In 1965, the handsome Ammaturo met Pupetta Maresca a former beauty queen who had made international headlines in the 1950s when she killed in revenge the murderer of her husband, a Camorra boss named Pasquale Simonetti.

Ammaturo managed to escape to Africa and then to South America, while Maresca remained in Italy to face the charges.

[5][8] While free and provided with a new identity in exchange for his testimonies, he admitted to killing Semerari and personally decapitating him in a rare interview with La Repubblica newspaper in May 2010.

In exchange for financial support, Semerari offered psychiatric evaluations to members of various criminal organizations, most notably the Camorra and Banda della Magliana.

[1] In the 1980s, Ammaturo established a virtual monopoly of cocaine trafficking to Italy from Peru, where he benefited from the protection and collusion of important personalities.

[10] The particular success of Ammaturo was the result of his innovation to set up a triangular system of cocaine smuggling, involving several African countries as staging posts, rather than just using the traditional South American-European axis.

[6] According to the DEA, due to his trafficking activities, Ammaturo was one of the chief financiers of the Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru.

In August 1990, he was arrested in Governador Valadares near Belo Horizonte (Brazil),[11] and spent three months in jail in Brasília awaiting extradition.

A drug smuggling operation of an even bigger scale was discovered in July 1992, involving the importation of 300 kg of cocaine from Colombia via Peru.