Testimonies
Marino Mannoia disclosed that Roberto Calvi—God's banker of the Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican—had been killed by the Mafia because he had lost Cosa Nostra's criminal proceeds when the Banco Ambrosiano collapsed. According to Mannoia the killer was Francesco Di Carlo, a mafioso living in London at the time, and the order to kill Calvi had come from Mafia boss Giuseppe Calò and Licio Gelli. When Di Carlo became an informer in June 1996, he denied that he was the killer, but admitted that he had been approached by Calò to do the job.
Marino Mannoia testified that his former boss Stefano Bontade had close relations with Sicilian politicians, in particular with Salvo Lima—Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti’s man in Sicily. In April 1993—after the killing of Lima and the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino – he gave evidence against former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti who was accused of Mafia association. He claimed Andreotti had met with Stefano Bontade in the 1970s.
Marino Mannoia provided the first eyewitness account tying Andreotti directly to bosses of the Mafia. He described a high-level meeting in 1980 with Salvatore Inzerillo and Stefano Bontade at which Andreotti allegedly arrived with Lima in a bulletproof Alfa Romeo belonging to the Salvo cousins. Andreotti had come to protest the killing by the Mafia of Piersanti Mattarella in January 1980.
He also testified about the murder of journalist Mauro De Mauro. The investiagtive reporter had been kidnapped and killed by the Mafia in 1970. Marino Mannoia had been ordered by Bontade in 1977 or 1978 to dig up several bodies including the one of De Mauro and dissolve them in acid.
Marino Mannoia admitted he had been one of the men who had stolen the Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, a painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio that has never been seen since it was stolen in 1969 (the artwork was believed, at one point, to have been in the hands of the late Mafia boss Rosario Riccobono.)
Read more about this topic: Francesco Marino Mannoia
Famous quotes containing the word testimonies:
“The worthiest man to be known, and for a pattern to be presented to the world, he is the man of whom we have most certain knowledge. He hath been declared and enlightened by the most clear-seeing men that ever were; the testimonies we have of him are in faithfulness and sufficiency most admirable.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)