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Today, the mafia looks more powerful than ever—and you only have to look at the cocaine figures to see it—yet it also feels more invisible. How did we get here?
When I wrote Extra Pure in 2020, cocaine was already everywhere; today, it saturates every corner, and it costs less. Global production has more than tripled, and seizures have hit records. That’s precisely the problem: grabbing tonnes without pushing up the price is like trying to scoop seawater with a teaspoon.
The structure has shifted: there are no longer vertical cartels, but a brokerage network, interchangeable cells, Ecuador as a hub, Northern Europe with Antwerp and Rotterdam as entry gates, the ’Ndrangheta acting as the banker of the system. And then there are synthetic drugs, which require neither soil nor farmers, only a warehouse.
But the real novelty lies where we don’t look.
What is this blind spot?
Oliver Bullough has named it “Moneyland,” a borderless land where dirty money flows freely while the laws meant to chase it remain national. The criminologist Michael Levi has argued for years that, in the fight against money laundering, we measure activity and never results: we count the number of reports filed, not the amount of crime that was prevented.
The consequence is that we recover about 0.05% of the proceeds of crime, while the costs of compliance exceed the amount seized by hundreds of times. It’s the lamp-post paradox: we search for keys where there is light—in forms, in bank reports, in the compliance bureaucracy—while the keys lie in the darkness and no one wants to venture there.
What signals, strong or weak, do you see in France where there is increasing talk of a Mexicanization of the country?
Whenever a young person dies in Marseille, France looks at the corpse and says, “Mexico.” That is where the error lies. The dead body is the only part of the drug trade that accepts being photographed. It is the residue, the tally of mistakes, the cost of a market that has yet to find its balance. A market that kills is an immature market. When the system actually works, no one dies: you sign a notarial deed. Blood is not the sign of criminal power; it is the sign of its adolescence.
The grave signal is the other party, and by definition, you do not see it, because its success is tied to its invisibility.
Let us begin with language, which always betrays us. The French speak of “blanchiment.” In Italian, we speak of “riciclaggio” (recycling). These are two opposing philosophies.
That is to say?
Laudering promises purification, the stain vanishes, the money becomes innocent again. Recycling, on the other hand, admits that the substance remains and merely changes form. France has long clung to the illusion that money can be “washed”; Italy has learned the hard lesson that nothing is washed, only transformed. This is not a lexical detail: Tracfin still calls money-laundering entities “washing machines” that launder proceeds from crime. The entire laundry metaphor lives in the state’s administrative vocabulary.
Blood is not the sign of criminal power, it is the sign of its adolescence.
Roberto Saviano
And here is the historical portion that France refuses to read. The trafficking that flooded America with heroin for thirty years was the “French Connection.” The word “French” was in its name; the laboratories were in Marseille, and France nonetheless managed to treat it as someone else’s affair: first Corsicans, then Italians, then North Africans, today Slavs and Albanians.
Every generation has borne its ethnic label, and every label has served to deflect from naming the structure. For if the laboratories were in Marseille, the money never remained within the milieu: it circulated through banks, real estate on the Côte d’Azur, casinos, and shipyards. The trafficking may be foreign.
And the laundering?
Not so here. Laundering remains local, out of technical necessity: to launder money you need a notary, an accountant, a credit institution, a public market, a cadastre. You therefore need the institutions of that country and its professionals.
The figures speak with brutal clarity that chronicles rarely capture. The European Court of Auditors estimated money laundering at 1.3% of the EU’s GDP each year, roughly €38 billion for France alone. A Senate inquiry estimated that networks specializing in laundering funds of criminal origin turnover at about €50 billion in the country. The French drug trafficking business is put at between €3 billion and €6 billion by authorities.
Put these numbers side by side: drugs represent only a fraction. In its June 18, 2025 report, the Senate states plainly: money laundering is today France’s most profitable traffic, and there is no coherent anti-laundering strategy; the system is simply a patchwork of disparate devices. The report’s title already issues a verdict: “These tens of billions gnawing at society.”
