Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the Cia, and the Mafia

by Paul L. Williams

On March 20, Sindona rose from his cot to take breakfast. As always, his plastic plate and pressed foam coffee cup were sealed. It was eight-thirty. He carried the coffee cup with him through the door that led to the toilet. Minutes later, the Mafia don emerged from the bathroom, his shirt covered with vomit, his face convulsed with horror. “Mi hanno avvelenato,” he screamed. “They have poisoned me!”45 These were his last words. Sindona was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was found to be in an irreversible coma. A lethal dosage of potassium cyanide was detected in his blood. That afternoon a priest administered extreme unction. Forty-eight hours later, Michele Sindona—the man known as “St. Peter’s banker”—was dead.46 His death was only to be expected. The Gladio agents possessed the keys to every prison. They could manage the escape of Ağca from a cell in Turkey and Gelli from a jail in Switzerland. They could arrange the jail-house deaths of Henri Arsan of Stibam and General Santovito of SISMI. And they could poison the coffee of a celebrated Mafiosi who remained in solitary confinement within a maximum-security prison.