Mafia Arrest in Italy Nets Female Boss

ROME — Italian police dealt a ringing new blow to organized crime Monday, arresting a long-sought female fugitive whom they called the mastermind of a major Mafia gang in the Naples area.

Rosetta Cutolo, 57, a sister of a jailed boss of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia, was surprised by police raiders in the suburban town of Ottaviano early Monday. National police identified her as one of the most wanted members of the Camorra.

Cutolo, a fugitive for 13 years, wept but surrendered meekly to dawn raiders at an apartment on Via delle Rose in the town that has long been the Cutolo family stronghold, police said. She had been sentenced to 9 1/2 years imprisonment, in absentia, for Mafia activities and was wanted in five other pending cases, including kidnap and murder.

With her brother Rafaele, Cutolo founded a new Camorra gang in the late ‘70s that shot its way to brief dominance in a war against rival groups that cost more than 100 lives.

Rafaele Cutolo went to jail for life in 1982 but is thought to have continued to direct the gang through his sister. She is accused of having arranged the murder of a prison warden in 1981 and a 1983 car bombing intended to kill former gang members Vincenzo Casillo and Mario Cuomo. Casillo died. Cuomo, who was left paralyzed, was murdered a few years later.

One of the major branches of organized crime in Italy, the Camorra has offered more equal opportunities for women than the Cosa Nostra, its Sicilian cousin. Seven of 32 Camorra leaders jailed in a Naples crackdown a year ago were women, although none of them of Cutolo’s rank.

Her arrest was a major victory for Italian police; they have recorded an impressive string recently, including the capture last month of Salvatore Riina, described as “the boss of bosses” of the Cosa Nostra.

Riina, who spent 23 years in hiding, is being interrogated by judges from Rome and Palermo about the Cosa Nostra’s drug links and political ties at home and abroad.

Last Friday, one of Riina’s possible successors was arrested in the villa where he lived near Palermo with his wife and three children. Giuseppe Montalto, 34, had been a fugitive for almost 10 years.

Police in Palermo said Montalto was a trusted associate of Riina’s whose star was rising in the Cosa Nostra. They accused him of being one of a number of crime lords who ordered the assassination last March of Salvo Lima, the powerful Sicilian politician and member of the European Parliament. Investigators believe Lima to have been a conduit between organized crime and the Italian political Establishment.

As part of increasingly assertive law enforcement against what has become institutionalized crime, judges in Milan began interrogating a jet-set architect Monday who is accused of being a key figure in the biggest political and financial corruption scandal in Italian history.

Silvano Larini, accused of being the bag man for millions in bribes paid to the Italian Socialist Party, gave himself up Sunday to police on the Italian border with France after eight months in hiding abroad. “I miss Italy, I’m tired of running, and I want a pizza,” Larini, 57, told arresting officers.