Roberto Saviano: Italy's Most Hunted Author

Ian Thomson at the Telegraph offers a piece of Italian author Robert Saviano.

Roberto Saviano, baldheaded and dark-stubbled, is recognisable to most Italians. In Umberto Eco’s opinion, the 36-year-old Neapolitan journalist is a “modern Italian hero”. Paradoxically, the more famous Saviano becomes, the greater the need for him to be invisible. For the past 10 years, Saviano has been under police protection. His bestselling exposé of the Neapolitan Mafia, Gomorrah, published here in 2007, became an internationally celebrated film that put his life at risk.

“The Mafia want to be famous in their own, local territory,” Saviano explains, “but not on the international stage – my book drew unwelcome attention to their illicit affairs.”
 

As I expected, plain clothes police are discreetly in evidence in the London hotel where I meet Saviano to talk about his new book, Zero Zero Zero. The son of a Neapolitan doctor and Genoese mother of Sephardi-Jewish origins, Saviano is surprisingly easy to talk to, and his conversation ranges from classical music (“Claudio Abbado was a great friend”) to the inquisitorial realism of Francesco Rosi’s Neapolitan films.    

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/11712823/Roberto-Saviano-Italys-most-hunted-author.html

An Unexpected Place For Lessons To Fight Mexico's Mafia: Italy

Robert Saviano, author of Gomorrah, offers his views on how to combat Mexican organized crime at Reuters.com.

At this moment, the fiercest, most powerful criminal organizations in the world are located in Mexico. Recent events should leave no one with any doubts.

On Sept. 26, 43 trainee teachers in the southwestern city of Iguala were abducted by the police and, according to the government, were most likely murdered by drug traffickers. Their deaths, which are the latest in a long list of bloody gang-related murders, sparked widespread riots in Mexico City. According to Amnesty International, 136,100 people were killed by Mexican cartels between December 2006 and May 2014 alone.

So how is Mexico to deal with this formidable problem? Perhaps it could look to Italy for lessons on how a deeply entrenched mafia.

Why Italy?

Italy is the country with the oldest mafia in the world—indeed, the very word mafia has Italian origins. But ever since the 1980s and early 1990s, when the Italian mafia was planting bombs on highways to kill state magistrates, mafia-related homicides have nose-dived. Between 1992 and 2012, murders related to organized crime dropped around 80 percent, according to the United Nations.

According to one mafia expert, the “radical and painful” changes seen in the decline of mafia groups in southern Italy “are the best proof of the effectiveness of anti-mafia law enforcement.”

Some might counter that Mexico does not have a mafia problem. After all, the Mexican cartels are often simply referred to as “drug traffickers.”

However, the most recent report of the U.S. State Department has estimated that the amount of money laundered annually in Mexico is between $19 and $29 billion. Such data suggests that continuing to merely call them drug traffickers is neither accurate nor, indeed, responsible.

To launder that amount of money, one has to be a mafia organization. These groups do more than merely produce and sell drugs — they reinvest profits in real estate, businesses and stocks. In addition, the groups also have a pyramid structure and employ financial consultants and accountants, which is typical of mafia organizations.

To date, Mexico has primarily used military crackdowns to fight its mafia. This has not resolved the situation, and, in some cases, has even worsened it by leading to a significant increase in ferocity and defections.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/12/04/an-unexpected-place-for-lessons-to-fight-mexicos-mafia-italy/

Goodfellas Don't Sue Goodfellas, But 'Gomorrah' Author Is Suing The Gangsters Who Ordered His Death

Veteran organized crime reporter and author George Anastasia offered a gem of a statement in his  book The Goodfella Tapes: The True Story of How the FBI Recorded A Mob War and Brought Down a Mafia Don.

In the book Anastasia reported the FBI recording of a Cosa Nostra member telling a possible litigant in a mob dispute that "Goodfellas don't sue goodfellas... goodfellas kill goodfellas."

But Michael Day at the British newspaper the Independent reports that in Italy Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano is suing the organized crime figures who ordered his death for writing the book that exposed their criminal enterprises.
 
Italy's most prominent anti-mafia campaigner has appeared in court to sue the mobsters who ordered his death.

In a high security Naples courtroom Roberto Saviano, the writer whose print expose ‘Gomorrah’ and the eponymous hit film it spawned made him a household name, finally looked his enemies in eyes - six years after he was forced into hiding.

Mr Saviano confronted Camorra bosses Francesco Bidognetti and Antonio Iovine via video link as he began the process of suing them - and two of their lawyers, Michele Santonastaso and Carmine D'Aniello - for threats and defamation, which he says came in an 2008 appeal hearing.

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/antimafia-campaigner-roberto-saviano-sues-gangsters-who-ordered-his-death-8406282.html

You can also read my Crime Beat column on The Goodfella Tapes via the below link:

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2011/09/goodfellas-dont-sue-goodfellas-look.html    

Where The Mob Keeps It's Money

 

Roberto Saviano, the Italian who wrote Gomorrah, an interesting true crime book about the Neapolitan organized crime organization the Camorra, wrote a piece for the New York Times about organized crime and money.

The global financial crisis has been a blessing for organized crime. A series of recent scandals have exposed the connection between some of the biggest global banks and the seamy underworld of mobsters, smugglers, drug traffickers and arms dealers. American banks have profited from money laundering by Latin American drug cartels, while the European debt crisis has strengthened the grip of the loan sharks and speculators who control the vast underground economies in countries like Spain and Greece. 
      

Mutually beneficial relationships between bankers and gangsters aren’t new, but what’s remarkable is their reach at the highest levels of global finance.    

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/where-the-mob-keeps-its-money.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all