Born and raised in a street in the Magliana neighborhood, Abbatino frequented school at Palestrina (in the province of Rome), staying at the house of his paternal grandmother.

In those years, the underworld of Rome was disorganized, with many small groups called batterie, each independent and containing usually 3-4 people, dealing mostly in gambling and robberies.

Skilled, but also cold and calculating, Abbatino therefore came to lead — when he was only 21 years old — his own batteria, which consisted of several people that he would later involve in the future project for the Banda della Magliana.

[1] The Banda della Magliana was formed after a casual encounter between Crispino and another exponent of the Roman underworld, Franco Giuseppucci, known as Er Negro.

The Banda della Magliana was eager to get their hands on new and profitable illicit businesses, beginning with drug trafficking, but they lacked the effective funds to be able to launch this initiative.

It was Giuseppucci who proposed to the two groups a way in which they could gain enough money to finance their future operations: the kidnapping of duke Massimiliano Grazioli Lante della Rovere, against a ransom.

Unlike Giuseppucci, who preferred to remain in the shadows to avoid attracting too much police attention, Crispino earned a reputation as a "man of action" and was regularly on the front lines, ever since the organization's first high-profile murder: that of Franco Nicolini, the undisputed king of the city's bookmaking.

On the evening of 25 July 1978, as Nicolini was exiting the Tor di Valle Racecourse and heading for the parking lot, he was ambushed by Giuseppucci's men who opened fire on him.

Unlike Giuseppucci however, Abbatino was not interested in politics, but he did take part in a series of meetings with criminologist, psychiatrist and neofascist professor Aldo Semerari, and has been directly involved in the corruption of doctors, judges and politicians.

This had the side effect of temporarily shielding the two from the revenge of the Banda della Magliana, which instead decided to take it out on Enrico Proietti, known as Er Cane, who was a cousin of the two killers but was not involved with the assassination.

After several more attacks on the clan's relatives and associates, on the evening of 16 March 1981, the gang managed to track down Maurizio Er Pescetto, who had been released from jail, at his father's house in Donna Olimpia street, and it what would be one of the most infamous shootouts in the gang's history, Abbatino leads an expedition and the two chosen killers, Marcello Colafigli and Antonio Mancini reach Maurizio Proietti and his brother Mario as they were returning home with their families.

Finally, the war with the Proietti Clan ended when, on 30 June 1982, the second of Giuseppucci's killers, Fernando Er Pugile, was ambushed and shot to death in his car by Edoardo Toscano.

More of Selis' lieutenants would later be killed in the following periods, which coupled with the murder of Vincenzo Casillo on 29 January 1983, ended the NCO's presence in Rome.

The group known as "i Testaccini", so called because most of them were from and operated in the Testaccio neighborhood, represented by Danilo Abbruciati and Enrico De Pedis, gradually distanced themselves from the rest of the gang.

When Abbruciati later died under mysterious circumstances in Milan while shooting the vice-president of the Banco Ambrosiano, Roberto Rosone, an act for which again Abbatino was not informed, the Maglianesi held meetings in which they decided the Testaccini were no longer trustworthy and resolved to eliminate all of its most prominent members, even though they continued to operate alongside them in drug trafficking for the time being.

In contrast to the Testaccini which invested in legit businesses and became involved in money laundering, Abbatino's group was the one most responsible for murders and drug trafficking, activities which attracted much more police attention.

He had almost succeeded in being granted permanent house arrest until Fulvio Lucioli, known as "Er Sorcio", decided to cooperate with authorities and Abbatino was accused of over a dozen murders, and so he was moved from the private clinic back into prison, alongside most of the high-ranking members of the organization.

But most of all he was accused to be a traitor because Abbatino, despite having accepted the plan to eliminate the Testaccini, spoke in favor of Enrico De Pedis due to their long-standing friendship.

Abbatino tried again and again to obtain house arrest, feigning cancer and leg paralysis, managing to get himself hospitalized into a private clinic whose owners he had bribed off, when another high-ranking member of the gang decided to turn informant: Claudio Sicilia.

The first one, Sicilia, was dismissed only ten days after the beginning of the trial by judge Antonio Pelaggi (who was later found to have been a close friend of Enrico Nicoletti, one of the leaders of the Testaccini).

Two years later in 1988, a court presided by judge Corrado Carnevale — known as "l'ammazzasentenze" (the verdict killer) because of the high number of convictions of Mafiosi overturned on appeal at the Maxi Trial for the slightest technicality, such as the lack of a rubber stamp on a document — completely overturned the convictions for the Lucioli trial, deeming Lucioli to be "insane" and his revelations "completely unreliable".

His killers wanted to find out where Maurizio Abbatino was hiding, but despite the enormous suffering, Roberto did not reveal the location of his brother, and was thus killed and dumped at the river.

[6] Maurizio Abbatino, the only founding member of the Banda della Magliana to be still alive, was arrested, after 6 years on the run, on 24 January 1992 in Caracas, Venezuela, as he was leaving a pub.