When Sudhir Venkatesh, professor of sociology at Columbia University, wrote about the life of Chicago drug lords in Gang Leader for a Day, media everywhere lauded his courage at daring to chronicle a positively gritty side of American street life. Well, if Venkatesh was courageous, Roberto Saviano can only be called crazy.

We know how The Godfather came to symbolize a certain method to Italian crime — an almost corporate aloofness. Continuing in that spirit, Italian journalist Roberto Saviano decided to write about the Camorra (a play on Gomorrah, with all its attendant notions of hell). The resultant book is called Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System. To the uninitiated, the Camorra is one of Naples’ most dangerous mafia setups, running the region of Campania like a personal fief. Street crime is rife, even as drug lords move around in swish Mercedeses.

In terms of its economy, Campania is an image of prosperity. Saviano elaborates how the lucrative drug trade has led many former down-and-out crime syndicates to regroup. Not permanently, mind you. Internecine conflicts force members to change loyalties with laughable frequency, and it’s a wonder the “system”, as it is called, works at all. Saviano’s indictment of the violent machismo of the mafia is striking. His portrait of widows who take over syndicates and come to lord over islands of ill-gotten wealth is spot-on.

So powerful is the Camorra in the region that in the mid-1990s, the mafia appropriated the city’s garbage disposal. As was expected, heavy metals, chemicals and personal waste were mixed together, and left to rot on the streets. This led to a precipitous decline in the health of the local populace. The situation continues, thanks to the complicity of local officials with the Camorra.

The most blatant condemnation in the book, then, falls not on the mafia but on the politicians, who operate hand-in-glove with the syndicates and oversee their protection. In some ways, Saviano explains, the cycle is a vicious one, with a new entrant to government merely a pawn in the hands of an unbreakable chain that connects crime with politics.

A literary sensation in Italy, Gomorrah has become the bane of Saviano’s life. Since the book’s publication in 2006, its author has lived under constant police protection—threats to his life are routine. In writing a book that harshly criticizes a way of life that’s ostensibly glamorous for its crime and monies, Saviano has taken an uncalculated risk indeed.