Michele Zaza

Michele Zaza (Procida, April 10, 1945 – Rome, July 18, 1994) was a member of the Camorra criminal organisation who was also initiated in the Sicilian Mafia.

He headed the Zaza clan (later Mazzarella clan) in Naples.

Zaza was known as ’O Pazzo (the madman) due to his outspoken and implausible public statements.

Instead, this city should thank the twenty, thirty men who arrange for ships laden with cigarettes to be discharged and thus stop crime!” (The Agnelli referred to is Gianni Agnelli, president of Fiat, the Turin-based car multinational) The profit margins were lucrative: in 1959 a case of Chesterfield, Camel or Pall Mall was bought for US$23 and sold on the streets for US$170.

He was one of the first Camorristi to emerge as a powerful organiser of the cigarette contraband industry in the 1960s and 1970s.

A son of a fisherman from Procida (the smallest of the three islands in the Gulf of Naples) he grew up in the poor neighbourhood Portici in Naples.

The second of three brothers, Zaza had a troubled youth with involvement in burglaries, fighting, and even attempted murder.

In the 1960s, he became the leader of a successful cigarette smuggling group through the port of Naples besides the other predominant group, the Maisto clan.

With his relatives, the Mazzarella family, he controlled the zones from San Giovanni a Teduccio to Santa Lucia.

His had his first encounter with the law in 1961 when he was arrested for being involved in a street fight.

In 1961, the Free Port of Tangiers in Morocco, a smuggling restocking base for cigarettes, was closed.

The illegal trade in the Mediterranean shifted towards the Yugoslavian and Albanian coasts.

This relocation greatly benefited the Camorra.

Naples had an ideal strategic position in the Mediterranean and easy access to the Yugoslavian and Albanian coastlines, and took over as the major transit point for smuggled goods.

It transformed Naples into the smuggling capital of the Mediterranean.

Mother ships carrying the illegal cigarette loads hid just behind Capri.

At night small blue speedboats (motoscafi) came to off-load the goods, avoiding Custom control.

The Zaza clan managed to take advantage of this situation.

Zaza became known as "the King of the blondes", as cigarettes are called in French and Italian slang, and ran a fully multinational operation together with his brother Salvatore.

The two main tobacco multinationals, Philip Morris (Marlboro) and Reynolds (Camel and Winston), through concessionaires in Basel, Switzerland, supplied the merchandise without much questions asked.

As the major Camorra cigarette smuggler of the 1970s and 1980s, Michele Zaza once said: “At least 700,000 people live off contraband, which is for Naples what Fiat is to Turin.

They have called me the Agnelli of Naples… Yes – it could all be eliminated in thirty minutes.

And then those who work would be finished.

They’d all become thieves, robbers, muggers.

Naples would become the worst city in the world.

In the early 1970s, 20 to 40 speedboats off-loaded cases of cigarettes from motherships every day.

To secure their share in the thriving illicit cigarette smuggling industry the Sicilian Mafia initiated Neapolitans into their organisation.

By 1974 there was evidence that he had risen in the criminal underworld when he was arrested with important Mafiosi like Gerlando Alberti, Stefano Bontade and Rosario Riccobono.

Soon after that he was arrested in Palermo with Mafia boss Alfredo Bono for illegal possession of firearms.

Zaza was an extravagant and prolific cigarette smuggler.

He once described his activities during questioning by an investigating magistrate: “First I’d sell five cases of Philip Morris, then ten, then a thousand, then three thousand, and I bought myself six or seven ships that you took away from me… I used to load fifty thousand cases a month… I could load a hundred thousand cases, US$10 million on thrust; all I had to do was make a phone call… I’d buy US$24 million worth of Philip Morris in three months.

My lawyer will show you the receipts.

I’m proud of that - US$24 million!”

Several Camorra and Mafia clans struck a deal on the division of the shiploads of contraband cigarettes at a meeting in 1974 in Marano, the stronghold of Camorra boss Lorenzo Nuvoletta.

The deal lasted from 1974 to 1979 when a new and more profitable arrangement was made.

It consisted of a rotation system of off-loading turns: four teams of off-loading turns made up of both Neapolitans and Sicilians, helped each other smuggle, off-load and distribute the goods.

The off-loading became more efficient and coordinated and helped seal some solid business relations and friendships.

Zaza together with Lorenzo Nuvoletta and Antonio Bardellino were sworn in to seal a pact on cigarette smuggling in 1975.

Zaza was associated to Tommaso Spadaro, linked to Mafia boss Stefano Bontade.

All three Neapolitans were regional representatives of the Mafia and were represented by Michele Greco on the Sicilian Mafia Commission.