Giovanni Pandico
Encyclopedia
Giovanni Pandico is a former Italian Camorrista who was a member of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata
(NCO), a Camorra
organization in Naples
. Pandico rose to become one of Camorra boss, Raffaele Cutolo
's underwriters within the organization. After twelve years of imprisonment, he decided to collaborate with Italian justice and subsequently became a pentito
in 1983. Pandico's revelations brought a massive crackdown on the NCO and led to the arrests of over 856 NCO members and affiliates on June 17, 1983, a day labeled by the Neapolitan press as the black day of the NCO.
, Sardinia
, where his father was a lieutenant in the Italian army. Leaving Italy
shortly after the Second World War, his mother brought him to Liveri
, another small town on the outskirts of Naples
where his Greek grandfather had first taken up residence. During one of his first days on the witness stand, Pandico commented on his Greek roots: "My family has Greek origins and in Greek
, Pandicos means the just man" By the age of 15, Pandico was already familiar with juvenile hall, having spent some years inside the Filangieri, the Neapolitan juvenile detention centre. At the age of 19, he was arrested for attempting to bomb the barracks of the Carabinieri
and thus incarcerated in the infamous Poggioreale
prison of Naples.
It was during this period that he met prominent Camorrista and head of the NCO, Raffaele Cutolo. According to his later testimony in the courtroom, Pandico was initiated into the Camorra by Cutolo on December 8, 1963, by the classical ritual of blood baptism: a small cut on the base of the index finger of the right hand. Later, in a letter to Cutolo, he would recall the event as "our first camorristic dawn with all our splendor."
Pandico was eventually acquitted of the bombing charges and released from prison. While living in freedom, he survived on odd, low paying jobs and was occasionally sent back to the Poggioreale prison for minor offenses. During one of his prison terms, he was reunited with Giorgio Della Pietra, another native of Liveri, who was serving a 24 year prison term for murder. It was during his stay with Della Pietra that Pandico came to the conclusion that it was his own father and mother, together with the mayor of Liveri, Nicola Nappi and his brother Salvatore, who had conspired to have Della Pietra convicted of the murder of another brother of the mayor, Michele Nappi, on April 3, 1956.
Pandico was arrested the following day and immediately confessed to the crime. He stated that he wanted to get even with the mayor, the mayor's brother Salvatore, and his own mother and father who had testified in the criminal trial against his friend, Giorgio Della Pietra. However, he later changed his mind and declared that Mayor Nappi had put a contract on Giuseppe Gaetano. He claimed that Gaetano was blackmailing the mayor and that Nappi arranged to be wounded in order to confuse the reconstruction of the crime and thereby, distance himself from the murder. After a brief psychiatric examination which had cleared Pandico to stand trial, he was defined as a "pure paranoid individual, able however to understand very well his own situation." As a result, he was convicted of multiple murder, multiple attempted murder and lying with malice by the judges of the Corte d'Assise in Naples, and sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment, in total. He had been sentenced to three years of imprisonment for a slander charge in 1973.
Pandico's new status of scrivano (writer) coupled with his close contact and relationship with the boss greatly boosted his prestige and standing within the organization. He had now gained a reputation as a "man of honor". However, Pandico was increasingly at odds with the younger, more determined members of the NCO who despised him due to his arrogance and his desire to always know everything. It was only Cutolo's vested interest in Pandico that prevented any violence against him.
, President Sandro Pertini personally intervened to have Cutolo transferred to the high security prison on the island of Asinara
, Sardinia. Pandico realized that the younger leaders of the organization would never give him the respect that he wanted. After attempting unsuccessfully to improve his position by meeting with the NCO leadership, he asked the prison administration to put him in isolation. Two days later, on March 21, 1983, Pandico summoned the warden and announced his desire to defect from the NCO and cooperate with the authorities. Pandico also claimed to be a godfather
and senior figure in the NCO.
