Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Gomorrah
Book Review: International Organized Crime in and out of Italy today
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is an extremely engrossing read about the real world of high stakes organized crime operating in and out of Italy today. It will have tremendous appeal to real life crime fighters and mob aficionados across the world, not to mention anyone with generational ties to Italy as a homeland. Well written and extremely informative, it engages the reader in a tell-all approach of the extensive world wide implications of organized crime originating in and out of Naples today. Graphic and disturbing, it gives factual details only an `insider' would have access to. Particularly fascinating is the increasingly large part women play in the leading role of organized family clans. `The Godmother', if you will. One could only imagine a blockbuster film coming out of this information. This reader would have preferred more details about how the writer actually infiltrated `The System' but perhaps that will be a follow up to this amazing read.Book Review: More of a drumbeat than a narrative
Summary: 1 Stars
This is a compendium of crime. I am in no position to evaluate the truth of all that, but as a reading experience this book falls short. There is no narrative thread. There are no characters around which you can organize your emotions, so the whole thing is ultimately heartless. I like the punchy writing style. There is a breathlessness that seems appropriate to the subject matter and to the feeling of sick indignation that I would guess Saviano is trying to give the reader. But apart from brief moments like his adventure as a longshoreman early on, it's just a lot of name-dropping.Book Review: Naples-- a place to avoid.
Summary: 4 Stars
I am a Sicilian by ancestry living in America. Despite what passes as common knowledge most Italians know Naples is the most dangerous city in Italy. This is true now and was true 40 years ago when my Mother who was visiting from the US was accosted on the street in daylight, knocked to the ground and her purse stolen. When reported, the attitude of the police was that it happens too oten to have expectation that the thieves will be caught. In reading "Gomorrah" I find the situation has become worse. Author Roberto Saviano's first hand account of the corruption indicates that it has become a major part of the social fabric of Naples. Anyone thinking of visiting Naples should read this book before going.Book Review: One of the most important books from Italy in the last 50 years
Summary: 5 Stars
Gomorrah is not a compilation of news clippings on the subject of the Mafia or better the Camorra.
It's the result of years of heroic work by a young writer that has devoted himself to the understanding of the criminal world that developed in the area around Naples .
The scope and range of the illegal activities are world wide and control the world of fashion, construction, drugs, food, toxic waste, and almost any form of commercial endeavor. The message is a portent of things to come where the claws have not reached yet. The courage of the writer has put him in life danger for the rest of his life and and under constant police protection. The valor of his pen is as great as the beauty of his prose. I can not recall any book that has moved me so deeply in a long time. The story is not only a requiem for the Italian nation but also
a heads up for the rest of the world where the connections with the Italian Camorra are blossoming: that is China, Australia, Central and South America, Africa and obviously the US.
Book Review: Real organized crime as a pervasive cancer, stripped of Hollywood glamour
Summary: 4 Stars
Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System is an eye-opening account of just what organized crime really means in terms of the truly cancerous effects it has on society. And just how deep and how wide-spread those effects can be. In the case of the Camorra - the Naples-based equivalent of the more infamous but surprisingly less powerful Sicilian Mafia - their reach extends all over the world, from local monopolies on everything from cement and construction to milk and high fashion, to hooks in virtually every illegal enterprise in every part of Europe, to money-laundering operations in the UK and the US, to supplying massive illegal arms shipments to rebel groups in Peru and pariah states like Serbia.
The book is organized into chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of the Camorra's activities and influence:
'The Port' covers the role of the Camorra in making Naples the number one port in all of Europe... for avoiding inspections and import duties and for importing contraband:
"The port of Naples is an open wound... the hole in the earth out of which what's made in China comes.... Everything made in China is poured out here... The port of Naples handles 20 percent of the value of Italian textile imports from China, but more than 70 percent of the quantity.... According to the Italian Customs Agency, 60 percent of the goods arriving in Naples escape official customes inspection, 20 percent of the bills of entry go unchecked, and fifty thousand shipments are contraband, 99 percent of them from China -- all for an estimated 200 million euros in evaded taxes each semester. The containers that need to disappear before being inspected are in the first row. Every container is duly numbered, but the numbers on many of them are identical. So one inspected container baptizes all the illegal ones with the same number."
'Angelina Jolie' covers how the Camorra dominate the Italian fashion industry, using every tactic imagineable to minimize cost - and when necessary, to eliminate local competition - in effect creating third-worldesque work environments (one neighborhood is even nicknamed Terzo Mondo, Italian for 'third world') to produce the high-priced Italian high fashion goods known around the world.
'The System' refers to what the Camorra call themselves and deals with the organization and clans and how they've evolved over the last few decades.
"System -- a term everyone here understands, but that still needs decoding elsewhere, an obscure reference for anyone unfamiliar with the power dynamics of the criminal economy. _Camorra_ is a nonexistent word, a term of contempt used by narcs and judges, journalists and scriptwriters; it's a generic indication, a scholarly term, relegated to history -- a name that makes Camorristi smile. The word clan members use is _System_ -- 'I belong to the Secondigliano System' -- an eloquent term, a mechanism rather than a structure. The criminal organization coincides directly with the economy, and the dialectic of commerce is the framework of the clans."
'The Secondigliano War' covers a particularly nasty episode in 2004-2005 where a faction of mid-level Camorristi drug clans tried to break away from the overall hierarchy and set up their own System in the town of Secondigliano.
Women
Kalashnikov
Cement
Don Peppino Diana
Hollywood
Aberdeen, Mondragone
Land of Fires
Saviano does an effective job, serving as an intimate camera at the individual level, showing in a very personal way how the Camorra affects everything it touches, that the artificial line Hollywood tends to draw that seperates crime families from 'civilians' is an illusion. And while showing the individual and the personal, he also steps back to show the numbers that one needs to understand the sheer scope of the Camorra's operations in terms of money, reach and social cost.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in the disturbing reality and reach of Italian organized crime as it exists today.