Mob Chronicler Turns to Fiction
NAPLES — Roberto Saviano is only 38, but for nearly a dozen years it has been like this: He is guarded around the clock, moving from house to house and sleeping in the police station when he returns to Naples, because it’s the only safe place for him to stay overnight in his home city.
Mr. Saviano earned the long line of people who wish him the very worst with his first book, “Gomorrah,” which in 2006 peeled back Naples’s skin to name the mobsters who he says destroyed his city. Thus began his journey to become Italy’s most divisive writer.
He returned to Naples recently to point out key places that appear in his new book, “The Piranhas,” the only way he can: From the back seat of an armored car, with sirens screeching. At least two dozen elite officers took positions as the sports utility vehicle stopped at a square where he was going for a short walk.
Out of nowhere appeared a large plainclothes security officer with a submachine gun.
“I’m neither alive nor dead,” he said later as the car drove south along the A1 autostrada. “They didn’t kill me. But they haven’t let me live.”
“The Piranhas” marks a literary departure for Mr. Saviano as his first conventional novel. “Gomorrah,” which turned into a movie and TV series, and a second book in 2013, “ZeroZeroZero,” about the cocaine trade, are works of investigation told in a novelistic style with some license.
His new book tells the story of a real gang of teenagers who defied the old order and tried to take over criminal life in Naples. Though it is like his other books in that it is based on real events and was deeply researched, he has invented the names, and presents even real episodes and dialogue as fiction. Unlike his other two books, which named names, “The Piranhas” does not. “I wanted the freedom to imagine what they were thinking,” he said.
Some of his friends, who have feared for his safety, are relieved that he finally wrote a “regular” novel. “His move to use fiction to communicate certain truths is a way to allow his message to get through without all the distractions that swirl around,” said Ruth Ben- Ghiat, a professor at New York University.
Still, he is visiting Naples at a time, as he put it, of “tension.” He has criticized Italy’s new populist government, and raised the ire of Matteo Salvini, a right-wing, anti-migrant deputy prime minister.
In July, he posted a photo of a dead woman and child floating in the Mediterranean Sea on Twitter, asking “how much pleasure” Mr. Salvini derives from walling off migrants. “The hatred you have sown will overthrow you,” he tweeted. Mr. Salvini has threatened to sue the author and end the state-sponsored escort. “I go from trouble to trouble,” Mr. Saviano said.
The title of “The Piranhas” in Italian — “La Paranza Dei Bambini,” or “The Fishing Trawler of Children” — suggests the tiny fish who are attracted to a bright light by nighttime nets meant for bigger fish. It is the first of two novels; the second, “Fierce Kiss,” is scheduled for translation into English in 2020.
Both tell the story of a gang led by a clever but coldhearted high school student, Nicolas Fiorillo. He believes the old gangsters who controlled drug running in central Naples have be-
A life under guard and with a bed at the police station.
come weak and decides to take over the business. This is no “baby gang,” but a real enterprise of young criminals who did not come up through the Camorra, Naples’s dominant crime group. They are like hundreds of thousands of young unemployed Italians who see little hope in following their parents’ career paths. “They despise their parents,” he said. “Because they can’t pay the mortgage” and have taken on too much debt.
While silence was the code for oldschool mobsters, these younger ones are endlessly texting each other, posting their exploits on Facebook.
“The new generation understands that if you aren’t on social media, you don’t exist,” Mr. Saviano said. “They are like Camorra 2.0.”
But it is not just the Camorra. As he has spoken out against the government, corruption, deals between politicians and the mob, and in favor of migrants, he has become ever more polarizing. He has accused Mr. Salvini of inching Italy back to authoritarianism, a growing worry in Europe.
On the square, some fans managed to get close enough to take a selfie with Mr. Saviano. “Can I greet you?” an older, local woman, Raffaela Ippolito, asked, extending her hand.
“Part of what he writes is true,” she said later. “Unfortunately it’s only the bad side of Naples. There are so many good things. But it’s his job.”
“Fierce Kiss,” his next novel, is selling briskly in Italy, and will not prove her wrong. “The ending is not a happy one,” Mr. Saviano said, “as you can imagine.”