A young Ital­ian laments how Naples has fallen under the sway of bru­tal mobsters.

Antony Shugaar

Think of Italy — the world’s seventh-largest econ­omy — and sleek Fer­raris, Armani suits, wine, food and tourism come to mind. But in Octo­ber, an Ital­ian busi­ness asso­ci­a­tion reported that the largest sec­tor of the country’s econ­omy is orga­nized crime, account­ing for an esti­mated 7 per­cent of its gross domes­tic prod­uct. That’s $127 bil­lion, more than twice the annual rev­enue of Microsoft. To put flesh on that unset­tling X-ray of Ital­ian life, read Roberto Saviano’s aston­ish­ing Gomor­rah. The book is sub­ti­tled “A Per­sonal Jour­ney Into the Vio­lent Inter­na­tional Empire of Naples’ Orga­nized Crime Sys­tem,” and both per­sonal and vio­lent it is. Saviano’s tour of his native Naples shows us the heart of what can only be called a com­pany town for orga­nized crime, with indus­trial tox­ins in great abun­dance. The title Gomor­rah is a ref­er­ence to the Camorra, Naples’ coun­ter­part to Sicily’s better-known Mafia. The Gomorrah-Camorra pun — even more pun­gent in the orig­i­nal Neapoli­tan, which soft­ens C’s to G’s — comes from a eulogy for a priest who took on the Camorra and paid with his life. “The whole land is brim­stone, and salt, and burn­ing,” declared the mourner, curs­ing the Camorra with a bib­li­cal metaphor for all-encompassing evil. Saviano gal­lops straight into the maw of the inferno, using a hard-boiled style that has only begun to take root in Ital­ian media. Naples is where he grew up, the Neapoli­tans are his peo­ple, and while the eye­wit­ness accounts he brings to the page — sto­ries of mur­der­ous bar­bar­ity and dev­as­tat­ing debase­ment — could have been told by one of Dashiell Hammett’s chilly pro­tag­o­nists, Saviano is no cold-blooded cynic. If there is a lit­er­ary model at work here, it might be the Lamen­ta­tions of Jere­miah. The set­ting for the first ghastly scene is the immense Molo Bau­san, a con­tainer ter­mi­nal on the Naples water­front with mer­chan­dise stacked high on the quay. A crane oper­a­tor looks down in hor­ror as a refrig­er­ated con­tainer sway­ing at the end of his cable pops open, pour­ing dozens of bod­ies onto the cement below. (They are dead immi­grants, being shipped home to China for bur­ial.) Fur­ther hor­ror comes moments later, when he low­ers the con­tainer to the ground and dozens of work­ers appear, quickly pack the bod­ies back in the con­tainer and hose down the cement. Work then resumes as usual. Many of Saviano’s most aston­ish­ing set pieces are like dio­ra­mas from some lurid museum. There are mur­ders, mur­ders with tor­ture, dis­posal of bod­ies (inge­nious tech­niques that verge on folk­ways: bod­ies tossed into wells, fol­lowed by a grenade to bury them under tons of silt), extor­tion, gang wars and a teem­ing drug cul­ture pop­u­lated by zombie-junkies that make parts of Naples seem like scenes from “Night of the Liv­ing Dead.” The book’s use of vignettes reflects the fact that much of the report­ing that went into it appeared first as arti­cles in the Ital­ian press. And as the sub­ti­tle sug­gests, the book is intensely per­sonal: The author inter­sperses eye­wit­ness accounts of Camorra killings with time spent with his father and friends or, less per­sua­sively, descrip­tions of his own phys­i­cal reac­tions to the things he wit­nesses: “I could feel the blood swelling the veins in my neck, flood­ing my chest, I was out of breath, inhal­ing all the air I could and then exhal­ing hard, like a bull.” Still, Gomor­rah is grip­ping. To point out that there are 45 cities in Europe with higher mur­der rates seems churl­ish. After all, this is a per­sonal voy­age through the hor­rors of a beau­ti­ful, once civil city now under the con­trol of a vicious orga­nized crime sys­tem that, observers agree, makes the Sicil­ian Mafia seem the very pic­ture of restrained sta­bil­ity. Saviano first began report­ing on the Camorra as an ana­lyst for a cit­i­zen watch­dog group. This puts him squarely in the activist-journalism tra­di­tion of, say, George Orwell’s Homage to Cat­alo­nia. Saviano openly acknowl­edges the influ­ence of both left-wing the­o­rist Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mafia-fighting judge and mar­tyr Gio­vanni Fal­cone. He also exhibits the pas­sion and hero­ism of a young man (he was born in 1979). His work has brought him death threats and, in turn, police pro­tec­tion — though not until Umberto Eco made a pub­lic appeal for the gov­ern­ment to take action. Gomor­rah was awarded the pres­ti­gious Ital­ian Viareg­gio lit­er­ary prize in 2006, and no doubt the Ital­ian ver­sion is pow­er­ful and assured. But as a trans­la­tor and a reader, I found numer­ous inept ren­der­ings, mis­takes that could only baf­fle most read­ers, and that cer­tainly give the impres­sion of a loose­ness in style not present in the Ital­ian. The police here “sequester” prop­erty — a lit­eral mir­ror­ing of the Ital­ian — instead of con­fis­cat­ing it. Mur­der­ous work is called “killer work,” which sounds like very nice work indeed. Ital­ian sol­diers don’t wear com­bat boots, they wear “amphib­ians” — an enigma if you don’t know that the Ital­ian for army boots is “anfibio.” Most galling of all, when mob killers “empty a clip” into a vic­tim, they invari­ably “unload a charger,” again mir­ror­ing the Ital­ian “svuotare un car­i­ca­tore.” Instead of mur­der­ing in cold blood, they seem to be sell­ing a used Dodge to some unsus­pect­ing sucker. This book deserved much better.