[9] Back in Rome, he ran an upmarket fashion boutique "Il Papavero" ("The Poppy") as a cover in the 1980s when he was making his way in the heroin business.
[12][13] In the late 1970s and 1980s he was involved in heroin trafficking with the Sicilian Mafiosi Gaetano Badalamenti and Gerlando Alberti, organizing shipments from Turkey through Italy to the United States.
[14] He put them in contact with Corsican gangsters from Marseille and convinced the chemist André Bousquet an old hand from the French Connection days, to set up a heroin-refining lab on Sicily.
[12] In 1989, Pannunzi was involved in setting up a heroin lab near Bergamo in northern Italy together with the Barbaro and Sergi 'Ndrangheta clans from Platì.
[12][9] The lab was discovered on May 21, 1990, in a farmhouse Valsecca, while French Connection chemists Alain Mazza and Gilles Pairone were refining 20 kilograms of heroin.
As a result of the police dismantling the operation an arrest warrant was issued against Pannunzi for drug trafficking and criminal association.
When he was visited in prison by an Italian police officer he boasted about the huge investments in property and precious stones in Canada, Australia, Medellin and Rome.
He was arrested again on April 5, 2004, in Madrid, Spain, together with his son Alessandro Pannunzi and his right-hand man and son-in-law Francesco Antonio Bumbaca, married with his daughter Simona.
The extended network operated in Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Portugal, Spain, Greece, South Africa, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
[13] "He is the biggest cocaine importer in the world," said Nicola Gratteri, deputy chief prosecutor in Reggio Calabria, when he was detained.