In the grip of Italy's bloodiest mafia clan

Gomorrah has been hailed as a classic mafia movie, which lays bare the savagery of the Neapolitan Camorra and how it developed into a political and cultural force. It is based on a bestselling book, whose author, Roberto Saviano, now lives in fear of his life under armed guard. Former Italy correspondent Ed Vulliamy returns to Naples to meet Saviano and witness, first hand, the brutal gang's reign of terror

The black Fiat Punto, loaded with cocaine, broke through a road block near Casal di Principe in the hinterland of Naples. Policemen Francesco Alighieri and Gabriele Rossi gave chase. In the pursuit their car keeled off an overpass, wrapping itself around a tree, killing both of them. They had only been in the area a week, drafted from northern Italy following the murder of six Africans by the local Casalesi criminal syndicate. For hours afterwards the lanes around Casal di Principe were scattered with characters in sunglasses sitting in cars and talking on mobiles. Menacing, but hardly mysterious, for these are the sentinels of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia which is about to achieve worldwide notoriety as the subject of a major new movie. Gomorrah, released this week, will bring worldwide attention to the Camorra: the most potent criminal organisation on the planet.

  1. Gomorrah
  2. Production year: 2008
  3. Country: Italy
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 137 mins
  6. Directors: Matteo Garrone
  8. More on this film

The scenes described above are not from the film. The police chase took place nine days ago when I returned to the area 14 years after last reporting on the Camorra as Italy correspondent for the Guardian. This week the army was being mobilised into the area as three of the top Casalesi were arrested.

Gomorrah won the Grand Prix at Cannes in May and was last week chosen as Italy's entry for the Foreign Language Oscar. It is based on a book by Roberto Saviano, who grew up in Casal di Principe and lived alongside the Casalesi clan of the Camorra, one of its most powerful and ruthless. His father, a doctor, was beaten and obliged to hide for months after treating a man the Camorra had wounded. Saviano saw his first corpse in the street when he was 13 but 'never got used to seeing murder victims'. After studying philosophy at Naples University, Saviano observed then wrote about the Camorra with brazen fearlessness.

His book had a raw vividness, an attention to human detail and a dimension of outrage that caught public attention in a way that other diligent and brave reporters over decades have not. Now copies of Gomorrah are piled up for sale at every bookshop and motorway service station. It has sold 1.8 million copies and been translated into 32 languages. With the film, Saviano is even more famous, and more of a target. He was threatened by the bosses of his hometown clan and lives under 24-hour armed police watch 'somewhere,' he says, 'in the north of Italy'.

We meet at his publishers, Mondadori, in Rome. 'I like these interviews,' he says. 'They give me some sense of space and communication. I live this enclosed life, physically and psychologically. First it was one guard, then two, three, four and five. Two bulletproof cars now. And I can never go home. I love the beauty of Naples, but what happens there I despise; that is what I wanted to write about and do something about.'

Saviano made that decision after 14-year-old Annalisa Durante was killed in crossfire between Camorra factions. In the book he describes her friends at the funeral: 'Many of these girls will soon marry Camorristi... Many will bear children who will be killed ... But for now they are just little girls in black. They weep for a friend ... Annalisa is guilty of having been born in Naples. Nothing more, nothing less. As her body is being carried away in its white coffin, a classmate calls her on her cellphone. The ringing in the coffin is the new requiem... No one answers.'

In conversation, he adds: 'That they could kill children like that reached a point beyond my understanding, and that moment I decided something had to be done.'

The film of Gomorrah is savage, squalid, claustrophobic and relentless. The action is authentic, in gratifying contrast to the grotesque romance of films like The Godfather. 'All Camorristi love Scarface,' says Saviano. He cites newer role models - The Matrix and Pulp Fiction - as 'how the Camorristi want to see themselves'. Among the newly powerful women, Saviano points to a gangster called Immolata Capone who dresses in the same yellow as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Saviano calls his book a 'non-fiction novel'. 'There is no need to make anything up. Everything is from real life. Some things have been changed to protect people but I knew the people in this book.'

