Lead Review (Gomorrah)
- Book: Gomorrah
- Location: Naples
- Author: Roberto Saviano, Virginia Jewiss (translator)
We spent a few days in Naples a couple of months ago. Sightseeing, plus a base for trips to Pompeii and Herculaneum, and a setting off point for the Amalfi Coast. An amazing city, full of faded grandeur, a delightful ‘old town’, and some amazing food (yes, we did eat pizza – but much more besides). We were there the week after Napoli had won Serie A, and the whole city was buzzing. We stayed in an Airbnb in a newly gentrified area just up from the Archaeological Museum. What was not to like?
I had, of course, heard of the Neapolitan mafia (the Camorra), but didn’t know that much about them. Back in the UK I decided to find out more. The go-to book is Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano. In the early 2000s a young Roberto was living in Naples and fascinated by the workings of the Camorra. He wrote a book exposing the organisation in great detail. Published to global acclaim in 2006, the book has left Roberto – 17 years later – with a price on his head and under 24 hour police protection. He debates the wisdom of what he did and the impact it has had on his life.
The book is a quite shocking account of greed and brutality. It opens in Naples port when a container being loaded onto a ship bursts open and dozens of frozen Chinese bodies spill out. The people who used to live in the bodies had saved for years to be transported after their death back to China for burial in their ancestral lands. The bodies were loaded back into the container – presumably to be dumped at sea.
Naples port is vast. Roberto got a job working for a low level Camorra boss involved in smuggling goods in through the port. The numbers were staggering. 1.6m tons a year of goods from China passed through Naples port. Over 60% avoided any from of customs check, and were loaded onto trucks owned by the Camorra for onward transportation around Europe – often to shops again that were themselves owned by the Camorra. The Northern suburbs of Naples were full of small Camorra-owned garment factories converting cheaply imported Chinese fabrics into high fashion items. Labour was cheap and disposable, no employment laws here… And they weren’t producing cheap knock offs, they were manufacturing high quality for major global brands, who didn’t ask too many questions. One dress produced here by a worker earning peanuts was then seen being worn by Angelina Jolie on the red carpet in Hollywood. Roberto knew the worker well, and the punishment he received for complaining.
The Camorra are, I guess, best known for their importation and distribution of drugs. Another Northern suburb of Naples, Secondigliano, was the centre of this trade. Roberto witnessed the extremely violent and bloody wars there between rival clans. Many young teenagers were killed on the streets in bloody gun battles. One especially distressing event stands out from Roberto’s time in Secondigliano. Pure cocaine is cut with several other substances to make the powder that is sold on the streets. The more substances that can be safely added, the further the pure cocaine goes – increasing profitability. Roberto witnessed an extraordinarily shocking event. To test a cut, the dealers rounded up a bunch of junkies. A sort of Russian roulette was then played. A junkie was injected. If he was OK he’d received a free high. If he died (as some did) then he had proved the cut wasn’t safe.
While Roberto was researching the book, he also spent some time back in the cement manufacturing town of Casal di Principe, his birthplace. Cement is the backbone of the Camorra entrepreneurial empire. It is said that any Italian businessman who is anybody came from cement. Construction work has driven the Camorra. Whole townships were built illegally without any form of permission. Other very major infrastructure projects across Italy were built with Camorra cement and / or Camorra imposed building gangs. The level of corruption was truly amazing. All this construction of course generated a great mass of toxic waste. No problem. It was disposed of illegally with the filling in of old quarries or the creation of massive, but poisonous, land fill sites.
It is easy to say that the book was published in 2006, and that many of the events it described happened over the decades before that. Things must have changed. But, in reality, they have not. The Camorra enterprises may have evolved, but they have not gone away. Much of the infrastructure of Naples is owned by the Camorra. For pretty much every pound / dollar / euro that is spent in Naples, a cut goes to one of the clans. Naples is largely a safe city for tourists (the Camorra want to make it so to protect their income flow) but there are very definitely areas in the suburbs that it is not wise to visit if you care for your life.
Gomorrah is a great and brave book that takes the lid off a fascinating city. Very well worth reading before you visit.
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