Roberto Saviano’s life mirrors that of the mobsters who have vowed to kill him: He has gone into hiding, even from his neighbors.

Saviano, 29, is the author who fingered the Camorra mafia in a bestseller. A month ago, Italian police learned of what they call a credible plan to murder him before Christmas.

The reason: His book “Gomorrah,” which has sold almost 2 million copies in 33 countries, drew attention to the crime bosses of the Campania region and its capital, Naples. A movie based on the book captured the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and has been nominated for a Golden Globe. It’s up for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards.

Sitting in a brown-leather armchair in his publisher’s office in Rome, Saviano discusses his plans for a new book and his life in isolation under armed guard. His crown is bald; black stubble covers his jaw. He wears three silver rings, a local custom symbolizing the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. His security detail waits in two dark sedans outside.

Scherer: Can you describe your life on a typical day?

Saviano: I’ve lived with five bodyguards and two armored cars for two years. I don’t have a home, and that’s the hardest part. People won’t rent a house to me because they’re afraid. In Naples, they’re partly afraid of retaliations, which is a noble excuse. In truth, it would bother them to rent to me because it would symbolically mean that they’re on my side.

Like a Fugitive

There’s a horribly negative opinion of me in Campania and in southern Italy. Many think I defamed their territory and drove away tourists. When a landlord rented me one place, the neighbors forced me to leave. Now I live in a house where I have to hide. I return home in the evenings after setting out early in the morning. I’m living as if I were a fugitive — as if I committed some crime.

I’ve read in court documents how mafia fugitives cope with this life. When things are really bad, I pile all the furniture in the center of the room and run laps. I learned that from them.

I was supposed to be killed just before Christmas, around the 21st or 22nd. A month ago, everyone thought I was a dead man.

Scherer: Are friends able to visit you?

Saviano: Sometimes. When I’m in Naples, I often stay in the military-police barracks. It’s hard to have people over when I stay there. In Rome, people visit me, but it’s difficult. I’m trying to reconstruct my life. I dream of starting a family.

Scherer: So the book exposed a criminal economic system, while what has happened to you since has uncovered the cultural side of the story?

Saviano: Exactly. I’m sorry that I’ve been accused of having defamed southern Italy. Because I’ve always said that organized crime is a national and international problem.

Economic Infiltration

Scherer: Is there a greater danger of mafia infiltration of the economy now, during the financial crisis?

Saviano: During a crisis, people lower their guard. Studies show that two markets never suffer during a crisis: the criminal market and the art market. I’m convinced that this crisis is bringing huge advantages to criminal syndicates.

Organized crime is a capitalist force that is restructuring the free market. European authorities will notice what criminal capital is doing only when it’s too late. Not just capital coming from Italy, but also from Serbia, Russia, Albania and Nigeria. Several investigations demonstrate that criminal cartels are investing in Romania, in Poland. They’re buying sovereign bonds. Half of Europe is already in their hands.

Scherer: Will the whole world start looking like the bleak Naples suburb seen in the movie?

Saviano: My intention wasn’t to tell the story of Naples to the world, but to tell the story of the world through Naples. The screenwriters were careful not to create just a slice of Naples. If you didn’t know the film was set in Italy, you might think it shot in Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, the suburbs of Istanbul or parts of Spain and Greece.

‘Stench of Money’

Scherer: The movie and the book are very different.

Saviano: The big difference between the movie and the book is that I’m obsessed with money and with telling the story of the economic network, while the director is obsessed with the faces, the environment. But the stench of money is missing. The movie didn’t betray the book; it simply took a different path.

Scherer: Will your next book be about organized crime?

Saviano: I think so, though not about Italy’s or not only about Italy’s, definitely not about the Camorra. I’m studying the Mexican and African crime syndicates.

“Gomorrah,” translated into English by Virginia Jewiss, is from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S. and by Macmillan in the U.K. (301 pages, $25, 16.99 pounds). The original is published by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (336 pages, 15.50 euros).

(Steve Scherer writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own. This interview was adapted from a longer conversation.)

Mafia Author, in Hiding for His Life, Says Mob Feeds on Crisis – Interview by Steve Scherer – Bloomberg – Dec. 23 2008 – This story was found at: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=ajaPAXAnjjdk&refer=muse

Salman Rushdie has said that an Italian journalist who is under an alleged death threat from the country’s feared Neapolitan mafia is in even greater danger than he was under Iran’s fatwah.

The British author said the Naples-based Camorra Mafia has a much further reach than the mullahs of Tehran who called for his assassination.

Roberto Saviano has spent the last two years surrounded by a 24-hour armed protection squad and living in an undisclosed location after writing the best selling Gomorrah.

The book incensed Camorra Mafia bosses by lifting the lid on the crime empire they control around Naples and in the Campania region of southern Italy and this week it was reported that mobsters want Mr Saviano dead by Christmas.

The book’s title is a play on Camorra, a criminal syndicate which is less well known than the Sicilian Mafia but equally ruthless and powerful in its home territory around Naples.

