There is much to destroy, which is why Saviano attacks the Camorra from different angles. He is at special pains to demonstrate how the Camorra straddles the clandestine and legal economies of Campania and, increasingly, those same economies in other parts of Italy and Europe. (Indeed, according to a study issued in October by Confesercenti, an association of small businesses, organized crime has become the largest segment of the Italian economy, accounting for 7 percent of Italy's GDP.) The book's opening scene establishes its focus: Saviano wants to know what the apparently bland and faceless economies of transport, construction and couture in Italy look like when they are broken open. He's asking where the bodies are hidden.

Camorra bosses prosper in the marketplace not only because they smuggle drugs and extort money but also because they dominate apparently legitimate sectors of the economy. There is no clear separation between the worlds of legal and illegal business in southern Italy--one feeds off the other. The most wretched quarters of Naples are simultaneously its "hidden mine, the darkness where the beating heart of the market gets its energy."

Saviano indeed suggests that the Camorra's underlying logic is a kind of capitalism on overdrive. By his account, the clans of the Camorra take the lessons of modern business, the "post-Fordist" economy that provides flexibility without rules, and exploit them to their logical conclusion. The clans compete in a marketplace based on the threat of violence but also provide certain services more cheaply and effectively than law-abiding firms ever could. They allow ordinary citizens to invest in the narcotics market: an investigation conducted by the Naples anti-Mafia bureau describes how retirees and small businessmen would hand money to Camorra agents, who would then bundle it and invest it in job lots of cocaine, providing the investors with far higher returns--doubling their money in a month--than they would have received for legitimate investments. Contract killing is seen as a kind of piecework: the slang term for killing someone is "to do a piece."

In some ways, the Secondigliano clans resemble speculative capitalists--they are ruthless market operators who identify and seek to capitalize on gaps and potential efficiencies that other organizations have overlooked. Saviano describes how they pioneered new forms of drug market organization in southern Italy. Rather than selling heroin only to dealers with clan connections, they opened up the market, breaking up heroin into smaller lots and selling it to anyone who would buy. They reorganized themselves so that lieutenants had much greater autonomy to make decisions. They provided safe market access by ensuring that the lookouts protected customers as well as dealers. They lowered prices when they needed to test the quality of a potentially dangerous cut of heroin, attracting "visitors," desperate junkies who were given hits for free to see whether they died or not. In short, the Secondigliano clans flattened the corporate hierarchy, brought through market liberalization and identified new efficiencies in bringing their product to market.

Some of these innovations had unexpected consequences. As lieutenants won greater freedom they lowered their contribution to the clan bosses and eventually tried to establish complete independence through the traditional means of betrayal and assassination. This led to a vicious internal war between the family of a reigning boss--the Di Lauros--and the "Spaniards"--the rebellious lieutenants and their allies. Despite the murder of their top management, the Di Lauros survived and staged a counterattack in which they killed many of their most important opponents. The war petered out after the parties agreed to carve up the narcotics market (giving the province to the secessionists and Naples to the Di Lauros). This pact wasn't kept secret--it was announced publicly and published in the pages of a prominent local newspaper for everyone to read, as if it were a coalition agreement between political parties.

In describing the clan wars and how they were rooted in changes in market organization, Saviano sometimes seems to claim that the Camorra is driven by a simple desire for power and money. Yet Saviano also cuts against this interpretation, describing the ways the Camorra is hostage to its own myths. The kids in the lowest ranks of the Camorra, Saviano explains, don't "dream of being Al Capone but Flavio Briatore [a flamboyant and shady Italian businessman], not gunslingers but entrepreneurs with beautiful models on their arms; they wanted to become successful businessmen." Their bosses, in contrast, fashion a style based on American movies and borrow language from The Godfather. When Cosimo Di Lauro is caught by the police, he doesn't try to escape; instead he ties his hair into a ponytail (like Brandon Lee in The Crow) so as to present a bella figura for the journalists' cameras. The figures of the mobster and the businessman blend into each other; both are attractive not simply because they have money but because they have glamour, power and, most important, respect.

Image and iconography are everything. The Camorra, like the Sicilian Mafia, often relies on the showier aspects of Catholic ceremony and devotionalism: packets of cocaine are blessed with holy water from Lourdes. Saviano writes about how the notorious boss Sandokan strangled another boss's heir to mark his own accession to the throne, strangulation being the traditional means through which one Neapolitan dynasty succeeds another. When the man who betrayed one of the Di Lauros was caught by his former comrades, he was tortured slowly with a spiked bat for hours, before having his ears cut off, his tongue cropped and his eyes gouged out with a screwdriver. He was finally done when his face was beaten in with a hammer and a cross carved on his lips. All this carried meaning--he had lost the ears with which he heard where the boss was hiding, the eyes he saw with, the tongue he talked with. The cross on his lips signified the faith he had betrayed.

These stories, focused as they are on myths and the desire for victory and respect, are hard to reconcile with Saviano's image of the Camorra as a harbinger of an especially brutal and rationalized form of neoliberalism. Even so, it's crucial that Saviano conveys the economic and the symbolic aspects of the Camorra. Both point beyond the bloody but often banal interclan struggles to the underlying system that creates these struggles. As Saviano says, each time one group of bosses is hauled off to prison, it's replaced by a newer, hungrier crew. Like a lizard that has lost its tail, the Camorra regenerates itself, and the Italian justice system seems hopelessly inadequate to destroying it, opting instead to ignore the problem and then taking palliative action.

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