For all their wealth, the Camorristi can be parsimonious. Last week I tracked down the flat in Via Canonico Stornaiuolo that was home to the boss who terrorised the Secondigliano district of Naples during the savage Camorra war which is backdrop to the film. I found a modest place of peeling plaster. When, in 2005, the police came for Paolo Di Lauro, whose empire was worth billions, the only personal assets they discovered were playing cards, cheap furniture, a TV, cigarettes and peppers drying on a newspaper. And this was the man who established what Saviano calls 'the biggest narcotraffic holding company, nationally or internationally' in the world.

The English edition of Saviano's book is subtitled Italy's Other Mafia in recognition of the incorrect supposition among British and American readers that the Sicilian Mafia is the premier organisation. The Neapolitan Camorra was Italy's original Mafia by a century; it commands a higher turnover - and a higher body count than any criminal syndicate in the world: 4,000 over the past four decades.

I was unaware of this when I started to report from Italy in 1990. The Camorra first attracted international attention in 1991 when it was found to have ensnared the footballing Messiah of Naples, Diego Maradona. He bought his cocaine from the Camorra, and became a trophy for the bosses, photographed in their shell-shaped baths and at weddings of their children. 'It is a very strong identity, to be Neapolitan,' says Saviano. 'You love the place, and you hate it. I am estranged from it now, which is extremely difficult.'

Naples is a proud but battered city where life is agrodolce, bittersweet: a city of breathtaking beauty but perched on a fault line and nestled under a volcano. Much of life is lived in shadow yet there can be no secrets in the warrens of alleyways, steps and courtyards from which great domes and façades of tatty baroque churches rise like cliffs from the old stone propped up by scaffolding. Naples is the last great pagan city - of dolls, puppets, cards, magic and the significance of numbers, with which Neapolitans interpret dreams. Naples has a bright face but the Vesuvian city is ridden with the apocalyptic cult of death. After Maradona's Napoli won its first ever championship in 1987, graffiti appeared on the cemetery wall: 'You don't know what you missed.' Next day came the reply: 'Don't be so sure we missed it.'

The Camorra was forged at the time of backlash against the revolutionary French republic of Naples. Into the vacuum between a liberal intelligentsia and reactionary elite, the Camorra moved as 'protection' for the masses in Europe's third city and, crucially, its biggest port, a portal for smugglers and extortionists. The Italian Mafia was first crushed by, then absorbed into, Mussolini's fascist regime. As Tom Behan writes in See Naples and Die, the rebirth of the modern Camorra was ironically due to the return of its Sicilian rival after the war. But the Camorra and Mafia were different - the former urban, the latter rural; the Neapolitans bound only by criminal commercial interest, the latter by family ties also. The Sicilians subscribed to a veneer of 'honour' to which the Camorra paid little heed. The Camorra has been more cynically flexible than Cosa Nostra, more fickle in its recruitment, loyalties and hostilities.

Only one Camorra boss seriously allied himself to the Sicilians: Michele Zaza (aka Michel O'Pazz or Mad Mike), a shrewd smuggler-turned-gangster. Others saw no need to be bound to Cosa Nostra, markedly Raffaele Cutolo, who in the 1970s founded the New Organised Camorra, re-establishing Neapolitan control. The earthquake of 1980 relaunched the Camorra in terms of capital with some £16bn earmarked for reconstruction siphoned off by gangsters and by politicians building themselves villas while some made homeless by the earthquake were still billeted in a lunatic asylum in Naples in 1993. The looted funds stoked the first Camorra civil war between Cutolo and the 'New Family' of clans led by Zaza and his heir, Carmine Alfieri. By 1991 a courageous Naples examining judge called Paolo Mancuso was able to tell me that the Camorra had overtaken Cosa Nostra as a criminal business operation but that 'what marks them out is that their legal income is now greater than their illegal one. The Camorra has become a social, financial and political institution.'

