. He goes on the run for 15 months, which is like the longest he's ever been out of prison since that first sentence before being captured for his final time. His men had blown up a wall with TNT and he allegedly went through the rubble, but the truth is actually he just walked through the front door, which reminds me of the El Chapo thing, right? We were supposed to have hidden in a laundry basket, but the reality is

He probably just walked out again through the front door. Yeah, that's got to be BS. I mean, he probably just got wheeled out sitting on top of the laundry basket, just noting down all the guards' names as he went. I mean, who is going to stop that dude? Before he gets recaptured, he boosts the NCO's growth like crazy with hundreds more joining. He even goes to the US to show up ties with some American mafias. You could just get away with anything in the 70s. You know, you probably didn't even have to like show ID on again on a flight. You just show like a Costco card and they let you on. It's just crazy.

What a wild, wild, fun time to do crime. Then he buys a palace once owned by the Medici family on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, puts his sister there, and he also kind of makes it the headquarters of the NCO. Just to get into how powerful this dude is when he was in prison...

In that prison he's in, on average, there's like 25 prisoners to a cell. He has his own cell with a shower while his own personal cook had the cell next door. So, I mean, it's like Goodfellas times 10. When he's transferred to a smaller prison where his cell was carpeted, fitted with a colored television, sound system, and that's colored TV in like the late 70s, early 80s, right? That's a big deal. He requests that his chef follows him, and his request is immediately granted by the prison authorities. As

As a prisoner, he dresses impeccably. He's got ties on, designer shirts, gold watch, crocodile skin shoes. And his daily meals consisted of lobster and champagne, which I don't know if I buy that. It's kind of the fast track to gout, but the guy was doing well. Yeah. How's it going on down there? You'd know, right? Dude runs in my family and I eat a lot. I eat too much meat and drink too much red wine. I got to be careful. Yeah.

It's a rough one to get, but- There's an insight. Yeah. We're learning a lot about me in this episode, maybe too much. There's also all these stories too about him basically sitting in the warden's office. I guess they call it the prison governor in Italy. He's making international phone calls, which again, for our younger listeners, making an international phone call back then, it was a big deal. Even in the 90s, if you called your pen pal from Belgium, whatever Sean did, and talked to him for like 15 minutes-

your mom would whoop your ass. And coincidentally, the professor once slapped the warden across the face when he searched the cell, and then later that warden was killed. So in the trial about his escape from prison, which he wins on appeal where the court said he could not be punished because his lack of mental fitness,

He gives this impromptu press conference. This is another guy who like love the media, love giving statements, you know, Gotti, like all that sort of stuff. And this again comes from blood brothers by John Dickey. Um, buy that book. I think Alexander Reed Ross sent it to me as a gift. So very nice man. Go. I, he's got a podcast about Italy actually. Fuck. What's it called? But look up Alexander Reed Ross, Italy podcast. Good dude. Yeah. Sent me a book.

That's how you get promo around here. So he starts talking to the media. He says, I'm someone who fights injustice, being on my friends, a Robin Hood, so to speak. Then when they ask him about the NCO, I don't know, maybe NCO means non-conosco nesuno, which means I don't know anyone. They ask him if he's in charge of the prison system. He says, I'm on charge. The prison governor is...

What about the murder of the deputy prison governor? You had prusely slapped him and threatened to kill him. And great answer right here. Yes, I did because he was doing some really, when he pauses, 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.

Yeah, I mean, he absolutely does like collecting life sentences like that. I mean, I'm starting to believe that Robin Hood has done way more harm than good to society by emboldening all these crooks. I mean, he comes up like about two dozen times in the shows that we've done. You don't get many folks quoting Goldilocks or Rumpelstiltskin when they're murdering families, do you?

Yeah, very, very influential. Like don't, maybe don't read your book, that book to your kids or show them that movie when they're at an impressionable age, because it'll just, you never know what path it'll steer them down. The NCO though is getting huge and they get so big that one of their split up organizations ends up becoming the Sokoda Corona Unita, which again, I'm mispronouncing, you know, live with it.

It's currently the fourth biggest mafia in Italy. They don't get a lot of attention. They're sometimes just called the fourth mafia. And what happens is the NCO guys, they start getting transferred to regions all over Italy, not just the ones they request, but the prison system does that. And we've kind of seen this play before. We know how it works out.

