Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia
By Roberto Saviano
Translated by Virginia Jewiss
Macmillan £16.99, 424 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

Defiance: The Story of One Man Who Stood Up to the Sicilian Mafia
By Tom Behan
IB Tauris £15.99, 232 pages
FT bookshop price: £12.79

Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature
Introduced and Translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi
University of Toronto Press £16.99, 208 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

Who is Lou Sciortino?
By Ottavio Cappellani
Translated by Howard Curtis
Picador £7.99, 240 pages
FT bookshop price: £6.39

Name five words that have entered the English language from Italian. Pizza, opera, fresco, madonna … mafia. Like spaghetti, the Renaissance, Fiat cars and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the mafia is, for some of us, one of the first images that spring to mind when we think of Italy.

The term evokes not just criminality and secrecy in the broadest sense but cold-blooded murder, intimidation of the innocent, global drug-trafficking, political and public sector corruption, racketeering and extortion. This is quite apart from deviant codes of personal and family honour that have stunted the economic and moral development of Italy – and not merely the southern half of it – for the past 150 years. Thanks to Hollywood, the term also evokes sharp suits, sunglasses, wise guys, horses’ heads and offers that can’t be refused; much of what we think we know about the mafia we owe to the entertainment industry.

In truth, there is no excuse for ignorance. Several excellent books have appeared in English over the past 10 years, such as Alison Jamieson’s The Antimafia: Italy’s Fight Against Organized Crime (2000) and John Dickie’s Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (2004). In Italian there is an abundance of material, much of it amassed by parliament’s anti-mafia commission over the past 40 years; anyone with an interest can make use of a number of specialist websites.

A new set of books continues this mission to uncover the real workings of the mafia. The strength of Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia lies in the angry passion with which he denounces the grip of organised crime on his native region of Campania, the area that surrounds Naples. He sprinkles the book with statistics – 60 per cent of goods arriving in the port of Naples escape customs inspection; three million tonnes of waste have been illegally dumped in Campania during the past five years – though a specialist will need to check every figure because Saviano tends not to cite sources for his information.

This is a flaw, but the book is a good read nonetheless. Saviano is a powerful, punchy writer who has seen the operations of the Camorra, as the Naples-based mafia is known, at first hand. Indeed, the publication of this book in Italy in 2006 prompted the police to place him under protection – not that such measures have saved anti-mafia crusaders in the past.

Saviano describes how the Camorra’s influence extends from the docks to the fashion industry, from construction companies to pasta manufacturing, from waste management and sugar refineries to hotels, restaurants and farms. He is stating facts that Italy’s anti-mafia investigators have been aware of since at least the 1980s. But Saviano’s forceful language and disquieting images bring his subject to life. Recounting his travels through the illegal waste-collection dumps of Campania, he observes: “Trash, accumulated over decades, has reconfigured the horizons, created previously non-existent hills, invented new odours, and suddenly restored lost mass to mountains devoured by quarries.”

Why are the Camorra and its sister organisations – Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia and the ’ndrangheta in Calabria – so indestructible? Saviano finds answers in the words of Don Peppino Diana, an anti-mafia priest murdered by the Camorra in 1994: “The southern Italian’s wariness and distrust of the establishment because of its age-old inability to solve the serious problems that afflict the south, particularly employment, housing, health and education;

“The suspicion, not always baseless, of complicity with the Camorra on the part of politicians who, in exchange for electoral support, or to achieve common goals, guarantee cover and grant favours;

“The widespread feeling of personal insecurity and constant risk resulting from insufficient legal protection of persons and possessions, from the slowness of the legal system, the ambiguity of the legislative tools … ;

“The lack of clarity on the job market, so that finding a job is more a matter of Camorra-client operations than the pursuit of a right based on employment legislation;

“The absence or inadequacy, even in pastoral activities, of a true social education, as if it were possible to shape a mature Christian without also shaping the man and the mature citizen.”

For several decades after 1945, it was hard for Sicilians and other southern Italians to challenge the mafia – even if they had wanted to – because intricate bonds of corruption and collusion bound the mafia and the hegemonic Christian Democratic party. No less a figure than Giulio Andreotti, a Christian Democrat who was prime minister seven times between 1972 and 1992 and who is today seen as Italy’s pre-eminent elder statesman, was deemed by a Palermo appeals court in 2003 to have had friendly ties with mafiosi up to 1980. Andreotti was cleared of the crime of “mafia association”. Though hailed by his fellow politicians as proof of his innocence and virtue, this in fact meant little: as the court pointed out in its ruling, it had no choice but to exonerate him, since his activities before 1980 were covered by a statute of limitations.

In such circumstances it took great courage to confront the mafia. One young man who did so was Peppino Impastato, whose life forms the basis of Tom Behan’s concise and reliable book, Defiance. Impastato was a leftwing activist born in Cinisi, a town west of Palermo that was well and truly under mafia control in the 1970s, a focal point of the international drugs trade that reaped vast profits for organised crime bosses on both sides of the Atlantic.