The Camorra's coup was to realise that cocaine rather than heroin would become the drug of super-liquidity. They built international connections accordingly, in Colombia, Venezuela, Spain and along the French Riviera. They became the first capitalist operation to penetrate post-communist Eastern Europe, to deal in drugs, clothing and arms, in particular Kalashnikovs made under Soviet licence, with which the Camorra can now equip any army or militia suffering an embargo or supply problem. The profits were so great that the Camorra was obliged to invest imaginatively and semi-legally: in construction (it built much of the Costa del Sol), football pools and gambling, agriculture, car franchises, tourism, banks, social services, prostitution, waste disposal and textiles - even haute-couture, whether 'Made in Italy' or 'Made in China'.

The Camorra had meanwhile entwined itself with senior Christian Democrats and other politicians to form a terrifying power machine in Naples. Thousands in Naples owed their livelihoods to either Byzantine political patronage or to the Camorra, or both. There were no rights, only privileges for those who paid the Camorra or a politician in cash or votes.

Through the collapse of Christian Democracy and the advent of a leftist local authority and a right-wing Silvio Berlusconi to national government, the system remained intact. Saviano explains that few in Naples use the term 'Camorra' any more. The clans call themselves 'Sistema'- the System. It is impregnable, like cement, he says.

'Cement' is the title of Saviano's chapter about his home town, the stuff of construction, legal or illegal, completed buildings or those left paid for but abandoned as concrete skeletons. 'Successful Italian businessmen come from cement,' says Saviano. 'Before transforming themselves into fashion models, managers, financial sharks and owners of newspapers and yachts, before all this and under all this lies cement.' The English translation, for some baffling reason, castrates the climax to this passage, which in Italian reads: cemento armato - armed cement.

The last article I filed from Italy, in March 1994, concerned the Camorra's execution of Father Giuseppe Diana, or Don Peppino, as he prepared the host in his church in Casal di Principe. Saviano, then 16, knew him, and remembers the Christmas Day on which he distributed a tract defying the Camorra. It was the worst form of denunciation for murderers who think of themselves as Catholics.

Saviano recalls how rival Casalesi clans, in order to show that the murder was not their doing, pledged to find the killer. Saviano, meanwhile, was thinking about the power of the word. 'While Don Peppino's assassins were talking about cutting up flesh to seal their position,' he wrote, in the book's pivotal passage, 'I was still thinking about the priest's battle and the primacy of the word... words against cement mixers and guns... to testify, take a stand. The only way to eliminate a word like that is to kill it.' Which is what the Camorra wants to do to Saviano, now it has disposed of Don Peppino.

'If that book had sold 10,000 copies, they would not have had the slightest fear, and I would still have my freedom,' he says. 'But so many people have now read about who they are, and this they cannot forgive. They have been denied their romance.'

Part of the book and all of the film is set in Secondigliano, heartland of the Camorra. That is where I found myself last week on Corso Secondigliano. Turn right at the heavily fortified 'Penitentiary Centre', and there they are: the Vele (the Sails, because of their shape), hideous blocks built in the 1960s, turned into the biggest drug marketplace in the world, and then its most ferocious criminal battlefield. This neighbourhood is called Scampia, one-time fiefdom of a man few outsiders had heard of until 1998, when a teacher ticked off his son's girlfriend for being lazy in school, and was beaten senseless. In 2002 police traced 160kg of heroin and cocaine to his door. A man called Paolo Di Lauro, aka Ciruzzo the Millionaire.

Di Lauro's trafficking system was so pervasive that Saviano details a lucrative scheme for local pensioners, who could get a good return by putting their savings into cocaine. 'No substance gets introduced into the European market without first passing through Secondigliano,' writes Saviano, describing the squalid inferno of product tests carried out on pathetic addicts to gauge the effects of 'cutting' drugs, and then the war which followed a revolt against Di Lauro by lieutenants wanting a bigger share, and Di Lauro's terrible revenge.

