A Reporter Lands a Slot on Italian Best-Seller Lists and Hit Lists

IN Italy, it is called the “Saviano effect,” the intense national focus on the Camorra elicited by Roberto Saviano’s 2006 best seller, “Gomorrah,” which traced the rise of the Campania region’s violent and economically mighty clans

Rosaria Capacchione, a veteran reporter for Il Mattino, a daily newspaper in Caserta, outside Naples, who since the mid-1980s has reported on the short lives, violent deaths and intricate finances of the members of the Camorra’s ruling families

In March, Ms. Capacchione was given a police escort after a Camorra defendant in a high-profile trial issued a death threat against her

Under the Camorra in recent decades the Campania region, which surrounds Naples, has become the hub of an international criminal web involving drug trafficking, illegal waste dumping, public works fraud and money laundering through semi-legitimate businesses like supermarkets and gaming parlors.