It was made into an award-winning film, released last week in the UK, further angering the godfathers of the Camorra.

“The Mafia poses a much more serious problem than the one I had to face,” said Mr Rushdie, who was condemned to death by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 for writing The Satanic Verses, which was condemned by Iran’s theocratic regime as insulting to Islam.

“Saviano is in terrible danger, worse than me.”

In Paris to promote his latest book, The Enchantress of Florence, Mr Rushdie said he met Mr Saviano in New York in April.

The Mafia’s deep-rooted transatlantic connections meant the Italian writer was in danger in the US too, he said.

Mr Saviano, 29, said this week that he felt like a prisoner in his own country because of having to live in a safe house constantly surrounded by armed police officers.

He said he was thinking of leaving Italy – a decision supported by Mr Rushdie.

“Without doubt, he’ll have to leave Italy but he must choose his future destination very prudently,” the author of Midnight’s Children said.

Since Mr Saviano announced that he might flee his homeland, Italians have rallied round him in solidarity, with the government urging him to stay as a symbol of the fight against the Mafia.

But the journalist appears to be exhausted by the strain of living under the Mafia’s death threats.

“Right now I don’t see why I should keep living like this, as a prisoner of myself, my book, my success. I want a life, that’s all,” he told La Repubblica.

“I want to take a walk, get some sun, walk in the rain, meet my mother without scaring her and being afraid.”

Mr Saviano grew up in the town of Casal di Principe, the stronghold of the Camorra’s feared Casalesi clan, and saw his first murder victim at the age of 13.

His gritty portrayal of the Camorra’s brutal and often squalid activities was based on his experiences working as a labourer in Naples’ huge container port and in a textile and building firm controlled by the mob.

But he has paid a heavy price for the success of the book, which has sold more than a million copies in Italy alone.

“What is my crime? Why must I live like a recluse, a leper? I only wanted to tell the story of my people, my land and their humiliation,” he said.

Salman Rushdie: Gomorrah author in greater danger than I was under fatwah – By Nick Squires in Rome – Last Updated: 3:48PM BST 17 Oct 2008 – Telegraph.co.uk – This story was found at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3212189/Salman-Rushdie-Gomorrah-author-in-greater-danger-than-I-was-under-fatwah.html

Stereotypes become stereotypes because nine times out of 10 they are true. Hear the words “Mafia boss” and you think: olive-skinned with dark, slightly bloodshot eyes and a sharp suit.

Louis Ferrante fulfils some of those preconceptions. He is New York Italian, powerfully built, and was wearing a black shirt when interviewed for HARDtalk by Sarah Montague.

He worked for John Gotti of the infamous Gambino crime family, which pulled off some of the most lucrative heists in American history.

But he is younger than you would think, given that he ran his own “crew” and did nine years in jail before deciding to change his life and become a writer.

Ferrante’s moment of truth came when a prison guard at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center described him and his kind as “animals”.

Two months in solitary forced him to ponder the question: was he an animal? If so, why was he one?

“I thought about the people I’d victimised… and I realised I did deserve to be in a zoo,” he recalls.

For the first time in his life he started reading books, looking deeper into himself and searching for some answers.

He set himself the challenge to read the entire prison library.

“Prison was the greatest thing that happened to me, because it gave me time to look inside myself, the solitude that I needed to take a closer look at everything around me; to analyse myself.”

He educated himself and converted to Judaism.

Burgers and fries
Given his experience behind bars, Ferrante believes the prison services should be about giving inmates the opportunity to change their lives.

But before his own transformation, Ferrante’s “greatest aspiration” was always to be a member of the Mafia.

A kid with big balls and no brains can go from flat broke to fat pockets with one good stick-up. It’s the quickest money on the street
Louis Ferrante

Video: Louis Ferrante on HARDtalk

He started off as a kid, sawing the tops of meters to get the coins, and hijacked his first truck as a teenager, using a gun.

“I was 17 years old. I liked girls. I liked to drive fast cars. I liked hamburgers and French fries.

“And I’d just realised that I liked to hijack trucks”.

A common misconception about the Mafia is that you have to have a genetic link to a “family” in order to be a member.

Not so, says Ferrante. The most famous Mob bosses were not born into “the Life”.

Lucky Luciano, Thomas Lucchese, Carlos Marcello and Vito Genovese all started out as petty thieves, graduating to bigger crimes as the years passed. So did John Gotti and so did Ferrante.

Career criminal
Whether he is accurately described as a “boss” is debatable.

His memoir, Tough Guy, more modestly describes him as a “Mafia insider”.

But he was on the list being passed around the five Mafia families and was on the verge of being “made” when he was arrested for racketeering.

“I had a dozen good men under me… I was already equal to a made man, since I answered directly to the heads of my family.”

In a legitimate business he would be considered middle management.

At the height of his criminal career Ferrante had the trappings of wealth.

“I’d drop $10,000 at the tables in Atlantic City, pick up a $500 tab at a steakhouse, and hand out hundreds to anyone with a story.”

