Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia [Hardcover]

'...strength of Gomorrah lies in the angry passion with which he denounces the grip of organised crime.'

`a superb piece of investigative reporting ... Saviano is without question a winning young man with real potential as a writer'

`Every so often, when reading Saviano's book you have to pause, and remember he is writing not about some war-torn African territory or former communist state, but about life in a big city in a rich nation in western Europe; a founder-member of the European Union; a favourite destination for low-cost flyers, and a country whose affairs are increasingly - and, Saviano suggests, dangerously - bound up with ours.'

'One of the most enthralling and disturbing books written on organised crime ... the great value of Gomorrah is to highlight two points: the power and wealth that southern Italy's Mafias have accumulated in recent years, and the fact that their globalisation makes them an issue of concern for us all. His description of the effects of gang war on ordinary people ("Women stop wearing high heels--too hard to run in them") is masterly. His final chapter, set in the apocalyptic wilderness of the Camorra's smouldering waste dumps, is inspired -- and prescient, as the garbage crisis in Naples unfolds'

'Part economic analysis, part social history, part cri de coeur, this crushing testimonial is the most important book to come out of Italy'

`This brave account of the most organised of all Italy's crime fraternities demands respect. Saviano's devastating account of his homeland is highly emotional: unlike many, perhaps older and wearier, Italian journalists, he still feels personally outraged by what he sees. His descriptions of the lawless violent world of Naples are both gritty and sentimental, a poetry of cruelty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since the book came out, he has been threatened by the clans and now has a police escort for his own safety'

`A brave expose of the gangland hell that is tearing Naples apart. A powerful work of reportage, Gomorrah became a literary sensation when it appeared in Italy last year. 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. Part economic analysis, part social history, part cri de coeur, this crushing testimonial is the most important book to come out of Italy in years. Like Conrad's London, Saviano's Naples is one of the world's dark places. He tugged a loose thread in the fabric of Italian bourgeois respectability and pulling until nothing was left. I could not get this brave book out of my head. After reading Gomorrah, it becomes impossible to see Italy, and the global market, in the same way again'

'Roberto Saviano's horrifying book paints organised crime as it really is. Forget Vito Corleone; forget Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. The ruthless Camorra gangs that control modernday Naples exert a malign influence on every area of the Italian economy, from fashion to drug-dealing, from sanitation to refuse collection and from construction to hospitality ... as an insight into a terrifying world by a remarkable investigative journalist, it is riveting' Mail on Sunday

'An extraordinarily powerful book. With its pages of gritty reportage and low-life legwork, Gomorrah recreates a truly evil sense of menace. The book has been a huge bestseller in Italy. Saviano, however, has incurred the wrath of the Camorra for naming names, and is now under police protection. Naples, one-time Arcady of Bourbon kings and queens, emerges here as disaffected, dying. If you love this city, as I do, Gomorrah will fill you with dismay'

'Read this important book, and you will appreciate why Italy is still a country that needs heroes like him'

A dangerous, politically explosive international literary sensation

Roberto Saviano's groundbreaking and utterly compelling book is a major international bestseller, and has to date sold over 1 million copies in Italy alone, where it continues to sell strongly two years after original publication. Since publishing his searing expose of their criminal activities, the author has received so many death threats from the Camorra that he has been assigned police protection. Known by insiders as 'the System', the Camorra, an organized crime network with a global reach and large stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs and toxic-waste disposal, exerts a malign grip on cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast is the deciding factor in why Campania has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and why cancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years. In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer and on a construction site, both controlled by 'the System', and as a waiter at a Camorra wedding. Born in Naples, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to help an eighteen-year-old victim, left for dead in the street. Gomorrah is both a bold and engrossing piece of investigative writing and one heroic young man's impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.

Roberto Saviano was born in Naples, where he still lives, and studied philosophy at university. This is his first book. He is a regular contributor to L'Espresso and La Repubblica and to a number of foreign magazines and newspapers, such as Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and Time.

