Rippling with the anger of an avenging angel
There is a criminal organisation in southern Italy with more power than the Mafia. Jim Butler follows one journalist's attempts to get to the heart of this conspiracy
11 April 2008

The streets of Naples following a Camorra attack

More than anything - more than the vivid depictions of violence and the casual treachery described within its pages, more even than the mind-boggling economic corruption it reveals - Gomorrah is a book of names. They come in torrents, their bearers making such brief appearances before being deposed or shamed or slain that the effect is a kind of vertigo. Not only does this sensation aptly convey the immoral whirlpool that Roberto Saviano depicts as modern Naples, it is also the reason that the author is now in such danger that he lives in hiding, accompanied by an armed guard wherever he goes.

Less famous than the Cosa Nostra of Sicily or the Ndrangheta of the Italian south, the clans that make up the Neapolitan Camorra nevertheless operate on a scale and with a ruthless ambition that makes their rivals pale in comparison. According to police investigations, they run 50 per cent of all businesses in Naples; 71 of the 92 municipal administrations have been dissolved since 1991 because of clan infiltration, some more than once. Over the course of four years the clans and their middlemen made €44bn (£35bn) by horrifically abusing waste management contracts - yet such figures barely summarise the reach and intent of the Camorra's domination. So, with a cool, angry eye and scalpel-like assurance, Saviano digs deeper, naming names, exposing the city's rotten underbelly, the gross obviousness that has long been ignored as Naples turned itself into a pillar of the global economy, "the darkness where the beating heart of the market gets its energy".

The Camorra, Saviano explains, make their money by controlling the narcotics, textile, construction and refuse industries, operating more like business committees than stereotypical clan conventions.

Yet some things remain constant. In Naples, with its ineffective administration and endemic criminal infrastructure, "cruelty is the most complex and affordable strategy for becoming a successful businessman".

As Gomorrah unfolds and the bodies pile up, our indignation grows with the author's - partly because Saviano has a novelist's eye for the telling detail; he describes how, as the gang wars progress, the tires of the mortuary van are worn smooth and the women no longer wear heels so they can run. Yet such observations allow the city's unwilling civilian participants to understand what is really happening. "There are no invasions," Saviano says of these conflicts, "no skies darkened with planes. It's a war you feel inside. They say the Camorra war is fought among gangs, that they kill off each other. But no one knows who's them and who's not."

Perhaps the most dominant clan of the last decade has been the Di Lauros, a suave, brutal Neapolitan dynasty responsible for revolutionising the way the European narcotics industry is organised. In direct contact with the South American barons - and controlling the trade routes through Europe via their alliance with the Albanian cartels - by the early 2000s the Di Lauros were employing thousands of individuals across Europe and invoicing €500,000 a day. What they effected was a deregulation of the marketplace on the scale of a government department. Traditionally, the clans controlled the quality, quantity and street value of their products, whereas the Di Lauros allowed their subsidiaries to operate as autonomous businesses, free to set their own prices and advertise how and where they chose. This liberalisation caused prices to drop, and even changed the face of drug use: between 1999 and 2002, as this restructuring took effect, cocaine consumption in Italy soared by 80 per cent. Doctors, pilots and journalists all had their own supply circles, and dealing became "a friendly exchange, more like a Tupperware party, far removed from any criminal structures".

There is a fine line, though, between evolution and extinction. As Saviano notes: "You pay with prison or your skin for the power to decide people's lives or deaths, promote a product, monopolise a slice of the economy." The freedom the clan gave their associates later became a threat; they realised that as soon as a group gathered enough organisational and military force, they'd give their bosses "the big shove, the one you don't get up from, a shove with lead in it". In response, the Di Lauros decided to re-regulate the business and put everyone on a salary. This sudden curtailment of freedom sparked a long and bloody war that, in perhaps the finest section of the book, Saviano charts with a kind of appalled rigour. The author haunts crime scenes daily, even as he wonders why he is there, zipping around the city on his moped, following the trails of blood, unable to shake off the feeling that it is he who is bleeding. "Neutrality and objective distance are things I've never been able to find," he says, and it is his search for precisely such things, immaculately failing to find them as his prose ripples with the anger of an avenging angel, that makes Gomorrah so engrossing.

At stray intervals in the text he comes up against the ghost of himself, the person he could have been, a Neapolitan son drawn down the only two paths seemingly open to the young men of the region: become a Camorrista or a failure.

Yet in setting down his account, miraculously, he has found a third way. At its best, his is an eternal voice, the same that spoke through Emile Zola in his J'accuse on the Dreyfus Affair, and that with which Pier Paolo Pasolini denounced the Christian Democrats in his front-page declamation: "I Know".

In Gomorrah what comes through is the quiet fury of one whose homeland has been ravaged, the burden of knowledge that won't be silenced. "I know how economies originate and where they get their odour," Saviano writes savagely in his conclusion. "The proofs are irrefutable because they are partial, recorded with my eyes, recounted with words, and tempered with emotions that have echoed off iron and wood. I see, hear, look, talk, and in this way I testify, an ugly word that can still be useful when it whispers, 'It's not true,' in the ear of those who listen to the rhyming lullabies of power."

With those same ears now surely ringing - Gomorrah has sold 1.2m copies in Italy alone, and has been translated into 42 languages - the questions remain whether anything will change, and for Roberto Saviano, with his life now as restricted as those of the Camorristi he describes, whether his defiance was worth it.

Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano, Pan Macmillan £16.99