What about the figures on the supposed foreign origin of the problem?
We have a number that ends the debate about foreign origin. In 2024, Tracfin received more than 215,000 suspicious activity reports, but the non-financial sector—from notaries to clerks to gaming houses—accounts for only 7% of the total. Lawyers filed only fifteen. Sports agents, a high-risk category, never filed a single one.
Fifteen indications for an entire profession. This isn’t a border issue: it’s a professional class issue. The line that divides dirty money from legitimate assets runs through the offices in central Paris, not through the ports. The most revealing case goes back seven weeks.
What happened?
On June 9, 2026, Marseille’s JIRS dismantled an organized crime money-laundering network: thirteen arrests, five people charged, sums reinvested in real estate or moved abroad. €2.7 million in cash, gold bars, and fourteen luxury cars were seized. It all began in spring 2024 with a simple tax audit in the Narbonne suburbs.
The shell companies used as fronts were construction firms from Perpignan, Narbonne, and Béziers, with real economic activity and genuine turnover. Not phantom entities in the Seychelles: actual French construction sites. The head of the Bouches-du-Rhône Building Federation admits these firms win bids by offering prices 25, 30, or even 40% below market, and the sector faces threats and extortion around hiring on sites near Marseille.
In other words: drug money wins French public contracts by underpricing. It eliminates legitimate businesses for that exact reason: its profitability, it has achieved elsewhere. It is the perfect definition of a mafia method, and no one brought it from outside.
The new National Anti-Organized Crime Prosecutor’s Office seized nearly €990 million in five months.
So this isn’t enough…
It’s a good start. But it must be weighed against the €38 billion estimated each year. The ratio of those two numbers sums up the entire French problem.That is why the term “Mexicanization” feels comforting, and must be rejected precisely by those who denounce these practices. Speaking of Mexico means saying: “They’re importing their violence.” It shifts the gravity outward, toward ethnicity, toward immigration, and turns a systemic economic problem into a public-order issue.
Mafias are not measured by the number of deaths they cause; they are measured by the assets they manage to launder. Murders are what the drug trade loses; money laundering is what it gains. And no state has ever been toppled by what criminals lose.
Could the destabilization of certain European countries reach the levels we have seen in Latin America?
The difference is structural, not merely a matter of degree. In Latin America, the drug trade eroded the state’s monopoly on violence, with territories where the state does not penetrate, double-digit homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants, police infiltrated to the highest levels, and candidates assassinated during campaigns.
In Europe, that isn’t the pattern. Mafias here do not challenge the state; they traverse it. They buy markets, launder capitals, insinuate themselves into port logistics and into the construction sector. Little violence, heavy economic infiltration. A different model, and precisely for that reason harder to detect.
What should the response be?
The drift toward authoritarianism is not the answer to either model. Mafias have never feared a strong state. They fear a state that controls the money. What touches them are an independent judiciary, asset investigations, confiscations, transparency in public procurement, and journalism capable of reporting without fear of abusive prosecutions. These are the same tools that any authoritarian government would eagerly weaken because they can reach it too.
Murders are what the drug trade loses. Money laundering is what it gains.
Roberto Saviano
Two historical examples. Fascism boasted of defeating the mafia thanks to the prefect Mori, yet it only struck the base and left intact, or even favored, the mafioso bourgeoisie who had joined the regime, to the point that in 1943 that network was ready to reconstitute itself. Today, the Bukele model, with mass prisons and a perpetual state of emergency, has reduced murder rates without touching drug trafficking or money laundering. You stop the street, you leave the capital intact.
Authoritarianism yields a perceived security and real impunity at higher levels. Against mafias, the opposite is needed. Less spectacle, more balance sheets.
In terms of fighting organized crime, Italy has some experience (notably since the 1980s). Do you think it is sufficiently studied by other European countries?
