Salvatore Miceli

Salvatore Miceli
Mug shot of Salvatore Miceli in 1993
Born	(1946-04-12) April 12, 1946 (age 71) Salemi, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Allegiance	Sicilian Mafia

Salvatore Miceli (born April 12, 1946, in Salemi) is a member of the Sicilian Mafia. He was on the "Most wanted list" of the Italian Ministry of the Interior from 2001 until his arrest in Venezuela in June 2009. Some Mafia turncoats (pentiti) referred to Miceli as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, due to his frequent trips abroad. Others called him "the chicken that lays golden eggs", referring to his lucrative drug business.

Miceli was born in Salemi, Italy, in the province of Trapani. He was the grandson of the notorious heroin trafficker Salvatore Zizzo. Together with Roberto Pannunzi, he is considered to be the intermediary between the Mafia and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta clans with Colombian cocaine cartels. The two had met when they were living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the 1960s an 1970s. The became close friends and Pannunzi became the godfather of Miceli's first born. The relation between the Calabrian and the Sicilian mafioso also was very useful for drug trafficking.

Both were involved in a cocaine trafficking network with Mariano Agate, the Mafia boss of Mazara del Vallo and Calabrian clans of Marando, Trimboli and Barbaro from Platì. When one of the cocaine transports to Greece went wrong, Miceli was taken hostage by the Colombian suppliers. He was moved towards a hacienda in the Colombian jungle and only to be released when the damage of losing 900 kilogrammes of cocaine, some 22.5 million US dollars, would be repaid . He was only released when Pannunzi guaranteed the money through his Calabrian contacts.

The entire ring was dismantled in May 2003 – but Miceli remained at large. His wife Veronica Dudzinski and his sons Ivano and Mario Miceli were arrested in May 2003, when the cocaine trafficking network was disrupted.

In the beginning of the 1990s, after a failed cocaine transport, Mafia boss Giovanni Brusca also had condemned Miceli to death. However, he was saved thanks to the intervention of Vincenzo Sinacori and Matteo Messina Denaro – the boss of Castelvetrano – who made clear that Miceli belonged to the Mafia in the province of Trapani, and that the "palermitani" could not act against him without the permission of the Mafia bosses of Trapani.