Niele

Roberto Saviano on the Italian Camorra

(First part of an exclusive interview with the author of 'Gomorra', investigating the Neapolitan mafia. From Scottish tourism to Spanish drug trade, the Italian empire stretches throughout Europe and the world)

'Sentenced to death': that was the title of an article by Italian publisher L'Espresso on 16 August 2007. After denouncing entire mafia clans, identifying them by their full names in his book Gomorra (2006), Roberto Saviano won’t easily be forgotten ('nun s’o scordano, in Neapolitan dialect). Yet the 28 year-old, from Casali di Principe, a stronghold of the Camorra (or 'System O' as the Neapolitan mafia prefers to be called), has been made untouchable, for the moment, by the immense interest of the press. Not just the Italian press, either: media giant Mondadori has euro signs ringing in its eyes having sold 700, 000 copies of the book. There is interest in Germany too, where the book has been the literary phenomenon of the season, selling 100, 000 copies in one week. Significantly, Germany is still in a state of shock after the reprisals of the ‘Ndrangheta (southern Italian and Calabrian mafia) on 15 August in the centre of Duisburg, resulting in 6 deaths.

Saviano seems tiny and affable as he sits opposite me, his gaze even narrower because of a slight squint. We are in a Paris apartment provided by Gallimard, the French publisher currently preparing for the book’s release in France on 18 October. Saviano will soon be returning to Italy, where he is working on a film script inspired by Gomorra. Then he will head to the US to continue promoting the book, the rights having already been sold in 29 countries. He will be accompanied at all times by a bodyguard, as he is still the subject of death threats by mafia clans.

What would you say to those people in Europe who view the Camorra as a distant, essentially Italian, phenomenon?

There is truly nothing more international than criminal organisations, especially the Neapolitan and Calabrian mafia. There is a simple reason for this – they are part of the economic and financial avant-garde. I am sorry that people only seem to realise this when people are murdered, like in the events in Duisburg, which opened Germany’s eyes, and also Europe’s. After Duisburg, organised crime can be defined as a European problem - not just an Italian one.

The Italian mafia’s criminal networks are potentially without limit. In Scotland the 'La Torre' clan invests in Aberdeen (especially in the tourism sector). All the big Neapolitan clans invest in Dortmund, Leipzig and eastern Germany. Francesco Schiavone aka 'Cicciarello' (a blueish fish found along the Ligurian coast with France), was arrested in Poland on 18 March 2004, and had also been investing money in Romania. Vincenzo Mazzarella was found outside the Eurodisney park in Paris on 19 December later the same year, although he had been negotiating diamond deals with groups of Africans. In Nice, they invest particularly in property.

Property, diamonds, drugs: what are the sectors in which the Camorra is most active internationally?

Investment in the tourism industry remains fundamental. Restaurant chains are still a safe way of getting into a country. But, for example, the ‘Ndrangheta has bought steel works in Russia. In France the Camorra concentrates on clothes shops and invests in transport and in fuel distribution. Hence the famous 'white petrol pumps' which have nothing to do with Agip or Total, but they are the symbol of the Camorra. There are currently investigations going on into this matter.

You should know that the Camorra or the ‘Ndrangheta cannot invest in sectors where there is high risk. Talking about all of this has been really difficult. I am not exactly sure where my will to succeed has brought me, but the miraculous thing about what I have done is to get this information across to the greatest number of people, thanks to the vehicle of literature. It might sound ridiculous but the danger is no longer in revealing some piece of data or information, but rather in the fact that this tale, this information can spread from the limited few to reach the whole world. Take murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya – she really became dangerous in making the situation in Chechnya an international problem, making what was happening there the cause of every human being.

When American novelist Philip Roth was asked who he considered to be the greatest Italian writer of all time, from Dante right through to modern literature, he replied 'Primo Levi. After If this is a man (1991), nobody could say that there had never been an Auschwitz.' As far as my own revelations go, I don’t think the mafia was angry because I had collected all this information, but because the information has been made public, which is something completely different. It wouldn’t have been a problem if it had been confined to my region, or even the south of Italy, but the fact that these revelations are beginning to circulate quickly and on a large scale, that is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a powerful person or organisation, no matter who or what it is.

Here, the criminals’ power is always based on the diffuse nature of information, as everybody knows, and at the same time it is based on the impossibility of proving or even talking about something. When you break this strange equilibrium, you create a real danger. And the fact that that can happen in Europe demonstrates that it is now possible to stand up to these criminal powers. I say 'powers' because now the Italian mafia is forming links with the Albanian and Nigerian mafia. Testament to this is that they even go so far as to intermarry…

Can you give some examples?

Augusto La Torre, a member of the Camorra, is married to an Albanian woman. To emphasise another very important event: the first foreign pentito (a member of the mafia who makes a confession and denounces his accomplices) in Italy, a Tunisian, admitted to being involved with the feared Casalesi clan, part of the Camorra. The first town that the Italian mafia gave over to be completely governed by a foreign clan was Castel Volturno, which was given to the Rapaces, clans from Lagos and Benin City in Nigeria. So from now on they can control trafficking of cocaine and prostitutes before sending them across the whole of Europe.

