Though its bloodstained cover will defi nitely conjure up memories of The Godfather, unfortunately, Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah is not a work of fi ction, but a powerful investigation into the world of the Neapolitan crime organisation known as the Camorra. The book opens with a terrible image: frozen bodies of illegal Chinese immigrants spill from a container on to the quay of the port of Naples.

 

The bodies are being returned to their home country to be buried and allow in this way hundreds of other immigrants to take up their paper identities. Saviano symbolically starts his journey into the bowels of the Camorra from the port of Naples, the main route into the EU for dodgy merchandise - 1.6m tonnes annually - coming from the Far East.

 

A trip to the Camorra controlled garment sweatshops of Secondigliano, on the outskirts of Naples, follows. Here phoney designer clothes are made and then distributed to boutiques owned by the Camorra all over the world, while famous Italian fashion brands tender their products - even the creations to be worn by actresses on the Hollywood red carpet - to the cheapest and most skilled manufacturers. Fashion, drugs, weapons, toxic waste and industrial waste removals, construction and public works fraud, the Camorra, or “The System” as its members call it, has permeated everything.

 

Saviano describes in detail the bodies he sees lying on the streets - shot, mauled, beheaded, tortured and beaten up to death - all of them victims of endless wars between Camorra clans or between rival factions of one clan for the control of the region’s drug trade. Campania has indeed one of the highest murder rates in Europe: since 1979, the year Saviano was born, 3,600 people have died at the hands of the Camorra, more than have been killed by the Sicilian or Russian Mafi a, the Irish Republican Army or the Basque group ETA.

 

The Camorra, Saviano states, has also adopted a new image: its bosses try to model themselves on the main characters out of The Crow and Matrix and want their houses to be replicas of Tony Montana’s villa in Scar face, while Camorra women have female bodyguards dressed in yellow like Uma Thurman in Tarantino’s Kill Bill. The criminal organisation has also abandoned its local interests to go global: nowadays the Camorra makes deal with South American and Nigerian drug cartels, while it also launders money through various businesses all over Europe. According to Saviano’s investigation, the Camorra has also reached the UK.

 

A whole chapter is dedicated to the connection between the coastal town of Mondragone, north of Naples, and Aberdeen. Here, the brother of the Mondragone “godfather” Augusto La Torre, was arrested and extradited to Italy in 2006. Since in Britain there isn’t yet a law that makes mafi a membership an offence, Camorra seems to have found in the UK an ideal ground for its businesses.

 

The Italian version of the book also mentions that the Camorra recruited a Scottish mobster - the fi rst British Camorrista, currently in jail in England - but, because of the British libel laws, the name has been removed from the UK edition of the book. Saviano’s visit to Aberdeen is brief, but it’s enough to make him feel disgusted about Camorra: nausea rises in his throat whenever he sees another body being taken away, but also when he realises that wherever he goes, wherever he turns his eyes to, he sees businesses infi ltrated by the Camorra, lands owned by it or buildings built with its money.

 

A raw and obsessive anger and hatred seeps through the pages of this compelling book, and there is little hope in a chapter dedicated to Don Peppino Diana, a priest who tried to fi ght against the Camorra and was killed on March 19, 1994, by armed men who shot him in the head at close range. Part history and part autobiography, Gomorrah has won its author many literary prizes in his home country, but it has also enraged the clans: Saviano has been given armed escort since the book was published in Italy.

 

Review by: Anna Battista