Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe ROME, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- A Mafia boss has won a law degree while in solitary confinement in an Italian prison, hoping to conduct his own appeal. Carlo Marchese, 48, has served nearly seven years of a life sentence for Mafia crimes, including murder, in a maximum-security prison. Advertisement "There was nothing to do, apart from the daily hour of exercise, nothing to see, no one to talk to," the Times of London quoted him as saying. Marchese was allowed one family visit a month and was "as isolated as the Count of Monte Cristo." But he had access to books -- one at a time -- and used his isolation to study law, claiming to have taken notes and hidden them in his shoes to be read in the exercise yard. Soon the warden and prison chaplain helped him enroll as an external student of the University of Palermo school of law. After going before an 11-member university board, he was declared a doctor of law with honors, earning high marks in private, constitutional and criminal law. "I had to earn a law degree to defend myself because my lawyers proved incapable of doing it for me," Marchese said before being escorted back to his cell. Advertisement