Diego Maradona's Scandals: Cocaine, the Camorra, Women and a Death Still on Trial
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Diego Maradona is remembered as one of the greatest footballers who ever lived, a man who could win a World Cup practically on his own and turn a stadium of 80,000 people into believers with one run at goal. But strip away the highlight reels and you're left with one of the messiest, most scandal-soaked private lives in sporting history. Cocaine addiction that nearly killed him more than once. A years-long entanglement with one of Naples' most violent mafia clans. Eight acknowledged children by four different women, and at least two more still fighting for recognition. Tax evasion cases that dragged on for decades. A shooting incident involving an air rifle and four journalists. And now, six years after his death, a criminal trial over who let him die is still grinding through the Argentine courts, having already been blown up once by a judge who was secretly filming a documentary about it.
This isn't a footnote to his career. For long stretches of his adult life, the scandal basically was the story.
The Cocaine Years That Started in Barcelona
Maradona's cocaine use is usually associated with his time at Napoli, but it actually started earlier, during his brief and miserable spell at Barcelona in the early 1980s. He was 21, already the most talked-about player on the planet, and struggling under the pressure. By the time he arrived in Naples in 1984 for a then-world-record transfer fee, the habit had taken hold properly.
What followed was a grim, almost ritualised cycle. Maradona later admitted that he'd binge on cocaine from Sunday night through to Wednesday, then throw himself into an intense detox to be fit enough to play the following weekend. It's a genuinely disturbing routine when you think about it: a professional athlete building his entire training week around recovering from a multi-day drug binge, over and over, for years. Somehow he still produced some of the best football anyone has ever watched, which tells you plenty about the scale of his talent and probably nothing good about how normalised his addiction had become to the people around him.
Cocaine was pouring into Europe in huge quantities through the 1980s, the same boom that made traffickers like Griselda Blanco, the so-called godmother of cocaine, unimaginably rich and violent on the other side of the Atlantic. Naples, with its port and its organised crime networks, was exactly the kind of city where a famous addict with money could get whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. And that's exactly what happened to Maradona.
Naples, the Camorra and a Very Public Bust
This is the part of Maradona's story that sounds like it belongs in a crime documentary rather than a sports biography, and in fact it became one. Asif Kapadia's 2019 documentary "Diego Maradona" laid out in detail just how close he got to the Camorra, Naples' homegrown mafia, and specifically to the Giuliano clan, one of the most powerful and feared crime families in the city.
The Giulianos didn't just brush shoulders with Maradona. According to police investigations at the time, they supplied him with drugs and with women, and they made sure they were photographed doing it. Officers eventually recovered 71 photographs of Maradona with members of the Giuliano family, including pictures of him relaxing in a jacuzzi at their private residence and attending the wedding of a cousin of Luigi Giuliano, the clan's don. For a crime family, being seen as close friends with the most famous athlete on earth was worth more than money. It bought them a kind of untouchable glamour.
It all came apart in early 1991. Police revealed they'd caught Maradona on wiretaps at three in the morning, trying to arrange sex workers to be sent to his room through his mafia contacts. His voice turned up on the tapped calls eight separate times. He was eventually cleared of the more serious charge of drug trafficking, which could have carried up to twenty years in prison, but he was convicted of cocaine possession and handed a suspended sentence along with a fine. Several sex workers later came forward with their own accounts of cocaine-fuelled nights with him, some of which had allegedly been arranged through his Camorra connections.
A Positive Test, a Ban and a Flight From the City
The wiretap scandal was bad enough, but the real hammer blow landed in March 1991, when Maradona tested positive for cocaine after a Serie A match against Bari. Italian football banned him for fifteen months. Within weeks he'd fled Naples entirely, leaving behind a failed drugs test, an unrecognised son he'd spent years denying, and a tax dispute worth well over a billion lire. The city that had built statues and shrines to him, that genuinely worshipped him as something close to a saint, watched him disappear almost overnight.
The Taxman Comes Knocking
Maradona's financial mess with the Italian authorities didn't end when he left the country, not by a long way. Italian tax officials eventually said he owed close to $53 million in unpaid taxes stemming from his Napoli years, debts he refused to settle for a long time because he argued the club, not him personally, should have been responsible for the bill.
Italy pursued him for it relentlessly, and often with a flair for public humiliation. In 2006, police confiscated two of his Rolex watches, worth around $15,000, when he turned up to play in a benefit match on Italian soil. In 2009, while he was at a weight-loss clinic in Merano, officers seized diamond earrings he was wearing, worth close to $6,000. It wasn't until 2014 that a Naples court finally ordered the Italian tax agency to back off, ruling that new evidence showed no actual tax violation had occurred. By then the sequence of very public seizures had already become one more chapter in the ongoing spectacle of his life.
Eight Kids, Four Mothers and Decades of Denial
Maradona's romantic life produced almost as many headlines as his drug use. He married Claudia Villafañe in 1989 and had two daughters with her, Dalma and Gianinna, before the marriage ended in divorce in 2003. But there was already another child in the picture by then, and Maradona had spent years refusing to admit it.
