Raffaele Cutolo (Italian: [raffaˈɛːle ˈkuːtolo]; 4 November 1941 – 17 February 2021) was an Italian crime boss and leader of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO), an organisation he built to renew the Camorra. Cutolo had a variety of nicknames including 'o Vangelo ("the gospel"), 'o Princepe ("the prince"), 'o Professore ("the professor") and 'o Monaco ("the monk"). Apart from 18 months on the run, Cutolo lived entirely in maximum-security prisons or psychiatric prisons after 1963. At the time of his death he was serving multiple life sentences for murder.

Cutolo, the youngest of three, was born in Ottaviano, a town in the hinterland of Naples, into a close-knit Catholic peasant family with no prior ties to the Camorra. After a happy childhood, he did well at primary school and was an altar boy, he lost his father prematurely in 1953 at the age of twelve. His father, an agricultural labourer, had worked for years as a sharecropper to support the family. One day, the landowner informed him that the field would be repurposed the following year and that his services would no longer be needed. In desperation, Cutolo’s father turned to the local Camorra boss, whose influence was absolute in the village. The boss invited the Cutolo family to his home and promised to resolve the matter. Shortly thereafter, the landowner reversed his decision and renewed the contract. After his father's death, he was raised by his elder sister Rosetta Cutolo.

Cutolo was a poor student, and he was violent, inattentive, and prone to trouble. By the age of 12, he was already running with a gang of teenagers, committing petty thefts and extorting local shopkeepers. As soon as he was old enough to drive, he bought a car; not only for status, but also for the mobility it gave him during his raids. At 21, on February 24, 1963, he committed his first murder. The victim was an innocent firefighter that helped a girl Cutolo had slapped following an alleged insult. During the confrontation that followed, Cutolo pulled out a gun and shot the man dead. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, which was later reduced to 24 years on appeal. He was sent to Poggioreale prison in Naples.

Cutolo had established himself as a ringleader, when Antonio Spavone, known as "'o Malommo" ("The Badman"), was transferred to Poggioreale prison. He challenged Spavone to a knife fight in the courtyard (a practice called "'o dichiaramento", "the declaration"), but Spavone refused. The challenged boss allegedly limited himself to a reply: "Today's young men want to die young by whatever means". Spavone was released from prison shortly after this event. From his prison cell, Cutolo ordered the murder of Spavone. A hitman, allegedly Cutolo's friend, shot Spavone in the face from short range with a shotgun. Spavone survived the ambush, but the shotgun blast left considerable damage to his facial structure, which required plastic surgery. Spavone immediately resigned from his highly visible role as a Camorra boss.

Cutolo was soon able to gather under him a small group of prisoners, the nucleus of which would later become the leadership of the NCO. They were Antonino Cuomo known as "'o Maranghiello" ("The Cudgel"), Pasquale Barra known as "'o Nimale" ("The Animal"), Giuseppe Puca known as "'o Giappone" ("Japanese"), Pasquale D'Amico known as "'o Cartunaro" ("The Cardboard picker") and Vincenzo Casillo known as "'o Nirone" ("The Big Black"). After being released, they would set up criminal activities on the outside which would be directly controlled by Cutolo from within the penitentiary system.

From within Naples' Poggioreale prison Cutolo built a new organisation: the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO). He began by befriending young inmates unfamiliar with jail, giving them a sense of identity and worth, so much so that when they were released they would send Cutolo 'flowers' (i.e. money), which enabled him to increase his network. He helped poorer prisoners by buying food for them from the jail store, or arranging for food to be sent in from outside. In such ways Cutolo created many 'debts' or 'rain cheques' which he would cash at the opportune moment. As his following grew, he also began to exercise a monopoly of violence within a number of prisons, thus increasing his power. By the early seventies, Cutolo had become so powerful that he was able to decide which of his followers would be moved to which jails, use a prison governor's telephone to make calls anywhere in the world, and allegedly even slap the prison governor on one occasion for daring to search his cell. Another key bond Cutolo created was regular payments to the families of NCO members sent to prison, thereby guaranteeing the allegiance of both prisoners and their families.

What is unusual about Cutolo is that he has a kind of ideology, another factor that appealed to rootless and badly educated youths. He founded the NCO in his home town Ottaviano on 24 October 1970, the day of Cutolo's patron saint, San Raffaele. In such a way Cutolo created the most powerful organization ever to exist in the Neapolitan hinterland. Using his personal appeal and almost magic charisma, he was able to achieve this single-handedly. Cutolo had strong ties with the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta. According to some pentiti, Cutolo's career started with his affiliation with the 'Ndrangheta, supported by important bosses such as Piromalli, Paolo De Stefano, and Mammoliti. Cutolo based his organisation of the NCO on the model of the 'Ndrangheta, its internal codes and rituals.

The NCO strongholds were the towns to the east of Naples, such as Ottaviano, and Cutolo appealed to a Campanian rather than Neapolitan sense of identity, perhaps as a result of his poor peasant background. For instance, Cutolo is once reported as having said: "The day when the people of Campania understand that it is better to eat a slice of bread as a free man than to eat a steak as a slave is the day when Campania will win".