Absolutely not. Europe is behind, the rest of the world even more so.
Italy holds the best know-how in the world, and it is a know-how born of blood: Article 416-bis exists because Pio La Torre was assassinated; Article 41-bis and the system of “collaborators of justice” exist because Falcone and Borsellino were assassinated. Behind every piece of Italian legislation lies a coffin. It is legislation written in mourning, and that is why it works: it did not emerge from a seminary but from the urgency of a state that was losing its grip.
Tant que l’Europe traitera la mafia comme une question d’ordre public et non de marché, elle restera structurellement sans défense.
Roberto Saviano
Almost no other European country knows the crime of mafia-type association. They judge individual offenses—the trafficking, the murder, the money laundering—but not the organization as such, nor the method, nor the coercive power of belonging. And almost everywhere, the assault on wealth is missing: preventive measures, extended confiscation, judicial administration of companies. The rest of Europe arrests people; Italy has understood that you must strip them of their money, because a boss in prison with intact wealth keeps ruling.
Is there, at this level, a gap between Northern Europe and Southern Europe?
For a long time Northern Europe nurtured a misunderstanding: that the mafia was a folkloric problem of the South, a matter of caps and rifles. While people clung to that idea, cocaine entered via Rotterdam and Antwerp, the ’ndrangheta invested across Germany (Duisburg 2007 taught nothing), and in Marseille the DZ Mafia established a system of violence that France hardly knows how to name. It’s not that the mafias arrived in Europe; it’s that Europe did not yet have the categories to perceive them.
Because the true phenomenon is different: it’s not just that mafias capitalized; capitalism itself became mafioso. Criminal organizations are no longer the foreign body invading the legal economy. They are the most reliable liquidity provider on the market: they pay cash, demand no guarantees, and in a crisis arrive before the banks. And the legitimate economy stopped asking where that money came from.
Behind every Italian legislative instrument lies a coffin.
Roberto Saviano
As long as Europe treats the mafia as a public-order issue rather than a matter of markets, public procurement, port logistics, and public funds, it will remain structurally defenseless and will continue to seek guidance from Italy on the dead without copying its laws.
If you had to retain only one lesson from your work and books, what would it be?
The lesson is simple. You cannot change what you do not understand.
Criminal capitalism exists because it remains inscrutable. You cannot fight it if you do not grasp the mechanism designed to slip by unnoticed.
It’s very easy to say that immigrants are attacking cities. Despair has a body, a face, it is in the street, you can photograph it. Money, not. It moves through transfers, shell companies, public markets, and doesn’t make front-page news. Thus, outrage always targets the visible poor and never the invisible flow—which is exactly what that flow desires.
My work has been to bring this shadow into the light. I’ve paid the price. Every day I wonder whether it was worth it.
How do you interpret the fascination with drug traffickers? Netflix, for example, seems to have made it a core business.
The drug trafficker does not fascinate because he stands outside the system. He fascinates because he embodies a system stripped of hypocrisy. The legitimate entrepreneur must present a moral narrative of his wealth: merit, innovation, value to the territory, and today a sustainability report. The drug trafficker is exempt from that. His capital does not need to apologize. The viewer recognizes a structure they already know: ascent, risk, reinvestment, elimination of the rival, stripped of the words that would make it legible if it wore a suit. This isn’t a reflection of our world; it is our world with the sound turned off.
From there arises a gnosis-like pleasure, the true engine of the series. The viewer feels they have been admitted to the secret, that they have finally seen how the world really works. It is an epistemic, not moral, pleasure, and for that reason dangerously compatible with inertia. Understanding how the machine operates provides a satisfaction that closely resembles capitulation.
What should be done?
There is an internal objection to be faced, and it is the part that anchors everything else. The narcotrafficker is not completely hypocritical. He wields a remarkably refined apparatus of legitimation: family, honor, a football field built in the town, the poor who avenge the oligarchy, the Virgin on the wall.
