Italy: The Crooks in Control
"Last year, Italy seemed to wake up to the problem of the Camorra—the Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia—in the form of 2,700 tons of garbage. On the nightly news for several days running, TV viewers stared with a mixture of wonder and horror at mountains and mountains of garbage—some of it wet and stinking, some of it on fire and spewing toxic fumes—on the streets of Naples and nearby towns. All but one of the city's garbage dumps had been closed for safety violations, and when the trash was left to mount on city streets some residents set it on fire in attempts to get rid of it. The illegal burning of waste created so grave an environmental disaster that many towns had to shut down their schools. [...] Hollywood, Saviano finds, has supplied the models for the Camorra lifestyle. He describes the female bodyguards of a female Camorra boss dressed up in yellow tracksuits like Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. The villa of one of the chief Camorra bosses of Casal di Principe was modeled down to the smallest detail on the villa of Tony Montana, the chief character (played by Al Pacino) of Brian De Palma's Scarface. Camorristi repeat monologues from Pulp Fiction and police keep turning up DVDs of famous crime movies in the hideaways of fugitive gangsters. By aping Hollywood, Saviano argues, the Ca-morra tries to create a kind of "culture" and give itself legitimacy. Identifying with Hollywood gangsters and the winner-takes-all, dog-eat-dog ethos they project, the camorristi (and their counterparts elsewhere) come to believe that enjoying unlimited wealth and the power of life and death over others is worth risking their own early death or life in prison." (Alexander Stille, New York Reviews of Books)
Italy aka an ongoing disaster.
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