Nov 25 2007
The pen is mightier than the mob
ROBERTO Saviano jokes that he has a mobster’s face, which, if true, has done nothing to endear him to the real criminals he writes about. They despise him, so much so that Saviano, 28, has been forced to live in hiding under state protection, a sort of Salman Rushdie in Italy’s still unresolved struggle against organised crime.
The distaste is mutual. “I have always hated them, a personal hatred, not just an intellectual one,” Saviano said in the safety of his publisher’s office in Rome, with his three well-armed police bodyguards waiting outside on the street. “It is a very personal hatred because they ruined my country, forced people to emigrate, killed honest people.”
By his count, 3,600 people have been killed in the area where he grew up, outside Naples, since his birth in 1979.
“I know where to hit them to make them angry,” he added.
Saviano became famous in Italy after the 2006 release of his first book, an up-close account of the inner workings of the Camorra, the crime group that has operated around Naples for more than a century. The title was provocative: Gomorra. The subject was notable: little has been written about the Camorra, whereas books and films about the Sicilian Mafia have flourished for many decades.
But Gomorra went beyond expectations. It sold 750,000 copies in Italy and is being released in the United States.
“When you die on the street, you’re surrounded by a tremendous racket,” Saviano writes, describing one of scores of slayings he bumped into as a teenager in the town of Casal di Principe. “It’s not true that you die alone. Unfamiliar faces right in front of your nose, people touching your legs and arms to see if you’re already dead or if it’s worth calling an ambulance.
“All the faces of the seriously wounded, all the expressions of the dying, seem to share the same fear. And the same shame. It may seem strange, but in the instant before death there is a sort of shame or humiliation.”
Shame has been no small part of the complicated reaction in Italy to Saviano and his book, despite its ongoing success. It has sold well in translation around Europe, notably in France and Germany. A movie in Italian is being filmed, and a stage version has opened in Naples. But with the strong desire in Italy to shed its identification with organised crime, the book is too close to the truth to make him a popular man.
“No one will forgive me for what I did,” he says. “I gave attention to a world that creates problems for the honest part of my country. And also some of the honest ones in my country hate me because I spoke of crime.”
Recent news seems to support Saviano’s view of the pervasiveness of the mob: Italy’s small business group reports that mob activity accounts for the single largest sector of the nation’s economy.
Saviano believes that the Camorra remains as centrally integrated into life as ever, a dark and never-purged mirror image of Italy.
Alexander Stille, a professor of journalism at Columbia who wrote one of the most respected books on Italy’s struggle with the Sicilian Mafia, Excellent Cadavers, called the book “very important” for shedding light on an organisation that has unjustly “taken second or third billing” compared with the Mafia.
“What the book does so well is to remind people, as if they needed reminding, that a third of the country is essentially condemned to a state of permanent underdevelopment because of the persistent, and in many ways increasing, dominance of organised crime,” he said.
The Camorra is not as well known as the Sicilian Mafia, but much of the lore and romance of mob life was born around Naples. Don Corleone of The Godfather was modelled on a Camorra boss, though he was portrayed as Sicilian in the book. The real Lucky Luciano, seen by many as the man who invented the concept of ‘the Mob’, dropped dead of a heart attack in Naples Airport in 1962. The family of New York crime boss John Gotti was not from Sicily but from a town near Naples, as was TV mobster Tony Soprano’s.
In his book, researched in part by taking small odd jobs connected to the mob, Saviano documents the Camorra’s recent history, detailing more than just the expected, such as its reach in drugs, extortion, high fashion, shipping (increasingly with Chinese gangs) and politics.
He shows other connections, such as how Tuscany stays eco-lovely and full of tourists by shipping its rubbish south illegally, or how money is rarely the first thing on a young mobster’s mind. One chapter is called ‘Women’; another ‘Hollywood’, about how mobsters imitate movies as much as movies imitate them.
Saviano is very much a child of southern Italy, poorer and less developed than the north, drained over nearly a century of people who gave up on Italy to find life elsewhere. His joke about having a mobster’s face, with his shadowy eyes and stubble, is not far off the mark. He wears the three rings traditional to the area - for the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
The son of a doctor, Saviano says he too learned the mobster’s talent for living with death, growing up in Casal di Principe, home of one of the top Camorra bosses, where he stumbled across his first body in his early teenage years on the way to school. That has served him well over the last year, after the threats started coming. The Camorra, suddenly the topic of a bestselling book, were apparently not happy.
“I can’t feel afraid, but this could be one of my limitations,” Saviano said. “It’s as if the continuous telling of things, observing things, has perhaps blocked my fear.”
Amid other threats as the book gained popularity - and after an appearance in his hometown during which Saviano publicly challenged Camorra bosses by name, earning both praise for bravery and criticism for being either self-promoting or suicidal - some camorristi were wiretapped discussing Saviano’s “destiny”.
“What’s required is a public intervention by the state,” Umberto Eco, perhaps Italy’s most prominent author, wrote at the time. “Let’s not leave Saviano alone.”
Now Saviano is never far from his three guards. As he ponders a second book, possibly on crime in Mexico, he knows he will not have the same freedom to report as he did for Gomorra. He has no regular home. With Italian crime globalised to a degree that its legitimate businesses are not, when he leaves Italy his bodyguards will go too.
Writing their way into hiding and exile
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
In 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his writings, which uncovered the brutality of the Soviet prison camp system.
Four years later, after The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union. He was only allowed to return 20 years later after the fall of Communism.
SIR SALMAN RUSHDIE
Sir Salman provoked the wrath of many Muslims who felt his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, was blasphemous about Islam. Copies of the book were burned on the streets of Bradford, West Yorkshire, and the author was forced into hiding after Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa - or religious edict - calling for his death.
Earlier this year, Osama bin Laden’s number two warned Gordon Brown that al-Qaeda would attack Britain again in retaliation for awarding a knighthood to Rushdie.
The pen is mightier than the mob - IAN FISHER IN ROME - Sun 25 Nov 2007 - http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1849852007