One of the regions some of these guys get transferred to is the Italian region of Apulia, which is in the southeast. And when these NCO guys get transferred to the prison there, they do what they do. They take over. They initiate all the local crooks into their organization, bring in all those gangs. The big man himself, he actually travels to Apulia when he had escaped from jail for a bit to bless this kind of growth. You know, I'm forgetting the word that gangs use. Like when the bloods, it might be sanctioned when they basically take in a new gang. Is it sanctioned? It might be sanctioned, whatever that means. Yeah.

Soon enough, they have hundreds of members there. And Cthulhu, he kind of forms it as a standalone branch. The

The deal was that the local gangsters would manage all the criminal activity with Cthulhu's Kimura backing it, and they would get 40% of the profits. However, this proves to be an unstable arrangement. In 1983, during some troubles that he goes through, I'm going to talk about, they split off the group and formed their own separate entity called the SCU. And the SCU, it mixes in traditions from the Andrangheta and the Kimura and their own Apulia traditions to form the foundation of their group.

Like I said, they're commonly called the fourth mafia. You don't hear them often in the same sentence as the big guys, you know, the Andrangheta, the Camorra, the actual mafia. They're not on that scale. Actually, I want to do an episode on them, but there's just not that much on them in English. They have about 1500 members. They're active in Europe, the U.S.,

They're involved, again, drug trafficking, prostitution, arms trafficking, extortion, the usual stuff. And they bring in like 2.5 billion euros where anywhere else in the world, they'd be considered a massive criminal organization. But when you're talking about the Camorra and the Andrangheta who have tens of billions of dollars, they're kind of considered small fry. Yeah, I don't know huge amounts about Italian organized crime, but I mean, so these guys are still active in Puglia right now? You don't hear a huge amount about them at all. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, they kind of go under the radar because the other groups are so massive and, I guess, popular too. Pop culture is a big thing too, right? I guess the Calabrians and the Andrangheta and Camorra didn't have a ton of attention, but there's been TV shows and books about them the last 10, 15 years in English. So I'm sure we're only years away from a Paramount Plus series.

on the seo but we'll get there guys so ip get it i also shout out to pulia it's like one of the most amazing place i've been it's like cheap beautiful old towns everything amazing go

Yeah, one of these days, man. One of these days. Cotello, though, he is not a small fry. He's not doing little money. He's expanding like crazy. Thousands of soldiers at this point, he starts demanding taxes from all the other Camorra clans, the ones not affiliated with him, including those that are working and affiliated with the Sicilian mafias. He's asking for every carton of untaxed cigarettes to get paid a fee, which is a huge form of tribute. It's a lot of money. That's one of the biggest industries right there.

A bunch of their clans decide they've had enough, and they form into their own little super group called the Nuovo Familia, the NF. In the early 80s, this whole region where Naples is, it basically splits into two groups for the battle that's going to come. Says the professor, quote, this is his little battle cry before the war starts, one day the people of Campania will understand that a crust of bread eaten in freedom is worth more than a steak eaten as a slave. And

And that day Campania will truly have victory. I mean, I'll give him that one. He's been improving since his prison days. He's been reading his classics. Maybe that's pretty, that's way, way better. The start of this war, the NCO, they've got dedicated soldiers. They have like, you know, hierarchy, single leadership. Well, the NF is a very loose alliance where the only thing holding them together is their opposition to Cthulhu and the Sicilian mafia. Who's ruled by your friend, Sean Toto arena, right? Is that how you say his name? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

which we've done on... To win his scumbags. Yeah, we've done episodes on him. Not a very nice man. He's heavily involved in the war. He wants to manage it from the outside. But the Sicilian mob, they quickly find out that Camorra claims a failure with them. They're not so gung-ho about going to battle against this guy who has thousands of soldiers. They're kind of more interested in cutting a deal. So the Palermo Commission, which is the ruling body of the Sicilian mafia, they send an assassin in the summer of 1980 to take care of Cotolo. But the assassin gets dealt with very quickly after arriving in Naples.

And soon the Sicilians, they try a different tactic, which is peacemaking. The mafia sponsors three... I don't know what sponsors mean in this situation, but they have three peace conferences trying to broker a deal between the NCO and the NF. These conferences are actually attended, some of them by Tottorini himself, which...

