Michele Sindona - fraudster and killer

Failed banker ordered murder of investigating lawyer

Michele Sindona - banker whose empire collapsed
after failure of Franklin National Bank in America

The shadowy banker Michele Sindona, who had links to underworld figures in Italy and America as well as prominent politicians, died in hospital in the Lombardy town of Voghera, 70km (43 miles) south of Milan, on this day in 1986.

His death, attributed to cyanide poisoning, came four days after he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for ordering the killing of a lawyer investigating the collapse of his $450 million financial empire.

His own lawyer claimed he had been murdered but although it was never established beyond doubt, the circumstances of his death, caused by drinking coffee laced with the poison at breakfast in Voghera's maximum-security prison, pointed towards suicide.

During his chequered career, which also saw him sentenced to 25 years' jail in America for fraud following the failure of the Franklin National Bank on Long Island, Sindona had links with Mafia bosses in Sicily and New York, with the illegal Propaganda Due masonic lodge and with the controversial head of the Vatican Bank, the American Archbishop, Paul Marcinkus.

His close ties with another Vatican Bank client, Roberto Calvi, gave rise to theories that both he and Calvi, whose body was found hanging from the underside of Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1980 following the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, of which he was president, were killed because they knew too much.

Roberto Calvi

Sindona's political associates included the former Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, who hailed him as the "saviour of the lira" just weeks before the Franklin National Bank went down, with catastrophic consequences for the many banks and financial institutions in Italy that Sindona controlled.

He also enjoyed a friendship with the former American president, Richard Nixon. Ironically, through Italy's giant construction conglomerate, Società Generale Immobiliare, Sindona was the part-owner of the Watergate Building in Washington, which housed the Democratic National Committee office, the bugging of which led to Nixon's resignation and impeachment.

Born in Patti, a town on the northern coast of Sicily some 76km (47 miles) from Messina, the son of a florist, Sindona went to a Jesuit school, where he showed an aptitude for maths and economics. He attended Messina University, where he graduated in law in 1942 and completed a thesis on The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli's 16th century treatise on political philosophy.

He moved to Milan in 1946 at the age of 26 and opened a tax consultancy business, soon gaining a reputation for his knowledge of tax havens and the export of capital.  He began to build capital and within 15 years had amassed a fortune through his shrewd investments, mainly in the banking sector.

He acquired the Banca Unione di Vaticano with the aid of London's Hambros Bank, then the Banca Privata Italiana.  In due course, he added controlling interests in the Wolff Bank of West Germany, the Finabank and Amincorn Banks of Switzerland, the Banca di Messina in his native Sicily and finally the Franklin National Bank.

Carlo Gambino, the New
York Mafia boss

His association with the Vatican Bank led to joint investments not only in the banking sector but in a chain of luxury hotels in Europe and a string of companies in the United States, including the Watergate real-estate development in Washington.

At the same time, though, as investigations later revealed, Sindona had become involved with the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the Gambino crime family in New York, largely in the area of money laundering, and it transpired that a good deal of the capital he was investing to build his empire came from the proceeds of the Gambino family's heroin trafficking.

All of this went on unnoticed, however, until a sudden stock market crash in April 1974 left the Franklin National, the 20th largest bank in the United States, badly exposed.  In what became known as Il Crack Sindona, Franklin National's profits plunged by 98 per cent compared with the previous year, Sindona lost $40 million dollars and the domino effect brought down most of the other banks he had acquired.

Under pressure from the Gambinos to recover their money, Sindona promised to inject new capital up to the sum of $50 million but by October of that year the Franklin Bank had been declared insolvent and Sindona was being investigated for fraud.

Giorgio Ambrosoli - Sindona was jailed for life for arranging
the murder of the lawyer appointed to look into his affairs

Meanwhile, in Italy, the Bank of Italy had begun to look into Sindona's activities and ultimately a suspension of his banking empire was ordered and a liquidator, the lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli, appointed.

Sindona urged Licio Gelli, the self-appointed 'grand master' of Propaganda Due, to use his influence and contacts to call off the process, but to no avail. Sindona is said also to have asked Roberto Calvi to provide the capital to rebuild his empire and, when rebuffed, began to leak information about Calvi's activities to a journalist, whose investigations were central to the ultimate collapse of Banco Ambrosiano.

Meanwhile, it was not long before Ambrosoli was receiving telephone calls offering bribes to facilitate the approval of documents proving that Sindona had acted in good faith, which would have exempted him from criminal proceedings and required the Italian government to use public money to bail out his ailing empire.

