Cosa Nostra News

Roberto Saviano wrote an acclaimed best seller -- and has lived under severe restrictions ever since.  REVISED In October 2006, precisely 10 years ago yesterday, Roberto Saviano, the award-winning Italian writer who lives under police protection, received the phone call that changed his life. Saviano's widely lauded  Gomorrah  was issued earlier that year in his homeland by Mondadori, one of Italy's top publishing houses. (It wouldn't be available in the U.S. until 2008.) It was the source material for an acclaimed film, an award-winning play and a television series in production today . The Camorra, the Mafia in Naples -- the inner working of which Saviano's book had laid bare --initially chose to ignore the writer, reportedly under the belief that simply shooting him dead in the street wasn't worth the heat from both law enforcement and the media, which are feared equally in Italy, unlike in the U.S. But Saviano's influence continued to grow, whic...

Iovine also turned in one of his lawyers. Judges in Naples accepted bribes to acquit a Camorra boss  of murders he had confessed to carrying out, according to the boss in question, who is now an informant. "There was a whole system set up in the court in Naples. Three times the clan paid to ensure an acquittal," Antonio Iovine , the informant, told anti-mafia judges this past week in testimony, adding that each murder acquittal cost around $340,000.

Antonio Iovine, first boss of the Casalesi clan to flip. A Camorra boss of the powerful Casalesi clan is collaborating with investigators in Naples, according to published reports. Antonio Iovine, known as o'ninno or "the baby" due to his youthful face and swift climb up the ladder -- he is one of four bosses of the Casalesi clan -- all of which have been jailed for life following a major trial in 2008, began working with anti-Mafia prosecutors earlier this month. Iovine, 49, reportedly led the business side of the clan's activities. The Casalesi is the clan our roving correspondent Charles DeLucca has been reporting on for this blog .

Mr. DeLucca, who wrote a series of articles for me months ago, is back. He contacted me and to my surprise had no intention of writing, he was just being cordial, a lost art in America. I asked him if he'd write some more articles and told him that people had emailed me for some time after he'd stopped writing for this website. He was quite surprised, so he said he'd think about it. Then, this morning, I just got this story from him. I gave it a quick edit -- how I wish I had someone to give all my writing "a quick edit" -- and here it is, hot off the presses as they used to say. When reading DeLucca forget about what is truth and what is not - that's not a cop out; the point is you have to just give yourself over to an artist painting a picture for you of America's Cosa Nostra as seen through the eyes of an Italian steeped in the old world traditions and culture. I see DeLucca's work as a reflection of America itself, with echoes of both the g...