Leaving Sassari shortly after the Second World War, his mother brought him to Liveri, a small town on the outskirts of Naples where his Greek grandfather had first taken up residence.
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.
While living in freedom, he survived on odd, low paying jobs and was occasionally sent back to the Poggioreale prison for minor offenses.
He claimed that Gaetano was blackmailing the mayor and that Nappi arranged to be wounded in order to confuse the reconstruction of the crime and so distance himself from the murder.
After a brief psychiatric examination which had cleared Pandico to stand trial, he was defined as a "pure paranoid individual, able however to understand very well his own situation".
[4] In prison, Pandico increased his knowledge by voraciously reading written documents, particularly legal papers, and soon began helping other inmates in their dealing with the law.
[3] Pandico's new status of scrivano ("writer") coupled with his close contact and relationship with the boss greatly boosted his prestige and standing within the organization.
[3] However, things would later change dramatically for Giovanni Pandico when, following the scandal of the Cirillo affair, President Sandro Pertini personally intervened to have Cutolo transferred to the high security prison on the island of Asinara, Sardinia.
In an open letter to Cutolo which was published in a Naples daily paper, he said: "When you will be left alone, when all the camorristic people will have deserted you, you will take off your mask.
The resulting Maxi trials lasted three years and required the participation of nine different judges and scores of legal clerks, attorneys, witnesses and military policemen.
The Italian newspapers dubbed him "The Supercomputer", due to his extraordinary memory and were scrambling to cover the new wealth of information that he had produced in the courtroom.
Prior to an induction, an initiate had to prove his courage by executing a sgarro, a test of personal violence needed by any member to fully become a Camorrista.
Pandico agreed to this initiation and asked Guarnieri to murder his own sister-in-law, whom he deemed guilty of betraying the family honor after the death of his brother.
The judges, lawyers, and audience reacted to Pandico's story with a mixed reaction of interest, shock, horror and bemused curiosity.
[8] Among his many other important revelations was the claim that Italian businessman, and former SISMI officer, Francesco Pazienza had met the failed Turkish assassin, Mehmet Ali Ağca, in his prison cell at Rome's Ascoli Piceno.
[9][11] In the first set of trials resulting from the 1983 crackdown, Pandico's testimony along with those of many other pentiti such as Pasquale Barra, Giovanni Melluso and Luigi Riccio were found reliable and convincing enough to become a significant factor in the convictions of more than 800 defendants.
He claimed to have received this information directly from Raffaele Cutolo, in the course of a discussion which was supposedly carried out in the Ascoli Piceno prison during the second half of 1981.