Ambrosoli refused all offers, however, and paid the price. On July 12, 1979, arriving home from his office in Milan, he was walking between his car and the door of his apartment when he was approached by three men, one of whom shot him five times in the chest.

Investigations concluded that the killer was an Italian-American, William Arico, who had been commissioned on behalf of Sindona by Roberto Venetucci, a heroin trafficker.

The following month, while awaiting trial in New York over the Franklin National Bank collapse, Sindona defied orders restricting his movement by returning to Sicily, where he threatened Enrico Cuccia, the president of Mediobanca and an opponent of any rescue plan for Sindona's empire, and asked Licio Gelli to put pressure on Giulio Andreotti to intervene, threatening to name five prominent individuals who had profited from illegal currency deals.

None of this worked, however, and on his return to the United States he gave himself up.  After his conviction for fraud relating to the Franklin Bank collapse, he was extradited to Italy and found guilty of ordering the murder of Ambrosoli.

In the days before his death, he repeatedly spoke about his fears of being poisoned. On the day of his poisoning, prison guards noted that he took his coffee from his cell into the bathroom, which he had not done before, and emerged gasping for breath and claiming he had been poisoned. This led investigators to conclude that, on the balance of probability, he had taken his own life.

Patti, the town in Sicily where Sindona was born

Travel tip:

Situated close to the ruins of the Greek city of Tyndaris (Tindari), the town of Patti, birthplace of Michele Sindona, has an old town characterized by narrow streets, stairways and squares, with the different styles that reflect the area's diverse cultural heritage, having been a settlement for Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman and Spanish people. There is a 12th-century cathedral that underwent reconstruction in the 15th century and again  after the earthquake of 1693.

Hotels in Patti by Booking.com

The remodelled cathedral in the town of Voghera in Lombardy

Travel tip:

Voghera, which has a castle erected by the Visconti family between 1335 and 1372 and an 11th century cathedral later remodelled in Baroque style, is famous for the term 'Casalinga di Voghera' - Voghera housewife - which is often used in the media and political discourse to refer to the average Italian citizen - not particularly well educated or sophisticated but working hard and striving through self-sacrifice to raise a family in the best way possible.  In England, an equivalent but now somewhat archaic phrase is 'the man on the Clapham omnibus', which was once regularly used in courtrooms to represent someone whose hypothetical opinion might determine whether an action was or was not reasonable.

More reading:

Unanswered questions over bizarre death of Roberto Calvi

Carlo Gambino - the Mafia boss who inspired fictional Godfather

Giulio Andreotti - Italy's political survivor

Also on this day:

1837: The birth 'La Castiglione' - countess, model and secret agent


Home

Lorenzo Perosi - priest and composer

Puccini contemporary chose sacred music over opera

Lorenzo Perosi forsook opera in
 favour of religious music

Don Lorenzo Perosi, a brilliant composer of sacred music who was musical director of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican for almost half a century, was born on this day in 1872 in the city of Tortona in Piedmont.

A devoutly religious man who was ordained as a priest at the age of 22, Perosi was a contemporary of Giacomo Puccini and Pietro Mascagni, both of whom he counted as close friends, but was the only member of the so-called Giovane Scuola of late 19th century and early 20th century composers who did not write opera.

Instead, he concentrated entirely on church music and was particularly noted for his large-scale oratorios, for which he enjoyed international fame.

Unlike Puccini and Mascagni, or others from the Giovane Scuola such as Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano and Francesco Cilea, Perosi's work has not endured enough for him to be well known today.

Yet at his peak, which music scholars consider to be the period between his appointment as Maestro of the Choir of St Mark's in Venice in 1894 and a serious mental breakdown suffered in 1907, he was hugely admired by his fellows in the Giovane Scuola and beyond.

Perosi with Arturo Toscanini before the
premiere of his work Mosè in Milan 

Arturo Toscanini conducted his work Mosè on the occasion of its premiere at La Scala in Milan in November 1901, his French admirers included Claude Debussy and Jules Massenet and many of the great opera singers on his day were keen to perform in his works, including Enrico Caruso, Mario Sammarco, Carlo Tagliabue and Beniamino Gigli.

Puccini is quoted as saying that "there is more music in Perosi's head than mine and Mascagni's put together".

Perosi is credited with reviving the oratorio as a musical genre. His grand productions for chorus, soloists, and orchestra based on Latin texts were noted for their bringing together of Renaissance harmony, Gregorian chant, and the flamboyant melodies and orchestrations characteristic of the Giovane Scuola. 

