Considered a leading member of the NCO, protégé of the boss Raffaele Cutolo and right-hand man of his lieutenant Vincenzo Casillo. He was murdered in his apartment on 11 October 1990 by a group of hitmen.
He was born in Naples in the San Carlo all'Arena district, coming from a large family of 10 children. His criminal rise began when, still very young, he stabbed to death a guappo during an argument. A few years later a new quarrel, a new victim, this time in Avellino, an area where at just 22 years old he was already considered a boss. During the years of detention he became close to the boss of the nascent Nuova Camorra Organita, Raffaele Cutolo, soon becoming his trusted man. During his imprisonment, his mother lost her life in a car accident, just as she was going to him for a prison interview. Mario Cuomo takes on roles of high importance within the NCO, so much so that he becomes the right-hand man of Vincenzo Casillo, number two of the organization, the one who, as the boss of Ottaviano himself defined, was considered "Cutolo out of prison".
Accused of numerous crimes, Cuomo and Casillo made themselves untraceable, and after the feud between NCO and Nuova Famiglia he became the strong man of the Cutolo's organization in the Avellino area. The two must have had many reasons to be wanted, and not only by the police throughout Italy, all trace of them had been lost, so much so that Mario Cuomo's father had even decided to give an interview to "Il Mattino" of Naples , in which he put forward the hypothesis of his son's death.
In his career as a killer he had committed excellent crimes, such as the murder of Salvatore Alfieri, brother of the boss Carmine, killed on 26 December 1981 by Cuomo himself, the murder of the criminal lawyer Dino Gassani, killed on the evening of 27 March 1981, the attack on the then deputy public prosecutor Antonio Gagliardi and the shooting of tv journalist Luigi Necco.
Mario Cuomo was arrested on 5 April 1982 in Chiusi after a shootout with the police, by now he had made his way, thanks to his prestigious rank of "santista", so much so that for a murder he had obtained an assessment of semi-mental infirmity which had reduced him he was sentenced to just five years and three months.
On 7 October 1982, while Mario Cuomo was transferred from the Campobasso prison, where he had been detained for four months, to the Ariano Irpino prison, to be judged together with twenty-two other Cutolians for the attack on the then deputy public prosecutor Antonio Gagliardi, a commando of ten camorristi attacked the armored van on the Naples-Bari motorway, near the Avellino Est exit. On board three cars: the hitmen blocked the armored van in which Mario Cuomo was kept, freeing him after killing the carabiniere Elio Di Mella.
Five men blocked two carabinieri, threatening them with pistols and rifles so that they would disarm themselves and get out of the van and then lie down on the ground. A gunshot was fired in the rear part of the armored vehicle against the right door, where Elio Di Mella, next to the prisoner, was holding the chains tightly.
The carabiniere was not intimidated. Although hit with the butt of a gun, he continued to hold Cuomo until a commando man fatally shot him in the head. Collaborator of justice Luigi Maiolino will speak in detail about the murder of the carabiniere:
Two cars blocked the armored vehicle, one in front and one behind. The third pulled alongside the van. We got out, we were wearing wigs, Salvatore Di Maio's (Tore o' Guaglione) was blonde. We immobilized two policemen. We opened the armored vehicle after shooting at the lock. Inside were Cuomo and Di Mella, who didn't want to let the inmate go. We hit him with the butt of the gun. But he didn't give up. And then they shot him in the head, killing him. Then the escape and arrival in a refuge in the Montore area, where we opened the sparkling wine for the success of the operation.
On January 29, 1983 the car with Mario Cuomo and Vincenzo Casillo on board, turned out to be a car bomb and exploded at 9:30. The two entered the car parked inRome , Casillo was driving and he turned the ignition key and the terrible explosion occurred. The car literally folded in two and entire parts of the car were thrown tens of meters away. The bonnet will be found on the roof of a workshop thirty meters further on. Pieces of sheet metal stuck in many nearby cars, while the windows of all the surrounding buildings shattered. The scene that presented itself to the first passers-by who rushed to the scene was terrible. Vincenzo Casillo's body was lying on the back seat, while the car caught fire. Mario Cuomo was instead thrown out of the car, horribly mangled, with his legs severed but still alive. Next to Casillo's body, the police found a Browning 7.65 parabellum pistol with fifteen shots, Mario Cuomo had a 9 caliber war gun with him. False documents were found on the two.
After the attack in which he lost his legs, Mario Cuomo continued to serve his countless sentences in his home in Naples under house arrest for obvious health reasons. And it was precisely from his apartment that Cuomo set up a new Camorra organization that he managed, hiring mostly former Cutolians who had escaped death and arrest. The Cuomo clan, modeled in the image and likeness of the NCO, took possession of the central territory of Naples throughout the second half of the 1980s. Mario Cuomo was probably one of the rarest cases of a clan leader who managed to emerge despite the precarious conditions of health which saw him confined to a wheelchair, and under house arrest. On the morning of October 11, 1990, at 10:30, a group of hitmen hidden in the shadows entered Mario Cuomo's bunker-apartment, located in via Carlo De Marco 69, through one of his trusted men who betrayed him by having the door opened. Two gunshots ended the life of the last of the prestigious Cutolians left in Naples. As well as the last witness reachable in the negotiations for the release of councilor Cirillo. The 63-year-old father Michele opened the door and was the first to fall under the gunmen's fire. From the bedroom Mario Cuomo heard the shots and rushed to the floor from his wheelchair, dragging himself a few meters until he found himself in front of the assassins. She instinctively tried to protect herself with his arm. The first bullet pierced his elbow, hitting his forehead squarely, and was finished off with a further superfluous shot.
An astute and ambitious man, he loved to repeat to his friends: "I'm handsome, I don't have legs, otherwise I'd be full of females". On August 15th of the same year, while the father was arguing outside the house with an affiliate, the carabinieri inspected a recreational club in Via Carlo de Marco, the "Music and Videogame", managed by Cuomo's men. An entire hidden arsenal was found inside the video games: machine guns, pistols, bulletproof vests, balaclavas. Equipment for an army. Upon hearing the news of his death, Cutolo claimed from prison: "a good boy, I'd known him for fifteen years. Too bad, if I hadn't been in solitary confinement and he wrote to me, he wouldn't have ended up like this". But Ottaviano's super boss knew well that Cuomo had believed the false accusations of the repentants, who had pointed the finger at Cutolo himself for the attack in which Cuomo lost his legs and Casillo his life.
Only a few years after his death, the collaborators of justice Pasquale Galasso and Carmine Alfieri shed light on the affair, accusing themselves as the true perpetrators of the attack. In a short span of time since his assassination, two more of Mario Cuomo's brothers were killed. Perhaps a transversal revenge, or more likely the rival clans feared that the two could reorganize the clan's ranks.
Mario Cuomo
Vincenzo Casillo
Salvatore Di Maio aka Tore ‘o Guaglione