Good Fellas

A young Italian laments how Naples has fallen under the sway of brutal mobsters.



Think of Italy -- the world's seventh-largest economy -- and sleek Ferraris, Armani suits, wine, food and tourism come to mind. But in October, an Italian business association reported that the largest sector of the country's economy is organized crime, accounting for an estimated 7 percent of its gross domestic product. That's $127 billion, more than twice the annual revenue of Microsoft. To put flesh on that unsettling X-ray of Italian life, read Roberto Saviano's astonishing Gomorrah. The book is subtitled "A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System," and both personal and violent it is. Saviano's tour of his native Naples shows us the heart of what can only be called a company town for organized crime, with industrial toxins in great abundance. The title Gomorrah is a reference to the Camorra, Naples' counterpart to Sicily's better-known Mafia. The Gomorrah-Camorra pun -- even more pungent in the original Neapolitan, which softens C's to G's -- comes from a eulogy for a priest who took on the Camorra and paid with his life. "The whole land is brimstone, and salt, and burning," declared the mourner, cursing the Camorra with a biblical metaphor for all-encompassing evil. Saviano gallops straight into the maw of the inferno, using a hard-boiled style that has only begun to take root in Italian media. Naples is where he grew up, the Neapolitans are his people, and while the eyewitness accounts he brings to the page -- stories of murderous barbarity and devastating debasement -- could have been told by one of Dashiell Hammett's chilly protagonists, Saviano is no cold-blooded cynic. If there is a literary model at work here, it might be the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The setting for the first ghastly scene is the immense Molo Bausan, a container terminal on the Naples waterfront with merchandise stacked high on the quay. A crane operator looks down in horror as a refrigerated container swaying at the end of his cable pops open, pouring dozens of bodies onto the cement below. (They are dead immigrants, being shipped home to China for burial.) Further horror comes moments later, when he lowers the container to the ground and dozens of workers appear, quickly pack the bodies back in the container and hose down the cement. Work then resumes as usual. Many of Saviano's most astonishing set pieces are like dioramas from some lurid museum. There are murders, murders with torture, disposal of bodies (ingenious techniques that verge on folkways: bodies tossed into wells, followed by a grenade to bury them under tons of silt), extortion, gang wars and a teeming drug culture populated by zombie-junkies that make parts of Naples seem like scenes from "Night of the Living Dead." The book's use of vignettes reflects the fact that much of the reporting that went into it appeared first as articles in the Italian press. And as the subtitle suggests, the book is intensely personal: The author intersperses eyewitness accounts of Camorra killings with time spent with his father and friends or, less persuasively, descriptions of his own physical reactions to the things he witnesses: "I could feel the blood swelling the veins in my neck, flooding my chest, I was out of breath, inhaling all the air I could and then exhaling hard, like a bull." Still, Gomorrah is gripping. To point out that there are 45 cities in Europe with higher murder rates seems churlish. After all, this is a personal voyage through the horrors of a beautiful, once civil city now under the control of a vicious organized crime system that, observers agree, makes the Sicilian Mafia seem the very picture of restrained stability. Saviano first began reporting on the Camorra as an analyst for a citizen watchdog group. This puts him squarely in the activist-journalism tradition of, say, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Saviano openly acknowledges the influence of both left-wing theorist Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mafia-fighting judge and martyr Giovanni Falcone. He also exhibits the passion and heroism of a young man (he was born in 1979). His work has brought him death threats and, in turn, police protection -- though not until Umberto Eco made a public appeal for the government to take action. Gomorrah was awarded the prestigious Italian Viareggio literary prize in 2006, and no doubt the Italian version is powerful and assured. But as a translator and a reader, I found numerous inept renderings, mistakes that could only baffle most readers, and that certainly give the impression of a looseness in style not present in the Italian. The police here "sequester" property -- a literal mirroring of the Italian -- instead of confiscating it. Murderous work is called "killer work," which sounds like very nice work indeed. Italian soldiers don't wear combat boots, they wear "amphibians" -- an enigma if you don't know that the Italian for army boots is "anfibio." Most galling of all, when mob killers "empty a clip" into a victim, they invariably "unload a charger," again mirroring the Italian "svuotare un caricatore." Instead of murdering in cold blood, they seem to be selling a used Dodge to some unsuspecting sucker. This book deserved much better.