Impastato was a popular public speaker and ran a radio show called Crazy Waves in which he heaped mockery on the mafia, Christian Democrats and the Roman Catholic Church. He renamed Cinisi “Mafiopoli”, or mafia city, and in a reference to the 19th-century Sioux Indian warrior Sitting Bull (Toro Seduto in Italian) dubbed Gaetano Badalamenti, a sinister local mafia boss, Tano Seduto – Sitting Bully.

In May 1978, at the age of 30, Impastato was kidnapped, beaten, tortured, dumped on a railway line with sticks of dynamite strapped to his body and blown up. The killers’ intention was to make his death look like suicide or an ultra-leftist terrorist attack that had gone wrong.

As Behan emphasises, Impastato’s record as Cinisi’s best-known anti-mafia campaigner should have made it abundantly clear to the police investigators where to look for his murderers. Instead, they showed no interest in the mafia connection, and the Sicilian media cravenly echoed the nonsensical line that Impastato had killed himself or had been involved in a terrorist plot. “A fog of silence and disinformation was starting to smother Cinisi,” Behan writes.

The author’s account of how the politicians and police obstructed every attempt by Impastato’s family to uncover the truth makes grim reading. It was not until 2002 that Badalamenti, who was by now inside a US prison, was convicted of organising the murder and given a life sentence.

The long fight for justice that was conducted by Impastato’s mother, Felicia, is one of the true stories, told in her own words, in Robin Pickering-Iazzi’s absorbing collection of fictional and non-fictional writings about mafiosi and bandits since Italy’s creation as a nation-state in 1861.

Felicia Impastato’s husband came from a family with strong mafia ties. When her son was killed she would, in accordance with mafia traditions, have been expected to observe omerta – to say nothing, however terrible her grief. Instead she spoke out and provided information to state prosecutors about her son’s murder. “After his death, what hurt me the most was the investigators’ silence. There was so much resistance to recognising mafia murders because the magistrature back then was at the service of a corrupt, mafioso political class,” she says.

“I’m old, what can they do to me? If they kill me, they still can’t take away the freedom my son gave to me with his death. The freedom not to be afraid, the freedom to have said ’the mafia is disgusting’ when no one was saying it. By now I don’t care about anything in my life any more. They already took away my greatest love.”

Among the authors featured in Pickering-Iazzi’s collection are Giovanni Verga, the 19th-century Sicilian realist, and Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian-born winner of the 1926 Nobel prize for literature. Deledda’s short story, “The Hired Killer”, is not about a mafioso as such, but is a profile of an outlaw and mercenary who is eventually arrested and punished, ironically for the only crime he did not commit. For many readers, the quirky workings of human justice exposed in the tale will be a reminder of how woefully Italy’s judicial system has often served the mafia’s victims and the interests of Italian society in general.

Ottavio Cappellani’s debut novel, Who is Lou Sciortino?, is pitched at a different level. Lou Sciortino, the grandson of a Sicilian-American mafioso, is picked to run a Los Angeles movie studio that is a front for laundering mob money. Rival gangsters blow up the studio’s offices. The grandfather decides to protect Lou by sending him across the Atlantic to the Sicilian city of Catania. But in Catania all hell is breaking loose. A policeman has been shot dead during a botched robbery of Uncle Mimmo’s general store, and a hairdresser called Tony who wears silk shirts with huge collars just won’t stop throwing barbecues.

Turning the mafia into material for comedy is not impossible – think of the hilarious scenes in Billy Wilder’s movie Some Like It Hot (1959), or the humour of The Sopranos, the HBO television drama series that ran for six seasons from 1999 until last June. But Cappellani’s characters are as wooden as planks. The dialogue is trite. The novel’s violence is silly and unconvincing. One Italian reviewer has praised the book for having “the brutality of Quentin Tarantino and the trash of Pedro Almodevar”. It’s a judgment the US and Spanish film directors need lose no sleep over.

And what of the real mafia? It is rarely out of the headlines for long. In a trial verdict delivered in December 2004, Marcello Dell’Utri, a close political ally and business partner of Silvio Berlusconi, who is now seeking re-election as Italy’s prime minister, was sentenced to nine years in prison for mafia association. Dell’Utri is appealing the case.

Last January, Salvatore “Toto” Cuffaro, the president of Sicily’s regional government, was forced to resign after receiving a five-year sentence for helping people linked to the mafia. Cuffaro is appealing, too.

Several prominent mafia leaders in Sicily and elsewhere have recently been arrested. But I am reminded of what a wise Italian told me in April 2006, the month the police seized Bernardo Provenzano, the presumed head of Cosa Nostra: “Arrests make life difficult for individuals. But the mafia never dies.”

Tony Barber is the FT’s Brussels bureau chief and formerly worked in Rome.