Author a hit with Mafia

Heavily guarded Roberto Saviano is known as the Salman Rushdie of Italy

TORONTO -Roberto Saviano, the embattled Italian author of a sensational expose of the calamitous world of the Camorra, the Mafia of Naples, stares with darkly brooding eyes but flashes a mischievous smile when asked what Canada means to the mobsters in his neighbourhood.

"I'll answer the way a Camorrista would say it: 'Canada is a country full of forests' -- meaning it is a country where it is easy to hide -- 'and it is a place where it is easy to invest. It is our place.' "



It is with an accepting sense of irony that Mr. Saviano says one of the world's most bloodthirsty and rapacious criminal organizations eyes our country as a safe haven because it is he, a best-selling author and respected journalist, that requires an armed escort, not only at home in Italy but as he arrived yesterday in Toronto.

"It is not only an Italian problem, it is an international problem."

It is he who is in hiding.

Mr. Saviano, 28, has been dubbed the Salman Rushdie of Italy. The connection is a nod to the fatwa death warrant issued against Mr. Rushdie by the late Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after publication of his book The Satanic Verses.

When Mr. Saviano's book, Gomorrah (the title is provocative wordplay on the name of the Camorra and the eponymous biblical city of wickedness) was released in Italy in 2006, it hit with the clatter and punch of a Kalashnikov rifle.

The tentative first printing of 5,000 copies evaporated and it soon became a European publishing sensation with sales figures exceeding a million. The book brought unwanted attention to the secret and deadly commerce in the decaying neighbourhoods around Naples and sparked public debate over the canker that is the Camorra, a rarely examined cousin of the better-known Mafia groups of Italy.

The book was greeted with less enthusiasm, however, by some of the colourful characters Mr. Saviano portrays in unflinching detail.

In response to his words, a reply came in the acrid language of the mob: They called for his death.

With Mr. Saviano constantly accompanied by an armed escort, and when back in Naples even living inside the police station, he has avoided the bullets but suffers the discomfort of confinement.

The Camorristi have turned this into a boast. "What they said exactly was: 'We buried you without shooting you. We put you in a coffin without shooting you.' The reason I was granted police protection was to allow me to speak out and not to simply go away and live my life in hiding somewhere.

"It would be a lie to say that I never regretted writing this book," he says through a translator. "Many mornings I wake up and hate the book because of the life I have to live."

Yet he remains unrepentant.

"I am not afraid -- not because I am brave but because people get used to anything."

Last week, Mr. Saviano met Mr. Rushdie face to face in New York.

"We spoke about the difference between ourselves," says Mr. Saviano. The blasphemy of Mr. Rushdie's book was that it was written, he says. The blasphemy of his own book comes from the fact that it is being read.

"It is a big difference. It is not what I wrote that is dangerous. It is that it was read by so many people that makes it dangerous."

In that, his sin against the mob has compounded. The influence of his book continues to swell. It has been translated into several languages and published in more than a dozen countries. It has been turned into a stage play and a movie based on it will soon be released.

He is speaking out in Toronto, Montreal and New York.

His message is a poignant one for Canada.

In 2004, Italian investigators named Giovanni Bandolo the head of the first known Camorra group operating in Canada. From a warehouse in Woodbridge, north of Toronto, the group sold counterfeit Versace leather jackets across Canada for several years.

What seemed a petty crime took on grave implications when the National Post revealed that the operation's profits were traced back to Naples, where they helped fund a vicious war for control of the underworld that at the time had claimed more than 120 lives.

"This is a very big problem regarding criminal organizations, the fact that many people believe that the problem of clans, the problems of criminal organizations, is only an Italian problem," Mr. Saviano says.