Perosi was one of 12 children born into a pious Catholic family in Tortona, only half of whom survived infancy.  His own birth was said to have been difficult and music historians believe it was probably the cause of the mental health problems he suffered in adulthood.

His father, Giuseppe, was choir director at the cathedral in Tortona and his talent for music was shared with his brothers Carlo, who also became a priest, and Marziano, who would later be musical director at the Duomo of Milan.

Listen to the choir of the church of the Beata Vergine in Mandria, near Padua

Lorenzo enrolled at Milan Conservatory, where he began his association with Puccini and Mascagni, after which he took his first professional post as organist at the Abbey of Montecassino.  He spent a year studying in Germany under Franz Xaver Haberl, where he learnt Renaissance polyphony, but declined a permanent teaching position in Germany in favour of a position nearer home as director of sacred music at the Duomo in Imola.

The bust of Lorenzo Perosi in the
gardens at the Pincio in Rome

From Imola he went to Solesmes Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery in France to study under the Gregorianists Dom André Mocquereau and Dom Joseph Pothier.

The appointment at St Mark's in Venice came in 1894 and brought Perosi under the influence of Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, the Patriarch of Venice who would go on to be elected as Pope Pius X.  It was Sarto who ordained Perosi to the priesthood but just as importantly encouraged his music and was influential in his appointment in Rome.

Perosi's mental health problems began to manifest themselves in 1906, when doctors felt he was suffering from nervous exhaustion as a consequence of the hours he spent writing music in addition to his duties as a priest.

They became so severe following the deaths of both his parents within the space of a few years that at one stage his brother, Carlo, was nominated legal guardian as some doctors deemed him incurable. In time, however, his condition improved and he returned to a normal life.

He added to an already enormous body of work and the popes Pius XI and Pius XII waived the rules regarding mandatory retirement and retained him as 'maestro perpetuo' into his 80s. By the time his health deteriorated irreversibly he had served under five popes.  He died in Rome in October 1956.

The Duomo of Tortona, where Lorenzo Perosi is
buried along with his brother, Carlo

Travel tip:

Tortona is an elegant small city of around 27,000 inhabitants in the eastern part of Piedmont, roughly halfway between Milan and the Ligurian coast at Genoa.  It sits on the right bank of the Scrivia river between the plain of Marengo and the foothills of the Ligurian Apennines.  Lorenzo Perosi, along with his brother, Carlo, is buried at the Duomo, where his father was the choir director.  The Duomo has a 19th century neoclassical facade but the building itself dates back to the 16th century.


Travel tip:

The Sistine Chapel choir is one of the oldest religious choirs in the world, consisting today of 20 adult professional singers and 30 unpaid boy choristers.   Its reputation today owes much to Lorenzo Perosi, who raised its artistic level to a level as high as any it had known during his time as Maestro di Cappella and supported Pope Pius X in outlawing the use of boys whose voices were preserved by the barbaric practice of castration. Pius declared that only "whole men" should be allowed to be choristers or priests, and the last of the castrati were in time eased out of the choir.  A bust of Perosi can be found in the gardens on Pincian Hill - the Pincio - in Rome.

More reading:

How Giovanni Gabrieli helped popularity of Venetian Baroque

What made Puccini one of the greatest of opera composers

The genius of Venice's musical priest, Antonio Vivaldi

Also on this day:

1401: Birth of the great Renaissance artist Massacio

(Picture credits: bust by Lalupa; Tortona Duomo by Vincenzo da Tortona; both via Wikimedia Commons)


Home

Pope John Paul I

Sudden end to the reign of ‘The Smiling Pope’

Pope John Paul I making his weekly
address to the crowds outside St Peter's

John Paul I died on this day in 1978 in Rome, having served for just 33 days as Pope.

His reign is one of the shortest in Papal history and resulted in the most recent ‘Year of Three Popes’, which hadn’t happened since 1605.

John Paul I was also the most recent Pope to be born in Italy, his death ending the succession of Italian pontiffs that started with Clement VII in 1523.

Pope John Paul I was born Albino Luciani in 1912 in a small town then known as Forno di Canale, in the province of Belluno in the Veneto.

The son of a bricklayer, he decided to become a priest when he was just ten years old and was educated first at the seminary in Feltre and then in Belluno.

After Luciani was ordained, he taught for a while at the seminary in Belluno before going to Rome to work on a Doctorate in Sacred Theology.

He was appointed Bishop of Vittorio Veneto by Pope John XXIII in 1958. The next Pope, Paul VI, made him Patriarch of Venice in 1969 and then Cardinal Priest of San Marco in 1973.