Again, if you listen to our episode, you know the kind of legendary psycho he is. He had just taken over the Palermo Commission by murdering many of his opponents. And the peace attempts, they do not work. They don't amount to anything. The war ends up taking five years and over a thousand people are killed in it. So one of those deaths is, you know how we talked about how he got declared a mentally unfit?

The guy who declared him that is a professor, Professor Aldo Cimarari. In 1982, he gets killed. He's a criminal psychiatrist who's responsible for all the claims on Guttola's mental health that get him all the preferential treatment and sent from maximum security prisons to the far easier psych wards.

He's a self-proclaimed fascist with links – and not like a wannabe Twitter fascist, like a real one – with links to the Italian military intelligence, and he's a far-right agitator, which again, in this day and age, he would just have a Substack or a Twitter and maybe a Rumble channel. But back in the day, he's a guy trying to recruit Italian criminal organizations to his fascist causes.

But the mafiosos, God bless them, they're much more interested in just making money. They don't care about politics. So the best he could get was a very simple trade. The mob guys would get his psychiatric, quote unquote, expertise, and they would in turn help his fascist cohorts get weapons. He gets a little cocky though, tries to make this deal with not only Cotolo, but a bunch of the other NCOs, enemies in the Camorra, prevent

Eventually, his body is discovered in the boot of a car only a few hundred meters from Cotulla's castle while the head is found in the front seat, but it actually turns out that most people think it was orchestrated by the NF themselves. It kind of says a lot about how fully insane Italy is at this point. This crazy war is like

A bit under the radar in the wider mafia stories. I guess we've already covered a bunch of stuff like the P2, the secret society and God's banker and all of this like left and right political violence that's happening. This is a, this is the so-called years of lead, right? Is it all lumped into that kind of era? I think it's,

60s to 80s, roughly, right? Yeah, Years of Lead was more political, though. Isn't that where the classification comes from? Or does it also apply to the Mafia Wars? Yeah, but I think the Mafia's all wound up in that as well, I think. Alexander, who I mentioned, I think his podcast is about the Years of Lead. He gets really, really deep into it, way more than we do. But it's a wild, fascinating period. And I guess these guys probably always, like I said, paled in comparison to the Sicilians at the time, so I'm sure they didn't get as much attention.

And then also around this time before, in 1980, there's a huge earthquake in Naples. I think it's like a 6.9 Richter scale. It destroys a lot of the city. Some wings of the prison itself, the Poggio Real prison, the NCO called Stronghold, it collapses. There's total chaos. The guards largely abandoned it. The NCO goes around hunting its enemies and kills several of them. And the same process repeats itself in a 1981 aftershock. But...

The big thing about natural disasters, a ton of reconstruction is needed. And that means tons of money coming to Naples. And Cotolo, of course, he's going to get his fingers in all of it while the war is ongoing. Okay, so we've got two classics of the genre here. We've got prison falls down, Italian authorities do nothing, and just sit around and let everyone run amok.

And then we've got guys getting into real estate as well. So this is all coming together quite nicely. Yeah. Basically, you can just track all our themes in all these episodes. They all kind of add up. And then in 1981, there's this infamous kidnapping and the professor grows even more powerful. I feel like I've said that 15 times, but you guys get the idea. The guy was fucking serious business.

There's this politician for the Christian Democrats, who's the largest party in Italy at the time. He's kidnapped by the Red Brigades, which are a left-wing terrorist organization. Usually these cases, they don't end well because the Christian Democrats, they have a policy of not negotiating with terrorists and they kidnap people who end up dead. But this time something different happens and no one discovers it until 10 years later. Well, I guess some people do, but it doesn't become public until a decade and a half later.

He's actually released after 2.5 months after the Red Brigades received a 2.5 million ransom. And it turns out the government had secretly gone to Cotolo to manage the negotiations.

He has these meetings in prison with the guys from the group that are in there, all this stuff. And he's able to actually secure the release. And it just so happens that this politician is personally responsible for the handling of massive funds, giving to the reconstruction that's going to happen after the earthquake. So not only does Cattolo get a ton of those funds going through his people, including his son, but now he's kind of legitimized. That's not the right word. Legitimize.

