Book review: Zero Zero Zero, Roberto Saviano

Italian writer Roberto Saviano. Photo / Getty Images

In December 2009, as the world reeled in the grip of the global financial crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, who ran the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime, made an extraordinary statement: the only liquidity some banks had to prevent them going to the wall - at a time when inter-bank cash flow was practically frozen - came from the laundered profits of organised crime. In short, the only people with cash - a ceaseless tide - to spare were criminals.

Chief among them were drug traffickers. According to a University of Bogota study, 97.4 per cent of Colombia's illicit drug money - hundreds of billions of dollars - is laundered through the US and Europe. The International Monetary Fund estimated this at US$352 billion ($530 billion) in 2009, more than a third of the global banking industry's losses that year. And that's the money law enforcement knows about, likely the tip of a cash iceberg.

Much of the profit was from cocaine, the subject of Roberto Saviano's new book, Zero Zero Zero. Besides documenting cartel savagery - a litany of decapitation, dismemberment, torture and massacre - how drug deals are made, transport arranged, enemies murdered, officials bribed and money laundered, sometimes through mega-banks, the Italian investigative reporter relates that from the 1990s, "in an era of creative capitalism and commerce without borders", cocaine became the free market's drug of choice, the "dark side of that same global capitalism".

Saviano made his name with Gomorrah, documenting the reach of the Neapolitan Camorra. It reaped awards, death threats and permanent police protection, an accolade shared with author Salman Rushdie.

"It often wakes me up and crushes me, like a punch to the chest," Saviano writes of the psychological toll. "Then I get up, try to breathe and tell myself in the end that's the way it has to be."

As Saviano examines Los Zetas, the 'Ndrangheta, the Sinaloa cartel - run by fugitive Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera - and many other players, he shows how they corrupt weak states, filling vacuums; Russia's mafia is a classic example.

Based on prodigious research (alas, without footnotes),

Zero Zero Zero

is a gripping addition to milestone reporting like Norman Lewis'

The Honoured Society

, Alexander Stille's

Excellent Cadavers

and Alfred McCoy's

The Politics Of Heroin

. It is also a personal quest, as Saviano explores how cocaine became an unstoppable global commodity. "As terrible as it may seem," he concludes, "total legalisation may be the only answer."

Zero Zero Zero
by Roberto Saviano
(Allen Lane $37)

- Canvas