Ian Fisher
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 Mr. Saviano, 28, has been forced to live in hiding under state protection, a sort of Salman Rushdie in Italy’s still unresolved struggle against organized crime.
The distaste is mutual.
“I have always hated them, a personal hatred, not just an intellectual one,” Mr. Saviano said in the safety of his publisher’s office here, 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 have been killed in the area where he grew up, outside Naples, since he was born in 1979.
“I know where to hit them to make them angry,” he added.
Mr. 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: “Gomorrah,” a biblical wordplay invoking sin and degeneracy. 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 “Gomorrah” (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore) went beyond expectations. It sold 750,000 copies here and was just released in the United States, partly because of the way Mr. Saviano wrote it: it is a literary scream that names names, of the killers and the killed, in a style inspired by the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s broad unflinching criticism of Italy and by Truman Capote’s devotion to dirty detail.
“When you die on the street, you’re surrounded by a tremendous racket,” he writes, describing one of scores of slayings he bumped into as a teenager in the town of Casal di Principe, then went out seeking as an adult researching his book. “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 here to Mr. 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, though Mr. Saviano did not attend the opening for security reasons. But with the strong desire in Italy to shed its identification with organized crime, the book cut too close to truth to make him a popular man here.
“No one will forgive me for what I did,” he said in the interview. “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. It is as though I had reduced Italy only to the part of it that is criminal. I don’t think I did that.”
RECENT news seems to support Mr. Saviano’s view of the pervasiveness of the mob: In late October, Italy’s small-business group reported that mob activity accounted for the single largest sector of the nation’s economy. In August, six Italians linked to the ’Ndrangheta, an elusive crime group from Italy’s far south, were killed in Germany — a possibly foreboding expansion of what the group considers its turf.
Mr. Saviano believes that the Camorra — though views differ, he counts it as more powerful than the Mafia or ’Ndrangheta — remains as centrally integrated into life here 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 organization that has unjustly “taken second or third billing” compared with the Mafia.“What the book does so well is to remind people, as if it 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 organized 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 modeled on a Camorra boss, though he was portrayed as Sicilian in the book. The real Lucky Luciano dropped dead of a heart attack in the Naples airport. John Gotti’s family was not from Sicily but from a town near Naples, as was Tony Soprano’s.
In his book, researched in part by his taking small odd jobs connected to the mob, Mr. Saviano documents the Camorra’s recent history, detailing more than just the expected, like its reach in drugs, extortion, high fashion, shipping (increasingly with Chinese gangs) and politics. He shows other connections, like how Tuscany stays eco-lovely and full of tourists by shipping its trash 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.
“People of my age who decide to enter the clan do it less at first for money or power than for fashion, for women, to be a real man,” he said. “Because they teach you at an early age how to live with death.”
MR. 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, Mr. 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 best-selling book, was apparently not happy.
“I can’t feel afraid, but this could be one of my limitations,” Mr. 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 in which Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 “Gomorrah.” He has no regular home. With Italian crime globalized to a degree that its legitimate businesses are not, when he leaves Italy his bodyguards go, too.
“I have become a type of symbol for them,” he said. “I am responsible for all the attention on them.”
But now, he said, “If they strike, they will have to spill a lot of blood.”
On the bright side, “Gomorrah” is reportedly the most requested book in Italian jails.
