MAY 22, 2008
DISAFFECTION ALL’ITALIANA

I’m undergoing a painful trial separation. You might say it’s all in my head but the corroborating evidence is reliable. I can’t avert my eyes any longer.

I love Naples. A deep affinity pulls me as it has generations of Americans whose ancestors left a land they loved but couldn’t live in. In our hearts bella Napoli is a land of sun and song bursting with the visceral joy of living. The southern Italian region of Campania has always been a land of contrasts dancing together like tipsy guests at a wedding: palaces and slums, religion and sensuality, agricultural abundance and destitution, song festivals and mafia funerals, courtyards decorated with skulls, shop after shop full of handmade nativity scenes. My mother’s grandparents emigrated to Boston in the 1890’s. The Italian roots of my Italian-Irish American family had a predominant role in developing what sense of ethnicity I own. I am drawn to all of Italy but when I visit Naples, I have an uncanny sense that I belong there. But something has come between me and the object of my affection.

Let me tell you how the trouble started. I heard Roberto Saviano speak in New York in early May. This young Neapolitan author perpetrated an audacious act in 2006 when he wrote Gomorrah, a non-fiction book that exposes the Camorra, an organized crime empire the members of its numerous family clans call The System. I first read Saviano’s book in the fall of 2007 after returning from an inspiring visit to Italy. It revealed a dark and deadly side of modern Naples I wish I could forget or forgive. Being in a small room with the author and getting the bad news from his own mouth lit a new fire in me. You know how the smoke smells. It’s in all the papers.
Saviano calls The System “the most solid criminal organization in Europe.” Its prime resources include the port of Naples where merchandise arrives but is then substantially uninspected, devalued and looted before it even touches land, and the innate prestige of the “Made in Italy” brand established by the regions’ superbly skilled and perpetually exploited garment workers. Add to these assets a percentage of the population ready to commit violent and subversive crimes to ingratiate itself to The System and to take advantage of its role as conduit for hot cash and hard drugs throughout Europe. Last but not least by a long shot are the submissive government agencies of Campania. Saviano notes it is “the region with the highest number of cities under observation for Camorra infiltration.”

I have had my suspicions but I didn’t want to see the truth. The mafia had been a relic tolerated in my imagination as a bickering underworld clan withering with global progress. The characters in “Napoli Millionaria, ”that fine old play by Eduardo De Filippo, are average folk scraping through tough times in war-ravaged Naples. They participate in the “informal economy” of black-market cigarettes, coffee and other necessities. One lone man decries his family’s actions and the moral corruption in creates in them. In the touching finale, he and his wife contemplate the future without this illegal trade and its immediate gratification. Saviano’s contemporary antagonists are the rotten fruit of this deeply-rooted tree who suffer no such introspection. Their reckless avarice haunts me as its horrible consequences haunt the people, the economy and the very soil of Campania. I can only begin to imagine the terror decent Neapolitans must feel shackled to their vicious fellows.

How could I have been so blind? My Naples has been created out of gorgeous cultural artifacts and visits to the historic center, the Spaccanapoli, Capri and Sorrento. Roberto Saviano cut the throat of my nostalgia and naiveté. The System is no longer an Italian underworld society following antique codes of “honorable” behavior in a heavily-guarded niche of the society. Its rapacious tentacles reach all over the world’s national borders, oceans and cultures. The System has transformed itself into a multi-national corporation off the media’s radar, in a cement slum chrysalis outside of Naples. These decrepit suburbs were zoned by bribery, sanctioned by contracts pulled out of the pockets of local officials on the take, and colonized with brutal structures built of deficient cement. Europes’s most notorious drug supermarket thrives here, al fresco, and generates staggering cash revenues. This hopeless area’s low-income population sees few other options for advancement but to grab any crumbs tossed to them by the bosses. Thus, The System subsidizes its “legitimate” ventures in construction, toxic-waste disposal, tourism, and fashion. With capital as limitless as the world’s appetite for heroin, they sell services well below market-value thereby laundering billions of Euros every year. They break the legs of honest businesses along the way. The pawns of this trade are teenage boys who run drugs and run interference with the police, putting themselves into the line of fire for the thrill and for what seems like a lot of money to them. Their pathetic, dead end lives remind me of the plaster casts seen by every visitor to Pompeii -- vaporized human bodies left voids where molten ash cooled around them at the moment of death – archaeologists filled the empty spaces with plaster to recreate their shapes. Like their ancient cousins, these eager, replaceable youths just happened to be present at a particularly unlucky time and place. Exploited and endangered, these boy soldiers are never rewarded with actual membership in The System, an irrevocable lifetime “honor.” Saviano appeals their sentence by making them unforgettable.

