be finished. They’d all become thieves, robbers, muggers. Naples would become the worst city in the world. 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. 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. In the early 1970s, 20 to 40 speedboats off-loaded cases of cigarettes from motherships every day. Initiated in Cosa Nostra To secure their share in the thriving illicit cigarette smuggling industry the Sicilian Mafia initiated Neapolitans into their organisation. 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. 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