The Camorra - Working for you

I've just been watching Roberto Saviano on YouTube. It's a hour-long direct-to-camera summary of his book Gomorra about the Camorra and its business activities. He wants to correct the normal assumptions made about how the organisation (which is actually a large number of independent groups) does business.

Criminal activities per se make up just a small part of their activity. Mostly, they invest and reinvest in legitimate business. One example that struck me was that of new hotel and restaurant construction in Aberdeen (yes, Scotland). He doesn't give any names, but says that the hotels are top-class and the restaurants likewise, the menus featuring in Good Food guides. Another example is the distribution of genuine high-tech goods from the Far East through Eastern Europe into the West, which he says is controlled by the Camorra. The market in fake designer clothes has been transformed iin the last few years; now they are manufactured by the very same factories that do the genuine ones and sold in the same shops. They do not differ in the slightest from the legitimate article save for the single step of illegally applying the label. Why do the genuine brands not make a fuss? Because the Camorra control or own the means of distribution and often the retail outlets.

The big point is that, if you follow the movements of their money, only one, or maybe two of the ten or twenty steps involved are illegal, and often the only illegality present is corrupt or violent means to suppress competition. The economic and political implications of this criminal presence at the heart of the system are enormous. It spreads far out of Italy into all parts of Europe and to many parts of the world. Yet it seems there is very little political awareness and/or will to act against it.

The videos are all in Italian and there are five parts. The first is here.

The raising of Gomorrah

Earlier this month, I posted about Roberto Saviano's Gomorra, his tracing of the business of the Camorra in every part of Southern Italian life, an exposé that has earned him ostracism and a police escort. Michael Ledeen in NRO describes some of the ways the Camorra makes its money.

The newspaper accounts are way behind the times in their description of the camorra, for they routinely list its primary activities as drugs, prostitution, extortion, and public works. Some of the better Italian journalists have pointed out that the mob runs at least one third of the security companies in town, including a big chunk of the armored trucks that carry money and financial documents. They don’t need to steal, they simply control the cash. And the old protection racket — forcing shop owners to pay a fixed amount each month to guarantee they won’t be robbed or mugged — is also old hat, since the camorra either directly or indirectly controls roughly half of all retail outlets in the city.

The traditional picture of organized crime also ignores some of their most lucrative criminal enterprises, as for example the billion-dollar clothing industry, described in detail in a recent Italian best-seller, Gomorra, written by a 28-year old Neapolitan journalist named Roberto Saviano. Camorra companies in and around Naples produce tens of thousands of high-end branded clothes, including labels like Armani and Versace. Just like the authentic products, these are hand-stitched by skilled tailors, and are in fact indistinguishable from those manufactured at the official factories. Same materials, same quality, same label. The knockoffs are sometimes added to legitimate shipments, sometimes simply delivered directly to buyers in and outside Italy. Customers have no way of knowing where the clothes were made, nor, in many cases, do the producers know where their products are going. Saviano tells a moving story about a camorra tailor whose talent was the equal of anyone in the great fashion houses. One night he was watching the Academy Awards on television, and saw Britney Spears dancing in a gown he had made.

He also writes about why it is so difficult to overcome the Camorra and gives two examples of when it has been done.