Микеле Синдона: Мафия, Ватикан және құпия ложа мүшесі

Italian banker and member of Propaganda Due (1920–1986)

Michele Sindona (miˈkɛːle sinˈdoːna; 8 May 1920 – 22 March 1986) was an Italian banker and convicted felon. Known in banking circles as "The Shark", Sindona was a banker for the Sicilian Mafia and the Vatican. Sindona was a member of the fascist Propaganda Due (#0501), a secret Masonic lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy. He was fatally poisoned in prison while serving a life sentence for the murder of lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli.

Born into a poor family at Patti, a small comune (municipality) in the province of Messina (Sicily), to a Neapolitan father, a florist who specialized in funeral wreaths, and a Sicilian mother, Sindona was educated by the Jesuits, and showed very early in his life an unusual aptitude for mathematics and economics. He graduated with a law degree from the University of Messina in 1942.

After landing on Sicily the Allied gave important posts to the mafia, to reduce the influence of Communists and for them to organise the distribution of food aid. Sindona began working in smuggling operations with the Mafia transporting food in trucks.

Within a year of being chosen by the Gambino family to manage their heroin profits, Sindona bought his first bank. At the beginning of the 1960s, Sindona was a friend of Giovanni Battista Montini, at the time archbishop of the Archdiocese of Milan and Cardinal. In 1964 Sindona made a deal with a London banker with the newly introduced offshore Eurodollar. Sindona became a member of the fascist Propaganda Due (#0501), a secret Masonic lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy.

On 11 July 1979, Giorgio Ambrosoli, the lawyer who was commissioned as liquidator of Sindona's banks, was murdered in Milan by three Mafia hitmen commissioned by Sindona. Sindona feared that Ambrosoli would expose his manipulations in the Banca Privata Italiana case. Shortly before he was killed, the American Mafia hitman William Arico, a convicted bank robber, invoked the name of Giulio Andreotti – the influential Christian Democrat politician close to Sindona – in a threatening phone call taped by Ambrosoli. Arico fell to his death while trying to escape from a federal prison in New York in 1984. Andreotti later replied in an interview that Ambrosoli "was a person who, in Romanesque words, was looking for it".

In 1980, Sindona was convicted in the United States of 65 charges, including fraud, perjury, false bank statements and embezzlement of bank funds; his defense was provided by one of the leading American lawyers, Ivan Fisher. The federal court in Manhattan, in addition to the 25 year prison sentence for the failure of the Franklin National Bank, fined Sindona $207,000. On 16 March 1985, in the trial for the bankruptcy of Banca Privata Italiana, Sindona was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the crime of fraudulent bankruptcy. The compensation for the damages was established in civil court; Sindona was sentenced to immediately pay a provisional amount of two billion lire to the liquidators of the bank and to the small shareholders who had filed a civil action lawsuit. On 18 March 1986, he was sentenced to life imprisonment as the instigator of the Ambrosoli murder.

Two days after his life sentence, Sindona drank a potassium cyanide coffee (likely prepared by himself) in the Voghera prison; he died in the Voghera hospital after two days in coma, on 22 March 1986.