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...

La Cicciolina, sans exposed breasts. The following was written by Charles DeLucca , our itinerant journalist, who occasionally files reports with Cosa Nostra News based on his observations and thoughts regarding organized crime, Italian-style, in all its various guises and locals. Most of the time, when I mention I am of Italian nationality, people ask me about every single issue relating to Italy. From Berlusconi to La Cicciolina (a Hungarian-born Italian porn star, politician and singer, famous for delivering political speeches with her breasts exposed). They also ask my about the dynamics of organized crime. Certain topics are off limits because it’s really, really difficult to explain the truth about certain groups. For instance, most of what we know about the American Cosa Nostra is from the movies, TV and pentitis (plural for “those who repent”; rats, turncoats, in other words). Nobody knew much about la Camorra until Robert Saviano published Gomorrah ...