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...

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.

Vince Cassel may have thought he was joking.  The Italian voice-over industry acts like the Mafia, French actor Vincent Cassel said. Now, he's probably using hyperbole to draw attention to an issue that annoys him. I am not for one minute suggesting what he said is true! Not at all..... But if one considers what he says in light of what we know about the mob's infiltration of labor, then the Italian film dubbing industry is actually the perfect example of how the Mafia takes over entire industries by controlling the labor force via unions. Still, I am not saying this is the case. Not at all. Consider this an educational exercise -- and that only. I mean nothing more or less.... 

Mafia violence is on the wane. The Italian mafia is on the march, infiltrating new sectors of the country's economy, according to a new report. Newspaper articles have been seeking to offset this news with word that the Mafia has been keeping a lid on violence -- as if taking a page from its American brethren, which no longer sanctions murder. The report, by the government’s anti-mafia directorate (the Dia), adds that while Sicily’s Cosa Nostra faces a troublesome ongoing restructuring and the Naples-based Camorra is getting major attention from law enforcement, the Calabrian Ndrangheta has consolidated its position as the most powerful criminal organization in all of Italy, if not the world.

Smiles Everyone, Smiles! The Casalesi Camorra boss The following story regarding the capture of the first Casalesi Camorra boss to flip includes a wealth of details about the man who folded under the pressure of solitary confinement. The information to which O'Ninno, or "Baby Face," as he is known, is privy can “make the Italian political and business worlds tremble,” world-famous journalist Roberto Saviano told The Daily Beast, which obtained a copy of the mob boss's court testimony. O'Ninno, known widely as a bookkeeper for the Naple-based Mafia outfit, was also a quite prolific killer. “I started killing in the '80s,” he said, and his "hit lists" included police officers, bodyguards, opposition clan members, and "people in discotheques, on lonely roads and in broad daylight." He also took his wife and daughter with him as far away as Brazil and Portugal to participate in killings, "while they enjoyed what amounted to f...

Da Ciro, one of 23 restaurants seized by the police in Rome. "Buy everything." --An Italian mob boss caught on wiretap in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell; he was giving an order to a lieutenant who'd just been told to immediately go to East Germany. The International New York Times  reported that harsher laws in Italy have led criminal rings to seek new territory abroad. In this year alone, according to the report: "Italian officials seized € 51 million, or $70 million, in mob properties and other assets in Rome, providing a small glimpse of the legal business interests that southern clans control in the capital." The "mob economy" as Italian officials call it, "has rapidly expanded across Europe."