Italy's deadly affair with the mafia - My Italians: True Stories of Crime and Courage by Roberto Saviano

Reviewer: Alan Taylor

ON a dreich November night in Florence my wife and I were the only two customers in a restaurant near the Ponte Vecchio. A waiter, doubtless bored, drew up a chair and we chatted about this and that. It was all very lighthearted and studiously inconsequential. Why I mentioned Roberto Saviano and my admiration of him I cannot now recall but suddenly the mood at the table changed and without exchanging another word the waiter rose and scuttled off as if he’d spied the sickle-wielding reaper.

Saviano is only too well aware that not everyone in Italy is enamoured of him. Ever since the publication in 2006 his international bestseller Gomorrah, in which he exposed the activities of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia, his life has been under threat and he has been in constant police protection. As he recalls in My Italians, a collection of essays which originated in an Italian television series, he and his ilk have never wanted for critics. Prominent among them is Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s appalling former Prime Minister who, rather than laud those with the courage to stand up to the Mafia, said he would like to strangle them.

This, in essence, is the dilemma that faces Saviano as he struggles to free his countrymen from the shackles of gangsterism. The Mafia is hydra-headed, subterranean, infectious, brutal, and insinuated in all aspects of Italian life from Church to State. As Luigi Barzini acknowledged more than sixty years ago, the Mafia is “a spontaneous formation like an ant-colony or a beehive”. In the south of Italy, where Saviano was born in 1979, it is a fact of life, what the misguided have called a necessary evil, and it is often impossible to draw a line between Mafiosi and non-Mafiosi.

Typical is the point of view expressed by a writer of a letter to a Sicilian newspaper who would rather put up with the malign presence of the Mafia than be disturbed by the sirens of police cars escorting anti-Mafia judges as they go about their job. “After all,” writes Saviano, “obeying the Mafia is very simple: if you don’t cross them, you get what you’ve been promised. With the government it’s more complicated: often you don’t get what the law should provide, and it’s hard to lead a life consistent with lawful principles, especially in the South.”

Mafiosi are like moles or malarial beetles. For the most part they live out of sight in minuscule holes with little to show for their efforts. You could pass them in the street without giving them a second thought. They don’t look like Al Pacino or Marlon Brando though they revel in the way they’ve been portrayed by movie stars. Invariably, they emerge from the ghetto dirt poor and barely literate. But they learn quickly how to kill and intimidate, and they are well aware that they in turn will either be killed or will end up in jail where, if they’re a boss, they can expect to live even more comfortably than Fletcher in Porridge.

They buy votes so they can control politicians, deal in drugs and dump toxic sewage on prime agricultural land. The south of Italy, and Naples in particular, is slowly becoming one huge landfill site filled with waste that is not only stinking and unsightly but has a terrible effect on the health of the population. In one case noted by Saviano, “The liquid wastes were so contaminated that all the rats immediately died when the wastes were dumped.”

Not, of course, that those involved gave a damn. “Profit, profit, profit: those are the three cardinal rules of the organizations.” Combatting them is an enervating, thankless and dangerous vocation. Saviano’s heroes are those such as the magistrates Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, Giuseppe Di Lello and Leonardo Guarnotta who, instead of being praised by the media, were often vilified by a press which, incredibly, described them as careerists.

Some career! Falcone, it is worth recalling, was blown up in Palermo in 1992, whereupon, ironically, he was instantly hailed as a hero. “Must one be killed in order to be credible in this country?” he had some time earlier asked a TV interviewer who wanted to know how he was still alive. “This blessed country where, if they plant a bomb near your house and the bomb luckily doesn’t explode, it’s your fault that you didn’t make it explode.” This “blessed” country is the one that the likes of Falcone and Saviano care so deeply about that they are willing to risk everything to save it from itself. What can the rest of us do but offer them every support, however pitiful?