Diego Sinagra, known as Diego Junior, was born in September 1986 in Naples, the result of Maradona's relationship with a woman named Cristiana Sinagra. Maradona denied paternity for over a decade, forcing Sinagra to fight it out in the Italian courts, where paternity was eventually established. It took until 2016 for Maradona to publicly and fully acknowledge Diego Junior as his son, and the two spent years building a relationship that had essentially been denied to both of them from birth.
More children followed the same pattern of denial and delayed recognition. Jana was born from Maradona's relationship with Valeria Sabalain, and didn't reunite with her father until 2015, when they happened to meet at a gym where he was training. Dieguito Fernando was born in 2013 during a turbulent period with his mother, Verónica Ojeda, and his paternity became the subject of a legal battle involving DNA testing before Maradona accepted him.
Then, in March 2019, Maradona acknowledged three more children in Cuba, reportedly born to two different mothers during the years he spent living in Havana for drug treatment. By 2019 he'd officially recognised eight children in total. It still wasn't the end of it. Since his death, at least two more people have come forward claiming to be his children and pursuing legal recognition, which would also entitle them to a share of his estate.
The Night He Opened Fire on Journalists
In February 1994, with the World Cup only months away and the press hounding him relentlessly over his fitness and form, Maradona snapped. He grabbed an air rifle and opened fire on a group of reporters camped outside his home near Buenos Aires, crouching behind a car as he pulled the trigger. Four people were hit. Television cameras caught the whole thing.
It took four years for the case to work its way through the courts, but in 1998 Maradona was handed a suspended prison sentence of two years and ten months. He'd go on to appeal the associated fine, treating the whole episode with the same defiance he brought to most accusations against him.
Cuba, Castro and a Rescue From the Brink
By 2000, the cocaine had caught up with him in the most literal way possible. Maradona nearly died of an overdose that year, and it was Fidel Castro, a friend of his since the late 1980s, who stepped in and invited him to Cuba for treatment. Maradona spent roughly six months in a Havana rehabilitation clinic doing an intensive detox, and ended up living at the La Pradera health resort on and off for close to four years, reportedly playing golf most days between treatment sessions.
He returned to Cuban rehab again in 2004, and on both occasions doctors found that years of heavy cocaine use had done serious, lasting damage to his heart. In 2005 he underwent gastric bypass surgery to deal with the dramatic weight gain that had followed his years of addiction. Maradona later dedicated one of his autobiographies to Castro and the Cuban people, and had the late Cuban leader's face tattooed on his leg alongside Che Guevara's, describing Castro as something close to a personal hero. It's a strange, genuinely touching footnote to a period defined mostly by the fact that he'd almost died.
A Death That's Still on Trial
Maradona died of heart failure on 25 November 2020, at the age of 60, while recovering at home in Buenos Aires province from surgery for a subdural hematoma in his brain. The decision to let him convalesce at home, rather than in a hospital where he could be properly monitored, is now at the centre of a criminal case that's become one of the most watched trials in Argentine history.
Seven members of his medical team, including neurosurgeon Leopoldo Luque, psychiatrist Agustina Cosachov and psychologist Carlos Díaz, stand accused of homicide with possible intent, essentially meaning prosecutors believe they pursued a course of treatment while aware it could get him killed. If convicted, they face between eight and twenty-five years in prison.
The first trial began in March 2025 and ran for almost three months before it completely fell apart. Presiding judge Julieta Makintach was accused of secretly authorising a film crew to record the proceedings for a documentary called "Divine Justice", all while denying any involvement. Footage later surfaced appearing to show her being interviewed by the crew on the eve of the trial. A special panel found her guilty of negligence, breach of confidentiality and abuse of power, and formally removed her from the bench in November 2025, barring her from ever holding judicial office again. The mistrial was declared in May 2025.
A new trial, in front of three different judges, resumed in April 2026. Prosecutor Patricio Ferrari opened proceedings by calling Maradona's medical team a "bunch of amateurs," arguing that the football legend "began to die twelve hours before his actual death" and that anyone who'd thought to move him to a clinic in a car or an ambulance during his final week would have saved his life. The case is still ongoing.
The Fight Over What He Left Behind
Maradona died without a will, which has turned the division of his estate into exactly the kind of drawn-out legal battle you'd expect given everything else about his life. Under Argentine inheritance law, his children are entitled to share the bulk of what he left behind, but establishing exactly who counts as his child has been its own fight. Just 48 hours after his burial, a teenager named Santiago Lara, who claims to be an unrecognised son, requested that Maradona's body be exhumed so a DNA sample could be taken. Other claimants have since pursued their own paternity cases through the courts, each one adding another name to a family tree that was already famously complicated while he was alive.
A Life That Refused to Sit Still
It's tempting to separate Maradona the footballer from Maradona the man, to treat the drugs and the mafia ties and the paternity denials as an unfortunate sideshow to the genius on the pitch. But that separation doesn't really hold up. The addiction, the chaos and the scandal were woven through his entire adult life, right up to and including the argument still being fought in an Argentine courtroom over how he died. Whatever else he was, Maradona was never a man who lived quietly, and it seems fairly clear now that he never will, even six years after his death.
Sources
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