Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). In 1973, Italian financial shark Michele Sindona was celebrated as the ‘most outstanding representative of free enterprise’. Thirteen years later, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for, among other things, incitement to murder. The Mafia is said to have killed him with cyanide because he was a dangerous confidant.
Fifty-two years ago, in December 1973, Italian financial magnate Michele Sindona made headlines in the media. Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti hosted a lavish banquet for him at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, where he celebrated him as the ‘savior of the lira’ in the international financial war. The Club of Rome, which brought together representatives of the business world from 25 countries, awarded Sindona the title of ‘Entrepreneur of 1973’ and called him the ‘most outstanding representative of free enterprise’. Washington’s ambassador to Rome, John Volpe, honoured him as ‘Man of the Year 1973’ for having made ‘a significant contribution to strengthening the friendship and economic relations between Italy and the United States’.
This ‘most outstanding representative of free enterprise’ had begun his business career in 1943 after the American landing in Sicily. There, as later throughout southern Italy, the occupying power had preserved the fascist power structures and revived the Mafia in order to suppress the influence of the communists. It is hardly credible and is rarely mentioned in most sources that the Allies, after their landing operation in Sicily in July 1943, made use of the Mafia’s help in setting up new administrations. By transferring state and police powers to their people, the military authorities granted them a status of legality for a long period of time and, on top of that, helped them to acquire an anti-fascist label. The military government appointed the boss of the Sicilian Mafia, Calogero Vizzini, as mayor of his hometown of Villalba. He and his men were armed with rifles and pistols and tasked with maintaining public order. The military government also left the latifundistas unmolested. When farm workers and tenants occupied their undeveloped lands, they called on the Mafia for help. The Princess of Trabia and Butera, Giulia Florio D’Ontes, appointed Calogero Vizzini as administrator of her estates. To protect the large estates, he, like other Mafia bosses, organised armed gangs to suppress the farm workers. The former head of the New York Mafia, Vito Genovese, was hired by the US military government as chief interpreter. He had gone into hiding with the Sicilian Mafia in 1936 after being charged with multiple murders in the United States. Don Vitone used his position not only to smuggle cigarettes from US Army stocks, but also to build up a drug trafficking organisation based on the American model, selling cigarettes and other goods from US Army stocks on the black market. Sindona became Don Vitone’s middleman and during this time laid the foundation for his lucrative relationships with the Mafia, the CIA and Mussolini’s fascists, who were untouched by the occupying powers. He later entered the property speculation business. By 1950, the then 33-year-old was already a millionaire. Within a few years, he became one of the big names in international finance, in Mafia circles and in giant companies serving the fascist coup lodge ‘P2’. In 1977, journalists Paolo Panerai and Maurizio De Luca wrote in their book, 1 that Sindona had built ‘an empire without equal in Europe and the USA, with thousands of branches in all sectors of the economy’. It ranged ‘from banks to finance companies, real estate companies and electronics groups to textile companies and large hotels, including the infamous Watergate in Washington. Sindona was a confidant of the Vatican and a partner of major English and American bankers (such as Hambro of London and Continental Illinois Bank of Chicago) and ruler of the Italian stock exchange.’ He advised Richard Nixon on business matters and maintained excellent contacts with the White House, as well as good relations with the CIA and the Pentagon. When the general of the SIFAR secret service, Giovanni De Lorenzo, attempted to prevent Aldo Moro’s Apertura a sinistra (the inclusion of socialists in his government) with a fascist coup in 1963/64, Sindona was among the circle of influential figures from the worlds of business and diplomacy, the CIA and the Pentagon who wanted to prevent this. His closest friends included the head of the secret service, Vito Miceli, the former secretary of state to the Duce, Giorgio Almirante, leader of the fascist party re-established in 1946 in the form of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), and the head of the fascist coup lodge P2, Licio Gelli, who admitted him to the lodge. Sindona himself and those associated with him always provided large sums of money to the fascist movement and the generals who were ready to stage a coup.
The pursuit of ever greater profits and new ventures, which led to speculation involving dizzying sums of money, brought about the collapse of the financial magnate, who of course also had powerful adversaries, in 1974. One factor that played a role in this was that Sindona increasingly became an intermediary and lobbyist for American capital circles, whom he helped to bring the Italian economy under their control. In 1971, with the backing of foreign banks, he sought to take possession of the Bastogi financial holding company, a core piece of Italian state capital. With massive intervention, but also considerable financial losses, the Italian economy fended off this attack. As a result of the intensifying confrontation between various interest groups, Sindona ultimately fell by the wayside. His downfall was sealed in the autumn of 1974 with the bankruptcy of four major banks that he owned or in which he held a controlling stake, including the Franklin National Bank of New York.
Sindona fled to the United States, where he was later charged and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1980, and subsequently extradited to Italy. Here he was charged with, among other things, various accounting frauds, heroin trafficking between Italy and the United States amounting to 600 million dollars annually, and incitement to murder. High-ranking representatives from politics (Prime Minister Andreotti),2 business (State Bank President Carli), and the Vatican (Cardinals Caprio and Guerri and Archbishop Markinkus) tried in vain to save him. Sindona threatened to name ‘big names’ if the case against him was not dropped. All subsequent assurances that he would remain silent were to no avail. Four days after the announcement of his life sentence, the ‘most outstanding representative of free enterprise’ of the Club of Rome died in his cell on 22 March 1986 from an overdose of cyanide. ‘Mi hanno avvelenato’ (‘They poisoned me’) were his last words, wrote Vatican expert Nik Tosches, who had visited him in his cell and was present at his death.3
Notes:
1 Il Crack, Sindona, la DC, Il Vaticano e gli altri amici. Milan 1977.
2 The seven-time prime minister was himself charged with ‘participation in a mafia-type organisation’ in Palermo on 27 March 1993. Photos and film footage proved that Andreotti had met with Mafia bosses on numerous occasions. Testimony confirmed, among other things, that at Andreotti’s instigation, the ‘Honourable Society’ had been securing votes for the DC in southern Italy for decades, in return for which the accused Mafiosi were guaranteed immunity from prosecution. In a second trial in Perugia, Andreotti was charged with instigating the murder of journalist Pecorelli, who had exposed his role in the assassination of Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro, who had formed a government alliance with the Communists. In Perugia, he was sentenced to 24 years in prison. In 1999, he was acquitted on appeal, a decision that was upheld by the Court of Cassation in Rome in 2003. In Palermo, he was acquitted on ‘second-class’ grounds due to lack of evidence. The public prosecutor’s appeal was also rejected by the Court of Cassation in Rome in 2003. Nevertheless, the trials meant political bankruptcy for Andreotti, because even when the Palermo verdict was overturned, it had to be noted that the former prime minister had been ‘friendly’ towards the Mafia for a long time, which meant that the defendant was not cleared of all suspicion.
3 Nik Tosches: Geschäfte mit dem Vatikan (Deals with the Vatican), Munich 1989.
