Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano - review

Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano, trans Virginia Jewiss (Allen Lane, £20)

In the West Indies, a prime trans-shipment point for cocaine-smuggling is the Jamaican capital of Kingston. Stockpiled along the Kingston wharfs are thousands of “reefers” (refrigerated containers) crammed with frozen meat, fish fingers and other TV dinners. Anti-narcotics security is on the look-out especially for “reefer” shipments from Colombia. No market in the world brings in more revenue than the cocaine market. In return for bribes, Kingston cargo personnel may turn off the container-scanning equipment.

Colombian “white petrol” is destined above all for Britain, a highly prized market. Cocaine fetches three times as much here as in other European countries. Eleven per cent of all our bank notes test positive for cocaine. Typically, proceeds from narco-trafficking are laundered through banking circuits in the City. Transformed into electronic stock, coke capital is almost impossible to trace. “Moving wealth around is hard work,” a City trader tells Roberto Saviano.

Saviano’s investigation into the cokehead brokers, dealers and professional killers who manage the supply and demand of cocaine has an intriguing title. High-quality cocaine is known to pushers as “zero zero zero” because it contains zero levels of baking powder or other impurities. Saviano has been here before. His bestselling exposé of the Neapolitan Mafia, Gomorrah, was turned into a film that put the author’s life at risk. For the past 10 years the 36-year-old Italian journalist has been under police protection. Pointedly, Zero Zero Zero is dedicated to “all my Carabinieri bodyguards”.

The book might lack the locker-room snooping and legwork that made Gomorrah such a visceral masterwork but it remains a tremendously gripping work of reportage. Throughout, Saviano turns an appalled eye on the methods used to grow, stock, transport and protect shipments of angel dust. “In order to understand cocaine,” he writes, “you have to understand Mexico.” Some 90 per cent of the cocaine currently used by Americans is thought to come across the US-Mexican border. Run by computer-literate entrepreneurs, the frontier cartels have spread their tentacles as far afield as oil-rich Houston. Corrupt Mexican policemen are mixed up in the transborder drug killings which, says Saviano, have become increasingly “lurid”. (Bodies are no longer quietly dumped in the desert; they are displayed for all to see, and in some cases decapitated or flayed.)

In a brilliant chapter, Saviano dilates on the Russian Mafia’s infiltration of Wall Street and the financial malpractice attendant on narco-laundering in general. International fraudsters and currency speculators of one stripe or another are often in cahoots with the Calabrian Mafia, who use “mules” to carry cocaine for them. Up to 100 condoms or latex surgical glove fingers filled with cocaine are ingested. Many mules are single mothers in need of money to feed their families. A rupture in just one of the packages can bring an “atrociously painful death”, Saviano reminds us. Not that the drug dons care: the women are expendable.

Saviano’s book, grimly absorbing, views cocaine as a fuel for the entire world economy. It’ll rot your brain — but just look at the money that can be made.

Go to eveningstandard.ca/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p