[3] Among his friends and "electoral agents" were the French mafiosi Paul Carbone, François Spirito, as well as Antoine Guérini, who had helped him get into the mayor´s office of Marseille in 1929.

[6][7] During World War II, he was the general secretary of the Marseille Bureau of the Légion des Volontaires Français, a collaborator of the Vichy regime.

On 5 August 1942 he was arrested alongside Paul Carbone in Marseille over the possible murder of two women and the shooting of five more people during the Bastille Day march a month earlier.

[9] Shortly after the war, members of the French resistance put him on a list of collaborators they wanted to kill.

[9] He exiled himself to Sigmaringen, in Southern Germany, then Italy, Argentina, and finally to Spain under the name of Pedro Multedo.