He made his money robbing trucks, selling on bent goods bought with fake credit cards made from stolen numbers, dealing with anything from high quality white goods to government bonds.

In an early mistake he robbed a truck load of cheap underwear.

“I was stuck with 500 boxes of brassieres I couldn’t sell as slingshots”.

But mostly his jobs were highly lucrative.

Money collector
His book enables you to check what you think you know about the New York Italian underworld with reality.

You have to be Italian to be “made”? True.

Under no circumstances do you take your beef with another gangster to his home, involving his family. Also true.

He consorted with characters like Bert the Zip, Tony the Twitch and Barry the Brokester, who always maintained he could not pay you because he was broke.

Bobby Butterballs he leaves us to work out for ourselves.

He maintains that there is honour amongst thieves:

“Jimmy and I had no contract, no lawyers, no bill of sale; a handshake sealed the deal. Try that in the straight world”.

And he would have you believe that he was a nice cuddly gangster. He maintains he never murdered anyone.

But that was perhaps more by luck than judgement.

Ferrante glosses over quite how much he injured people, and he admits in his book that he beat someone up and left him not knowing whether he was alive or dead.

Collecting money, he says, was easy for him. “I collected $20,000 from a guy who owned a dress company in a garment centre. I threatened to hang him out the window. He paid, even though his office was on the first floor.”

When HARDtalk presenter Sarah Montague asked him how he asserted himself in prison he used elliptical phrases like: I would have to “declare myself” or “express myself”.

Writing his life story cannot have been an easy decision. The Mafia are not keen on insiders discussing their modus operandi.

He has changed the names to protect the innocent and conceal the guilty, and says as a matter of honour he has never ratted on his former associates.

HARDtalk’s interview with Louis Ferrante is broadcast on Wednesday 3 September.

On BBC News TV channel at 04:30 BST & 23:30 BST

How books changed Mafia man’s life – By Bridget Osborne – BBC HARDtalk – Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/7588537.stm – Published: 2008/09/03 03:48:57 GMT

Serio’s work in Russia includes a research position in the then Organized Crime Control Department of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs. Afterwards, he worked for the international security consulting firm Kroll Associates, as director of its Moscow office, overseeing investigations across the former Soviet Union. Serio also served as an adviser to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, Chicago Tribune and a few other news organizations. That work included television documentaries dealing with organized crime in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and former Soviet Union. Serio is currently a criminal justice doctoral student at Sam Houston State University’s College of Criminal Justice.

His book is a hybrid pop culture and academic read. As per the book’s preface, its intent is to provoke more questions than provide answers; and challenge what is said in mass media. These points partly relate to much remaining unknown about the involved subject matter, which does not appear to be as greatly studied, like some other Imperial Russian, Soviet and former Soviet topics.

The time period primarily focussed is from the late 1980s thru 1990s, during Serio’s stay in the Soviet Union/former Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin’s name is mentioned once in the book, whereas Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin are referenced in several instances. Whether in the form of a revised edition, or a completely new book, a follow-up from Serio will be greatly appreciated. A good portion of his book deals with what foreign businesses face in Russia. The last few years have seen more of them in Russia. The book leaves open this question: in comparison to the last decade, how much has changed for foreign businesses in Russia?

The book’s introduction has a highlighted “Reader Beware!” segment, which proceeds to list some alarming statistics involving government related criminal activity. After listing these figures, Serio wryly adds: “As you may have well guessed, I am referring to the United States.” He proceeds to essentially say that his study of Imperial Russian, Soviet and former Soviet organized crime is not meant as a propaganda swipe. In comparison to the West, Serio says that the “intensity and scope” of organized crime in the former Soviet Union correlates to the Soviet Union’s traumatic breakdown, that paved the way for the current status quo. One which had a track record (in one degree or another) going back centuries. This is followed by Serio’s comment and question that “it is useful to reserve an ounce of humility and ask ourselves from time to time, what we would do if we were in their shoes?”

Serio’s commentary on Georgia expresses the view of a flawed situation having practical aspects, in terms of what is the best available option. In the early 1970s, Eduard Shevardnadze succeeded Vasily Mzhavandze as head of the Georgian Communist Party. Mzhavandze developed the reputation of running a corrupt government, with Shevardnadze generally viewed as a strong anti-corruption replacement. Georgia’s first post-Soviet leader, the late Zviad Gamsakhurdia is quoted as believing Shevardnadze’s government to be corrupt. While not disputing Gamsakhurdia’s view, Serio describes him as “roguish.” When Shevardnadze returned to Georgian politics as Gamsakhurdia’s successor, the general perception in the West and Russia was that this marked an improvement. An opinion which does not seem to have changed much, despite an ample amount of critical commentary about Shevardnadze’s post-Soviet Georgian presidency.

A few chapters provide a general background of Russian and Soviet history. Some additional points can be added to what was said on these matters.

