Giorgio Ambrosoli

Giorgio Ambrosoli was born on July 26, 1933, in Milan. He practiced as a commercial lawyer in Milan and was appointed in 1974 by the Banca d'Italia as the official liquidator (commissario liquidatore) for Michele Sindona's bankrupt Italian banking interests following the collapse of Sindona's empire. He was shot and killed outside his apartment at Via Morozzo della Rocca in Milan on July 11, 1979, at age 45.¹

The Liquidation Task

Ambrosoli's appointment came after the Banca d'Italia placed Sindona's Italian banks - Banca Privata Italiana and Banca Unione - into compulsory liquidation following their insolvency. The task he was given was technically complex and politically dangerous: to reconstruct the true financial condition of institutions whose records had been systematically falsified, document the fraud, and work with judicial authorities toward criminal proceedings.

Ambrosoli conducted the liquidation with methodical competence over five years. He worked through thousands of transactions, reconstructed how funds had been moved out of the banks and into Sindona's offshore network and personal accounts, documented the connections to IOR and other institutions that had facilitated the transactions, and produced a comprehensive account of the fraud that left no significant question about Sindona's criminal liability.

He was aware of the danger his work created. He wrote to his wife in January 1979: "Regardless of what happens to me, I've had a wonderful experience that has made me feel like a man in the full sense of the word." His liquidation report was substantially complete by mid-1979.¹

Murder

Ambrosoli was shot three times by a gunman as he returned home on the evening of July 11, 1979. He died from his wounds within minutes.

The gunman was subsequently identified as William Arico, an American Mafia hitman from New York. Arico was hired through intermediaries connected to Sindona's American organized crime relationships. Arico died in an escape attempt from a U.S. federal prison in 1984 before he could be tried for the Ambrosoli killing.

Michele Sindona was convicted by an Italian court of ordering the assassination. The conviction came in 1986, shortly before Sindona himself was poisoned in prison on March 22, 1986. The judicial finding established definitively that the murder was a contract killing ordered by Sindona to prevent Ambrosoli's findings from being used against him in criminal proceedings.¹

Legacy

Ambrosoli's liquidation report, completed despite the threats he operated under, formed the documentary basis for Sindona's Italian criminal convictions. In Italy he is remembered as a civic hero - a private citizen who fulfilled a public trust at the cost of his life. His story was told by journalist Corrado Stajano in the 1984 book Un eroe borghese (A Bourgeois Hero), later made into a film. He was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal for Civil Valor by the Italian Republic.²