Basil Zaharoff
Basil Zaharoff was a Greek arms dealer and industrialist. One of the richest men in the world during his lifetime, Zaharoff was described as both a "merchant of death" and a "mystery man of Europe". His success was forged through his cunning, often aggressive and sharp, business tactics. These included the sale of arms to opposing sides in conflicts, sometimes delivering fake or faulty machinery and skilfully using the press to attack business rivals.
Zaharoff maintained close contacts with many powerful political leaders, including British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
Early life
Zacharias was the only son and eldest of four children of Basilius Zacharoff of Constantinople, a Greek notary, commodity dealer and importer of attar of roses and his wife, Helena Antonides. Zacharias was born in the Ottoman Empire town of Menteşe in southwest Turkey. His family lived in Russia for over two decades as exiles following the anti-Greek "Easter pogroms" of 1821. While in Russia, their family adopted the surname Zaharoff. They returned to the Ottoman Empire in 1855, to Constantinople's Greek neighborhood of Tatavla.Zacharias' first job was as a tour guide in the Galata. It is thought he became an arsonist with Constantinople's fire brigades, who were paid to recover or salvage treasures for their wealthy owners.
He was summoned to court in London on November 1872 due to irregular exports of goods from Constantinople to London. The London Greeks from Constantinople preferred disputes involving members of their community to be settled outside English courts, and he was discharged on the conditions that he paid £100 restitution to the claimant and remained within the court's jurisdiction. Instead, he immediately left for Athens, where the 24-year-old Zaharoff was befriended by a political journalist, Etienne Skouloudis. The eloquent Zaharoff succeeded in convincing Skouloudis of the rightness of his London court case. Skouloudis was a friend of a Swedish captain who was about to leave his job as an agent of arms manufacturer Thorsten Nordenfelt. Skouloudis used his influence to recommend Zaharoff for the role. Zaharoff was hired on 14 October 1877, beginning a spectacular career. The political and military instability in the Balkan states, Turkey and Russia provided an excellent opportunity for the arms sales, as each state spent to match the perceived aggressive intentions of its neighbours, even after the 1878 Treaty of Berlin.
Arms dealing
Zaharoff did not make arms dealing his sole business at first. After Cyprus passed under British control in 1878 he returned to the United Kingdom; by 1883 he was working as a shipping agent in Galway, Ireland, where he recruited local girls for work in American factories. He also had a spell in the United States where he worked as a confidence man, and later as a salesman for a St. Louis railcar business. In 1885, posing as "Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff", he married a Philadelphia heiress, Jennie Billings, and was pursued to Rotterdam by detectives after his exposure as a bigamist by a Briton who recognised him as the same man who had married a British girl in Bristol in 1872.Zaharoff sold munitions to many nations, including Great Britain, Germany, the Russian and Ottoman Empires, Greece, Spain, Japan and the United States. Despite his reputation for corruption, he was instrumental in marketing military equipment, including various famous weapons such as the Maxim gun and the first working submarine. The British-Swedish Nordenfelt produced a range of anti-torpedo boat guns in Erith, Kent, Stockholm and Spain.
Zaharoff worked for Vickers, the munitions firm, from 1897 to 1927.
Maxim machine gun
's automatic machine gun was a significant improvement over the then-current hand-cranked rotary barrel models. Maxim's gun was better than anything that Nordenfelt sold at the time. Zaharoff is believed to have had a hand in the events surrounding Maxim's attempts to demonstrate his invention between 1886 and 1888. In the first, Maxim's and Nordenfelt's machine guns were to be demonstrated at La Spezia, Italy, before a distinguished audience which included the Duke of Genoa. Maxim's representatives did not show up; a person unknown had waylaid them with a tour of La Spezia's nocturnal establishments leaving them unfit for purpose the next morning.Round two took place at Vienna, where the exhibitors were instructed to modify their weapons to comply with Austrian Infantry-standard sized cartridges. After shooting a few hundred rounds, the Maxim gun became erratic before stopping altogether. When Maxim took one weapon apart to see what had happened, he discovered that they had been sabotaged, but it was too late to repair. A third demonstration also took place in Vienna, and here the gun worked perfectly but again an unknown person went through the gathering of senior officers, convincing them that the workmanship required to produce such a marvellous weapon could be achieved only by hand, one at a time, and that without the means for mass production, Maxim could never produce machine guns in sufficient quantities to satisfy the needs of a modern army. Nordenfelt and Zaharoff had won. Maxim, who knew he had a good product, successfully sought a merger with Nordenfelt, engaging Zaharoff as their principal salesman on a huge commission.
Under pressure from Rothschild and Vickers, Thorsten Nordenfelt merged with Maxim's in 1888 to form the Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company. Two years later, a bankrupt Nordenfelt was forced out of the company.