Further elaboration can be given on the characterization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) being top heavy with Russians. In 1922, Russian CPSU membership exceeded its proportion of the population by 19%. By the late 1970s onwards, Russian CPSU membership was proportionately 8% higher than its share of the population. During this period, Byelorussians, Georgians and Jews were other nationalities showing a greater proportional representation in the CPSU. At the time, Ukrainians and Armenians had an equal per capita share in the CPSU. The Jewish proportional figure of CPSU membership was twice its percentage of the Soviet population. This did not prevent discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union. Likewise, it is inaccurate to believe that the Soviet Union was created and maintained for the benefit of Russians at the expense of others. Stalin (a non-Russian) and other Soviet brass would readily persecute an independently minded patriotic Russian over a perceived loyal non-Russian Communist.

Serio’s cited comments about the “backwards” aspects of Imperial Russia are broad. Imperial Russia led the defeat of Napoleon into Paris. Pre-1917 Russian artistic and scientific achievements are impressive. In its last decades of existence, Imperial Russia experienced a large scale economic growth. Russo-Japanese War? America had its debacle on the Asian continent. Pogroms? Unquestionably reprehensible, as were the Spanish Inquisition, treatment of Blacks in the United States and Armenian Genocide (which Turkey refuses to formally acknowledge). Subjugation of other nations? The Russian Empire existed in an era of a more blatant kind of imperialism.

Prior to World War I, Russia showed signs that its form of government would eventually change. The trauma caused by that war likely affected the manner of the change which took place.

Serio’s referenced point about anti-Russian hostility among non-Russian former Soviets can be further elaborated on. That animosity is not as great as some others like the one evident between a good number of Azerbaijanis and Armenians. Throughout history, Russia has been able to attract many non-Russians into a Russian persona. Granted, there are the opposite experiences (a view especially eminent with the Baltic peoples). At present, some territories outside of Russia have openly expressed the desire to join it. Pridnestrovie (Trans-Dniester) and South Ossetia had referendums supporting independence and a proposed future reunification with Russia. If given the choice, some other former Soviet parts outside of Russia would probably express the same desire. Separatist tendencies within Russia are essentially non-existent (Chechnya of the last decade was the exception).

Serio’s description of corruption in Imperial Russia keeps in mind his “Reader Beware!” segment in the book’s introduction (described in paragraph five of this review). He notes how major American cities of this period had plenty of government corruption.

His depiction of Imperial Russian, Soviet and former Soviet law enforcement bears some resemblance to the situation in the United States. Within this context, Frank Serpico’s testimony revealed widespread New York Police Department (NYPD) corruption in the 1960s to early 1970s. In more recent times, the NYPD (which refers to the police department situated in the five New York City boroughs, as opposed to the rest of New York) has experienced periodic bouts of corruption. A good number of relatively low salaried and job stressed NYPD officers have either opted for different careers, or chosen entry level police jobs in the higher paying and less stressful situations in suburban Long Island.

When comparing the contemporary crime situation in the larger of American and Russian cities, Serio finds the latter grouping to be safer in terms of the “low level crimes” (for lack of a better term) as rapes and stickups. Over the past several years, there has been an increase in reported bias crimes against darker complexioned people in Russia. On matters concerning police corruption (links to organized crime), Serio seems to be of the reasonable impression that Russian law enforcement is more corrupt than America’s.

As a related aside to his observations, bias crimes and police corruption were raised in the coverage of the widely reported ethnic violence in Kondopoga, Karelia (in northwestern Russia) in 2006. The specific issue involves low paid Russian police personnel accepting bribes from criminal organizations. Some of these groups have a noticeably non-ethnic Russian makeup, with roots in the Caucasus and Central Asia. When such groups threaten the public in predominately Slavic inhabited areas, the seeming lack of police action (in some instances) encourages a backlash of ethnic intolerance. Of course, there are other reasons for the level of ethnic intolerance. It is by no means an exclusively Russian problem. Reference America’s history as an ethnic melting pot, having its share of violent discriminatory acts.

Although using the term “Russian Mafia”, Serio is not comfortable with its usage. Unlike the Western version, the Russian Mafia lacks the organizational structure of mass cooperation among numerous crime factions. With seeming frustration, Serio notes how an American peer of his assumed the Russian Mafia to be insignificant because of its lack of structure. Such criminal activity is not as easy to identify when compared to American organized crime. Serio goes into considerable detail in explaining the different types of criminal activity in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and former Soviet Union. The transition period from Soviet to post-Soviet is of particular interest. Serio brings up the cogent point about how the “underground” Soviet economy served as a primer of sorts for Soviet citizens to understand the market economy.

The use of the term “Russian Mafia” is twofold. It is much shorter than saying “former Soviet organized crime.” From a media standpoint, the “Mafia” part is viewed as a good sell. This leads Serio to a lengthy critique of the media coverage. In the Soviet Union/former Soviet Union, he found Glasnost era media to be sensationalistic for the same reasons as Western reporting. The late Paul Klebnikov’s book on Boris Berezovsky (entiled “Godfather of the Kremlin”) is mentioned as an overkill. Some of Berezovsky’s alleged dubious activity has been reasonably challenged. At the same time, Berezovsky has not been low key, while being heavily involved with political activity; unlike some of the wealthier Russian tycoons. For these reasons, Klebnikov was not off base in writing about Berezovsky.