Escobar spoke with political rhetoric, not merely wealth. He did not tell the truth about capital: he spins another lie, archaic rather than managerial, and precisely for that reason more seductive, because it speaks the language of myth rather than a press release.
Criminal organizations are no longer the foreign body attacking the legal economy. They are the most reliable liquidity provider on the market.
Roberto Saviano
And here the trap lies in the narrative itself. The true hidden face is not spectacular. It is the notary, the inflated invoice, the transporter, the shell company in Malta. The series narrates the exception, the godfather, the shootout, the charisma, and thus ends up protecting the rule—the perfect continuity between the criminal economy and the legal economy. The drug trafficker depicted as a monster is an alibi. If the drug trafficker were presented as a colleague, it would be truly unbearable.
What did the Gomorra adaptation add beyond the book, in your view?
I don’t think the series adds anything; I think it subtracts. It takes away the “I,” it removes the voice-over, it deprives the witness. What remains is the world, with no one to judge it for us.
It is through this subtraction that Gomorra became a global visual grammar—the point of universalizing Scampia. PNL shoots the video clip Le monde ou rien in the VeIe because that suburb is already theirs: Manila, Philadelphia, Paris, Cairo… all suburbs follow the same logic.
Does legalization represent a solution to break drug trafficking?
No, legalization does not end drug trafficking. It eliminates part of it, and we must specify which part.
As for soft drugs, the experiment has already been tried and it worked. After legalization in Colorado and Washington, Mexican cannabis trafficking collapsed: border seizures dropped to a negligible fraction. No police operation ever achieved a similar result. Legalization achieved what forty years of the war on drugs had failed to accomplish.
In Europe, mafias do not challenge the state; they traverse it.
Roberto Saviano
The worst model is the one that remains halfway there: a tolerated demand, an illegal supply. The Dutch “backdoor problem” fueled, for forty years, the Mocro Maffia supply chain. Decriminalizing consumption without regulating production is the perfect gift to organized crime. The Dutch acknowledged the problem and are trying to fix it. Since 2023, the Experiment gesloten coffeeshopketen, a “closed chain,” is underway: ten municipalities—Breda, Tilburg, Arnhem, Groningen, Maastricht, and Nijmegen—where coffee shops sell only cannabis from legal production, under the control of the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority. From April 2025, the sale of any other product is prohibited. The plan is four years long.
What is your current relation to Naples, your homeland but a place where you are constantly under threat? How does this ambivalence manifest itself in you?
Naples expelled me. It is the deepest wound, because it does not come from my enemies. From my enemies, I expect it; it’s part of the game. It comes from home. From a part of my city that decided the problem wasn’t the Camorra, but those who spoke about it.
And I was driven out on the basis of a false accusation: that speaking of evil would destroy the place that shelters it. It is precisely the opposite that happened. After these stories, tourism exploded, the alleys I spoke of filled up. It is not my doing; But that theory—silence protects and speech destroys—is the oldest lie of criminal power. Naples is living proof against it.
That is where the most obscene paradox lies: those who accuse me of defaming Naples are often the same people who profited from this transformation. Those who bought, those who witnessed property values triple in a neighborhood no one would walk twenty years ago. They live off this change and spit at those who triggered it.
If you could do it again, would you write and publish your books again because of which you are now threatened?
No. I would not. Not because I renounce what I wrote, but because I was not the only one paying the price. The book is alive and continues its journey; I have remained stuck for twenty years and my family has collapsed.
The last words of Gomorra (“Son of a bitch, I’m still alive!”) have they, almost performatively, become the words that characterize your life?
I wrote them at 26, and they became a prophecy about my life.
What is the most important place for you in Naples? Do you have a fond memory?
I would answer these two final questions by quoting Dante: “There is no greater pain than to recall happy times in misery”…