Roberto Saviano

This is a study of organized crime in southern Italy, a.k.a. the Camorra, which is much bigger than the Sicilian Mafia and also somewhat less organized. And it does contain facts about the Camorra; but if you want to be informed in any methodical way—like about how they got to where they are now, or whether recent prosecutions of them have made a difference, or who the author is (other than a guy who grew up in their territory) or how he managed to investigate so much of this up show more close—you'll have to look elsewhere. It's not that kind of book.

Saviano isn't mainly trying to inform you, and he's not trying to entertain you (although in the few sections where he pauses for a while to give a ground-level view of one person's story, it's very involving; those are basically the parts that made it into the movie, which is also good). He's trying to overwhelm you. After an opening chapter that's in a more familiar style of first-person reportage and keeps the story at an easily understandable level, the book quickly escalates, rushing through one story after another or within another, and alternating between banal scams, long lists of names, and insane atrocities, so you never know what to expect; the overall impression is that it doesn't really matter where he starts, this thing is just too big and chaotic to describe rationally.

The one constant is Saviano's anger, as it gradually becomes clear how much of a personal thing this is for him: he hates these people, not just for terrorizing and exploiting everyone in his home region of Campania, but for contributing to a general acceptance of corruption throughout Italy. One guy claims that the illegal waste management industry, which basically just throws toxic waste all over Campania, was responsible for boosting Italy's economy enough to get into the European Union, so everyone should be grateful; of course it happens to be that guy's own industry, but the implication is that lots of people think that way and they're not all in the Camorra. (The rest of the world isn't exempt, as the book often points out how legitimate companies and governments elsewhere have relied on the Camorra's business ventures.) When Saviano appears in the story, he doesn't depict himself as an intrepid reporter, just someone who's so dazed and revulsed by everything he sees that he has no idea what to do but keep writing—except when at one point he decides to pee in a mob boss's abandoned villa.

But he doesn't think there's anything uniquely evil about the clans; this is just what happens when legitimate systems aren't working well and people get used to the idea that ethics will stop you from getting anywhere. A recurring theme of the book is that the Camorra doesn't have a code or a philosophy or a strategy (or really even a hierarchy, in the sense of any stable structure; bosses don't last long, and the aspiring bosses don't expect to). It's just a lot of people who want more stuff and don't care about other people. It's a disease of capitalism—not that something similar can’t arise within other systems, but this is what we're working with.

The prose style isn't really my cup of tea (that could be partly the translation, but also Saviano rarely uses one simile when five would do) and reading it is a very uneven and exhausting experience. But if you don't mind being a little bored at some times and horrified at other times, and you want to know more about parts of Italian culture that aren't well known in the US—not just the criminal parts, but what it can be like for people simply trying to get by—it's quite a thing. show less

When Gomorrah was firt published, it was risky investigative journalism at its finest; Saviano revealed to Italians and to the wider world the nature and extent of the Comorra's domination of Naples, Campania and beyond.

Even the best journalism loses its immediacy over time, but after 10 years and from half a world away, Gomorrah is still a riveting read. Saviano recounts a catalogue of vicious crimes and ongoing feuds that turned Campania into a bloodbath, pretty much the murder capital of show more the world. As well as their drug and extortion actvities, Saviano explains how the bosses extended their tentacles into the more legitimate business world, coming to dominate the garment and construction industries, waste management and others. Their ruthlessness enables them to spread beyond Italy to Eastern Europe, China and the UK.

The book starts off fairly matter-of-fact, but you gradually sense the author's mounting rage against the system,spilling out in a chapter where he points his finger and sets his face against the clans. They took him seriously - he's needed government protection since publication - and we should too. show less

Mi sono sbilanciata. Invece di dare un voto saccente ho seguito il mio cuore che mi ha fatto amare le parole di Saviano in questo corto di carta. Maria è una figura che sembra angelica, così piccola e minuta e giovane. E ancora una volta racconta la verità sulla sua terra e lo fa con dolcezza, con affetto. Questo mi piace anche. Perché lui è nato lì e ama i suoi luoghi ma non riesce a stare zitto e a dire come fanno le cose e vorrebbe fossero diverse ma come si fa? SI'! I soldati fanno show more in guerra per i soldi! Come tutti i lavori, del resto. Ma NON solo: anche per aver un lavoro riconosciuto, legale e che ti fa sentire importante. E chi non abita al sud continua a parlare senza conoscere, senza aver provato cosa voglia dire e a giudicare!(Questo non lo dice Saviano lo dico io dopo aver letto alcune affermazioni, io che abito nel profondo nord) Roberto Saviano in Il contrario della morte secondo me è riuscito a condensare denuncia, cronaca, filosofia, amore e comprensione in 50 pagine. show less

There's an extraordinary scene near the start of Gomorrah that I don't think I'll be able to forget. Roberto Saviano, investigating the numerous clothing sweatshops in the countryside around Naples, happens to be with one of the master tailors when he turns on the television in his run-down shack one evening. It's Oscars night, and Angelina Jolie is on the red carpet – wearing one of his handmade outfits.

The man breaks down in tears. He had no idea – they just told him that one was show more ‘being sent to America’. He's one of the greatest tailors in Italy and he's just dressed one of the most beautiful women in the world – but he can't tell anyone. His job doesn't officially exist. He works twelve-hour shifts. He's paid six hundred euros a month.