Organized Crime in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and Former Soviet Union – Michael Averko – June 12, 2008 – http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/64788

Heavily guarded Italian mob author Roberto Saviano, 28, poses for a photograph at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 in Toronto. Nathan Denette/National Post

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 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.

“It is not only an Italian problem, it is an international problem.”

Author a hit with Mafia – Adrian Humphreys, National Post – Published: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 – http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=497249

The title of this horrifying but gripping book derives not from some criminal variant of the Celtic tiger, but a suggestion that just as McDonald’s fast food outlets have spawned exponentially all over the world since the Nineties, so has the Mafia.

By the Mafia, Misha Glenny means any group of organised criminals, not just those with their roots in Sicily. Balkan cigarette smugglers, Nigerian internet phishers, Russian oligarchs, Chinese snakehead people-traffickers, South African drug lords, Bombay extortion-racketeers, Israeli money-launderers and Brazilian cyber-thieves are among the many who play their part in a complex network of links that the author estimates makes up nearly 20 per cent of global trade.

Glenny covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia for the BBC and he knows south eastern Europe well. Unsurprisingly, it is here that his account is at its most vivid and involving, perhaps because he retains some good contacts.

Elsewhere, however, there is a sense that he is just as much of a shocked tourist as the rest of us, and that much of his information comes from a whistle-stop tour and some careful reading.

There is a sense, too, as the book moves on from its starting point – the almost comical, state-trained Bulgarian strongmen – of the utter despair at the size of the problem: during the mid-Nineties the volume of trading on the currency markets exceeded $1 trillion a day, more than 40 times the value of daily global trade. Of course, some of this trading was legitimate, but much of it was merely money-laundering, as criminals sought to legitimise their ill-gotten gains by swapping them into another currency.

But where did all this money come from? In a word, Russia.

It began in 1992, when Boris Yeltsin abandoned 70 years of centralised planning by freeing all prices – except, crucially, oil, gas, diamonds and metals. This meant that a small group of traders could buy these goods from the state at the old price, and sell them abroad for more than 40 times as much.

Huge profits were made, most of which were spirited out of the country just as the IMF was trying to prop up Russia’s failing institutions.

Stark differences in wealth is one thing that typically excites criminal activity, but as these traders grew luridly wealthy, the state institutions collapsed around them, and services such as the KGB found themselves without prestige, money or purpose.

A supply of bored young men with guns is the other stimulus to crime, and soon the oligarchs needed bodyguards. In one shoot-out, the KGB found themselves up against men from the interior ministry, as the security services were effectively privatised, each arm guarding a different client.

These criminal practices did not arrive with capitalism, though. The Bulgarian secret service was just the most ruthless gang of smugglers in a region full of smugglers: they shipped an estimated 70 per cent of the heroin bound for the West, and when free enterprise was finally permitted in the country, 90 per cent of the new companies were set up by former state security men.

There are a few good news stories: thanks to hyper-inflation in Dagestan – a crazily violent Russian republic – a film director called Alexander Gentelev survived a shooting because the bullet lodged in the great wad of notes he was carrying in his chest pocket.

Glenny disapproves of this sort of activity, but you sense that he understands the perpetrators. He reserves his real disgust for the rulers of the United Arab Emirates, who, he suggests, have taken advantage of the deregulation of the capital markets to set up gruesomely unjust societies at the expense of the world’s taxpayers.

Although this is in many ways a depressing book, there is cause for hope.

If the Americans and the European Union acted in concert to close down these offshore tax havens, reintroduced some control of the money markets, and set up logical drug policies in the West, much of the money would be taken out of the system and the profits would not be there to attract the criminals.

Of course it would not be easy: the Americans are aggressively liberal with markets and illiberal with drugs, the Europeans are incompetent, the Russian cynical, the Indians and Chinese too ambitious.

But still.

The mafia are everywhere – Toby Clements reviews McMafia: Crime without Frontiers by Misha Glenny – Last Updated: 12:01am BST 18/04/2008 – telegraph.co.uk – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/04/12/bogle112.xml

For followers of crime drama, the word mafia might produce images of unspeakable violent acts and gun battles in the streets of major U.S. cities, reminiscent of scenes from “The Godfather” movies.

However, there is a different mafia functioning quietly yet successfully in the United States, and its operations could possibly be affecting every American either directly or indirectly.

This mafia, driven more by the desire to acquire money rather than territory, is collectively known as the Russian mafia, although those involved are from other post-Soviet countries as well, according to a new book by Joe Serio.

Serio, a criminal justice doctoral student at Sam Houston State University and project manager in the Correctional Management Institute of Texas, has spent almost 20 years studying Russian language, culture and crime.

The book, “Investigating the Russian Mafia,” is scheduled to be available today.

Serio will sign books Friday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Fat Boys Restaurant, located at 1932 Sam Houston Avenue in Huntsville.