Giovanni Pandico's decision to become a pentito was received as a big surprise by the Italian law enforcement agencies. This was because although he had spent the past twelve years in prison, he had never come under suspiscion as being a member of the NCO. Pandico soon proved to be one of the most important pentiti to ever be involved in the Maxi Trial
against the NCO. He was the second senior member of the NCO to turn informant, the first being Pasquale Barra
, who realizing that Cutolo was prepared to let him be killed, decided to reveal details of NCO murders in order to gain greater protection. A week after announcing his decision, he was flown via helicopter to the Neapolitan Operative Center of the Carabinieri, where his visit was eagerly awaited by the prosecuting attorneys, Lucio Di Pietro and Felice Di Persia.
In his confession to the two district attorneys, Pandico presented himself as the betrayed man and expressed his disillusion in the organization:
By this time, Pandico also held his former boss and mentor, Raffaele Cutolo, responsible for his problems and the general situation. In an open letter to Cutolo which was published in a Naples daily paper, he said: "When you will be left alone, when all the camorristic people will have deserted you, you will take off your mask. Maybe only to breathe some fresh air. Otherwise you will end up choked by all these dead men who will scream at you: for what we have died?"
After more than a week of interrogation and 300 pages of deposition, Pandico was identified as a true pentito. His deposition was released to the press two months later on June, at the time of the crackdown against the NCO, as the most significant evidence behind the arrests of 200 individuals. Overall, more than 1,000 would later be indicted for the crime of association with a "Mafia-like organization" called the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. The resulting Maxi trials lasted three years and required the participation of nine different judges and scores of legal clerks, attorneys, witnesses and military policemen. Pandico was also sentenced to two years of imprisonment, for slander charges against prison staff, by the Tribunal of Livorno
in 1984.
On the second day of his testimony, Pandico reminisced about the actions of one of his own Camorristic godsons, Alfredo Guarnieri. Pandico testified that during this time when he and Guarnieri had shared the same cell, the latter had asked to be admitted into the NCO. Prior to an induction, an initiate had to prove his courage by executing a sgarro, a test of personal violence needed by any member to fully become a Camorrista. Pandico agreed to this initiation and asked Guarnieri to murder his own sister-in-law, whom he deemed gulity of betraying the family honor after the death of his brother. Moreover, he wanted her head cut off in an almost surgically precise way in order to create a cover up, and put on the grave of his brother.
However, Guarnieri did not possess the necessary skill for the operation. Therefore, Pandico decided to teach him how to decapitate a person by showing him how to behead rabbits. He brought a dozen rabbits from the prison's canteen and with a sharpened spoon demonstrated how to sever their heads. He gave the novice some rabbits to practise on and when he became completely certain that Guarnieri knew the proper decapitation techniques, he sent him to behead his sister-in-law. This murder was never accomplished. The judges, lawyers, and audience reacted to Pandico's story with a mixed reaction of interest, shock, horror and bemused curiosity.
Among his many other important revelations was the claim that Italian
businessman, and former SISMI
officer, Francesco Pazienza
had met the failed Turkish assassin, Mehmet Ali Ağca
, in his prison cell at Rome's Ascoli Piceno. This claim was also made by Ağca himself in his trial. From his New York prison, Pazienza denied ever having visited Ağca.
In the first set of trials resulting from the 1983 crackdown, Pandico's testimony along with those of many other pentiti such as Pasquale Barra, Giovanni Melluso
and Luigi Riccio
were found reliable and convincing enough to become a significant factor in the convictions of more than 800 defendants. However, many of Pandico's accusations were later proven to be unfounded, and several of the convicted defendants were released. In a separate trial in Salerno
in which Pandico was called to testify, the prosecuting magistrate stated that "Pandico's repentance was one of his many opportunities to show off his histrionic personality made up of mystifications, ample but void gestures, bickering accusations and lies.
anchorman Enzo Tortora
of NCO membership and cocaine
trafficking. He mentioned Tortora's name while examining the lists of the members of the NCO. He claimed to have received this information directly from Raffaele Cutolo, in the course of a discussion which was supposedly carried out in the Ascoli Piceno prison during the second half of 1981. Pandico underlined that Tortora's task within the organization was that of selling the drugs and taking the money abroad.
