Mafia boss Raffaele Cutolo, a key player in one of the bloodiest periods in Naples organised crime in the 1970s and 1980s, has died in prison aged 79, Italian media said Thursday.
He had been unwell for many months but died Wednesday of septicaemia in the prison ward of a hospital in Parma, northern Italy, the reports said.
Cutolo spent more than 57 years behind bars but became so powerful that other branches of the Camorra mafia in Naples, southern Italy, paid him dues and the state asked for his help when a politician was kidnapped.
Born in 1941 in Ottaviano, a town outside Naples, Cutolo's path was set when in 1963, aged 22, he was jailed for life for murdering a man who insulted his sister.