Following the book signing, Serio will perform with The Mixed Review, a musical group with whom he plays the guitar and harmonica.

He taught himself how to play the harmonica while he lived in Moscow and played for a time with a Russian rock band.

“Oddly enough, in addition to playing in Moscow clubs I ended up playing private evenings for KGB agents,” Serio said. “What made it so bizarre was that on the one hand these guys were slitting throats in Afghanistan in the ’80s and now here they were enjoying my music.”

Serio lived in Russia for seven years. He first went to Russia in 1986 as a tourist. He returned the following year as a student in a Russian language school in Moscow.

In the early 1990s, he served an internship with the Soviet police prior to the collapse of the USSR.

Later, he became a security consultant to a global corporate investigation and business intelligence firm and served as director of the firm’s Moscow office overseeing investigations across the former Soviet Union.

While studying for his master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he was employed to work in the Office of International Criminal Justice at the university by Richard Ward.

Ward later came to Sam Houston State University as dean of the College of Criminal Justice and was recently named dean of the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences at the University of New Haven.

Ward was in the process of establishing relationships with law enforcement personnel around the world.

In 1989, he began a relationship with the Soviet police who sent two of their top organized crime officials to Chicago to meet with Ward.

They agreed to an exchange program and because Serio spoke Russian, he was selected to serve an internship at the Sixth Department for Organized Crime Control under the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow for a year.

It was during this time that he became interested in the Russian mafia.

In “Investigating the Russian Mafia,” Serio discusses how small cells within the organization have come to the United States to set up a white-collar version of organized crime.

“The circumstances under which they existed during Communist domination forced them to become expert manipulators,” said Serio, “and to them, America is a huge cookie jar of opportunities.”

Although groups are still involved in crimes such as human, drug and weapon trafficking, they have become especially good at crimes of fraud and deception.

“When they first arrive in the United States, they get as much documentation as they can and make themselves legal,” Serio said. “They set themselves up in respectable, legitimate professions then they conduct illegal activities such as filing false medical insurance claims and staging automobile accidents.”

During his research Serio discovered that according to a New York state official, every driver in New York pays an extra $200 a year for the privilege of driving because of insurance fraud.

“The Russian mafia is at the top of the list for orchestrating that outcome because of their activities,” Serio said.

So that no one is misled by the movie industry portrayal of the Russian mafia as crime lords only on the East and West coast of the United States, Serio said that indicators show they have activity in almost every state, including Texas.

He cites examples in his book of rural border activity as well as “big city” operations.

He points out that law enforcement officials are concerned about the organization, but because so much attention has been directed to Al-Qaeda and terrorism since 9/11, the Russian mafia hasn’t had near the focus that it did during the 1990s.

“The problem with organized crime in the 21st century is that these crime groups are starting to consolidate across the United States,” he said. “The Russians are joining the rest of the criminal world — not taking over.”

Serio said that while writing the book he had several audiences in mind, including college students and law enforcement officials.

“I hope that not only will it be understandable and enjoyable, but that it’s different from other books about the Russian mafia in that it explains how the organization developed in terms of history, culture and economics, as well as why it has been so successful in the modern world.”

New book investigates Russian mafia – By Julia May – SHSU News Service – Published: April 09, 2008 – http://www.itemonline.com/local/local_story_100231846.html

The letters of jailed Cosa Nostra boss Bernardo Provenzano are full of insights into his leadership style. The result could be a how-to manual for company directors. Clare Longrigg opens the mafiosi’s management handbook

They’re violent, they’re ruthless, they have caused misery to many, but you can’t fault their business sense: mafia bosses know how to make a profit. Its practices may be largely illegal, but Cosa Nostra is not as retrograde, or conservative, as it has often been portrayed. Its raison d’etre is profit. Like any business, it is pragmatic and constantly changing to exploit new opportunities.

Big business has learned how to sell itself to the public, with television shows such as The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den granting us a view of harsh but compellingly competitive environments. Businessmen such as Sir Alan Sugar, Duncan Bannatyne and Peter Jones have become unlikely media personalities. But the mafia has been using these methods for years.

When Bernardo Provenzano took over the organisation in the mid-90s, he inherited a depleted and demoralised workforce, who had scuppered their own access to politics and industry. The bombs that killed anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino had created a PR disaster and a law enforcement backlash. Hundreds of mafiosi were in prison, and many of them were so disillusioned with the organisation that they were telling the authorities everything they knew.

Magistrates and mafiosi agree: Provenzano was the charismatic force who revived the fortunes of Cosa Nostra. It has been said of Provenzano, as of so many mafia entrepreneurs, that had he turned his talents and resources to legitimate business, he would have been extremely successful. Fortunately, the mafia’s particular modus operandi – the use or threat of violence to create monopolies and price-fixing cartels – is not part of general business practice. But his “System” turned around a failing organisation with far-sighted tactics worthy of any business impresario. The fact that he wrote his reforms by letter means that we have what amounts to seven rules for running a successful business.