He claimed that Tortora was mentioned accidentally while discussing a stock of drugs, when Cutolo allegedly said: "let's not behave like Tortora", "the one with the parrot". However, Cutolo would have been referring to a misdeed committed by Tortora, that is, a stock of drugs worth 50 or 60 millions of lire which he was in debt of with the organization and especially with Barbaro and Alcamo, a stock which Tortora had supposedly sold but not paid to the NCO during the years between 1977 and 1978. Tortora was detained for years before being cleared of the charge by an appeals court. He developed cancer
and died soon after the case was finally solved, some say because of the emotional stress
of his imprisonment.
Nuova Camorra Organizzata
The Nuova Camorra Organizzata was an Italian Camorra criminal organization founded in the late 1970s by a Neapolitan Camorrista, Raffaele Cutolo, in the region of Campania. It was also known by the initials NCO...
(NCO), a Camorra
Camorra
The Camorra is a Mafia-type criminal organization, or secret society, originating in the region of Campania and its capital Naples in Italy. It is one of the oldest and largest criminal organizations in Italy, dating to the 18th century.-Background:...
organization in Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
. Pandico rose to become one of Camorra boss, Raffaele Cutolo
Raffaele Cutolo
Raffaele Cutolo is an Italian crime boss and the charismatic leader of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata , an organisation he built to renew the Camorra. Cutolo has a variety of nicknames including "'o Vangelo" , "'o Principe" , "'o Professore" and "'o Monaco"...
's underwriters within the organization. After twelve years of imprisonment, he decided to collaborate with Italian justice and subsequently became a pentito
Pentito
Pentito designates people in Italy who, formerly part of criminal or terrorist organizations, following their arrests decide to "repent" and collaborate with the judicial system to help investigations...
in 1983. Pandico's revelations brought a massive crackdown on the NCO and led to the arrests of over 856 NCO members and affiliates on June 17, 1983, a day labeled by the Neapolitan press as the black day of the NCO.
Early years
Giovanni Pandico was born in SassariSassari
Sassari is an Italian city. It is the second-largest city of Sardinia in terms of population with about 130,000 inhabitants, or about 300,000 including the greater metropolitan area...
, Sardinia
Sardinia
Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . It is an autonomous region of Italy, and the nearest land masses are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Tunisia and the Spanish Balearic Islands.The name Sardinia is from the pre-Roman noun *sard[],...
, where his father was a lieutenant in the Italian army. Leaving Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
shortly after the Second World War, his mother brought him to Liveri
Liveri
Liveri is a comune in the Province of Naples in the Italian region Campania, located about 30 km northeast of Naples. As of 31 December 2004, it had a population of 1,725 and an area of 2.6 km²....
, another small town on the outskirts of Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
where his Greek grandfather had first taken up residence. During one of his first days on the witness stand, Pandico commented on his Greek roots: "My family has Greek origins and in Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, Pandicos means the just man" By the age of 15, Pandico was already familiar with juvenile hall, having spent some years inside the Filangieri, the Neapolitan juvenile detention centre. At the age of 19, he was arrested for attempting to bomb the barracks of the Carabinieri
Carabinieri
The Carabinieri is the national gendarmerie of Italy, policing both military and civilian populations, and is a branch of the armed forces.-Early history:...
and thus incarcerated in the infamous Poggioreale
Poggioreale
Poggioreale is a small town and comune in Sicily, Italy, set on the Belice valley, which administratively belongs to the province of Trapani....
prison of Naples.
It was during this period that he met prominent Camorrista and head of the NCO, Raffaele Cutolo. According to his later testimony in the courtroom, Pandico was initiated into the Camorra by Cutolo on December 8, 1963, by the classical ritual of blood baptism: a small cut on the base of the index finger of the right hand. Later, in a letter to Cutolo, he would recall the event as "our first camorristic dawn with all our splendor."
Pandico was eventually acquitted of the bombing charges and released from prison. While living in freedom, he survived on odd, low paying jobs and was occasionally sent back to the Poggioreale prison for minor offenses. During one of his prison terms, he was reunited with Giorgio Della Pietra, another native of Liveri, who was serving a 24 year prison term for murder. It was during his stay with Della Pietra that Pandico came to the conclusion that it was his own father and mother, together with the mayor of Liveri, Nicola Nappi and his brother Salvatore, who had conspired to have Della Pietra convicted of the murder of another brother of the mayor, Michele Nappi, on April 3, 1956.
