Book review: Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano

Zero Zero Zero is the follow up of Saviano's best seller book, Gomorrah

ROBERTO Saviano’s debut book Gomorrah focused on the Neapolitan crime organisation the Camorra.

 

It achieved immense success, selling millions of copies worldwide and was even called “unpatriotic” by Silvio Berlusconi for lifting the lid on the institutions of violence at the heart of Italian society. However Saviano received so many threats of violence that he was given a permanent police escort.

In his follow up, Zero Zero Zero, Saviano tackles the equally fascinating subject of the international drugs trade. It was first published two years ago in Italy but its UK publication has received a boost following the escape of one of its major characters, the legendary drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, from a Mexican maximum security prison on July 11.

However readers of Saviano’s book will be unsurprised by the apparent ease with which El Chapo, a man with connections to the highest levels of government, could escape. 

The book’s biggest challenge is the familiarity of the subject matter.

It will come as a surprise to nobody that the drugs war shows no signs of being won, that the international consumption of cocaine has created lawless enclaves in South and Central America where increasingly horrific punishments and deaths are visited upon rivals and competitors and that the journey from its origins to smart dinner parties is a testament to how greed and self-indulgence trump any amount of human misery.

 

Saviano’s skill is to take well-worn territory and, through a mixture of journalistic investigation and old-fashioned narrative skill, make it a horrible but gripping saga. 

The title refers to the highest purity of cocaine. This never reaches ordinary consumers who can expect their drugs to be adulterated with anything from rat poison to laxative powder. Some unsuspecting consumers pay a fortune for cocaine with as little as five per cent purity. 

Saviano also makes it clear that the white-collar participants in the dealing, the real-life Walter Whites, must bear a share of the responsibility. This includes the Russian Mafia with their pernicious influence on global money laundering and criminal organisations and gangs who would disdain the term “drug dealer” but whose billion-dollar businesses put them at risk of life imprisonment unless they bribe the right people. 

Zero Zero Zero is a despairing book with no answer other than legalising drugs. It contains many, many descriptions of torture and murder which have a numbing effect (many might wish to skip the account of what happens to undercover DEA agent Kiki Camarena).

However it is also compulsively readable and a reminder that we don’t live in a world composed of heroes and villains so much as one of greys and darkest jet blacks. As well, of course, as long lines of white. 

Blazing Star: The Life And Times Of John Wilmot, Earl Of Rochester by Alexander Larman is out now (Head Of Zeus, £9.99)