Rule 1: Submersion

When a company is failing, the first step is to take it below the radar. You want to lose that cursed epithet “troubled” as quickly as possible, even if it means disappearing from the business pages.”It’s the sensible thing to do – you bury your mistakes and get on with it,” says Peter Wallis (known as Peter York in his other guise, as a social commentator), management consultant at SRU Ltd. You also want to buy shareholders’ patience and convince them to hold their nerve and trust you.

“Our aim was to make Cosa Nostra invisible, giving us time to regroup,” recalled Provenzano’s lieutenant, Nino Giuffrè, who collaborated shortly after his arrest in 2002. After a series of power struggles that had left many dead, businessmen were understandably reluctant to return calls. Mafiosi were instructed to avoid any activity that would attract publicity. If a factory owner refused to pay protection, no one was to set fire to the machinery or blow up the trucks. Peaceful persuasion was the only way.

By contrast with the old-style system of shoot first and ask questions later, any hostile action would have to be thoroughly assessed for potential PR damage. “It was essential to weigh up whether a person could do more damage dead or alive,” revealed Giuffrè.

Announcing his system, Provenzano warned that recovery would take time: members might have to wait between five and seven years before they were making profits again. Rebuilding links with business and politicians could only be done out of the glare of publicity. In relative obscurity, Cosa Nostra would be repositioned to shake off its parasitic image and become part of the industrial and political institutions.

Rule 2: Mediation

“Be calm, clear, correct and consistent, turn any negative experiences to account, don’t dismiss everything people tell you, or believe everything you’re told. Always try to discover the truth before you speak, and remember that, to make your judgment, it’s never enough to have just one source of information.”

This letter has been described as “a manifesto of Cosa Nostra under Bernardo Provenzano”. After a decade of unspeakable violence under the previous leader, Totò Riina, Provenzano changed the culture of Cosa Nostra by instructing his men in the art of negotiation and the importance of dialogue.

Provenzano was decisive, and on occasion demanded swift and direct answers to his questions, but he could be a ditherer when it suited him. Playing for time, he encouraged his men to negotiate agreements between them. If that failed, Provenzano was at his typewriter night and day, offering his wisdom and experience (and just occasionally, a little double-dealing) to resolve disputes.

Like any company director, who carefully crafts his or her media persona, Provenzano didn’t want to come across as a tyrant, he wanted to be a “kindly dictator”. He coordinated the activities of different and competing groups, without imposing his will. He was the uncontested boss, but he gave the impression that his decisions were reached after long consultation.

Rule 3: Consensus

Provenzano answered letters from every level of society about job vacancies, exam results, local health and hospital administration. Like the charity work carried out by major corporations today, Provenzano was clear: the mafia must present itself as a positive element of society. The boss had to appear as a beneficent figure, an uncle whose advice and consent was sought on all matters – business and personal. He understood that persuading the people they need you is a far more effective way of promoting your business than imposition and violence.

“Let me know whatever [the people] need,” he wrote to his adviser, “they must expect nothing but good from us.”

One key step in the organisation’s recovery was recapturing the popular consensus. The mafia has always relied on the obedience (goodwill might be putting it too strongly) of the community. In the business of selling protection, social control is essential: if your “clients” unite and rebel, you’re in trouble.

Author Augusto Cavadi, 58, says his aim is to explain “everything you ever wanted to know about the Mafia but were afraid to ask.”

The guide, called “Mafia For Tourists”, costs £3.50 and has been published in English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish.

If you want to know what the chances of finding a horse’s head in your bed or whether the Godfather really looks like Marlon Brando then this is the book for you.

Cavadi explains the origins of Cosa Nostra on their island stronghold of Sicily and the grip the Mob has.

He explains what a Mafiosi looks like and whether it’s true that the Mafia won’t kill women, children or priests – which they have done in the past.

Philosophy professor Cavadi is a lecturer on the Mafia at Palermo University and is seen as an expert on the Mob.

He said: “For years I’ve been accompanying groups of tourists who choose to come here with the aim of understanding our land and our problems.

“They always ask me the same questions: the relationship between politics and the Mafia, and how it’s possible that we can’t get rid of the Mob when there are 5,000 of them and five million Sicilians.

“In general foreign and Italian tourists have a stereotyped view of the phenomenon and I wanted to help people understand something that is very difficult to simplify.

“Some teachers have asked me to distribute it in schools so that children can read it.

“Even though they live in Sicily, many have a distorted idea of the Mafia.”

The book has won praise from critics with one saying: “Whoever decides to visit Sicily always asks out of curiosity or fear about the Mafia.

“How do they react? What damage do they do? To these and frequent other questions this book answers honestly, intellectually without hiding the brutality of the Mafia – a stain that blackens a beautiful island.

“But at the same time is shoots down some of the unfounded myths that people may have when walking the streets.”

Within the last few years the Italian government has launched a concentrated effort on fighting the Mafia.

Two years ago Italy’s most wanted Godfather Bernardo Provenzano who had been on the run for more than 40 years was finally captured.

