WHY DO WE LET THE KINGHTS OF COLUMBUS BUILD SOCIAL CLUBS?:

Lunch With Roberto Saviano: Four years after the publication of Gomorrah, the Naples-born writer lives in hiding. (John Lloyd, Nov. 27, 2010, Slate)

It is four years since the publication of Gomorrah, the Naples-born writer's description of life under the Camorra, the Neapolitan crime syndicate. Part journalism, part reportage in the first person, part autobiography, the book is a hybrid. Vivid flashes of observation are juxtaposed with bitter denunciations of cruelty and indifference. Federico Varese, professor of criminology at the University of Oxford and one of the world's foremost scholars of organized crime, says Saviano makes clear not just the brutality of the Camorra, but also the way they have their claws dug so deep into Neapolitan society (and far beyond). What made the book especially valuable, he says, is the way "he showed how they are useful to a section of the people: They provide credit, they allow investments in their drugs and other businesses and then pay interest; they will stamp on competition. And he didn't just write about them as a local phenomenon: He showed how they are tied into global networks: he showed that they affect you and me."
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The book was a huge success—in Italy alone, a country with a relatively small reading public, 2 million copies were sold; and in 2008 an extraordinary film of it was made, directed by Matteo Garrone with amateur Neapolitan actors, some mere children. Saviano, still in his 20s, became nationally famous as a no-holds-barred hater of the gangs, a glimmer of light against their growing darkness. At the same time, it has meant that he has had to accept that he is a target for their wrath, that he has to live with the consequences of his actions.

He enters—slim, shaven-headed, a sharp, handsome but watchful face—and we sit. I gesture about the room: "This is how you live?" "This is how I live; all the time," he replies. He has been living like this almost since Gomorrah was published and the Camorra said they would kill him. In 2008 an informer named Carmine Schiavone, a cousin of Francesco Schiavone, one of the Calabrian Camorra Clan dei Casalesi leaders, revealed details of a plan to blow up Saviano's car as it was travelling between Naples and Rome.