Submarines
From 1886 to 1889, at the same time that Zaharoff got the Maxim machine gun, he managed to appropriate Isaac Peral's submarine; although these facts are less well known. Zaharoff and Nordenfelt tried at this time to develop a submarine for their own business purposes.One of the most notorious sales by Zaharoff was that of the Nordenfelt I, a faulty steam-driven submarine model based on a design by the English inventor and clergyman George Garrett, which US Navy intelligence characterized as capable of "dangerous and eccentric movements." Thorsten Nordenfelt had already demonstrated his vessel at an international gathering of the military elite, and while the major powers would have none of it, smaller nations, attracted by the prestige, were a different matter.
It was thus that, with a promise of generous payment terms, Zaharoff sold the first model to the Greeks. He then persuaded the Turks that the Greek submarine posed a threat, selling them two. After that, he persuaded the Russians that there was now a new and significant threat on the Black Sea, and they bought another two.
None of these submarines ever saw action. The mechanics, driven by steam propulsion, were completely inadequate for underwater navigation, and failed demonstrably when undergoing sea trials by the respective navies. Besides the underlying problems of the faulty propulsion system, they were also chronically unstable. One of the Turkish Navy's submarines sank, capsizing during a torpedo firing test. The vessel reared in a vertical position, from which it sank by the stern.
At this time Spanish inventor Isaac Peral designed and built the first submarine capable of navigating underwater with a decent level of control and with the ability to launch torpedoes both submerged and on the surface. This was the first proper submarine, solving the problems of propulsion, stability and armament all at once. Peral's submarine was driven by electric propulsion, and had a periscope, target practice apparatus, compensating compass needle, gyroscope, sliding electric torpedo tube launcher and servomotor.
Zaharoff found out quickly about this young Spanish Naval officer's invention. Previously in shipbuilding, he had already seen the plans and memorandum reports sent by Peral to the Spanish Navy's HQ at the Defence Ministry.
Later on, during Peral's visit to London, Zaharoff tried meeting with him unsuccessfully, with the help of one of Peral's Spanish Navy fellow officers. Peral refused twice, but after several attempts, he had a meeting with Thorsten Nordenfelt, the company owner, who offered him a deal to purchase the patent of the stability servomotor. Isaac Peral rejected both offers but signed his sentence in that same instant, without knowing it.
Zaharoff then got to work with his own Machiavellian plan. The Spanish inventor, as with Maxim, suffered four sabotages during the tests: the first of them, in the previous test, in the presence of the Head of the Spanish State, but, Peral, more cautious than the North American inventor, proved successful in all of them.
Despite this, Zaharoff used underhand methods, which came to light later, and was able to cause a controversy between the inventor and his own government leading to the Spanish Government's disapproval of this submarine invention, although it would have been a formidable weapon in the conflict with the United States, several years after.
Zaharoff traveled to Spain several times between 1886 and 1890 with three objectives: boycott Peral's submarine, sell weapons to the Spanish Army, and acquire a Spanish munitions factory. He was successful in all three objectives, mainly because his initiation of an amorous relationship with Pilar de Muguiro y Beruete opened many doors for him.
Pilar's father, influential banker Fermín Muguiro, Count of Muguiro, was a close friend of the King, and leader of the Spanish Conservative Party. She was a personal friend and niece of Segismundo Moret, a leading Spanish progressive thinker and the Liberal Party Leader's right-hand man. Unhappily married to King Alfonso XII's cousin, the Spanish Grandee, Francisco de Borbón, Duke of Marchena, she had unrestricted access to the Royal Palaces. During one trip, Zaharoff was spotted at the shipyard where the Spanish submarine was being built, but the Spanish authorities "covered up" the matter.
The acquisition of one of the best Spanish armament companies, Euskalduna, located in north Spain and renamed "Placencia de las Armas Co. Ltd" was in large part thanks to his love affair, and through establishing a powerful network among Spanish politicians, journalists and military commanders, who served his business interests well. This influential group of people took his side against the development of Isaac Peral's submarine, and the Spanish Government, despite the astounding success in sea trials, finally pulled the rug from the project.
After "Placencia de Armas Co. Ltd" swindled the Spanish Government by selling useless arms during the 1898 War, the Sociedad Española de Construcciones Navales in Spain, a branch of Vickers were awarded, by the Spanish Government, exclusive naval construction rights for the Spanish Navy.
In the aftermath of this scandal, accusations of bribery and manipulation flew in the direction of this dangerous trafficker of weapons. A Spanish Navy lawyer denounced the Spanish Government for two alleged crimes of "prevarication." The Spanish Government acted expeditiously and especially cruelly against any naval officers who went public with their discontent. The Central Chief of Staff and the head of the Armada Juridic Service were fired, and hundreds of officers were imprisoned and lost their jobs.