While in the last three months several senior Godfathers have also been captured but Provenzano’s replacement and the new Boss of Bosses Matteo Messina Denaro is still managing to elude the authorities.

At the back of Cavadi’s book is recommended list of films on the Mafia which includes the Brando classic The Godfather.

The new Italian guidebook ‘Mafia For Tourists’ flies off the shelves – Last updated at 12:23pm on 13th March 2008 – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=533130&in_page_id=1811

In this absorbing collection of tales about the Mafia in Sicily, most taken from Italian fiction but a significant few from the personal experiences of real people, “life” emerges as the winner over “literature.” Measured in drama and in acts of remarkable bravery, the stories told in their own words by a handful of Sicilian women who dared to resist the Mafia are far more compelling and tragic than anything dreamed up by the novelists and short story writers.

Robin Pickering-Iazzi, the woman who put the book together, teaches French, Italian and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She knows her way around Italian literature and in the book, she draws on excerpts from novels and from journalism written as far back as 1884 and as recently as the 1990s to track the activities of the Mafia and other organized Italian brigands.

The Mafia, we learn, emerged in Sicily in the early 19th century as the henchmen for absentee landlords. As the owners of mammoth estates, the landlords leased their properties to middlemen who put the local peasants to work on the lands. The leaseholders employed thugs in the area to keep watch over the peasants, and it was the thugs who morphed over time into the Mafia.

Giving the broadest interpretation to their mandate, the early Mafioso generated profits for themselves as well as for the owners. Violence became their modus operandi. The occasional murder of an innocent field worker accomplished wonders in squeezing the peasants for a regular profit. In no time, the Mafia was in business for the long haul.

Any notion that they operated as a Latin version of Robin Hood and his Merry Men is revealed in the book to be entirely false. The Mob guys preyed on the weakest members of Sicilian society, not excluding women and children. Even later, when the Mafia matured into other business interests – kidnapping, hits for hire, drugs – they continued to make victims of Sicily’s little kids.

The only national leader who made even small progress in standing up to the Mafia was none other than Benito Mussolini. Il Duce’s beef with the Mob men was that their loyalty to the Mob conflicted with the absolute obedience to the fascist state, which Mussolini demanded of all Italians. Not long after he came to power in 1923, he travelled to Sicily and announced a war on the Mob.

Though the Mafia survived the Mussolini regime, he cut into their profits in one lucrative area. In 1925, Mussolini abolished all elections as unnecessary frills in a dictatorship. That was bad news for the Sicilian Mafioso, not because they were ardent democrats but because trafficking in votes to the highest bidder represented a reliable cash stream.

But nobody, not even Mussolini, resisted the Mafia for long. That’s a home truth, apparently as accurate today as it was two centuries ago. This makes the true stories of three contemporary Sicilian women, which Pickering-Iazzi places at the end of her book, all the more amazing. The women talk about their lives with the Mafia in court testimony, in diaries and in interviews, and each document is a testament to courage beyond anyone’s imagining:

Maria Saladino devoted her life to Sicily’s children. In the atmosphere of terror generated by the Mafia, kids suffered unspeakable misery, little girls raped by their fathers and sold by their mothers. Saladino opened centres where children now get protection, education and hope. Surviving Mafia opposition, Saladino has still not come to terms with one blight on her selfless life: She is haunted by the guilty knowledge of her own father’s career as a Mafioso.

Another of the women, Felicia Impastato, married into a Mafia family. She was at first indifferent to her in-laws’ criminal activities, but years later, when her son, an anti-Mafia activist, was murdered by the Mob in 1978, Felicia changed course. Ignoring the traditional omerta required of everyone with Mafia connections, she furnished information to three magistrates, eventually bringing about the conviction of her son’s murderer. After the trials, Felicia was left alone, too old to bother killing, but the Mob showed its undiminished muscle by murdering two of the three magistrates.

The third of the incredible women, Rita Atria, grew up in a Mafia family in the Sicilian town of Partanna. It was a home of arguing and abuse, the father beating the mother, the mother getting her licks in on Rita and her older brother and sister.

In 1991, when Rita’s brother, by then a Mafioso himself, died in warfare between two Mob factions, she collaborated in the prosecution of the Mafia killers.

To protect her, the prosecutors hid Rita in a witness protection program in Rome. Rita doubted whether any program was beyond the reach of the Mafia.

“I could go away to the tiniest corner of the world and crawl inside forever,” she wrote in her diary, “but if they wanted to, they would find me and kill me.”

In the spring and summer of 1992, the Mafia murdered two of the magistrates on the cases in which Rita’s testimony played a large role (one of the magistrates was also central to Felicia Impastato’s case).

Later in 1992, apparently in despair over the magistrates’ deaths, Rita jumped from the seventh floor of her safe house in Rome. When she died, Rita was 22 years old. The Mafia had stolen her childhood and then, at the end, they took Rita Atria’s life.
Jack Batten is a Toronto author, novelist and freelance writer. His Whodunit appears every two weeks.

They challenged the Mafia – Mar 09, 2008 04:30 AM – Jack Batten – http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/Books/article/326559