Assassination attempt on Mayor Nicola Nappi
Pandico was inclined by this piece of information to seek revenge on the people responsible for his friend's incarceration. On June 18, 1970, two days after his release from prison, he went to city hall with the intention to kill the mayor, Nicola Nappi. In his rampage through the corridors of the city hall, he first killed Giuseppe Gaetano, a city supervisor who tried to block him. He then proceeded to shoot and kill Guido Adrianopoli, a clerk who had appeared in the corridor to see what was going on. Finally, he shot and wounded the mayor and employee, Pasquale Scola, who were both trying to find some protection in the mayor's desk.Pandico was arrested the following day and immediately confessed to the crime. He stated that he wanted to get even with the mayor, the mayor's brother Salvatore, and his own mother and father who had testified in the criminal trial against his friend, Giorgio Della Pietra. However, he later changed his mind and declared that Mayor Nappi had put a contract on Giuseppe Gaetano. He claimed that Gaetano was blackmailing the mayor and that Nappi arranged to be wounded in order to confuse the reconstruction of the crime and thereby, distance himself from the murder. After a brief psychiatric examination which had cleared Pandico to stand trial, he was defined as a "pure paranoid individual, able however to understand very well his own situation." As a result, he was convicted of multiple murder, multiple attempted murder and lying with malice by the judges of the Corte d'Assise in Naples, and sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment, in total. He had been sentenced to three years of imprisonment for a slander charge in 1973.
Career in the NCO
In prison, Pandico increased his knowledge by voraciously reading written documents, particularly legal papers, and soon began helping other inmates in their dealing with the law. Thus, he soon developed a prodigious career in the mostly illiterate Neapolitan prison system. He was soon transferred to the prison of Porto Azzurro, where he was hired by the prison administration to help other inmates write personal letters, appeals to judges and other bureaucratic letters. Later, he was again transferred to the prison of Ascoli Piceno, which was a traditional stronghold of Raffaele Cutolo's NCO. He was moved to a cell next to Cutolo and assisted the crime boss in his daily routine, which included making coffee for him, serving food, but above all, he wrote letter's on Cutolo's behalf, using a stamp with Cutolo's signature.Pandico's new status of scrivano (writer) coupled with his close contact and relationship with the boss greatly boosted his prestige and standing within the organization. He had now gained a reputation as a "man of honor". However, Pandico was increasingly at odds with the younger, more determined members of the NCO who despised him due to his arrogance and his desire to always know everything. It was only Cutolo's vested interest in Pandico that prevented any violence against him.
Becoming a Pentito
However, things would later change dramatically for Giovanni Pandico when, following the scandal of the Cirillo affairCirillo kidnap
On April 27, 1981, the Red Brigades kidnapped the 60-year-old Christian Democrat politician Ciro Cirillo and killed his two-man escort in the garage of his Naples apartment building. At the time Cirillo directed reconstruction efforts in Campania devastated by the earthquake in the Irpinia region...
, President Sandro Pertini personally intervened to have Cutolo transferred to the high security prison on the island of Asinara
Asinara
Asinara is an Italian island of in area. The name is Italian for "donkey-inhabited", but it is thought to derive from the Latin "sinuaria", and meaning sinus-shaped. The island is virtually uninhabited. The census of population of 2001 lists one man. The island is located off the north-western...
, Sardinia. Pandico realized that the younger leaders of the organization would never give him the respect that he wanted. After attempting unsuccessfully to improve his position by meeting with the NCO leadership, he asked the prison administration to put him in isolation. Two days later, on March 21, 1983, Pandico summoned the warden and announced his desire to defect from the NCO and cooperate with the authorities. Pandico also claimed to be a godfather
Capo di tutti capi
Capo di tutti capi or capo dei capi is Italian for "boss of all bosses" or "boss of bosses". It is a phrase used mainly by the media, public and the law enforcement community to indicate a supremely powerful crime boss in the Sicilian or American Mafia who holds great influence over the whole...
and senior figure in the NCO.
