Giovanni Pandico

Giovanni Pandico (born June 24, 1944) 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.

Giovanni Pandico was born in Sassari, 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.

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