Michele Sindona

Michele Sindona was born on May 8, 1920, in Patti, Sicily, Italy. Beginning as a tax lawyer, he built a financial empire through Vatican connections and Sicilian Mafia relationships that spanned Italy, the United States, and Switzerland before collapsing under criminal convictions in both countries. He died on March 22, 1986, in Voghera prison, poisoned with cyanide stirred into his morning coffee.¹

Rise as Vatican Financier

Sindona built his initial fortune in postwar Sicily, using his legal expertise and connections to the Vatican to become a trusted financial advisor to Catholic institutions. His relationship with the Catholic Church in Rome developed through the 1950s and 1960s; he became known as "the Pope's Banker" through his management of Vatican financial interests in Italy, including currency transactions and investments that bypassed Italian currency controls through Vatican sovereign status.

He was a member of P2, Licio Gelli's clandestine Masonic lodge, which connected him to the network of Italian intelligence officers, politicians, and financiers who formed the lodge's effective membership. His Vatican connections gave him access to IOR (the Vatican Bank), whose assets he helped move through Swiss banking channels, particularly through Banca Unione in Milan and Finabank in Geneva.¹

Franklin National Bank

In 1972, Sindona acquired a controlling interest in Franklin National Bank, one of the twenty largest American banks at the time, paying approximately $40 million for the stake. The acquisition brought him into a community of American financiers and provided a vehicle for moving funds between Italian and American banking systems.

Franklin National Bank collapsed on October 8, 1974, in what was at the time the largest bank failure in American history. Federal regulators found that the bank had been systematically looted, with losses exceeding $1.7 billion, through unauthorized foreign exchange speculation and fraudulent transactions that disguised the bank's true financial condition. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve coordinated an orderly resolution; depositors were protected, but investors lost the entire value of their shares.¹

American Criminal Proceedings

Sindona was indicted in the United States on multiple counts related to the Franklin National failure. In March 1980, he was convicted in the Southern District of New York on 65 counts of fraud, perjury, and misappropriation of bank funds. He was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.

Before his American trial, Sindona faked his own kidnapping in August 1979, traveling to Sicily under an assumed identity and making contact with Mafia figures before returning to New York and claiming he had been abducted. The fiction was intended to generate sympathy and delay his trial; it failed when investigators documented his actual movements.²

Murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli

Giorgio Ambrosoli was a Milan lawyer appointed as the official liquidator for Sindona's Italian banking interests following their collapse. Over several years, Ambrosoli methodically documented the fraud underlying Sindona's Italian operations, producing a comprehensive account of funds misappropriated from depositors and transferred to Sindona, his associates, and political figures. His work was expected to support criminal charges against Sindona in Italy.

On July 11, 1979, Ambrosoli was shot and killed outside his apartment in Milan by a gunman who had flown from the United States specifically for the killing. The assassin, William Arico, was a New York hitman with connections to the American Mafia. Arico died in a prison escape attempt in 1984 before being tried for the Ambrosoli killing.

In 1986, shortly before Sindona's death, an Italian court convicted him of ordering the Ambrosoli assassination. This conviction, in addition to his Italian fraud convictions, was the final judgment against him before his murder.¹

Death in Prison

On March 22, 1986, Sindona was poisoned in Voghera prison, where he was serving his Italian sentences after being extradited from the United States in 1984. He died a few hours after drinking his morning coffee, which was found to contain potassium cyanide. Whether the poison was self-administered or provided by someone who had access to his cell was never conclusively determined. Italian investigators concluded that the most probable explanation was murder by persons who feared what Sindona might disclose under continuing judicial examination - a conclusion consistent with his position as a node between the Vatican, P2, the Italian political establishment, and the Mafia.²