Giovanni Pandico's decision to become a pentito was received as a big surprise by the Italian law enforcement agencies. This was because although he had spent the past twelve years in prison, he had never come under suspiscion as being a member of the NCO. Pandico soon proved to be one of the most important pentiti to ever be involved in the Maxi Trial
Maxi Trial
The Maxi Trial was a criminal trial that took place in Sicily during the mid-1980s that saw hundreds of defendants on trial convicted for a multitude of crimes relating to Mafia activities, based primarily on testimony given in as evidence from a former boss turned informant...
against the NCO. He was the second senior member of the NCO to turn informant, the first being Pasquale Barra
Pasquale Barra
Pasquale Barra is a former Italian Camorrista who was a senior member and hitman for the Nuova Camorra Organizzata , a Camorra organization in Naples. Barra has the distinction of being the first NCO member to become a pentito, when he decided to collaborate with Italian Justice in 1982.Barra...
, who realizing that Cutolo was prepared to let him be killed, decided to reveal details of NCO murders in order to gain greater protection. A week after announcing his decision, he was flown via helicopter to the Neapolitan Operative Center of the Carabinieri, where his visit was eagerly awaited by the prosecuting attorneys, Lucio Di Pietro and Felice Di Persia.
In his confession to the two district attorneys, Pandico presented himself as the betrayed man and expressed his disillusion in the organization:
- "I intend to tell everything I know about the organization called NCO which I belonged and from which I want to dissociate myself because the rules of honor which had characterized the NCO up to now, no longer exist. A once perfect organization in which I believed, with a division of rules and hierarchies that are always respected, is now under the arbitrary will of different people who do not rely on the leaders of the organization and due to a lack of discipline go against the common interest of the organization, producing an unnecessary amount of violence and terror. I thought a great deal about it, and I have decided to talk. I want to do so in full spontaneity, having realized the uselessness of belonging to an organization devoid of all rules."
By this time, Pandico also held his former boss and mentor, Raffaele Cutolo, responsible for his problems and the general situation. In an open letter to Cutolo which was published in a Naples daily paper, he said: "When you will be left alone, when all the camorristic people will have deserted you, you will take off your mask. Maybe only to breathe some fresh air. Otherwise you will end up choked by all these dead men who will scream at you: for what we have died?"
After more than a week of interrogation and 300 pages of deposition, Pandico was identified as a true pentito. His deposition was released to the press two months later on June, at the time of the crackdown against the NCO, as the most significant evidence behind the arrests of 200 individuals. Overall, more than 1,000 would later be indicted for the crime of association with a "Mafia-like organization" called the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. The resulting Maxi trials lasted three years and required the participation of nine different judges and scores of legal clerks, attorneys, witnesses and military policemen. Pandico was also sentenced to two years of imprisonment, for slander charges against prison staff, by the Tribunal of Livorno
Livorno
Livorno , traditionally Leghorn , is a port city on the Tyrrhenian Sea on the western edge of Tuscany, Italy. It is the capital of the Province of Livorno, having a population of approximately 160,000 residents in 2009.- History :...
in 1984.
Testifying against his former colleagues
From April 10, 1985 to April 15, 1985, Pandico took the stand and provided an unchalleged five day testimony against his former associates and provided evidence for the crime of association in the NCO against many defendants. After his first testimony, he had come to be perceived as the most reliable of the pentiti by both the press as well as law enforcement agencies. The Italian newspapers dubbed him "The Supercomputer", due to his extraordinary memory and were scrambling to cover the new wealth of information that he had produced in the courtroom.On the second day of his testimony, Pandico reminisced about the actions of one of his own Camorristic godsons, Alfredo Guarnieri. Pandico testified that during this time when he and Guarnieri had shared the same cell, the latter had asked to be admitted into the NCO. Prior to an induction, an initiate had to prove his courage by executing a sgarro, a test of personal violence needed by any member to fully become a Camorrista. Pandico agreed to this initiation and asked Guarnieri to murder his own sister-in-law, whom he deemed gulity of betraying the family honor after the death of his brother. Moreover, he wanted her head cut off in an almost surgically precise way in order to create a cover up, and put on the grave of his brother.
