"Living shut up like an animal turns you into an animal. My life is not my own any more. It feels like everyone's trying to deceive me - I'm constantly on my guard."
His life is divided between Carabinieri barracks, hotels and prosecutors' offices. Research trips for this new book had to be planned in consultation with the Carabinieri. He has been on antidepressants and is frightened, above all, that his life will never get back to "normal".
Pointedly, Zero Zero Zero is dedicated to "all my Carabinieri bodyguards". An investigation into the brokers, dealers and professional killers who manage the supply and demand of cocaine, Zero Zero Zero is a powerful work of reportage that has sold nearly a million copies in Italy. In the voice of the courtroom testimonial (he was influenced by Primo Levi's memoir, If This Is A Man), it goes to the heart of the financial sector's dependence on drug capital and its depredations - though it is likely to make the author fewer enemies than Gomorrah did.
According to Saviano, the highest quality of cocaine is known to pushers as "zero zero zero". Why? "The finest white flour on the market - soft, light, almost impalpable - is graded in Italy and South American countries as 000. It has no impurities," says Saviano.
No drugs market in the world brings in more revenue than that of cocaine. Shipments of Colombian "white petrol" are destined above all the countries in Europe for Britain. Cocaine fetches three times as much there as it does in the rest of Europe. Eleven per cent of all bank notes in circulation in Britain test positive for cocaine. Typically, proceeds from narco-trafficking are laundered through banking circuits in the City of London. Transformed into electronic stock, coke capital is virtually impossible to trace.
"What happens in the City stays in the City," a London banker says in Zero Zero Zero.
Understandably, Saviano is reluctant to be viewed as a provincial southern Italian writer who views everything sub specie mafiosa. His reportage casts an appalled eye on the methods used to grow, stock, transport and protect shipments of the drug, and is of significance for all Europe.
"What affects me as a citizen of Naples also affects Londoners, Berliners, New Yorkers," Saviano says. Russian cocaine cartels - the so-called "Mafija" - recycle vast amounts of cocaine capital in Britain. "It's no coincidence that London is among the five cities with the highest consumption of cocaine," he says.
In the autumn of 2008, a group of Nobel Prize laureates - among them Orhan Pamuk, Dario Fo, Desmond Tutu and the late Gunter Grass - added their names to a 200,000-strong petition in support of Saviano, which appeared in the Rome-based La Repubblica newspaper: Neapolitan gangland bosses had set Christmas as the deadline for Saviano's elimination.
"It's not that I'm afraid of dying," Saviano says. "If anything, I'm more frightened of being discredited." He explains: "There will always be willing ears to hear ill of the dead. After I'm gone, people will say that I'd made it all up, that I plagiarised and that I libelled." Everyone who has ever been killed for what they believe in, Saviano says, has been "bad-mouthed subsequently".
The Neapolitan Mafia - the Camorra - is deeply woven into the city's political and social fabric.
"Naples always did have a disreputable edge," Saviano explains. The Camorra stronghold known as the Forcella used to be a hive of black-market activity controlled by old-school Neapolitan spivs involved in loan-sharking and smuggled cigarettes.
No longer: the Camorra is run by computer-literate entrepreneurs with their Versace-coutured wives. No less business savvy is the Calabrian Mafia, known as the 'Ndrangheta. In the 1980s, says Saviano, the 'Ndrangheta established links with the Colombian-Mexican cartels, becoming Italy's most powerful criminal group as a result. If cocaine is the "carburant" that fuels an entire world economy, the Calabrian influence is partly to blame.
On June 21, after an eight-year absence, Saviano returned to his home town of Casale di Principe near Naples. He feared a hostile reception, having been constantly accused in Naples of trying to make money out of the Mafia, and insulting the city. Instead, hundreds of young people greeted him on the streets.
"They wanted to touch me and embrace me. They shook my hand and they said to me: 'Cool, you're here.' Well, I was overwhelmed."
The war against drugs is clearly "unwinnable", Saviano concludes. In Mexico and the United States, drug cartel barons and anti-narcotic security feed off each other. If all drug possession were decrim-inalised, Saviano suggests, criminal gangs might be put out of work. Of course, there will always be a need for what Aldous Huxley called "chemical
vacations from intolerable selfhood", but the financial malpractice attendant on cocaine-trafficking has spawned a violent new breed of narco-fraudsters and currency speculators. Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, is where many of them started out.
With a smile, Saviano signs a copy of Zero Zero Zero, and embraces me. The armed policemen watch as I walk out of the hotel into the summer sunlight.
- Canvas, Telegraph
