Roberto Saviano became famous for exposing organised crime in Italy and living to tell the tale. But the writer and campaigner, who has lived under police protection for eight years, is facing a very different threat that has challenged his reputation as a moral voice in Italy.
A hard-hitting article published on the Daily Beast news website last week accused Saviano, the author of Gomorrah – which delves into the murky world of the Camorra mafia in Naples – of plagiarism and fabrication. It includes detailed examples of passages in Zero Zero Zero, his book on the global cocaine trade, that appear to be very similar to passages from other sources, and accuses the author of “plundering” from the work of lesser-known writers when he isn’t making things up.
The article portrays Saviano – who has described his life under armed guard as “shit” – as a “global celebrity living in a “gilded cage”.
“I believe they want to discredit me,” Saviano told the Observer in an email responding to the Daily Beast article. “[The article], which obviously gave fodder to my professional critics in Italy, was not concentrated on whether the book was judged to be absolutely bad … it made a caricature of me as a rock star who has rock-star aspirations and who has one million Twitter followers. The Rushdie of Rome. I never introduce myself as a journalist. I do not look for scoops; I comment on the news. I put things together, I give them new interpretations.”
Saviano dismissed accusations of plagiarism. The Daily Beast notes a similarity between a Los Angeles Times article that described a film and used certain statistics, and passages in Zero Zero Zero. “Why is it original in any way to report figures that are indicated in statistics accessible to all? If you describe The Godfather, are you plagiarising The Godfather?” he said.
It is not the first time Saviano has suggested that the aim of his critics is to savage his reputation. When he was first accused of plagiarism in Italy – in a case that is still going through the courts, but has forced the Neapolitan writer to add annotations to some passages in Gomorrah – many neutral observers dismissed the case as part of a smear campaign. Federico Varese, an Oxford University expert in organised crime, says he has sympathy for Saviano, but that the allegations cannot be ignored, given their source is not tied to organised crime. “I suspect the consequences will be more severe internationally and in the UK, because in Italy these things are always washed away with time,” Varese said.
“But this is the first time he has been questioned by anyone other than the right-wing press, which hates him because he was a very vocal opponent of [former Italian prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi and has talked about the problem of organised crime in the north [of Italy], which is very important.”At the heart of the controversy lie some nuanced questions. Saviano says he does not portray himself as a journalist, but writes for a newspaper and claims his work is based on his own investigative work and primary sources.
Should he be held to journalistic standards? Or is he a master of a genre that Truman Capote made famous – the “non-fiction novel” – that presents a narrative that is essentially true but not necessarily factual?
If that is the case, as John Dickie, a professor at University College London who knows Saviano, puts it, can he still pass himself off as a “voice of truth”? Dickie recalls how young Saviano was – just 28 – when Gomorrah took off. “People just loved the idea of him being a martyr to truth and I wonder what would have happened if, instead of saying, ‘I’ve been targeted for the truth’, he could have said, ‘Hang on, what I write is part of the product of imagination, my evocation of this world’,” he says.
Dickie points as an example to the first scene of Gomorrah. Saviano describes a massive container being hoisted on to a ship in the port of Naples by a crane when, all of a sudden, the hatches of the container spring open and “dozens of bodies” start raining down. “They looked like mannequins. But when they hit the ground, their heads split open, as if their skulls were real. And they were,” he wrote. The port operator who is telling Saviano the story covers his eyes with his fingers and begins whimpering to himself, and in the book Saviano says he cannot make out what he is saying.
“I think that is an urban legend,” Dickie says. “I have serious doubts about it, but it’s a fantastic opening to a book. He did that kind of thing because it was like a visceral reaction of disgust. You could call it a description of a hyper-real Camorra world,” he says.
Others have raised similar questions. In its review in 2007, the New York Times hailed Gomorrah as “a powerful work of reportage”. But the reviewer – Rachel Donadio – pointed out that in Italy Gomorrah was described as “docu-fiction”, and its publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, had called it a work of “investigative writing”.
Donadio wrote at the time: “Did the author change any names? If so, readers aren’t informed. These are not small matters, and should have been disclosed.” Then she added: “But the emotional truth of Saviano’s account is unassailable.”
In his first review of Zero Zero Zero in 2013, Varese pointed out that sections appeared to have been lifted from Wikipedia and, in a subsequent article, noted that the book had stated a conclusion about a mafia group in Moscow that had been established in Varese’s own book on the topic. “In fact, this statement is a result of an analysis that took – in my case – some 10 years to establish. So I do not want to say that he plagiarised my book, as this is not the point. Rather, it’s that the distinction between facts and analysis are not as clear cut as he makes out,” Varese says.
Other reviewers of Zero Zero Zero have suggested it is evident that his book is not straightforward non-fiction reportage. In the New York Times’s Sunday Book Review, reviewer Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, noted that Saviano’s sourcing of certain allegations was “left to the imagination” and that some of the more colourful events described in the book, like an alleged meeting of drug lords in Acapulco in 1989, may or may not have occurred.
“The way I see it, the book appears to blend prodigious research with conjecture,” Bowden said “There’s no law against this kind of thing, of course. Writers have been blending fiction and non-fiction since the beginnings of literature.”
Amid the media storm, some prominent voices in Italy have come to Saviano’s defence, including Ezio Mauro, the editor of La Repubblica, who said Saviano – a star contributor – was being targeted because “he has expressed thoughts and judgments on contemporary Italy that have triggered an avalanche of opposition”.
Those who sympathise with Saviano, even if they believe he must also be more forthcoming, emphasise how important his work has been. When Gomorrah was published in 2006, Varese points out, there was a sense that democracy and capitalism were “winning”. “He wrote a book that said in the heart of western Europe there is a rotten core, and that is the intersection between the mafia and capitalism,” he said. “And the point he was making is that these things coexist very well.”
Gianni Riotta, a journalist and professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, recalls sitting in a university cafeteria in Milan with Saviano when he was spotted. A long line of students appeared, wanting to shake Saviano’s hand. “That’s exactly what people want to break,” Riotta – a friend of the author – says.
Writing for the Guardian this year, Saviano described his worst fear. “This is what drags me down, the fear that I will be discredited somehow, that it’ll creep up on me and I won’t be able to defend myself, or my writing. I feel it’s happening already, that the people who say, ‘He’s lying, he’s plagiarising, he’s libelling us’, will end up having more importance than my own research, my own attempts to investigate how things work.”
