With his extraordinary new book about the international cocaine trade, Roberto Saviano once again rewrites the true-crime genre. Like “Gomorrah,” his blistering 2006 exposé of the Camorra, the Naples crime syndicate, “Zero Zero Zero” stretches the boundaries of investigative journalism with personal meditation and existential inquiry.
Saviano begins, in chapters chronicling the evolution of the Mexican drug cartels, by forcing us to confront human behavior of almost unimaginable viciousness and brutality. He matter-of-factly describes, in stomach-turning detail, murders and tortures inflicted on rivals, on government officials who decline to be bribed, and on innocent bystanders unlucky enough to be in the wrong place with groups like Los Zetas and La Familia as they engage in turf battles that reduce entire regions to war zones. Although this litany of horrors is punctuated by arrests, Saviano notes that cartel leaders often operate with impunity from jail.
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That point was underscored by the recent escape of the Sinaloa cartel’s top dog, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, from Mexico’s highest-security prison through a mile-long tunnel equipped with lighting and ventilation — not something he dug out with a teaspoon, or without substantial outside (and probably inside) assistance.
Anyone tempted to smugly view Mexico as a failed state, in need of US assistance to be cleaned up the way Colombia was, gets a reality check when Saviano moves on to Colombia, depicting the (relative) decline of its cartels as a case study in “the full adaptive capacity of a system that has one fixed constant: white powder.” Colombia still produces 60 percent of the world’s cocaine, and if the country is less dangerous than it was 20 years ago, that’s partly because Mexico became more so as the center of cocaine power shifted north.
Saviano works in an impressionistic style that requires attentiveness and patience. The periodic interludes titled “Coke #1,” “Coke #2,” etc. are initially irritating: Do we really need a four-page recitation of the different kinds of people who use cocaine? Seven pages listing the drug’s various nicknames? By the time we get to “Coke #6” (10 pages of cocaine busts), his intent is clear: He wants to shatter the complacency of those who think cocaine is irrelevant to their law-abiding lives by showing them that the drug touches every life.
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We grasp cocaine’s global significance as Saviano follows it across oceans to scrutinize its Old World traffickers. The Calabrian ’ndrangheta, the Russian Mafia, and the Nigerian underworld all thrive, like the Latin Americans, in fragile states with tottering institutions and rampant corruption, where criminal organizations have the advantage of operating by clear-cut rules and imposing a twisted sort of order. But they could not operate successfully without the complicity of legal institutions in prosperous industrial nations.
In the past five years, the US bank Wachovia and HBUS, the US subsidiary of international banking giant HSBC, admitted to accepting billions of dollars in suspicious transfers from Mexico, in effect laundering drug money; they paid fines that were derisory in comparison with the banks’ earnings.
Banks have historically been implicated in laundering money for all sorts of illegal enterprises, but Saviano sees a sinister escalation in the wake of the liquidity crisis caused by the 2008 economic meltdown. In December 2009, he reports, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that criminal organizations’ cash was the only thing that kept some banks from failing.
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“[T]he problem is no longer far away, in wretched countries,” he writes. “The centers of world financial power have stayed afloat thanks to cocaine money.”
Saviano agonizes over his obsession with organized crime in passages that sometimes seem self-indulgent, until you realize that he’s agonizing over whether writing can make a difference. “To know is the first step toward change,” he asserts. But his accounts of journalists and filmmakers who have been killed for documenting the drug cartels’ activities, and the indifferent response of authorities to their deaths, demonstrate how powerful the forces arrayed against change are. And for someone who’s been living under police protection since “Gomorrah” was first published nine years ago, the second step must seem a long time coming.
ZERO ZERO ZERO
By Roberto Saviano
Translated, from the Italian, by Virginia Jewiss
Penguin Press, 464 pp., illustrated, $29.95
Wendy Smith, a contributing editor at The American Scholar and Publishers Weekly, reviews books for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Daily Beast.