Since 2006 and the release of his book “Gomorrah”, Roberto Saviano has lived under police protection. Despite numerous death threats from the Camorra, the name given to Neapolitan organized crime, he continued to write novels, screenplays, articles and reports. An autobiography drawn by Asaf Hanuka, just translated into French, recounts his daily life.
He is 27 years old and, he remembers, an immense recklessness, which leads him to say everything without protecting himself. The book he has just published, the first of a long list, is called Gomorra, it is written like a novel, with this detail: to tell the grip of the Camorra on the city of Naples and its surroundings, Saviano chose the truth against the plausible, the mechanics of the facts and not the strings of a fiction that would only have shown what everyone already knows.
Above all, he did not take care to change the names, and when he was invited to one of the strongholds of the Camorrist families, Casal di Principe – 25 km north of Naples – he distinguished in the crowd the boss faces: You don’t belong to this land, he throws. You exploit it, violate it. Go away. » His fate is sealed. A month later, when he returns to Naples after a presentation in a bookstore, two carabineers are waiting for him. He will now live under protection.
Never shut up no matter the cost
Over the years, rumors have circulated around several “contracts” which plan his death, and at the top of the mafia organizations it is sought to know which, of his writings or his martyrdom, would do the most damage to the lucrative business of illegality. Homicide projects against him are abandoned because a repentant fears for his son, recruited among the killers, or because a woman, who is afraid of being an accomplice, transmits information heard in prison.
” It’s as if evil explains Roberto Saviano, was never a disaster for others, but only for oneself. So, if I’m safe and sound, it’s not thanks to brave or altruistic people, but to people who tried to save themselves. The injustice is all the greater since it was the murders of two people far from his immediate entourage who decided on his commitment at a very young age.
The first took place on the street. He witnessed it at the age of 12. A man kills another man hiding under a car. Terrorized, the latter betrayed his presence by urinating under him. The other is the assassination two years later of Don Peppe Diana, a priest from Casal de Principe, who covered his town with posters that read this sentence: For the love of my people, I will never be silent. »
Thousands of homicides
We are in the deadliest years of organized crime, those of the death of the anti-mafia judges Giuseppe Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, assassinated respectively in May and July 1992. Between 1988 and 1992, it is estimated that nearly 3,000 people died of hands of the Mafia (Sicily), the ‘Ndranghetta (Calabria), the Camorra (Campania) or the Santa Corona Unita (Puglia). This is between 5 and 10 times more than the terrorism of the Years of Lead (from 1969 to 1980), all trends combined.
If this systemic violence is partly a thing of the past – Italy today has one of the lowest murder rates in the European Union – the influence of organized crime is more than ever sprawling, affecting both traditional sectors of drugs and prostitution, than to the very lucrative ones of waste trafficking or the shameless exploitation of migrants. It extends its hold over several continents, which Roberto Saviano managed to show in 2015 in his book extra pure, around cocaine-related networks.
In 2018, he tackles Roberto Salvini (Northern League, extreme right party), then inside in the first Giuseppe Conte government. He describes him as the “minister of the underworld”, an expression used in 1908 by the socialist Gaetano Salvemini to define the president of the Council Giovanni Giolitti. Roberto Salvini then threatens to strip him of his police protection.
The deadly threats of Matteo Salvini
” It feels like a death sentence “, explains Roberto Saviano. In fact, it happens that police protection is taken away from a threatened person after several years, but then there is no publicity, since we are precisely counting on the criminals being forgotten. Matteo Salvini left office the following year. He has since been prosecuted three times by the courts of his country.
Of Dante to Antonio Gramsci, via Silvio Pellico or Cesare Pavese, many monuments of Italian literature were built in prison or in exile. For 16 years now, the situation experienced by Roberto Saviano is a bit of both, except that it is the result of an agreement between the author and the authorities of a democratic state.
And it is in the name of a democracy too weak to ensure a normal life for one of its greatest defenders, but strong enough to protect him, that Roberto Saviano accepts this secluded life. We arrive at this paradox: for Roberto Saviano, the deprivation of freedom has become the price of greater freedom: that of writing down inconvenient truths.
► Roberto Saviano, Asaf Hanuka, I’m still alive, Gallimard / Steinkis, translated from Italian by Vincent Raynaud, 20 euros.
► For further :
► Roberto Saviano at the microphone of Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint for his novel fierce kiss in 2019.
► Roberto Saviano, a writer on borrowed time in 2012.