21 Facts About Michele Zaza

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

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

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

The Michele Zaza clan managed to take advantage of this situation.

Michele 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.

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

Michele Zaza later admitted he was dealing in 50,000 cases of Marlboros a month.

Michele Zaza's cunning helped him to slowly emerge from the shadow of his Mafia protectors.

The Marano agreement between Sicilians and Neapolitans was wound up at a second Marano meeting in 1979, partly because Michele Zaza had become uncontrollable.

In contrast, the business-oriented gangs linked to the Mafia like Michele Zaza's organisation, were involved in cigarette smuggling and heroin trafficking, but soon moved on to invest in real estate and construction firms, in particular when the reconstruction after the November 1980 Irpinia earthquake provided ample opportunity to rake off public contracts.

Michele Zaza had to pay Cutolo US$400,000 for the right to carry on operating in contraband cigarettes.

Michele Zaza allegedly paid more than 4 billion lire to the NCO in the first months after the criminal tax was imposed.

Michele Zaza's success was due to the fact that he was more involved in smuggling and less interested in traditional Camorra extortion activities.

Michele Zaza invested his illegal money in legitimate businesses like real estate, construction companies and restaurants.

Michele Zaza got his heroin supplies from the Corsican gangster Gaetano Zampa, based in Marseille.

In 1982, with police raiding heroin refineries in Sicily and a raging Mafia war, Michele Zaza is believed to have set up a refinery on his own in the French city of Rouen, with support of contacts from the old French Connection heroin refiners and the right contacts with the Sicilian Mafia, such as Giuseppe Bono in New York, Salamone and the Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan.

Michele Zaza hoped to make a profit of between US$20,000 and $32,000 a day until the scheme was interrupted by his arrest on December 11,1982, in Rome.

However, Michele Zaza, fled his house arrest in December 1983 and moved to Paris.

Michele Zaza was extradited from France to Italy on March 27,1994.

Michele Zaza's daughter was the nominal owner of a ten-bedroom villa in Beverly Hills, a Paris flat, a villa just outside Nice and real estate in Naples.

Michele Zaza was survived by his wife Anna Maria Liguori, a former university student with a French mother, and three children, living in Rome with their mother, attending the American school without connections to their father's illegal business.