“My name is Catello Romano. I am 33 years old and have spent almost half of my life in prison, 14 years straight. I committed terrible crimes and was convicted of several Camorra murders. What follows is my criminal story.” It is the unprecedented beginning of university work with which a Neapolitan mafia killer completed his sociology studies in prison with honors and also confessed to three murders for which he was never brought to justice. The document is already in the hands of the prosecutor's office, which is examining it to reopen the cases and has transferred the detainee to a maximum security prison in Padua.
“My aim is also to contribute to the understanding of the crime phenomenon and therefore to its possible prevention. I am convinced that words matter and this autoethnographic text aims to change the world around us,” adds Romano in his dissertation to which EL PAÍS had access. The prisoner, who spent six years in the penal regime 41 bis – in which members of the Mafia are imprisoned in conditions of extreme hardship and isolation – and who wrote his dissertation while incarcerated in Catanzaro prison in Calabria, concentrates his research in 170 pages about Sociology of survival and reflects on “the fascination of crime”.
The thesis reads like an autobiographical novel in which dramatic episodes that really happened are interspersed with frightening descriptions of the criminal environment and reflections and bibliographic quotations on family, education, relationships in childhood and youth, divorce, abandonment, drugs, violence, etc the history of the mafia alternate.
“Since childhood, I have known first-hand misery and the negative effects it can have and have developed a certain inclination for reflection and the unfortunately not very common ability not to make hasty and hasty moral judgments about 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, who was shot while driving with his son in February 2009 and whose guilt, in the eyes of the Camorra, was “interfering in too many things that were none of his business.”
In his dissertation, the prisoner offers a detailed description of the peculiarity of juvenile crime and its possible and heterogeneous causes and claims that crime exerts a deep fascination on young people and adolescents from marginalized and stigmatized areas. “It is their way of emancipating themselves and gaining more respect and social recognition. In this context, violence becomes a language and a form of demanding respect and social recognition,” says Romano. And he claims that mafia clans are replacing the family of origin and becoming a “total institution.”
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Catello, who comes from a simple family with no ties to organized crime and wanted to be a police officer as a young boy, tells of the wounds caused by his parents' divorce, the episodes of gender-based violence he witnessed and the conflictual relationship with him his father and how he filled this “gap” by replacing his family of origin with “a new family in which he could live his “new criminal identity” deeply and fully,” with references from the world of crime. “With them, I constructed my new alternative identity as a tough guy, as a mask to hide my inability to accept my fragility as a teenager, and as a way to survive in a violent and extreme world,” the thesis states the court rated it with distinction.
In the text, Romano describes in detail the details of his first two murders, knowing full well that the justice system had never prosecuted him for these crimes and what consequences this confession could have. “Through this work, I am carrying out, at least in part, a work of truth and reparation, I would not say justice, to those directly affected by my wayward actions,” he says.
Catello Romano's parents, in July 1981, in a photo from his dissertation.
“Very difficult process”
Charlie Barnao, professor and sociologist at the University of Catanzaro, who has been teaching sociology of survival in prison for five years and was Romano's thesis supervisor, tells this newspaper that the student “went through a very difficult process.” “He described in great detail the circumstances that would have consequences, he was determined to reveal them in his dissertation, he put his life in order once and for all and ordered the episodes of his biography in order to combine them with a sociological research to analyze.” Method that also “had a kind of therapeutic function,” says the teacher, who defines Catello Romano as “a brilliant student who got very good grades throughout his career.”
Romano describes his criminal career in the pages of the dissertation. He tells how he picked up a gun for the first time to protect a gangster on probation from possible reprisals from rival clans. Or the “hole in the soul” that the first two murders left in him in 2008, the year he came of age: those of Carmine D'Antuono – a rival with too much power and his then interlocutor crime. – and Federico Donnarumma, who was shot a few seconds apart. The latter died alone because he had spoken to D'Antuono. Romano describes him as “just guilty of meeting the wrong person at the wrong time.” And he details the two-week preparation for “the most violent, traumatic and irreparable event” of his life.
He admits his “recklessness”. “[Tenía un] I have a crazy desire to be someone, to be seen and be part of something that is foolishly bigger and more important, and to prove to myself that I am worthy of it by oppressing my neighbor with cruelty and coldness.” , he emphasizes. He even remembers how he dressed for the occasion: “I liked to dress well and I valued my clothes, which I had acquired over the last few years with so many sacrifices in more humble, hard and honest work, so as I committed my first murder and I had to throw away everything I was wearing at the time of the shooting as a precaution to prevent traces of gunpowder from being discovered. I suffered a lot and complained for a long time, forcing the one who gave me my orders to promise me that he would at least “Buy me clothes, something he never fulfilled,” he says.
Catello Romano, who began a fleeting collaboration with the judiciary after the murder of the city councilor Tommasino, which he interrupted shortly afterwards with a spectacular and short escape, confesses in the pages of his dissertation to another crime previously unknown to the judiciary: the murder, also in the year 2008 Nunzio Mascolo, member of a rival clan. “Although I can't prove it, I'm sure he did nothing wrong to deserve death,” the confessed killer wrote. And he explains: “In the notorious logic of the Camorra and the underworld in general, it works like this: it is not even necessary that the victim has done anything. I was able to learn on the spot that one can die in this world “from envy, which, unfortunately for the victim, has a certain influence on the imposition of a death sentence.” He also clarifies that his task was to pull the trigger and not to ask questions.
“I hope for repairs”
In his work, Romano quotes Aldo Moro, the Italian Prime Minister who was assassinated by Red Brigade terrorists, and writes: “If you tell the truth, you should not regret telling it.” He praises the liberating power of the truth , “It is always insightful,” he says, and “It helps us to be courageous.” “I have said the above in the hope that I have done something reparative to those I have offended and to myself have,” he emphasizes.
Professor Barnao defends the need to guarantee prisoners access to studies and regrets that such didactic experiences are not abundant and are rather “a mirage” in Italian prisons. He believes inmates, particularly those in high-security facilities, are “great experts at surviving in extreme conditions.”
Barnao also praises the sociological research method through autoethnography, which serves to describe and analyze personal experiences in order to understand the cultural, social or political environment. And he points out that several prisoners have tried to learn lessons from their criminal careers. This is the case of the Sicilian mafia boss Salvatore Curatolo, sentenced to life imprisonment, also a sociology graduate, who wrote a dissertation on his survival strategies in prison; or the Camorra godfather Sergio Ferraro, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison and completed his prison term with a thesis on socialization within mafia clans.
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