Are we witnessing the birth of a new kind of feudalism then?

In a way, yes. The remarkable economic development of these networks is really competing with territorial structures that remain often slow and inefficient. Clans are investing in every part of the world, and yet they forbid women to dye their hair, because it’s considered erotic. They view the web as a new platform for investment, but they prohibit their families from consuming drugs. This is strictly forbidden because none of them must have any vice: 'no drugs, no homosexuals.' This sort of motto is reminiscent of a time we thought was past. Yet this same power realised ten years before the French Enterprise Movement (Medef) or Confindustria (the Italian equivalent), that it was necessary to invest in China. It is precisely this duality of tradition and modernity that makes them invincible, however the power they possess may also prove to be destructive. This is why no godfather ever survives, or escapes prison…

source

Capri c'ést fini (Hervé Vilard)

In Capri with Maria and Tobias

Napoli-Capri


Maria Listening to “A lady of a certain age” (Divine Comedy)


Tobias thinking


Maria getting ready


Arriving






Walking around

Have a bite my Superhero

Maria bought a new plant

Rosario

Today it snowed on Vesuvio and Michael is dressed in grey...

Napoli-Roma: 4-4

Sacro Capello Miracoloso Di Diego Armando Maradona

Piazza I don't remember

Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli

Napoli

Today I had a walk in Napoli wearing my new blue shoes.

Prime Meridian

With my brand new shoes, I stepped on both sides of the Greenwich Meridian and walked around on the hills of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London

The Duchess: Coming Soon

The River Thames

Regent's Park (with Louli)

Barbican "talk" sex ("Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now")

In London my Superhero

flying up hight and talking with pilots about Sartre and art, religion and politics, airplanes and separations… (it is nice in the cockpit)

Six Degrees of Separation

“Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one "step" away from each person he or she knows and two "steps" away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six "steps" away from each person on Earth. Several studies, such as Milgram's small world experiment, have been conducted to empirically measure this connectedness. While the exact number of links between people differs depending on the population measured, it is generally found to be relatively small. Hence, six degrees of separation is somewhat synonymous with the idea of the "small world" phenomenon.” (From Wikipedia)

The Shrinking World

“In 1929, a Hungarian author named Frigyes Karinthy published a volume of short stories titled "Everything is Different." One of these pieces was titled "Chains," or "Chain-Links." The story investigated in abstract, conceptual, and fictional terms many of the problems that would captivate future generations of mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists within the field of network theory. In particular, Karinthy believed that the modern world was shrinking due to the ever-increasing connectedness of human beings. Due to technological advances in communications and travel, friendship networks could grow larger and span even greater distances. Karinthy posited that despite great physical distances between the globe's individuals, the growing density of human networks made the actual social distance far smaller.
As a result of this hypothesis, Karinthy's characters believed that any two individuals could be connected through at most five acquaintances. In his story, the characters create a game out of this notion. He writes:
A fascinating game grew out of this discussion. One of us suggested performing the following experiment to prove that the population of the Earth is closer together now than they have ever been before. We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth—anyone, anywhere at all. He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances.
This idea both directly and indirectly influenced a great deal of early thought on social networks. Thus, Karinthy is often regarded as the originator of the notion of Six Degrees of Separation.” (From Wikipedia)

The Small World experiments

“Stanley Milgram was an American researcher in experimental social psychology at Harvard University in Boston, USA. Beginning in 1967, he began a widely-publicized set of experiments to investigate the so-called "small world problem." This problem was rooted in many of the same observations made decades earlier by Karinthy. That is, Milgram and other researchers of the era were fascinated by the interconnectedness and "social capital" of human networks. While it is unknown how directly Milgram was influenced by Karinthy's work, the similarities between the two authors are remarkable. However, while Karinthy spoke in abstract and fictional terms, Milgram's experiments provided evidence supporting the claim of a "small world." His study results showed that people in the United States seemed to be connected by approximately six friendship links, on average. Although Milgram reportedly never used the term "Six Degrees of Separation," his findings likely contributed to the term's widespread credence. Since these studies were widely publicized, Stanley Milgram is also, like Karinthy, often attributed as the origin of the notion of Six Degrees" (From Wikipedia)

Make 'em by hand, brake 'em by hand my Superhero

Eleni spins

Yesterday my cousin Eleni invited us to her brand new apartment for dinner. She cocked delicious Noodles a la Greca and after food she practiced her salsa pirouettes on her nice new floor.

European Photography (Number 82) – Special issue 2. FotoFestival Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, Heidelberg

Just received the special issue of European Photography Magazine on FotoFestival curated by Christof Tannert. It comes with a DVD including the video works of the exhibition and an extract of my video (documentation of the performance Slow Dance Marathon).