You know what, leave that in there to let the people know that we're all human here, mistakes are made. So he's legitimized having the government authorities come to him for help. I guess it wasn't public then, but around the government and all that, they kind of get to know. He though, he's not pleased and he thinks he deserves more. So he leaks details in the negotiations kind of secretly in a roundabout way to the press to make the government look bad. But

It backfires, and this ends up being his downfall. You got to stop being greedy, man. Yeah, I mean, what happened to the guy writing rhyming couplets about Amato as well? Bloody poet. And the Robin Hood thing, man. You got to stop being greedy and get to the needy. Come on. The highest levels of the government, the guys who, you know, they're not the Naples guys. They are a little harder to get bought off.

They start looking at Coutolo. Italy's president learns about how he's living in prison and is kind of horrified by it. So he immediately orders him transferred to the prison island of Asanara, which is like some Alcatraz type setup where you can't communicate with anyone, which means that Coutolo loses control of the NCO. He doesn't know how to tell them. He can't really communicate with them. And the NF decides to move in for the kill. But yeah, the war was still going on, even through the earthquake and all that stuff.

They systematically take out the NCO leadership, one after another, killing them, car bombs, shootings, all that. They might have even had help from elements of the state that were pissed at Cotolo for thinking he could push them around, leak this stuff, and basically do what he wants without the government authorities being able to keep in check. And the NCO at that point starts to fall apart. Bunch of the clans align with Cotolo, jump ship.

Cthulhu's son is killed eventually in 1990. His sister sent to jail in 1993. He only dies recently in 2021. I think he was like 79 at the time. But Sean, don't you want to jump in with your question you always ask about whether they're vaxxed or not? No, I mean, you know, stuff speaks for itself. I mean, if you're vaxxed, you're in trouble. That's my honest opinion. But he was... He's basically...

He's been done from a Kimura perspective for way longer than that, basically lost a lot of his power. His legacy, though, is still pretty legendary. He built a Kimura into a force it hadn't been before, rivaling the Androngetta and Sicilian Mafia, where before it was kind of playing second fiddle to those two powerhouses. And he did it all from behind prison walls, pretty much. I think he was only free for maybe a year and a half or total from the early 1960s on.

Here's a quote again from him about his life. I don't regret anything about my life. Good stuff. Yeah. Crime is always a wrong move. It's true. However, we live in a society that is worse than criminality. Better to be crazy than to be a dreamer. A crazy man can be returned to reason. For a dreamer, he can only lose his head. A camarista must be humble, wise, and always ready to bring joy where there is pain. Only thus will he become a good camarista before God.

I am far from being a saint. I've made people cry and I've done harm to those who want to harm me, making me cry. A camarista is one who declares himself by his lifestyle. He who errs dies. That sounds good, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly gibberish, but I don't know. Maybe it loses something in the translation. I mean, you have to hope so. But in a way, this is kind of the most honest translation.

Thing we've had one like massive criminal saying of why it's just like completely I don't get anything I've got a bunch of people it's bad. I don't care. It's good. It might be bad, but it's probably good and

and I got loads of money, and anyone who goes against me dies. It makes me cry. It makes me cry, but, you know, it's good, but it's bad. It's good. But I'm not a saint, but I'm also a really cool guy. Anyway, it was me. I want to learn what he meant by bringing joy to the people. Like, I don't know why my head jumped to, like, some kind of reason, like, doing a puppet show for kids on one of the neighborhoods. That's probably not what he meant, but that's where I'm...

I don't think it was the story about the guy with his head on the front seat of the car, but I might be wrong. I don't know. I don't know what makes a Camarista. I mean, as long as he doesn't err. I mean, as long as he's not an errer, then he's good. Yeah, but there you have it. That is the story of the professor. You know, subscribe, like, YouTube, TikTok, all that stuff. Patreon, please.

And yeah, just remember, you know, it's going to get worse before it gets even more worse. So that's where we're at right now. But at least you guys... Put it on the t-shirt. At least you guys, at least you got us, you know? I'm going to order Italian food. I'm in the mood for baked clams. Anyway... Yeah, I'm going for a July. No, you know what? I'm going to do a bonus with some other Camaro stuff soon. Once I can focus again. Yeah, good. Good to go. All right. Take care, everyone. Love you all. Bye. Peace out.

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