Part One

The Port

The container swayed as the crane hoisted it onto the ship. The spreader, which hooks the container to the crane, was unable to control its movement, so it seemed to float in the air. The hatches, which had been improperly closed, suddenly sprang open and dozens of bodies started raining down. They looked like manikins. But when they hit the ground their heads split open, as if their skulls were real. And they were. Men, women, even a few children, came tumbling out of the container. All dead. Frozen, stacked one on top of another, packed like sardines. These were the Chinese who never die. The eternal ones, who trade identity papers among themselves. So this is where they'd ended up, the bodies that in the wildest fantasies might have been cooked in Chinese restaurants, buried in fields beside factories, or tossed into the mouth of Vesuvius. Here they were. Spilling from the container by the dozen, their names scribbled on tags and tied with string around their necks. They'd all put aside money so they could be buried in China, back in their hometown, a percentage withheld from their salary to guarantee their return voyage once they were dead. A space in a container and a hole in some strip of Chinese soil. The port crane operator covered his face with his hands as he told me about it, eying me through his fingers. As if the mask of his hands might give him the courage to speak. He'd seen the bodies fall, but there'd been no need to sound the alarm or alert someone. He merely lowered the container to the ground, and dozens of people appeared out of nowhere to put everyone back inside and hose down the remains. That's how it went. He still couldn't believe it, and hoped he was hallucinating, due to too much overtime. Then he closed his fingers, completely covering his eyes. He kept on whimpering, but I couldn't understand what he was saying.

Everything that exists passes through here. Through the port of Naples. There's not a product, fabric, piece of plastic, toy, hammer, shoe, screwdriver, bolt, videogame, jacket, pair of pants, drill, or watch that doesn't come through the port. The port of Naples is an open wound. The endpoint for the interminable voyage that merchandise makes. Ships enter the gulf and come to the dock like babies to the breast, except that they're here to be milked, not fed. The port of Naples is the hole in the earth out of which what's made in China comes. The Far East, as reporters still like to call it. Far. Extremely far. Practically unimaginable. Closing my eyes I see kimonos, Marco Polo's beard, Bruce Lee kicking in midair. But in fact this East is more closely linked to the port of Naples than to any other place. There's nothing far about the East here. It should be called the extremely near East, the least East. Everything made in China is poured out here. Like a bucket of water dumped into a hole in the sand. The water eats the sand, and the hole gets bigger and deeper. The port of Naples handles twenty percent of the value of textile imports from China, but more than seventy percent of the quantity. It's a bizarre thing, hard to understand, yet merchandise possesses a rare magic; it manages both to be and not to be, to arrive without ever reaching its destination, to cost the customer a great deal despite its poor quality, and to have little tax value in spite being worth a huge amount. The fact is that textiles fall under quite a few product classifications, and a mere stroke of the pen on the shipping manifest can radically lower price and VAT. In the silence of the port's black hole, the molecular structure of merchandise seems to break down, only to recompose once it gets beyond the perimeter of the coast. Goods have to leave the port immediately. Everything happens so quickly that they disappear in the process, evaporate as if they'd never existed. As if nothing had happened, as if it had all been simply an act. An imaginary voyage, a false landing, a phantom ship, evanescent cargo. Goods need to arrive in the buyer's hands without leaving any dribbling to mark their route, they have to reach their warehouse quickly, right away, before time can even begin - time that might allow for an inspection. Hundreds of pounds of merchandise move as if they were a package hand-delivered by the mailman. In the port of Naples - 330 acres spread out along seven miles of coastline - time undergoes unique expansions and contractions. Things that take an hour elsewhere seem to happen here in less than a minute. Here the proverbial slowness that makes the Neapolitan's every move molasses-like is quashed, confuted, negated. The ruthless swiftness of Chinese merchandise overruns the temporal dimension of customs inspections, killing time itself. A massacre of minutes, a slaughter of seconds stolen from the records, chased by truck accelerators, hurried along by cranes, helped by forklifts that disembowel the containers.