Anti-mafia author wins prize for courage

The awarding of the PEN/Pinter international writer of courage award to the Italian mafia-busting journalist and author Roberto Saviano puts his plight in the public eye again.

Saviano, well known as the author of Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia, is under sentence of death by the mafia. It is known as a 'cappotto di legno', meaning living with a coffin. It is worse than a fatwa because the death sentence will remain with him forever.

Annalisa Piras, of L’Espresso, in accepting the prize on the 32-year-old’s behalf, gave an example of a man being murdered 50 years after he was sentenced to death by the mafia. Fatwas can be lifted, as British writer Salman Rushdie found to his relief, but the edict from the mafia is forever. Saviano now lives a ghostly existence, moving from hotel room to hotel room every two nights, and was unable to collect the prize in person in London because police protection could not be provided.

The mafia in its various forms is seen as a peculiarly Italian problem, and southern Italy at that. But that is a mistaken perception, according to Saviano, who has charted the rise of Italy’s mainland mafia, the Camorra, and the spreading of its tentacles to all parts of the globe. Its roots are in Naples, a principal route into Europe for thousands of containers of counterfeit goods, more than half of which are not even registered by port authorities, and virtually all coming from China. Like a fake Samsung? Try a Semsing, or why not try the latest not-so-smart phone.

According to Global Financial Integrity’s 2011 report, Transnational Crime in the Developing World, trade in counterfeit goods and illicit trade in guns, people, and natural resources is a $650 billion enterprise, which most affects the developing world. Counterfeiting is not far behind the drugs trade as a valuable criminal activity, valued at $250 billion per year compared to $320 billion per year for drugs.

The report points out that profits are, naturally enough, lining the pockets of these new transnational crime syndicates through the enormous international trade networks they have created for themselves.

Counterfeit fashion alone has warehouses and legitimate outlets in European cities, from Sarajevo to Dublin. Similarly for the Americas, boutiques in Canada, the US and South America peddle fake designer jeans and other clothing.

Saviano, of course, is not the only writer to point to the impunity with which the Camorra operate. Misha Glenny’s McMafia – A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (2008) is a broader analysis of gangsterism from Russia and to Japan through to Columbia, She points out that while the Sicilian mafia has been in retreat for many years, its mainland cousins, the ’ndrangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita and the Camorra, have been busy building up their outposts abroad. Montreal, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo are “home to the mightiest export and money-laundering syndicate in the world”, run by the Cuntrera-Cuarana mafia clans. Venuzuela is also an important base, after the clan moved successively moved from heroin to cocaine dealing since the 1950s. Glenny notes that Columbian, Russian, Bulgarian and Central American traffickers all became part of the scheme.

Saviano has said that the mafia is more of a threat to Europe as a whole than to Italy. It was ironic then that given the penetration of Britain by Italian and other ‘mafiosa’ that the London Metropolitan Police were unable, or, more likely, unwilling, to provide the adequate protection for Saviano to turn up to pick up his prize in person in London in October 2011. If his life is at such risk at a private gathering in London, that is an unacceptable threat to all of society and one which should be met with the full protection of the law.