Albino Luciani in 1959, soon after he was
 appointed Bishop of Vittorio Veneto 

After the death of Pope Paul VI in August 1978, Luciani was elected Pope in the fourth ballot of the papal conclave. He accepted his election but prophesied that his reign would be a short one.

The new Pope chose the name John Paul to honour both of his predecessors, Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI. It was the first time in history a Pope had chosen a double name.

It was suggested at the time that his election had been a compromise to satisfy rival camps among the Cardinals.

Pope John Paul I died during the night of 28 September 1978 and was found the following morning lying in his bed with a book open next to him and his reading light on. According to a doctor at the Vatican he had died at around 11 pm of a heart attack.

After his funeral in St Peter’s Square, the Pope’s body was laid to rest in a tomb in the Vatican grottoes.

His successor Cardinal Karol Wojtyla chose the name Pope John Paul II and paid tribute to his predecessor’s warm qualities.

In Italy John Paul I is remembered as ‘The Smiling Pope’, Il Papa del Sorriso.

Pope John Paul I was against Communism but was a friend to Muslim people and defended their right to build Mosques in Italy.

The suddenness of his death and the discrepancies in statements issued by the Vatican about it resulted in a number of conspiracy theories being aired. Several books were published and films and plays were produced based on the story.

David Yallop’s book, In God’s Name, puts forward the theory that the Pope was in danger because of corruption in the Vatican Bank, while Malachi Martin’s book, Vatican: A Novel, suggests the Pope was murdered by the Soviet Union because he was opposed to Communism. Other books and films propose alternative theories.

The house in Canale d'Agordo in which Albino Luciani, who
would become Pope John Paul I, was born

Travel tip:

Canale d’Agordo, the birthplace of John Paul I, is a small town in the province of Belluno in the Veneto, which was previously known as Forno di Canale. The Albino Luciani Museum, which displays documents, personal items and objects associated with the life of Pope John Paul I, opened last month in the old town hall in Canale d’Agordo.

Travel tip:

Belluno, where Luciani both studied and taught in the Seminary, is about 100 kilometres north of Venice. Named Alpine Town of the Year in 1999, it is the most important city in the area of the Eastern Dolomites and has some fine architecture There are picturesque views of the surrounding countryside to be seen from the 12th century Porta Ruga at the end of the main street and from the Campanile of the 16th century Duomo.

(Photo of John Paul's birthplace by Sibode 1 GFDL)

Books

In God's Name, by David Yallop

Vatican: A Novel, by Malachi Martin



Home

Roberto Calvi – banker

Mystery remains over bizarre death of bank chairman

God's Banker: Roberto Calvi

Roberto Calvi, dubbed God’s Banker by the Press because of his close association with the Vatican, was born on this day in 1920 in Milan.

In 1982 his body was found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge close to London’s financial district. His death is a mystery that has never been satisfactorily solved and it has been made the subject of many books and films.

Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan, which had direct links to Pope John Paul II through his bodyguard, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who was also was head of the Vatican Bank, which had shares in Ambrosiano.

Calvi had been missing for nine days before his body was found by a passer-by in London. At first police treated his death as suicide but a year later a second inquest overturned this and delivered an open verdict.

In October 2002, forensic experts commissioned by an Italian court finally concluded Calvi had been murdered.

Calvi had become chairman of Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank, in 1975 and had built up a vast financial empire.

But three years later the Bank of Italy issued a report claiming Ambrosiano had illegally exported several million lire.

Calvi was arrested, found guilty and sentenced to four years' imprisonment but was then released pending an appeal.

During his short time in prison he had attempted suicide. But he disappeared after his release before he could appear in court to appeal against his conviction.

He was also due to be tried on charges of fraud involving property deals with a Sicilian banker, who was at the time in prison in America following the collapse of a bank in New York.

Calvi is known to have fled to Venice and hired a private plane to take him to London but nothing is known about the time he spent in the city.

Blackfriars Bridge in London, where Calvi's body was found
(Photo: Peter Trimming CC BY-SA  3.0)

The day before his body was found hanging under the bridge, his secretary had jumped off the fourth floor of Ambrosiano’s headquarters in Milan.

When Calvi was found he had bricks in his pockets and in the fly of his trousers, but forensic tests later revealed that his hands had never touched them. He was also carrying large sums of money in different currencies, which seemed to rule out robbery as a motive.

