Basil Zaharoff

Basil Zaharoff was a Greek arms dealer and industrialist born on 6 October 1849, originally named Zacharias Basileios Zacharoff. He died on 27 November 1936. During his lifetime, he was among the wealthiest people on the planet and was called both a "merchant of death" and a "mystery man of Europe." His rise came from shrewd, often ruthless business methods: he sold weapons to both sides in wars, occasionally supplied defective or fake equipment, and used the press to undermine competitors. He kept close ties with influential leaders such as British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, and Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II.

Zacharias was the only son and the oldest of four children. His father, Basilius Zacharoff, was a Greek notary, commodity trader, and importer of attar of roses from Constantinople; his mother, Helena Antonides, was reportedly blind. He was born in the Ottoman town of Menteşe in southwestern Turkey. After the anti-Greek "Easter pogroms" of 1821, his family lived in Russia for more than twenty years, where they took the surname Zaharoff. They returned to the Ottoman Empire in 1855, settling in the Greek neighborhood of Tatavla in Constantinople. His first job was as a tour guide in Galata. He is believed to have worked as an arsonist with Constantinople’s fire brigades, who were paid to recover or salvage valuables for wealthy clients.

In November 1872, Zaharoff was summoned to a London court over irregular exports from Constantinople to London. The Greek community in London preferred to settle such disputes outside English courts, so he was released on condition he pay £100 restitution and remain under the court’s jurisdiction. Instead, he left immediately for Athens. There, the 24-year-old Zaharoff befriended political journalist Etienne Skouloudis, convincing him of the justice of his London case. Skouloudis knew a Swedish captain about to leave his post as an agent for arms maker Thorsten Nordenfelt. Using his influence, Skouloudis recommended Zaharoff for the job, and Zaharoff was hired on 14 October 1877, launching a spectacular career. Political and military instability in the Balkans, Turkey, and Russia created excellent opportunities for arms sales, as each state spent heavily to match its neighbors’ perceived aggression, even after the 1878 Treaty of Berlin.

Zaharoff did not focus solely on arms dealing at first. After Cyprus came under British control in 1878, he returned to the United Kingdom. By 1883, he was a shipping agent in Galway, Ireland, recruiting local women for factory work in America. He also spent time in the United States 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 Philadelphia heiress Jennie Billings. He was pursued to Rotterdam by detectives after a Briton recognized him as the same man who had married a British woman in Bristol in 1872, exposing him as a bigamist. He sold munitions to many countries, including Great Britain, Germany, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Spain, Japan, and the United States. Despite his corrupt reputation, he was key in marketing military equipment such as the Maxim gun—one of the first fully automatic machine guns—and the first working submarine. The British-Swedish Nordenfelt company produced anti-torpedo boat guns in Erith, Kent, Stockholm, and Spain. Zaharoff worked for the munitions firm Vickers from 1897 to 1927.

Hiram Maxim’s automatic machine gun was a major improvement over hand-cranked rotary models. It outperformed anything Nordenfelt sold at the time. Zaharoff is believed to have been involved in events surrounding Maxim’s demonstrations between 1886 and 1888. At the first demonstration in La Spezia, Italy, before the Duke of Genoa and other dignitaries, Maxim’s representatives failed to appear. Someone had waylaid them with a tour of local nightspots, leaving them unfit the next morning. The second demonstration took place in Vienna, where exhibitors were told to modify their weapons for Austrian infantry-standard cartridges. After a few hundred rounds, the Maxim gun became erratic and stopped. When Maxim disassembled it, he found it had been sabotaged, but it was too late to repair. A third demonstration in Vienna went perfectly, but again an unknown person moved through the gathering of senior officers, convincing them that the weapon’s fine workmanship could only be done by hand, one at a time, and that Maxim could never produce enough for a modern army. Nordenfelt and Zaharoff won. Maxim, knowing his product was good, sought a merger with Nordenfelt, hiring Zaharoff as their chief salesman on a large 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.

From 1886 to 1889, while handling the Maxim gun, Zaharoff also managed to appropriate Isaac Peral’s submarine, though the details are incomplete.