Sins of the camorra

Journalist brings crime clans into focus

Roberto Saviano's Italy is not the one you see in travel brochures. Instead, the author of Gomorrah depicts Italy's Campania region as a veritable Hell-on-Earth, a place controlled by the Camorra, a powerful group of clans that make up a form of organized crime rarely written about in North America. We hear much more about the Sicilian Mafia.



Gomorrah was written during the Secondigliano War - an internal Camorra power struggle that began in 2004 and resulted in an alarmingly high body count.

Perhaps because it is written from a refreshingly youthful perspective - Saviano is 28 - the book struck a nerve in Italy when it was published there in 2006. According to a recent estimate, it has since sold more than a million copies. This is a remarkable achievement when you consider Gomorrah is about a bleak place where heroin junkies offer themselves up as guinea pigs to help Camorra clans test cocaine before it is sold on the street and 14-year-old girls are the innocent victims of gunfire exchanges.

Saviano, who turned down offers from political parties to run as their candidate in the recent Italian election, also apparently struck more than just a nerve among the mobsters he wrote about. He now lives under state protection after police uncovered a plot on his life.

The book is based on transcripts from police investigations but also, more impressively, on Saviano's own work as a journalist covering crime in Campania and his deeply personal memories of growing up in Casal di Principe, a town that produced one of the more notorious Camorra bosses.

The mix sometimes causes the book to be inconsistent in tone. At times, Saviano is a sober analyst. At others, he is an emotional and fatalistic cynic, tossing his hands in the air, suggesting the Camorra's power, influence and corruption have always had a stranglehold on Campania and therefore always will.

Saviano obviously has learned a lot about organized crime despite his relatively young age. One would have difficulty finding a more succinct way of defining the criminal mind than: "For some reason one stupidly thinks a criminal act has to be more thought out, more deliberate than an innocuous one. But there's really no difference. Actions know an elasticity that ethical judgements ignore."

To get close to the Camorra, Saviano worked various legitimate jobs in companies controlled by the group. In Gommorah's opening chapter, the author describes his work at the massive port in Naples, Campania's capital, where "merchandise possesses a rare magic: it manages both to be and not to be, to arrive without ever reaching its destination."

From there, the reader is taken north of Naples, where merchandise brought through the port, like raw fabric, is received in sweatshop factories to become articles of clothing for Italy's much vaunted fashion industry. The factories are controlled financially by Camorra clans who use the knowledge gained from making genuine products to churn out counterfeit items that are sold worldwide. (It is here that the Camorra's influence is felt in Canada. In 2004, a man in Woodbridge, Ont., who allegedly had ties to the Camorra was extradited to Italy after he was found to have been quietly running a company, since 1995, that imported fake Versace leather coats and distributed them by the thousands to major cities across the country, including Montreal, where they were sold out of the backs of minivans. When the RCMP arrested the businessman it also revealed eight other people in Canada had been investigated for possible Camorra ties as well.)

The book's title is a play on words, evoking the sinful city God destroyed in the Book of Genesis. But it is also a reference to the end of one of the more poignant chapters in the book, about a priest who was killed in 1994 in Casal di Principe. The priest had challenged the Camorra by attacking its members' hypocritical participation in Catholic celebrations like baptisms. Saviano writes how the cold-blooded murder caused one of his friends to "shut down." The same friend wrote a rambling and emotional text, comparing Casal di Principe to a modern day Gommorah. The friend wanted to rally his town to rid itself of the Camorra's thorough corruption, and the text was meant to be read at the priest's funeral. But the friend couldn't find the energy to do it that day. Instead, the same message is delivered throughout Saviano's revealing book.