Donato Porpora

Age showed plainly on Donato, a ghoul of many years whose face had grown lined and weathered. He kept his light-colored hair cropped close and his beard neatly trimmed, with heavy, bushy brows above. In his priestly days he wore the vestments of the church, while imprisonment reduced him to plain scrubs, a long-sleeved shirt and trousers, his feet apparently bare. The anime gave him icy pale-blue eyes and washed-out skin. His Clown mask is a rounded white shell topped by a small golden crown at the brow, its eyes rendered as red circles split by cross-shaped slits and its faintly reddened lips left open enough for him to speak and feed.

Cruelty sits at the core of Donato, a sadism pronounced even by the standards of ghouls. He savors the suffering he causes, whether he is wrenching an arm from Touma Higemaru, toying with the mind of Kuki Urie, or slaughtering the children once entrusted to him. That same contempt for others makes him useful: he will trade information and sell out fellow ghouls to keep himself alive, and he delights in unsettling the investigators who come to question him. For all his depravity, a capacity for attachment lingers. When Amon uncovered his secret, he spared the boy out of some warped tenderness, and ever after he took pleasure in needling the one he called his beloved son.

Donato came to Japan from Russia and passed himself off as a caring priest, opening an orphanage that he treated as a private larder. Behind the affectionate facade he tortured and murdered the children supposedly placed in loving homes, and it is implied he fed pieces of his victims to the others as treats. His deception unraveled when Koutarou Amon walked in during one of his meals. Rather than silence the boy, he asked Amon to stay and share in the lie. He was eventually taken by the CCG and confined in Cochlea, where he made himself indispensable as a source investigators consulted again and again.

When Aogiri stormed Cochlea, he was left out of the mass release and could only listen from his cell as the guards were butchered, lamenting that he could not join in. Later, Amon and his new partner Akira Mado came to interview him, and he spent the visit teasing Amon about their bond and mocking the death of Kureo Mado before offering cryptic guidance to follow Alice rather than the White Rabbit. During the Torso case he received Haise Sasaki and Tooru Mutsuki, luridly describing how he longed to devour the frightened Mutsuki before Sasaki cut the display short, then reasoned from the killer's habits that Torso worked as a taxi driver. A follow-up meeting with Sasaki alone turned to the investigator's missing memories, and Donato pointed him toward a ghoul who might hold one of the keys to his past.

The Third Cochlea Raid set him loose. Sneaking up on warden Shinme Haisaki, he tore the man's head off, accepted a Clown mask from Uta, and went to meet Furuta, witnessing the killing of Chairman Tsuneyoshi Washuu. Through the ensuing Clown Siege he reveled in carnage, slaying Higemaru's uncle to bait Kuki Urie and Touma Higemaru into a confrontation, then ripping off Higemaru's arm and torturing him to break Urie's spirit. He revealed that Urie's own father, Mikito Urie, had been the investigator who once captured him, and he used clones spun from his kagune to slip away and leave a broken Urie behind. In the final crisis he was tied to the Taxidermied Owl, its neck bearing a cross like his kagune, and he faced Amon one last time. Holding back against the son he had raised, he was cut down by Amon's great cross-shaped quinque, and in his dying moments the two wept together as Amon insisted it was not wrong for a son to love his father.

His power flowed from a koukaku kagune that resembled a long tentacle laced with cross-like shapes, capable of striking at range and spearing targets with startling precision and speed. He could detach pieces of it, tear off limbs with sheer strength, and move so fast he seemed to vanish from open ground. His cells regenerated in a cross pattern, and he could spawn multiple independent clones from a single finger. Sharpest of all was his intellect, which let him read people at a glance and keep proving his worth to the CCG even from behind bars.