Not the only ones with a problem

To the average tourist, or even the devoted Italophile, the Italy of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah is an utterly unrecognizable place. There is no Renaissance art, no leisurely lunches or bustling piazzas, no world-class design, no achingly beautiful landscapes. Instead, we find an alien land of doped-up child soldiers, gun-toting clan women, illegal Chinese immigrants, sweatshops, drug smuggling, garbage and cement.

This is Campania, the region whose capital is Naples and pulsing heart the Camorra, or Neapolitan mafia. Thanks to the Camorra — the book’s title is a dark play on words — Campania has one of the highest murder rates in Europe, one of the world’s highest ratios of drug dealers to inhabitants, soaring levels of unemployment and cocaine addiction, and elevated cancer rates linked to toxic waste dumping. Since 1979, 3,600 people have died at the hands of the Camorra — more than have been killed by the Sicilian Mafia, the Irish Republican Army or the Basque group ETA. Just last month, the pope made a special visit to Naples to denounce the 'deplorable' violence in the region, the result of continuing drug wars between rival clans. The dead do not leave this world peaceably. In Gomorrah, bodies are decapitated with circular saws, strangled slowly, drowned in mud, tossed down wells with live grenades, shot point blank near a statue of Padre Pio. A young priest who dared speak out is murdered and posthumously accused of cavorting with whores. Even after death, Saviano writes, “you are guilty until proven innocent.”

A powerful work of reportage, Gomorrah became a literary sensation when it appeared in Italy last year, selling an astonishing 600,000 copies. It started a national conversation, but also won its 28-year-old first-time author uglier accolades: death threats and a constant police escort. He now lives in hiding. The stakes are high. In Gomorrah, Saviano charts the Camorra’s involvement in the garment industry and its grip on the port of Naples, where 1.6 million tons of Chinese merchandise are unloaded a year — and another million pass through without a trace, evading taxes. In mapping out the Camorra’s control over garbage and industrial waste removal, as well as drug dealing, construction and public works fraud, Saviano considers human rights indicators (the price of an AK-47 is low in Campania), and economic ones (in the 1990s, the Mercedes sales in one Campania town were among the highest in Europe). Drawing on trial transcripts and his own reporting, he explains the internecine battles between rival factions of the Di Lauro clan for control of the region’s drug trade.