It takes two to tarantella, cara mia, one dancer, one tarantula…. I finally understand northern antipathy toward The South, but The North has not been above cheating on me either. Northern complicity is obvious now: its industries and municipalities patronize the cut-rate construction and toxic-waste disposal services run by The System. When someone offers you a high value service for pennies, it’s like buying a new tv from a guy off the back of his truck: he doesn’t say where it came from but you know it’s hot.

I just don’t understand how it happened. At which intersection do diligent mozzarella-makers and murderous heroin-cookers cross paths?

The recent boycott of mozzarella made in Campania with the milk of water buffalo nurtured on dioxin-laced feed is the tip of the volcano. The “authorities” say the cheese is safe now, but who will take responsibility to inspect the Italian agricultural exports that the world consumes in enormous quantities? It made headlines because of this prized cheese’s high export value. Farmers sickened by 14 million tons of industrial waste trucked into Campania are a “local problem,” another dirty Southern secret newly revealed to the world. When a mobster kills another man “made of the same stuff” it is considered an old-world business tradition. When the wanton destruction of a region’s land and the sickening of innocent citizens is financed by an international drug superpower it is an international affair.

I plead guilty when you say it’s not the first time I’ve been warned! Excellent Cadavers, the 1995 book by Alexander Stille, documents the anti-Mafia prosecutions of the 1980’s and 1990’s when Giovanni Falcone taught the police to trace and document the money transacted in organized crime in order to establish guilt up to the very highest levels of Sicilian and Italian society. He gave his life to this cause but the government only took up the gauntlet temporarily until the smoke cleared and the blood was washed off the pavements of Palermo and Catania. That lesson must be applied now while The System’s filthy money trail is still warm. But here’s the catch: which agency, government or commercial, can be trusted to fight organized crime in Italy? It is frightfully clear where the real power in Italy is: with cash movers and trash movers, money launderers and waste eliminators and not with the well known flagships of Italian commerce. Will Saviano’s revelations lead the international community into action? If only like Toto` in Marotta and DeSica’s “Il guappo” we could screw up our courage and throw the bums out. It’s only natural to feel that it’s impossible to fight such massive corruption and that the path of least resistance is the only way to go, but, please, somebody prove us wrong.

Why is the lover always the last to know? Only a trusted friend could have opened my eyes -- opened all of our eyes. Poor Saviano is suffering separation anxiety above and beyond anything I’ll ever know for daring to bring The System into view. His life is under threat from the Camorra. He lives sequestered in a police barracks when he is in Naples and his family, too, has been displaced for their own safety. There’s no going back for him. Roberto Saviano decided to stab the darkness with his words. He must have sensed there were others out there waiting for his message, ready to acknowledge the true state of Campania.
In his New York interview of May 1, 2008, Saviano said the situation in Italy was hopeless unless the rest of the world joins the fight against its organized crime syndicates. We’ve all let Italy off the hook for a long time. Seduced and bound, gratified and inert, we’ve given a pass to bad behavior. Those of us on the outside have been too fascinated to believe the worst and those on the inside are frustrated that crime bosses strangle the Italian economy and threaten anyone standing in their way. I don‘t let any other countries’ sociopathic tribes off the hook (please apply this cautionary tale to the country of your choice.) But my great grandparents weren’t from some other crime capital: they were from Naples. Will people of Italian descent all over the world justify Saviano’s heroic act by taking his sad message to heart? Perhaps from this new consciousness some action will emerge.

What then is one lone Italian like me to do for the time being? Separate myself from Italy and its culture? I’m not giving up cappacollo, though, or Caruso (who also had issues with Naples,) or my memories of that night on the ramparts of Castel Sant’Elmo... And if I were to stop spending the money I lavish on my beloved, to steal her purse, cut up her credit cards and cut out her designer labels, to skip the visits to Venice and Pisa, would she even notice? No, that would be useless. It will be the drugs that may keep us apart in the end. Being romantically linked with an addict leads you down a dark alley. But my psyche needs an intact Italy. Surely you noticed that I’m too heavily invested in this co-dependent relationship to give it up. I’m going to be looking for a counselor. Maybe Saviano knows a good one.