How? Why? Because this is how even top fashion houses get stuff made – they (or possibly, for better deniability, some subsidiary entity) auction out the tailoring to groups of sweatshops in the South, who fall over themselves with promises to produce the work faster and cheaper than their rivals. Everyone who wants to take part is given the material, and whoever produces the right quality work first gets paid. Everyone else has to sell off their products however they can – in Asia, or Eastern Europe, or, as a last resort, in market stalls. That brand-name handbag being sold by a Nigerian outside the railway station may not be a forgery at all, but rather, as Saviano puts it, ‘a sort of true fake’ that really lacks nothing but the company's imprimatur.

It's just another part of The System – meaning the dense web of Camorra-controlled activities whose agents and beneficiaries extend not just up into northern Italy, but across Europe and, in fact, around the world.

The Camorra are much more numerous than Cosa Nostra or the 'Ndrangheta, and much more deadly – they've been responsible for more deaths than the Sicilian Mafia, Basque separatists or the IRA. (Campania has one of the highest murder rates in Europe.) That's nasty enough, but what's really chilling is how pervasive their control is, and quite how much economic power, according to Saviano, they wield.

In fact they're presented here as not so much a crime syndicate as a purified distillation of naked capitalism. It's not just drugs, it's also a vast global supply chain, a portfolio of legitimate and semi-legitimate businesses which all support and feed off each other, so that trying to find some area or segment that has not been tainted starts to feel hopelessly naïve.

Drugs, though, are important, and Saviano is impatient with worthy pontifications about the sociology of the ghetto. As he points out, ‘An area where dozens of clans are operating, with profit levels comparable only to a maneuver in high finance—just one family’s activity invoices 300 million euros annually—cannot be a ghetto.’ The numbers are sobering:

A kilo of cocaine costs the producer 1,000 euros, but by the time it reaches the wholesaler, it’s already worth 30,000. After the first cut 30 kilos becomes 150: a market value of approximately 15 million euros. With a larger cut, 30 kilos can be stretched to 200.

But you expect drugs. What I didn't expect was to hear about the Camorra controlling all the merchandise flowing in and out of Naples port; or how they have taken over Italy's waste disposal industry. This last is particularly upsetting: Saviano details how industrial and chemical waste is mixed with gravel or mislabeled so that it can be more easily transported, and then dumped in vast landfills. One abandoned quarry near Naples was found to have 58,000 truck loads of illicit waste in it. Child labourers are used to unload the barrels, which are acutely toxic. The area has inflated rates of cancers – but it isn't just a problem of the south. The activity is directly linked to big Italian companies in the Veneto or the capital, and in fact Saviano says that without this under-the-counter service from the Camorra, Italy would never have met the economic conditions for entering the EU.

Holding it all together are the capos and bosses who hide away in armoured mega-villas, conferring with accountants and issuing instructions to prosecute the latest inter-clan killing spree. The most important have jaunty Neapolitan nicknames – 'a scigna (the monkey), 'o scellone (the angel), 'o 'ntufato (the angry one). Local politicians are generally helpful to the clans, when they aren't outright members. The Camorra is often an area's main economy; as Saviano puts it, ‘refusing a relationship with them would be like the deputy mayor of Turin refusing to meet with the top management of Fiat.’

Their opponents are beheaded by circular saw, beaten to death in front of their families, or thrown into wells along with a couple of hand-grenades to take care of murder and burial all in one. In 2001, a guy called Antonio Magliulo made a pass at a boss's cousin:

They took him to the beach, tied him to a chair facing the sea, and began to stuff his mouth and nose with sand. Magliulo tried to breathe, swallowing and spitting sand, blowing it out his nose, vomiting, chewing, and twisting his neck. His saliva, mixing with the sand, formed a kind of primitive cement, a gluey substance that slowly suffocated him.

It is refreshingly jarring to read a book which links this violence with the run-down kids and sweatshop workers who drive it all – that does not, in other words, glorify it. We are a long way from cool Ray Liotta voiceovers and Tony Bennett soundtracks. (Far from Hollywood looking to the Mafia for inspiration, it's actually the other way round – Camorra bosses model their mansions on Al Pacino's house in Scarface, kids angle their guns sideways like Tarantino stars, and one female capo has a retinue of women bodyguards dressed in fluorescent yellow like Uma Thurman out of Kill Bill.)

The book generates a lot of disgust and outrage, and I wish there were a few more suggestions for what we could productively do with these feelings. Perhaps Saviano doesn't know any ways left to be an ethical consumer; certainly the tone often borders on the pessimistic. But it's saved from defeatism by his trust in the power of language.

In Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, Lila is constantly pushing Lenù, the respected writer, to finally write the devastating exposé of local Camorristi that she thinks will bring them down. Lenù can't quite do it, and the book she writes doesn't have the effect they were hoping. But Roberto Saviano really did lift the lid on a lot of things that Italians didn't know about or didn't talk about. The effects were dramatic, not least on his own life: he was put under police protection in 2006, and has lived outside Italy since 2008. But he made ignoring the issues infinitely more difficult. Words still have power, and someone using them like Saviano needs to be celebrated and protected. show less