Five Before Rome by Gabriel Valjan - Book Tour + Giveaway

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Book Details:

Book Title: Five Before Rome: 5 preludes to the Roma Series by Gabriel Valjan

Category: Adult fiction 18 yrs +, 215 pages

Genre: International Crime Thriller

Publisher: Wild Goose Publishing

Release date: June 2020

Content Rating: PG-13 + M. There is violence (not graphic) and mention of child abuse by the clergy. There are 4 instances of the F-Word.

Book Description:

These five novellas precede Roma, Underground,

the first novel in the Roma Series. Meet the five men, who form the

team around Bianca, and learn about their personal history, their

respective parts of Italy, and why they each have a stake in the fight

against organized crime.

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Guest Post

Cleaning the Lens: The Reality of Italian Organized Crime

Five Before Rome is five novellas that reveal the reasons why the five men, who form the team around Bianca in my Roma Series, devote their lives to fighting organized crime in Italy. Although Bianca is an agile and a resourceful American in a foreign culture, she (and the reader) will learn there is a vast cultural difference between the mafia in the United States and in Italy.

Americans weaned on movies either think of the glitz and glamour of Don Corleone or the vulgar and violent Tony Soprano. Fascinated and disgusted at the same time, they might realize that Sonny in The Bronx Tale, or the friends in Goodfellas have limited power and status outside of their Brooklyn or New Jersey. They are big fishes in a small pond. It’s even possible to rationalize our attraction to mafiosi as the outsiders who beat Big Bad Government, an entity that is perceived as a legalized version of them, at their own game. Nobody, not even Al Capone, has eluded the IRS.

The image of the American mafioso is replete with extremes, from that of John Gotti in his Brioni suits and power ties to the discrete businessman who sends his kids to Ivy League schools and the London School of Economics. Mafiosi with MBAs. It’s the difference between sitting in the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy and wearing a pinky ring, or working into a high-rise office at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. When Hyman Roth said, “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel” he meant that the mafia’s criminal activities would become corporatized and legitimate business. He was right, they have succeeded.

The American mafia and its Italian counterpart, as in over there, are two different animals. True, both organizations are preoccupied with money, but both are distinct cultural phenomena. What Americans know about Italian culture is, by and large, descended from immigrants who came here between 1880-1920. Even the Italian spoken in the United States is a relic of the past. For example, the Italian spoken by Sollozzo to Michael in The Godfather is incomprehensible to contemporary Italians. When Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos visits Italy and speaks to Italians at a nearby table, they don’t understand him and he is angry and thinks it’s because he’s an American.

What has happened to the mafia in Italy is beyond the scope of this brief essay, but I’d like to leave you with a compelling image that proves the Italian mafia abroad is a cultural reality that is alien to Americans. Instead of living in a palatial mansion and making millions, some mafiosi there were earning millions of euros and living underground. Literally. When Totò Riina was arrested, he was living in a barn with no modern conveniences. He spent his days reading and annotating his Bible.