Honors for the thesis of an Italian mobster who confesses to three unknown murders: “What follows is my criminal story”

“My name is Catello Romano. I am 33 years old and I have spent almost half of my life in prison, 14 uninterrupted years. I have committed horrendous crimes and have been convicted of several Camorra murders. What follows is my criminal story.” It is the unprecedented beginning of the university thesis with which a Neapolitan mafia hitman has graduated in Sociology from prison with honors and, in addition, has confessed to three murders for which he had never been held accountable before justice. The document is already in the hands of the Prosecutor's Office, which is scrutinizing it to reopen the cases and has transferred the detainee to a maximum security prison in Padua.

“It is also my objective to contribute to the understanding of the criminal phenomenon and, therefore, to its possible prevention. I am convinced that words are important and this autoethnographic text aims to change the world around us,” adds Romano in his thesis, to which EL PAÍS has had access. The prisoner, who spent six years in the 41 bis penitentiary regime – by which members of the mafias are imprisoned in conditions of extreme harshness and isolation – and who wrote his thesis while imprisoned in the Catanzaro prison in Calabria, focuses his research, of 170 pages, on the sociology of survival and reflects on “the fascination with crime.”

The thesis reads like an autobiographical novel in which dramatic episodes that really happened alternate with chilling descriptions of the criminal environment and reflections and bibliographical quotes on family, education, references in childhood and adolescence, divorce, abandonment , drugs, violence or the history of mafias.

“Since my childhood I have known firsthand misery and the negative influence it can have and I have developed a certain disposition to reflect and an ability, unfortunately not very common, to not make easy and hasty moralistic judgments on people,” warns the author.

Catello Romano is serving his sentence, other crimes, for the murder of the councilor of the Democratic Party of Castellammare di Stabia [un municipio al sur de Nápoles]Luigi Tommasino, shot dead in February 2009 while driving with his son and whose blamein the eyes of the Camorra, was “meddling in too many things that did not concern him.”

In his thesis, the inmate offers a detailed description of the idiosyncrasy of juvenile delinquency and its possible and heterogeneous causes, and maintains that crime exerts a deep fascination on young people and adolescents belonging to marginalized and stigmatized sectors. “It is their way of trying to emancipate themselves and gain more respect and social recognition. In this context, violence becomes a language and a form of claiming respect and social recognition,” Romano points out. And he alleges that mafia clans replace the family of origin and become “a total institution.”

Catello, who comes from a humble family with no ties to organized crime, and who wanted to be a police officer when he was little, recounts the wounds caused by his parents' divorce, the episodes of gender violence he witnessed, the conflictive relationship with his father and how he filled that “void” by replacing his family of origin with “a new family in which he could live deeply and totally” his “new criminal identity”, with references belonging to the world of crime. “With them I built my new alternative identity of Tough guy“, as a mask with which to hide my inability to accept my fragility as an adolescent and as a way of survival in a violent and extreme world,” reads the thesis, which the court rated with honors.

In the text, Romano describes in detail the details of his first two murders, aware that justice had never prosecuted him for those crimes and the consequences that this confession could have. “Through this work, at least to some extent, I am carrying out a work of truth and reparation, I wouldn't dare say justice, towards those who have been directly affected by my wayward actions,” he says.

“Very difficult process”

Catanzaro University professor and sociologist Charlie Barnao, who has been teaching Sociology of Survival in prison for five years and who was Romano's thesis advisor, explains to this newspaper that the student “has gone through a very difficult process.” “He has recounted in great detail circumstances that will have consequences, he was very determined to expose them in his thesis, he has put his life in order once and for all and has organized the episodes of his biography to analyze them with a sociological research method that has also “It had a kind of therapeutic function,” says the teacher, who defines Catello Romano as “a brilliant student, who has gotten very good grades throughout his career.”

Romano details his criminal career in the pages of the thesis. He recounts the first time he held a gun, to protect a paroled mobster from possible reprisals from rival clans. Or the “hole in the soul” that the first two murders left in him, in 2008, the year in which he came of age: those of Carmine D'Antuono — a rival with too much power and his interlocutor at the time of the crime — and Federico Donnarumma, gunned down a few seconds apart. The latter died alone because he had been talking to D'Antuono. Romano describes him as “guilty only of meeting the wrong person at the wrong time.” And he details the two weeks of preparation for “the most violent, traumatic and irreparable event” of his life.

He confesses his “recklessness.” “[Tenía un] crazy desire to be someone, to be seen and to be part of something, foolishly bigger and more important, proving to myself that I am worthy of it through the cruelty and coldness of suppressing my neighbor,” he points out. He even remembers how he dressed for the occasion: “I liked to dress well and I appreciated my clothes, which I had acquired with so many sacrifices in recent years doing more humble, hard and honest jobs, so when I committed my first murder and I had to throw away precaution everything I was wearing at the time of the shooting, to avoid traces of gunpowder being detected, I suffered a lot and complained for a long time, forcing whoever gave me my orders to promise me that he would at least buy me clothes, something he never fulfilled “, says.

Catello Romano, who after the murder of councilor Tommasino began a fleeting collaboration with justice that he interrupted shortly after with a spectacular and brief escape, confesses in the pages of his thesis another crime hitherto unknown to justice: the murder, also in 2008 , by Nunzio Mascolo, belonging to a rival clan. “Although I cannot prove it, I am certain that he did nothing wrong to deserve death,” the confessed murderer writes. And he details: “In the infamous logic of the Camorra and the underworld in general it works like this, it is not even necessary that the victim has done something, I have been able to learn on the ground that in that world one can die because of someone's envy which, to the bad luck of the victim, has some influence in issuing a death sentence.” He also clarifies that his role was to pull the trigger and not ask questions.

“Hope to repair”

Romano quotes in his work Aldo Moro, Prime Minister of Italy who was assassinated by Red Brigade terrorists, and writes that “when one tells the truth, one should not regret having said it.” He e
xtols the liberating power of the truth, “it is always enlightening,” he says, and “it helps us to be brave.” “I have told the above in the hope that I have done something reparative towards those I have offended and towards myself,” he insists.

Professor Barnao defends the need to guarantee access to study for prisoners and regrets that these types of didactic experiences are not abundant, but rather are “a mirage” in Italian prisons. He considers that inmates, especially those in maximum security facilities, are “great experts in survival in extreme conditions.”

Barnao also praises the sociological research method through autoethnography, which is used to describe and analyze personal experience in order to understand the cultural, social or political environment. And he points out that several detainees have used it to try to learn some lessons from their criminal trajectories. This is the case of the Sicilian mafia boss Salvatore Curatolo, sentenced to life imprisonment, also a graduate in Sociology, who wrote a thesis on his survival strategies in prison; or the godfather of the Camorra Sergio Ferraro, sentenced to 20 years in prison, who graduated from prison with a thesis on socialization within mafia clans.

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