Roberto Saviano - Author HARDtalk

Stephen Sackur speaks to the Italian author Roberto Saviano.

Welcome to HARDtalk.

I'm Stephen Sackur.

My guest today is a writer whose work has made him powerful enemies.

A decade ago, Roberto Saviano wrote a best-selling book,

Gomorrah, which exposed the power and brutality of the Naples mafia.

The crime bosses put a price on his head and in the last ten

years, he has lived in a shadowy world of safe houses and bodyguards.

Now he's written a new book about the global cocaine trade.

Why has he sacrificed so much to expose organised crime?

Roberto Saviano, welcome to HARDtalk.

Thank you.

You have taken an extraordinary decision because here you are,

a writer whose early decision to write about organised crime has

changed your life and in some ways has cost you an ordinary life,

and yet here you are, writing another book

about organised crime.

Why have you come back to the same subject?

I'm interested that you have described the situation

in personal terms.

You talk about revenge and a feeling of vendetta.

Let us go back to the beginning and see where the personal

feelings come from.

Would it not be true to say that if you hadn't been born in Naples,

in Napoli, one of the headquarters of one of the most powerful Mafia

groups in all of Italy, things would have been very different?

Naples shaped you.

But what I want to get to is why you specifically decided you had

to dig deep into the Camorra, the local mafia gangs in Naples.

Because, let's face it, your family lived peacefully

in the city.

Your dad was a doctor.

He made his life there.

You had a mother and a brother.

It was only you who was in the end filled with this rage and wanted

to take on the Camorra and describe exactly what they were doing.

Why? Why you?

Do you think that the Camorra was and is so pervasive in Naples

that every family is, in a way, morally compromised by it?

You once said, "From the postman to the professor, just by keeping

quiet, we become part of this mechanism that I wanted to expose."

Do you feel that it has spread so far that everybody

is somehow corrosively connected?

Let's think back ten years to your decision to write.

You say that your book, Gomorrah, is full of graphic stories

and detail of how the Camorra in Napoli worked.

And you went into real detail, you named names.

It seems to me that you must have been aware that writing that book

and having it published not just in Italy but around the world

was going to create a massive problem for you.

Well, you have had to live with the decisions you took then

for the last ten years and it seems to me that you are now a man

who is filled with conflicting, difficult feelings, and quite

a lot of regret.

You have said that the impact of having the death threat

upon you is not just about you, it is about your mother

and your father and your family as well, and you say that you can

never forgive yourself for the impact it has had upon them.

Does that mean that you wish you had not written Gomorrah?

What is it like?

I'm a journalist like you.

Well, you are a writer and I'm a journalist.

I cannot imagine the impact of having to live with bodyguards

every day of my life, having every move I make monitored,

having this sense that a threat could lie around any corner.

Are there times when you have actually found it impossible to live

this life and feel sane?

Sure, and we know what happened.

The two bosses were acquitted.

They walked free from the court.

You spoke, I think, to Salman Rushdie one time about how

to live free even when surrounded by security and bodyguards

and all of this paraphernalia.

What is the secret to being as free as you can be, in your mind?

It seems to me the most damaging aspect of this threat that you live

with is that you no longer, it seems, trust people,

partly because of what you have learned in the research

for your books in organised crime but also because of the way people

have responded to you since you were threatened.

You say that when you look at people now and you think about humanity,

you see the monster in all of us, you see the shadow.

And you hate yourself for seeing the shadows in people but you do it

all the time.

That must be very difficult.

You've already suggested deep disappointment with the way

the politicians, the big powers in Italy, have responded to your case.

Is that in your view because Italy is still heavily dominated

by the mafia, organised crime?

Well, Berlusconi was Prime Minister for much of

the period you have been in hiding.

Berlusconi said that your view of the mafia in Italy was unnecessarily

negative, that you were talking Italy down, and maybe quite a number

of Italians feel the same way.

I guess what this gets to is whether you really believe that

I guess what this gets to is whether you really believe that

your words, and in particular your book Gomorrah, changed anything.

Because if it didn't change anything, it raises the question

of what the heck all of your suffering since has been about?

And you have continued writing, and your latest book, ZeroZeroZero,

is about the massive impact of the global cocaine trade.

How is it possible to be an investigative writer,

as you are, now that you are surrounded by police and bodyguards,

when your name is associated forever with Gomorrah

and everything that came with it?

How can you possibly maintain this investigative profession?

But I'm just...

There just seems to be such an irony here, that in a way you're telling

me that you have more freedom to go to the favelas of Guatemala or

the drug towns of Colombia than you have your own country, Italy.

Would you say that, you know, having focused so heavily on mafia activity

in Italy, now the organised cartel trafficking and cocaine industry

around the world, you come across as a man who has a very bleak, dark

view of the human condition and human impulses,

and greed and cruelty, and the worst aspects of human behaviour.

Am I right?

But the...

The problem with that is that the truth is not winning.

The mafia is not finished in Italy.

The cocaine trade is as powerful as ever across the world,

as you itemise in the book.

One thing you conclude in the latest book on the cocaine

trade is that, in your view, the only way to beat the traffic is to

legalise cocaine around the world.

That is a counsel of despair.

Of course, if we legalised hard drugs they

would become more available, they would become cheaper,

more people would take them.

Is that really the only way you can see of ending organised criminality

connected to the drug trade?

I want to end bringing it back to a personal level, Roberto,

because your life in some ways is not your own anymore.

And it just struck me as very symbolic that

at the beginning of your latest book you write a dedication to

the police bodyguards who have been with you for all of these years.

I think you say, "We have spent 51,000 hours together.

"And here's to all of the hours and the places we will be

in the future."

Do you really feel that, for the rest of your days, you are

going to live with bodyguards, in safehouses, never knowing where you

might be sleeping the next week?

Is that really the rest of your life?

But you have no choice.

But you have no choice.

We have to end there, Roberto, on maybe that thought,

that hope that you have.

Thank you very much for being on HARDtalk.

Hi there.

We had some glorious sunshine yesterday across western parts

of the country once again.

These were the clear skies in Abersock, north-west Wales.

We have had a lot of sunshine over the last few days across western