[17] In 1997, while in high school, he grew close to the Italian Marxist–Leninist Party (PMLI) and published articles on its weekly newspaper, Il Bolscevico, under the pseudonym Roberto Ercolino.

[18][19] He began his career in journalism in 2002, writing for numerous magazines and daily papers, including Pulp, Diario, Sud, Il manifesto, the website Nazione Indiana, and for the Camorra monitoring unit of the Corriere del Mezzogiorno.

On 22 January 2011, the University of Genoa awarded him a bachelor's degree honoris causa in law "for the important contribution to the fight against crime and to the defence of legality in our country".

[22][23] Saviano is primarily influenced by southern Italian intellectuals such as Giustino Fortunato and Gaetano Salvemini,[24] by the anarchists Errico Malatesta and Mikhail Bakunin, and by poet Rocco Scotellaro.

Additionally, he has said that his educational background includes many prominent writers such as Ernst Jünger, Ezra Pound, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Carl Schmitt, and Julius Evola.

[25][26] In 2015, Saviano collaborated with the Neapolitan playwright Mimmo Borrelli on the play Sanghenapule – Vita straordinaria di San Gennaro, which was part of the 2015/2016 season of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan.

After the Neapolitan police investigations, the Italian Minister for Interior Affairs Giuliano Amato assigned Saviano a personal bodyguard and transferred him from Naples.

On 20 October 2008, six Nobel Prize-awarded authors and intellectuals (Orhan Pamuk, Dario Fo, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Desmond Tutu, Günter Grass, and Mikhail Gorbachev) published an article saying that they sided with Saviano against the Camorra.

In March 2006, Saviano's first book, Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System, was published as part of Mondadori's Strade Blu series.

It describes the business and criminal world of the Camorra and of the places where the organization was born and exists:[29] the region of Campania, the city of Naples, the towns of Casal di Principe, San Cipriano d'Aversa, and the territory around Aversa known as the agro aversano.

The book talks about the criminal bosses' sumptuous villas copied from Hollywood films, rural lands filled with the toxic waste of half of Europe, and a population that not only cohabitates with organised crime but even protects it and approves of its actions.

A television show titled Gomorrah - La serie was produced by Sky Italia, Fandango, Cattleya, Beta Film, and LA7, under the supervision of Saviano and the direction of Stefano Sollima, Francesca Comencini, and Claudio Cupellini.

The letter contained a request to move the trial due to legittima suspicione, or doubt surrounding the impartiality of the judicial body, caused by the alleged influence of Roberto Saviano, Rosaria Capacchione, and the district attorneys Federico Cafiero de Raho and Raffaele Cantone, on the judges.

Before the third criminal section of the Court of Naples, the Assistant Prosecutor of the District Anti-Mafia Directorate (DDA), Antonello Ardituro, requested the maximum sentence on conviction of one year and six months imprisonment.

A police inspector of the Milan Anti-Mafia Investigation Department DIA) informed the DDA that the pentito, Carmine Schiavone (cousin of boss Francesco Schiavone, aka Sandokan), had informed him of a plan, already in operation, to kill the writer and his bodyguards before Christmas through a spectacular attack on the highway between Rome and Naples,[34] in the style of the assassination of anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone at Capaci.

Subsequently, the district attorney heading the investigation requested and obtained dismissal of the case as the reports appeared to be unfounded, although Schiavone confirmed that Saviano had been condemned to death by the Casalese clan.

[35] In October 2008, Saviano decided to leave Italy for a time,[36] as the result of threats, which were confirmed by reports and statements from informants, revealing a Casalesi clan plan to eliminate him.

[37] People unfamiliar with Camorra power dynamics often think that killing an innocent person is a naive gesture on the part of the clans because it only legitimizes and amplifies the victim's example and words, a confirmation of the truths he spoke.

The Nobel Prize winners who launched the appeal were: Dario Fo, Mikhail Gorbachev, Günter Grass, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Orhan Pamuk, and Desmond Tutu.

The program Fahrenheit on Italy's Rai Radio 3 organized a marathon reading of Gomorrah in which celebrities from the world of culture, news, theatre, and civil society participated.

Need for bodyguards In October 2009, the head of the Rapid Response Team of Naples, Vittorio Pisani, questioned the need for a security detail to protect Roberto Saviano,[40] maintaining that the death threats had not been confirmed.

[43] Furthermore, the head DA for the Anti-Mafia Office of Naples, Federico Cafiero de Raho, declared that Saviano is exposed to a high risk and, therefore, requires protection.

The district attorneys Raffaele Cantone and Franco Roberti, both magistrates with years of experience on the front lines fighting against the clans, reiterated Saviano's dangerous situation.

Saviano replied in an article for La Repubblica, denouncing the attempt to isolate him and to cause the "disintegration" of the public's solidarity with him, comparing his case with those of Peppino Impastato, Giuseppe Fava, and Giancarlo Siani.

Pisani, therefore, explained that he did not say the words pronounced in the article since the Carabinieri (Italy's national military police) were the ones who had to make the decision concerning Saviano's security detail.

The writer affirmed that during the 1883 earthquake of Casamicciola, in which Croce lost his parents and sister, he allegedly followed his dying father's advice and offered 100,000 lire (a very large sum for the time), to whoever helped him out from under the rubble.

The testimony taken up by Saviano during the show Vieni via con me ("Come away with me") in 2010, was denied by Herling in a letter published in the Corriere del Mezzogiorno and in two interviews given to TG1, during which she explicitly maintained that the writer invented the episode.

His father, who was writing with his son at the table when the quake struck, was completely covered by debris except for his head and told him – Offer 100 thousand lire to whoever can save us.

[58][1] In September 2015, journalist Michael C. Moynihan wrote an article for The Daily Beast,[59] criticizing ZeroZeroZero and accusing Saviano of having used sections of text, including from Wikipedia, without citing his sources.

In an article for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica,[60][61] Saviano demonstrated how the passages from ZeroZeroZero and the presumed sources identified by Moynihan were manipulated in order to appear similar.