For most of us it's just "the" mafia, but there are so many sub-groups and they go by many other names. The Camorra is an organization made up of different families from Naples and Campania.
The author received death threats after the book's publication. A quote from Winston Churchill goes well with this: "You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." It's good that we have people like that.
We learn so much about the machinations of these people, it's hard to believe. I read this book ages ago, but it still has an impact. The author describes how the fashion and clothing industry is infiltrated, how the drug trade arises from this, how banks are also influenced, arms trade, they don't even stop at construction and disposal. There is hardly an area in which there is no criminal involvement. If it's lucrative, the Camorra is involved.
Quote from the author from an interview:
"Whatever I would like my life to be, the fact is, I wrote Gomorrah, and I pay the price every day. (…)
I’m attacked not just by the Camorra, but also by parts of civil society and even by journalists who are ashamed that they’ve never spoken out against the mafia, and that their silence makes them complicit."
Also: "You only do good if you can also do bad things. A failed existence on the other hand, a joke, a do-nothing person can only do good things, but that's a gift, it's worth nothing. Something is good when you consciously decides to do so, because one could also do the bad." That applies to many areas, or actually to all.
From the back cover:
"A groundbreaking major bestseller in Italy, Gomorrah is Roberto Saviano's gripping nonfiction account of the decline of Naples under the rule of the Camorra, an organized crime network with a large international reach and stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs, and toxic-waste disposal. Known by insiders as "the System," the Camorra affects cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast, and is the deciding factor in why Campania, for instance, has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and whycancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years.
Saviano tells of huge cargoes of Chinese goods that are shipped to Naples and then quickly distributed unchecked across Europe. He investigates the Camorra's control of thousands of Chinese factories contracted to manufacture fashion goods, legally and illegally, for distribution around the world, and relates the chilling details of how the abusive handling of toxic waste is causing devastating pollution not only for Naples but also China and Somalia. In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer, a waiter at a Camorra wedding, and on a construction site. A native of the region, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to aid an eighteen-year-old victim who had been left for dead in the street.
Gomorrah is a bold and important work of investigative writing that holds global significance, one heroic young man's impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization."
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