The tests also concluded that the injuries to Calvi’s neck were inconsistent with hanging and it was revealed that at the time of his death the level of the river had been high enough for someone to have tied his body to the bridge while standing up in a boat below it. There was no evidence from Calvi’s hands or feet that he had climbed over the parapet and fixed the rope himself.

Five people were tried for Calvi’s murder in Rome in 2005 but after proceedings lasting almost two years they were all acquitted, the judge citing "insufficient evidence." Marcinkus was granted immunity from questioning as a Vatican employee and has since retired and died.

Calvi’s death remains a mystery but claims have been made about it at various times in books and newspapers that involve the Vatican Bank, the Mafia, and Propaganda Due (P2), a clandestine Masonic Lodge, of which Calvi was a member.

P2 members sometimes referred to themselves as frati neri, black friars, which led to suggestions Calvi might have been murdered and left hanging below that particular bridge as some kind of Masonic warning.

Palazzo Mezzanotte, home to the Milan Stock Exchange
(Photo: Goldmund 100 CC BY-SA 3.0)

Travel tip:

Milan is the main industrial, commercial and financial centre of Italy. The business district is home to the Borsa Italiana (stock exchange) and the headquarters of the main national banks. The Borsa is located in Palazzo Mezzanotte in Piazza Affari (Business Square). 

Travel tip:

The Vatican Bank in Vatican City is also known as the Institute for the Works of Religion and was founded by Pope Pius XII in 1942. In June 2013, Pope Francis appointed a commission to review the Institute’s activities and in October of the same year the first ever annual report was published and made available for download from the Institute’s new website, www.ior.va.

Home

Pope Pius XII

Pope elected on 63rd birthday to lead the church during the war

Pope Pius XII during his time
as nuncio of Bavaria

Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope and took the name of Pius XII on this day in 1939, his 63rd birthday.

A pre-war critic of the Nazis, Pius XII expressed dismay at the invasion of Poland by Germany later that year.

But the Vatican remained officially neutral during the Second World War and Pius XII was later criticised by some people for his perceived silence over the fate of the Jews.

Pope Pius was born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli on March 2, 1876 in Rome.

His family had a history of links with the papacy and he was educated at a school that had formerly been the Collegio Romano, a Jesuit College in Rome.

He went on to study theology and became ordained as a priest.

He was appointed nuncio to Bavaria in 1917 and tried to convey the papal initiative to end the First World War to the German authorities without success. After the war he worked to try to alleviate distress in Germany and to build diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Soviet Union.

He was made a Cardinal priest in 1929 and elected Pope on March 2, 1939. 

When war broke out again he had to follow the strict Vatican policy of neutrality. It is thought he had genuine affection for Germany but he did not like the criminal hands it had fallen into, and he feared Bolshevism.

He used the modern technology of radio to offer sympathy to the victims of war in his broadcasts and towards the end of the war he appealed to the Allies to be lenient.

His supporters say he had sympathy with the Jews and that he tried to help them along with prisoners of war and people who had gone missing during the conflict. But his critics argue that he was too weak and did little to challenge the Nazis.

Pope Pius XII died in 1958 at his residence in Castel Gandolfo to the south of Rome .

Travel tip:

After Pope Pius XII died in Castel Gandolfo he was brought back to Rome to lie in state surrounded by four Swiss Guards. He was then placed in a coffin and buried beneath St Peter’s Basilica in a simple tomb in a small chapel. The Vatican Grottoes beneath the floor of St Peter’s Basilica house the tombs of many dead Popes, including St Peter himself.

Search Tripadvisor for a hotel in Rome

The papal palace in the centre of Castel Gandolfo
(Photo: Ra Boe)

Travel tip:

Castel Gandolfo, where the Pope has his summer residence, overlooks Lake Albano from its wonderful position in the hills south of Rome. The Pope spends every summer in the Apostolic Palace there. Although his villa lies within the town’s boundaries, it is one of the properties of the Holy See. The palace is not under Italian jurisdiction and is policed by the Swiss Guard. The whole area is part of the regional park of Castelli Romani, which has many places of historic and artistic interest to visit.

Castel Gandolfo hotels from Booking.com



More reading:

Italy enters the Second World War

Angelo Cerica - the general who arrested Mussolini

The Gran Sasso raid: Nazis free captive Mussolini

Also on this day:

1603: The birth of Sicilian painter Pietro Novelli

1886: The birth of double World Cup-winning coach Vittorio Pozzo

Selected reading:

The Other Italy: The Italian Resistance in World War II, by Maria de Blasio Wilhelm

Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance, by Christian Goeschel


Home