Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia by Roberto Saviano



On April 26, 2004, Ferdinando Bizzarro was in a Naples hotel indulging his passion for extramarital sex when two men dressed as police commandos shot their way into his room before finishing him off with a bullet to the head. The assassination marked the beginning of the second Camorra war when two families involved in the mass import of drugs fell out over percentages. Their dispute quickly attained an unprecedented ferocity and the bosses began ordering revenge killings as regularly as they would their morning espresso. As Roberto Saviano, a young and courageous Italian journalist, describes in graphic detail, this two-year campaign was the bloodiest internecine struggle to hit southern Italy since the 1980s. Since his birth in 1979, he calculates, the Camorra, Naples’s great network of organised crime clans, has taken the lives of 3,600 men and women, many more than the Sicilian mafia has on its conscience over the same period. As the piles of bodies grew following Bizzarro’s death, so did the Camorra’s reputation as the dominant new power of Italy’s criminal underground. But although the war certainly reflected the exponential increase in the Camorra’s turnover in the decade leading up to the outbreak of hostilities, it was also a demonstration of profound weakness. The most effective organised-crime syndicates are those that go largely unnoticed. Endless rounds of slaughter deprive an organised-crime boss of his most important resource – muscle. It also draws the heat of the police who feel pressurised to respond because public opinion reacts poorly to pools of blood on the street of big cities. The Camorra war forms the background to Gomorrah, an exposé of organised crime in Naples and the surrounding region of Campania over the past 15 years. Saviano’s book caused a sensation when it was published in Italy, selling more than 500,000 copies and forcing the author, still only in his late twenties, to seek police protection. It is an uneven work but one that opens exceptionally well with a superb piece of investigative reporting on the Camorra, or “the System”, as Saviano calls it. By finding a job with a Chinese middleman in Naples, he reveals how all the leading fashion houses of Milan work with the Camorra and Chinese syndicates to produce their expensive designer products. “Everything that is impossible to do elsewhere because of the inflexibility of contracts, laws and copyrights is feasible here.” In these passages, Saviano, a Neapolitan himself, gets closest to the opaque or invisible structures that underpin the Camorra’s mighty economic engine. Control of the goods coming through the port, which are then distributed all over Europe, is clearly critical to the whole operation, and Saviano’s experiences shifting contraband from ship to shore is gripping and illuminating. “I rested my head against the boxes and tried to guess their contents from their smell.” As it happened, the boxes contained sports shoes, but they could have held anything: “There’s not a product, fabric, piece of plastic, toy, hammer, shoe, screwdriver, bolt, video game, jacket, pair of pants, drill or watch that doesn’t come through the port. Everything made in China is poured out here.” The fall of the Berlin Wall paid huge dividends for the Camorra. Until this time, Italy’s middle classes had agreed at election time to “hold your nose and vote for the Christian Democrats”. This was to keep at bay the supposed threat to western democracy posed by Italy’s thoroughly house-trained Communist party. But with the Soviet Union gone, the Italian right could no longer play that game. Before long, the Christian Democrats were in freefall. Tumbling behind the party, came its corrupt system of government based on, among other seedy tactics, the collaboration between Sicilian mafia and the most senior politicians in Rome. Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two public prosecutors, sought to take advantage of the mafia’s growing vulnerability as its Christian Democrat protectors in the capital began to run for cover. But, in 1992, just as they were preparing the final blow, they were murdered. Antimafia politicians and police built upon the ensuing public outcry to launch an attack of unprecedented efficacy on the bastions of mafia power from which Sicily’s clans have never fully recovered. The drugs trade – the source of the Sicilian mafia’s wealth – did not, of course, disappear with the Sicilian mafia’s demise, and the Camorra filled the vacuum almost immediately, taking over a key role in the expansion of the international drugs market. From Rio to Cape Town and from Montreal to Mumbai, the Naples mob was involved in many of the biggest deals. This went largely unnoticed in the outside world until 2004 and the Camorra war. Saviano does a great job when he is recounting his experiences, working in the twilight zone of the Neapolitan economy. But he starts to lose this steady hand when he attempts to write a detailed history of the Camorra wars. Even an Italian is likely to be confused by the proliferation of names and locations, while the repeated and voyeuristic description of the killings dulls the senses. A decent editor could have sorted out Saviano’s frequent descents into a muddled stream of consciousness but at least the Italian reader would be relatively familiar with the Camorra culture. What is unforgivable, however, is the apparent decision by Macmillan, the British publisher, to dispense with the editorial process altogether. They have failed to correct the hurried American translation (Winning Eleven was never Sony PlayStation’s most popular soccer game, and we ceased calling Lviv, in Ukraine, “Leopolis” almost two millenniums ago). The publisher seems to imagine that by slapping the words “international bestseller” across the top of the book, it is freed from any obligation to render the book comprehensible to a British audience. This is a great shame, as Saviano is without question a winning young man with real potential as a writer. Gomorrah is a useful introduction to the hellhole that Naples has become under the tyranny of the Camorra but it could have been a really great book had its editors taken it more seriously, cutting it by a third, and encouraging greater coherence in its structure. Spreading poison For an image of the Camorra’s toxic power, glance only at the vast smouldering mountains of rubbish that have dominated the streets of Naples since refuse-collection suddenly stopped in the city last month. The Camorra (Naples’s network of criminal syndicates) has long controlled the processing of Italy’s trash, which is trucked to Campania and buried in huge landfill sites, for a fee that undercuts legitimate operators. Saviano’s investigation into the Camorra included touring its dumps – its second biggest source of income, after drugs. The Giugliano-Villaricca-Qualiano triangle near Naples has come to be known as the Land of Fires: at the time of writing, it contained 39 landfills. When a site approaches capacity, the trash is set on fire. Gypsy boys, learnt Saviano, are considered the best at it: they are paid 50 euros for each mound burnt. Dense black smoke and flames contaminate every inch of land with dioxins. Local agriculture, which once supplied fruit and vegetables to the whole of Europe, has collapsed – but the Camorra sees profit in this, too. As the land is poisoned, its owners sell off their fields cheaply. These in turn become new landfill sites. And so the cycle continues.