Book Review: Zero Zero Zero

Roberto Saviano. PHOTO CREDIT: GERALD BRUNEAU

  Roberto Saviano hit the jackpot with his first book Gomorrah, an exposure of the  Neapolitan Mafia, the Camorra. I admired it although regretting the fictional elements in a non-fictional narrative. It inspired a film, a play and a TV series.  A prime- time Italian State television talk show was built around him.  Bald and solemn, on television he came across as an implacable, suffering prophet.

  That same year 2006, because of Camorra threats to kill him, he was given a Carabinieri escort which still functions.   In recent years he has found that “what I have to say echoes less and less no matter how loudly I scream …my words are rejected as illegitimate by Naples itself “   He enlarged his investigations “to take on the whole world.” Zero Zero Zero (the dealers description of the purest cocaine ) is the result.

  His knowledge of the southern Italian underworld led him to the Colombian narcos who enable the Calabrian Mafia to flood Europe with cocaine, the main drug traffick studied by Saviano.  But he gives much space also to Mexican narcos who have now muscled the Colombians out of the US market.

  This comprises much of the first third of the book replete with narratives of publicized brutality to rival those of ISIS:  for instance, after cutting rivals’ head off, Colombian criminals replaced them with pigs’ heads and posted the video on internet.  Zero Zero Zero moves to Guinea-Bissau, one of the West African countries used in getting drugs into Europe; to Russia and its underworld operating in the West;  even to Australia, a ” Calabrian Mafia colony”, where in 2000 police found about two-thirds of 434 kilos of cocaine imported to Adelaide.

  Among the most interesting cases recounted are those of Mexican groups who started fighting narcos but then trafficked drugs to earn money for needed arms.     Bruno Fuduli’s story illustrates the not infrequent shifts in allegiance.  Fuduli was  a Calabrian marble factory owner who long resisted  the underworld but to survive eventually agreed to represent it in Colombia.  He was a success but  informed on the underworld which is why the huge shipment to Adelaide in 2000 was intercepted.  He testified against the narcos and entered an Italian witness protection program but was treated so shabbily that he denounced it publicly.  He resumed collaborating with the narcos but was arrested and in 2012 was sentenced for 18 years.

  Saviano makes him more vivid that many of the other personages because he knows his background better.    He presents his personages abruptly, often without explaining whether they are based on first- hand contact or collating police files.  He does not say when or why he went to West Africa, nor on whose behalf.  Believing that he is writing literature, he fails to meet journalistic standards. 

  He is mum about how the mechanics of his investigation but is fascinated by his own experience.  In recent years Saviano, now 35, has spent much of his time in New York; he regrets his loss of the simple pleasures of a normal life in Naples.  

  He calls himself an addict for knowledge about cocaine and believes it is a greater menace than terrorism because the immense profits attainable give criminals a huge advantage in a society strapped for liquidity.  He sees himself as a prophet crying in the wilderness but also verges, in his reflections, on the role of double agent: between chapters there are inserts on cocaine which are mostly informative but one is a kind of free verse praise of cocaine’s beauty and power.

 He self-dramatises “I looked into the abyss and I became a monster…I am a monster, as is anyone who sacrifices himself for something he believed is superior.”  This seems confused after he has chronicled the lives of narcos who have sacrificed themselves for something sordidly inferior.

  He devotes little space to solutions, mentioning legalisation as a possibility without discussing the problem of it being introduced by only one State which then becomes a magnet.  Instead he concentrates on showing drugs in action in Zero Zero Zero which, although lacking the tight focus of Gomorrah, still has an undeniable wallop.