Naple Mob + Cocaine

choi

Drug-trafficking | On the Cocaine Trail; An angry account of the suffering inflicted by the world’s appetite for illegal drugs. Economist, June 27, 2015.
http://www.economist.com/news/bo ... etite-illegal-drugs

Quote:

"Mr Saviano, an Italian journalist, now moves between safe houses under 24-hour police protection. He dedicates his new book 'to all my Carabinieri bodyguards. To the fifty-one thousand hours we’ve spent together and to those still ahead.'

"Cocaine-trafficking is risky but enormously profitable. As Mr Saviano points out, a kilo of the drug costing $1,500 in Colombia fetches $12,000-$16,000 in Mexico and $77,000 if it makes it to Britain. According to the accountant of Colombia’s Medellín drug mob, the group was trafficking 15 tonnes of cocaine into America every day in the 1980s.

Note:
(a) This is a book review on
Roberto Saviano, ZeroZeroZero. Look at cocaine and all you see is powder. Look through cocaine and you see the world. Penguin, 2015 (in English)
http://thepenguinpress.com/book/ ... -you-see-the-world/
(“ ‘Zero zero zero’ flour is the finest, whitest available.  ‘Zero zero zero’ is also the nickname among narcotraffickers for the purest, highest quality cocaine on the market”)

, whose original was
Roberto Saviano, ZeroZeroZero. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2013 (in Italian).

(b)
(i) Italian Flours. Cook's Info, undated
www.cooksinfo.com/italian-flours
("Italian Flours are graded by a Italian law passed in 1967 (law 4.7. 1967. n. 580.) It is based on measuring the ash content of the flour (just as for French and German Flours." Flour types: 00, 0, 1 , 2 and Integrale--from lowest to highest "ash content")
(ii) flour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour
(section 6 Type numbers: table)

(c) His previous book was
Gomorrah; A personal journey into the violent international empire of Naples’s organized crime system. Macmillan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; London: Picador), 2007 (on English)

, whose original had been
Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah. Milano: Mondadori 2006.
(d) Gomorrah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah
(may refer to: Sodom and Gomorrah, Biblical cities; "Gomorrah (book), a non-fiction investigative book by Roberto Saviano")
(e) Camorra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camorra

(f) About quotation 1.
(i) Carabinieri (proper noun): "pl[ural]  the Italian military police"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Carabinieri
(ii) Its singular form is carabiniere, which is defined as "member of the Carabinieri force."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carabiniere

(g) “Despite its shortcomings, the book lands a resounding thump to the solar plexus. Taken as a whole, it is an angry rebuke to all those—traffickers and politicians alike—who perpetuate the violence.”

celiac plexus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celiac_plexus
(also known as the solar plexus because of its radiating nerve fibers; The celiac plexus is often popularly referred to as the solar plexus, generally in the context of a blow to the stomach; part of vagus nerve 迷走神經)

choi

(2) William Brennan, Hunted by the Mob; The Italian investigative journalist Roberto Saviano, in exile in New York City. The Atlantic, July/ August 2015,
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/hunted-mob/395270/

Note:
(a) "Gomorrah recounted the horrors of the Camorra (as the Neapolitan mob is known) in a way that demolished the reigning mafia myth: in place of cannoli and codes of honor, he offered child soldiers and bodies being dissolved in hydrochloric acid."

cannoli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannoli

(b) "After some of the Camorristi featured in the book repeatedly and credibly threatened to have Saviano killed, he was assigned an armed police escort."
(i) camorrista (noun masculine; plural: camorristi): "ember of the camorra"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/camorrista
(ii) I check the Web: Camorra and Camorrista are capitalized in English --but kept lower case in Italian.

(c) "ZeroZeroZero is dizzying. It charts the bloody rise of the Colombian and Mexican cartels that control the global cocaine market, connecting them to a host of far-flung collaborators: Wall Street banks, the Calabrian mob, mariners in Greece, a son of a former president of Guinea."

Calabria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabria

(d) "In ZeroZeroZero, we get profiles of fascinating people—the Colombian supermodel Natalia Paris, who was the girlfriend of one of the DEA’s top cartel informants; the Wachovia whistle-blower Martin Woods."
(i) Natalia Paris (1975- ; white; 1.55m or 5 feet one inch)
(ii) Wachovia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wachovia
(1879-2008; purchased by Wells Fargo; Headquarters Charlotte, North Carolina; section 1.1 Origin of corporate name)
(ii) Ed Vulliamy, The Wachovia Whistleblower. The Nation, Dec 9, 2010
www.thenation.com/article/156986/wachovia-whistleblower
(Martin "Woods, from Liverpool, England, * * * In 2005 he joined Wachovia Bank as a money laundering reporting officer")