One ventures into the Vele with trepidation. Many of the apartments are empty, some burned out. But people are surprisingly ready to talk, not about the Camorra per se ('What Camorra?' says one man) but about the film. 'I was in it!' boasts a girl. 'In the bit when they kill the lady at the end! You can see me!'

A woman whispers hoarsely on a stinking walkway between front doors: 'There is nothing that hasn't happened here. I read his book too. It's true, every word, God bless him.'

'When the cameras arrived,' says Saviano, 'most people wanted to be part of it, to advise on how to make the film and get it right. Once the people had decided they wanted the film to be made there, there was nothing the Camorra could do. They didn't want this film but they had to allow it. That alone was something.'

Casal di Principe is the fiefdom of the Casalesi clan and now-jailed boss Francesco Schiavone, called Sandokan after the pirate. He strangled the heir to the leadership with his bare hands at a cartel meeting, then became the mogul of Camorra construction, arms dealing and garbage disposal. I pull up at the Caffe Penelope, attacked by Sandokan's men during the Casalesi wars, and make some stupid remark in nostalgic praise of Maradona to a man at the bar reading a football paper. I ask if he has read Saviano's book. He stirs sugar into his coffee and replies with a nod, then a stare and silent grimace which says, today of all days, with those cops dead: 'Don't try to talk. Leave.' My appointment here with one of the bravest reporters in Italy, Rosaria Capacchione, has been postponed because of the car chase and three important arrests of Camorristi, which she must cover for her paper, Il Mattino. One of a roll of honour of brave writers on the Mafia, of whom Saviano is the most prominent, Rosaria works the area under police guard, and no wonder. Only the other day she was again singled out, along with Saviano, by lawyers for Camorristi in the dock at neighbouring Santa Maria Capua Vetere for her reporting on a trial. The Casalesi have wanted Rosaria dead since 1995 when she was tailed by gunmen after revealing the contents of two supergrass confessions against Sandokan while he was still at liberty.

As Saviano says: 'The Mafia makes for the best and the worst. It's hard to find the best sometimes but it is there - the tenacity of the good people in this battle, which seems so hopeless. No Italian political party can fight an election campaign by going against the Mafia. Politics is an alibi - there is this idea that if you have politics that is corrupt you have the Mafia, and if you had clean politics, the Mafia would disappear. It's not like that. Political parties cannot rid us of the Camorra because the Camorra has no politics beyond the money it makes; no ideology apart from its business interests. This can only be done by getting at their economy and their roots in society. And the way to do this is by mobilising civil society, challenging the way they operate, refusing to take part.'

In last week's L'espresso magazine Saviano lambasted the passive complicity of the city's middle class - Napoli Bene, as they are called - confronted in this particular case by a story linking the undersecretary of state for economy in Silvio Berlusconi's cabinet, Nicola Cosentino, and senior local politicians from his party, with the garbage disposal rackets run by the Camorra. Saviano says: 'The reaction of this strata [the middle class] has been "So what?" or "Why should that amaze you - isn't that how things work?" The professional ranks, the intellectuals, the employers - in short, the bourgeoisie of Campania which is always seen as a noble stratum - seems incapable of protesting.'

'I have no illusions about the fascination with the Camorra, with the bosses,' concludes Saviano. 'To say they have no fascination is a lie. I'm not going to say that you don't earn more money or that you will not get more pretty women if you become a Camorrista. But what do you do then? You can't leave where you live, you can't talk to anyone apart from your own kind, and the only women you will meet are the ex-girlfriends of your own men. And possibly you'll end up dead.'

And what about his readers? Are they too caught up in morbid fascination? 'What is so fascinating about torturing a girl to death or shooting an innocent teenager? What I want to do is recognise the fantasy, take hold of it and take it apart.'

• Gomorrah the film is out on Friday. To order a copy of the book for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to or call 0870 836 0885

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