Cosa Nostra News

Revised Considering the success of  Gomorra h,  the critically praised and immensely popular television show about the Neapolitan Cammora , which last year reported ly "doubled" the audience figures of other foreign-language series on the Sundance channel, it's no surprise that Netflix would seek a similar property. (Is Hulu next?) Netflix has managed to take an admirable shot at doing just that with Suburra , Netflix's first original series from Italy. It's been in the pipeline for years, actually. The 10-part series, which debuts worldwide on Netflix on October 6, is named for a real 2,000-year-old ancient Roman seaside town where a Mafia group erects a gambling, prostitution, and drug trafficking empire.

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...

Scene from the television show. Key character, Ciro, on left. Robert Saviano's Gomorrah correctly depicts the Camorra — Italy's Neapolitan Mafia — as having a horizontal structure. This simple fact plays a key role in the plot machinations of the television show. The Camorra, established in Campania and Naples, may be older and even larger than Italy's other Mafias, with its roots possibly dating back to the 16th century. The vertical Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian Mafia and the proper name of America's Mafia ) is run by bosses with a hierarchy in place. There's a "commission" to help, literally, organize crime, specifically, inter-family criminal activity so wars don't break out. It was quite effective, in America, anyway.