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A review by mkesten
Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano
5.0
"In the land of the Camorra, knowing the clans' mechanisms for success, their modes of extraction, their investments, means understanding how everything works today everywhere, not merely here."
With this "J'accuse" Roberto Saviano closes out his encyclopaedia of mob violence, control and conquest of the small crime territory around Naples.
Except he isn't just talking about Naples.
He is talking about the web of criminal syndicates from China to South America. They start with their gains from drugs, extortion, and prostitution and swiftly move into "legitimate" industries of fashion, construction, retail, and other manifestations of money laundering.
They move massive amounts of arms and fabrics, cement, and even toxic waste around Europe and the world.
The trail of corruption extends far beyond even the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia.
I've come from reading about the Bad-ass librarians of Timbuktu who struggled to save 377,000 precious medieval books and manuscripts from Al-Qaeda bad men. Terrorists in name, hoodlums bent on kidnapping, drug running, and smuggling to finance their causes.
And the dismantling of government oversight in Louisiana where chemical processors dump tons of toxic waste into the bayou, in Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right."
Svetlana Alexievich tracks much of the same criminal mentality in "Secondhnad Time: The Last of the Soviets" except in this great book it is Russia and some of the former Soviet republics. And Bill Browder traces the same sense of entitlement Putin's bureaucrats show in stealing massive amounts from the public purse in "Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice." Then from Russian pockets millions, if not billions get laundered into New York, London, and Hong Kong real estate.
Saviano's book starts with the cancerous effects of organized crime in the fibre of society. In Naples, where many of the poor don't know where to start, the Camorra give them their start: pinching goods from warehouses, working in construction gangs, moving sewage.
Then it gives them one step up on the rest.
Young people gain their confidence and learn that might makes right from the bottom to the top of society.
As cash washes through the system it makes governing Southern Italy virtually impossible. So too does it make international trade difficult to police where Chinese goods are getting smuggled into knock-off factories ipoutside of Naples and Rome. Where tons of Europe's waste get re-purposes into fertilizer, and landfill sites become new housing developments.
This in a landscape of massive migration from war zones and famine in Africa to Europe and beyond.
Take the lid off the Soviet empire and you get worse than a pail of worms. You get an absolutely rotten society set on a pace to destroy the land and set civilization on its head. Or perhaps I should have said that the end of the Soviet Empire let us refocus on what really was going on in the world.
With this "J'accuse" Roberto Saviano closes out his encyclopaedia of mob violence, control and conquest of the small crime territory around Naples.
Except he isn't just talking about Naples.
He is talking about the web of criminal syndicates from China to South America. They start with their gains from drugs, extortion, and prostitution and swiftly move into "legitimate" industries of fashion, construction, retail, and other manifestations of money laundering.
They move massive amounts of arms and fabrics, cement, and even toxic waste around Europe and the world.
The trail of corruption extends far beyond even the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia.
I've come from reading about the Bad-ass librarians of Timbuktu who struggled to save 377,000 precious medieval books and manuscripts from Al-Qaeda bad men. Terrorists in name, hoodlums bent on kidnapping, drug running, and smuggling to finance their causes.
And the dismantling of government oversight in Louisiana where chemical processors dump tons of toxic waste into the bayou, in Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right."
Svetlana Alexievich tracks much of the same criminal mentality in "Secondhnad Time: The Last of the Soviets" except in this great book it is Russia and some of the former Soviet republics. And Bill Browder traces the same sense of entitlement Putin's bureaucrats show in stealing massive amounts from the public purse in "Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice." Then from Russian pockets millions, if not billions get laundered into New York, London, and Hong Kong real estate.
Saviano's book starts with the cancerous effects of organized crime in the fibre of society. In Naples, where many of the poor don't know where to start, the Camorra give them their start: pinching goods from warehouses, working in construction gangs, moving sewage.
Then it gives them one step up on the rest.
Young people gain their confidence and learn that might makes right from the bottom to the top of society.
As cash washes through the system it makes governing Southern Italy virtually impossible. So too does it make international trade difficult to police where Chinese goods are getting smuggled into knock-off factories ipoutside of Naples and Rome. Where tons of Europe's waste get re-purposes into fertilizer, and landfill sites become new housing developments.
This in a landscape of massive migration from war zones and famine in Africa to Europe and beyond.
Take the lid off the Soviet empire and you get worse than a pail of worms. You get an absolutely rotten society set on a pace to destroy the land and set civilization on its head. Or perhaps I should have said that the end of the Soviet Empire let us refocus on what really was going on in the world.