However, Guarnieri did not possess the necessary skill for the operation. Therefore, Pandico decided to teach him how to decapitate a person by showing him how to behead rabbits. He brought a dozen rabbits from the prison's canteen and with a sharpened spoon demonstrated how to sever their heads. He gave the novice some rabbits to practise on and when he became completely certain that Guarnieri knew the proper decapitation techniques, he sent him to behead his sister-in-law. This murder was never accomplished. The judges, lawyers, and audience reacted to Pandico's story with a mixed reaction of interest, shock, horror and bemused curiosity.
Among his many other important revelations was the claim that Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
businessman, and former SISMI
SISMI
Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare was the military intelligence agency of Italy from 1977-2007....
officer, Francesco Pazienza
Francesco Pazienza
Francesco Pazienza is an Italian businessman, and former officer of the Italian military intelligence agency, SISMI. As of April 2007, he has been paroled to the community of Lerici, after serving many years in prison, including a 1993 conviction due to his role in the Banco Ambrosiano scandal,...
had met the failed Turkish assassin, Mehmet Ali Ağca
Mehmet Ali Agca
Mehmet Ali Ağca is a Turkish assassin who murdered left-wing journalist Abdi İpekçi on February 1, 1979 and later shot and wounded Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981, after escaping from a Turkish prison. After serving 19 years of imprisonment in Italy, he was deported to Turkey, where he served a...
, in his prison cell at Rome's Ascoli Piceno. This claim was also made by Ağca himself in his trial. From his New York prison, Pazienza denied ever having visited Ağca.
In the first set of trials resulting from the 1983 crackdown, Pandico's testimony along with those of many other pentiti such as Pasquale Barra, Giovanni Melluso
Giovanni Melluso
Giovanni Melluso was an Italian criminal and alleged associate of the Milanese crime boss, Francis Turatello, who later became a significant informant against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata , a Camorra organization in Naples...
and Luigi Riccio
Luigi Riccio
Luigi Ginginiello Riccio is a former Italian Camorrista who is now a pentito. While initially a member of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, Riccio switched sides and joined the rival Nuova Famiglia only eight months before his collaboration with the Italian Justice department in 1983...
were found reliable and convincing enough to become a significant factor in the convictions of more than 800 defendants. However, many of Pandico's accusations were later proven to be unfounded, and several of the convicted defendants were released. In a separate trial in Salerno
Salerno
Salerno is a city and comune in Campania and is the capital of the province of the same name. It is located on the Gulf of Salerno on the Tyrrhenian Sea....
in which Pandico was called to testify, the prosecuting magistrate stated that "Pandico's repentance was one of his many opportunities to show off his histrionic personality made up of mystifications, ample but void gestures, bickering accusations and lies.
False testimony against Enzo Tortora
Giovanni Pandico was one of the eight former NCO pentiti who falsely accused the popular TVTelevision
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
anchorman Enzo Tortora
Enzo Tortora
Enzo Tortora , was a popular TV host and anchorman on national RAI television, who was falsely accused of being a member of the Camorra and drug trafficking...
of NCO membership and cocaine
Cocaine
Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and a topical anesthetic...
trafficking. He mentioned Tortora's name while examining the lists of the members of the NCO. He claimed to have received this information directly from Raffaele Cutolo, in the course of a discussion which was supposedly carried out in the Ascoli Piceno prison during the second half of 1981. Pandico underlined that Tortora's task within the organization was that of selling the drugs and taking the money abroad.
He claimed that Tortora was mentioned accidentally while discussing a stock of drugs, when Cutolo allegedly said: "let's not behave like Tortora", "the one with the parrot". However, Cutolo would have been referring to a misdeed committed by Tortora, that is, a stock of drugs worth 50 or 60 millions of lire which he was in debt of with the organization and especially with Barbaro and Alcamo, a stock which Tortora had supposedly sold but not paid to the NCO during the years between 1977 and 1978. Tortora was detained for years before being cleared of the charge by an appeals court. He developed cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
and died soon after the case was finally solved, some say because of the emotional stress
Stress (medicine)
Stress is a term in psychology and biology, borrowed from physics and engineering and first used in the biological context in the 1930s, which has in more recent decades become commonly used in popular parlance...
of his imprisonment.