Saviano gives a telling account of the ways in which organized crime in southern Italy fits into a world system of contraband goods—textiles, appliances, arms, and drugs—with connections to China's huge production of counterfeit goods, to off-the-books (but not necessarily criminal) employment in Italy, arms trafficking in Eastern Europe, construction and real estate in northern Europe, and the drug trade of South America. All of this adds up to an international underground economy that has implications far beyond its local boundaries.
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The region north of Naples and extending throughout much of southern Italy contains clusters of small sweatshop businesses that make high-quality clothes for the leading fashion houses of Italy. At the same time, the very same workshops, in cooperation with camorristi, produce identical clothes bearing counterfeit labels of leading fashion brands—Versace, Armani, Val-entino. These sell throughout the world, often in stores and shopping centers owned by the Camorra. But, Saviano comments,
"The clothes made by the clans aren't the typical counterfeit goods, cheap imitations, or copies passed off as the real thing, but rather a sort of false-true. All that's missing is the final step: the brand name, the official authorization of the motherhouse. But the clans usurp that authorization without asking anybody's permission.... The Secondigliano clans [connected to the town of Secondigliano] have acquired entire retail chains, thus spreading their commercial network across the globe and dominating the international clothing market. They also provide distribution to outlet stores. Products of slightly inferior quality have yet another venue: African street vendors and market stalls. Nothing goes unused."
This form of capitalism suits a world in which retailers are competing ferociously to squeeze every last dollar of profit from each product and consumers look for every penny of savings; almost no one has any reason to question or complain about these well-made products of dubious origin. Despite the violation of their trademarks, the big fashion houses have been surprisingly slow to protest. Saviano suggests shrewdly that copying the brand may have actually served the interests of the big-name clothing makers. A new class of middle-income consumers may go on to buy the real thing:
"The garments they turned out were not inferior and didn't disgrace the brands' quality or design image. Not only did the clans not create any symbolic competition with the designer labels, they actually helped promote products whose market price made them prohibitive to the general public. In short, the clans were promoting the brand."
The camorristi have allowed ordinary citizens to "invest" their savings in drug shipments, a poor man's stock market in which an elderly pensioner might double her income in a month. And they have found a new way to run extortion rackets. Rather than holding up shopkeepers for their monthly pizzo, they started "taxing" wholesale suppliers and taking over the distribution of goods. Many clan members became the chief representatives of major food suppliers in the Naples area. The system has had advantages for the supply companies. Companies that submitted to the clan system, Saviano writes, "experienced a 40 to 80 percent increase in annual sales."
Of course, the suppliers get the market advantage of a virtual monopoly for their products. Recent investigations have shown that the Camorra had a hand in two of Italy's major financial scandals of recent years, the failure of the food conglomerates Parmalat and Cirio. In both cases, Camorra groups handled the distri-bution for both companies not only in Campania but in other regions as well.
While stressing the great market efficiency of the Camorra, and portraying the clan leaders as resourceful capitalists, Saviano ignores the disastrous economic effects of clan domination for the overall economy of southern Italy. "They've created a kind of Soviet economy," according to Francesco Curcio, a magistrate in Naples who has conducted some of the most important Camorra investigations of recent years. "They are monopolies run by the Camorra. If someone presents a bid for a contract, the Camorra tells them, you make an offer of x and I will make one of x minus one." In one case, Curcio did a study of the milk market in the area near Caserta, a town north of Naples, and discovered that milk cost more there than in Milan. "They strangle the economy by deciding who gets to participate and at what price," he said. "People pay two sets of taxes, one to the state and the other to the Camorra. And naturally, no investors want to come here to Campania."
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