Achille Lauro

views updated Jun 08 2018

Achille Lauro

Achille Lauro (1887-1984), II Comandante (The Commander), had a rich business and political life. His fleet of ocean going vessels was spread over the waters of the world for 50 years. He was a deputy in the Italian parliament and mayor and political boss of Naples.

Achille Lauro was born in Piano di Sorrento (near Naples) on June 16, 1887, to a sea-faring family. As a youngster his father sent him on transatlantic trips on sailboats that he owned. When Achille was 20 his father died, leaving him in charge of the family—his mother and three sisters—three sailboats, and a huge debt. He managed to stay solvent until the beginning of World War I when the government requisitioned his sailboats and eventually lost them.

When the war ended, Achille Lauro was without money and without boats. His strategy was to create a company with limited participation (societa in accomandita) by having all his personnel invest their savings for a share of the profits and a guarantee of employment. It was this type of investment that brought Lauro's financial success. By having his employees participating in the profits of his ventures he avoided union problems and obtained the greatest productivity possible.

Between 1923 and 1928, when large shipping companies were abandoning their boats, Lauro found another expedient by leasing boats that he used effectively. He succeeded in having these boats loaded both ways—coal from England to southern Italy and grains from Romania to Rotterdam. As his fame for service and punctuality spread, he had no problems in increasing business volume. With the profits made this way he increased his fleet so that by the 1930s he owned the largest private fleet (in tons) in the Mediterranean basin.

At Italy's entrance into World War II (June 20, 1940) Lauro had 57 boats with over 300,000 tons, but by the next day all his boats were confiscated again for the war. Since he supported the war effort, Mussolini granted him 50 percent of all Neapolitan newspapers (they were previously 100 percent owned by the government through the Bank of Naples).

When the war ended he was imprisoned by the Allies for almost two years, only to be found at the end not guilty of fascist collaboration. Like others, he was ready to purchase Liberty boats that the United States government put on the market. During the huge Italian migration to Australia and South America Lauro crowded thousands of migrants on his ships for whom the Italian government was grateful to pay the fare.

This was also the moment he chose to enter politics. He did not care where. When the left and center parties rejected him as a fascist collaborator, Lauro financed the decaying Monarchist Party and became its local leader. As such, he was elected mayor of Naples in 1953. At the time Lauro also was the owner of the largest private fleet in Europe.

Over the next five years Lauro through his wealth and populistic politics succeeded in becoming the hero of the local people as well as the enemy of the establishment in Rome. He never hesitated to mix his business affairs with the affairs of the town hall—not so much for financial gains as for power and political gain. By 1958 the central government, fearing the spread of fascist-like populism and loss of central government control, dismissed the Lauro administration and named a receiver for the city of Naples. Lauro was elected again as mayor in 1960, but by 1961 he was outvoted by the city council and he resigned.

While in the 1960s business became better and Lauro could expand his fleet, he would never again regain absolute political power in Naples. He took the reins of the business from his sons who, he felt, mismanaged it. Upon the death of his wife of a half century, in 1973 he married a 35 year old would-be actress and tried to restructure the future of his newspapers. Until the end Achille Lauro remained the supreme master of the fleet, the Commander of a greedy family and of the people that alternately adored and hated him.

Achille Lauro

views updated May 09 2018

ACHILLE LAURO

Name of an Italian passenger-liner hijacked by a commando of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) on 8 October 1985 near Alexandria, Egypt. This operation was undertaken in reprisal for an Israeli raid carried out seven days previously on the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Tunis. The group, consisting of four persons and commanded by Majid al-Malki, was supervised externally by Khalid Abdul Rahim (Petros Floros, Hussein Khalid). During the operation, an American Jewish citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, was killed by one of the terrorists. Meanwhile, the leader of the PLF, Muhammad Zaydan (Abu al-Abbas), who had arrived on the scene, ordered the commando to surrender to Egyptian authorities.

In the night of 10–11 October, American fighter planes intercepted the Egyptian plane carrying members of the commando group and forced it to land at a North American Treaty Organization (NATO) base in Sicily. There, at the end of a face-to-face confrontation between the Italian police forces and the members of a special American unit, on a mission to capture the terrorists, the commando was arrested by the Italian police, while Zaydan was released and left Italy for Belgrade. On 14 October, the United States issued an international arrest warrant against Zaydan. Later a court in Genoa, Italy, sentenced the four hijackers to prison terms of four to nine years.

In January 1986 Zaydan traveled to Iraq via Cairo, Egypt. On 2 July, the Genoa court sentenced the leader of the PLF, in absentia, to life imprisonment. The attorney general had asked for life imprisonment for the leader of the commando as well as for four other Palestinians who had supplied logistical help to the group. On 22 April 1987, Zaydan, as member of the executive committee of the PLO, participated in the Congress of the Palestine National Council (PNC) that was held in Algiers. Indignant, the United States protested officially to the Algerian authorities against his presence. Under American pressure, the leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, demanded that Zaydan be expelled from the PLO.

Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Achille Lauro

views updated May 11 2018

ACHILLE LAURO

ACHILLE LAURO, an Italian cruise ship hijacked en route from Alexandria to Port Said, Egypt, in October 1985 by four members of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), an Arab extremist group. Holding 438 hostages, the hijackers sailed to Tartus, Syria, and demanded that Israel release fifty PLF prisoners. Denied entry at Tartus, the terrorists executed a wheelchair-bound American passenger. They surrendered after fifty-two hours and were taken to Cairo. When Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak allowed the hijackers to fly to Tunisia, American navy jets forced the flight to land in Sicily. U.S. investigations linked the hijacking to Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat and PLF president Mohammed Abul Abbas Zaidan.