Michele Sindona

Michele Sindona (; 8 May 1920 – 22 March 1986) was an Italian banker. Known in banking circles as "The Shark", Sindona was a banker for the Sicilian Mafia and the Vatican. Sindona was a member of 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.

Early life and education

Born into a poor family in 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.

Career After landing on Sicily the Allied Forces 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.

International banker 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 Propaganda Due (#0501), a secret Masonic lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy.

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".

Imprisonment, 1980-1986 In 1980, Sindona was convicted in the United States of 65 charges, including fraud, perjury, false bank statements and embezzlement of bank funds; his defence 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.

Personal life and death Two days after his life sentence, Sindona drank a potassium cyanide coffee in the Voghera prison; he died in the Voghera hospital after two days in a coma, on 22 March 1986.