Description
"They have poisoned me!"
With those words on his lips, Michele Sindona died in March 1986, two days after sipping a cup of cyanide-laced coffee in his cell at the maximum-security prison in Voghera, Italy. One of the most mysterious and, for years, one of the most powerful figures in international high finance, Sindona had lived a life of glamour, intrigue, and wheeling and dealing on the grandest scale. In Power on Earth, Nick Tosches draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with Sindona - the only such interviews Sindona ever granted - to tell the story of the am- bitious young lawyer from Sicily who lifted himself to the stature of a business giant, only to see his vast empire collapse amid charges of fraud and murder. Filled with revelations that are bound to spark new headlines in both America and Europe, Power on Earth provides startling new answers to a series of explosive questions, among them:
โข Who murdered Roberto Calvi, the financier found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, London, in June 1982? And what were the contents of Calvi's missing briefcase?
โข How exactly does the Mafia launder its money? And why has no government ever been able to do anything about it?
โข What illegal financial service did the Vatican routinely offer its favored sons?
โข Who was the Svengali behind which pope's recent momentous church reforms?
โข What really happened when Sindona vanished in 1979 just before his New York trial on bank fraud charges?
A confidante of popes and politicians, Michele Sindona amassed a personal for- tune estimated at half a billion dollars. He was also a central figure in some of the biggest financial manipulations of the last 25 years, including the billion-dollar collapse of the Franklin National Bank and the shocking money-laundering scandal that rocked the Vatican.
When he died, Sindona's enemies may have thought the inside story of these and other scandals would be buried along with him. If so, they were wrong. The fact is, for nearly two years before his death, Sindona had been meeting and corresponding with Nick Tosches, one of America's top journalists, recounting his side of a life that reads like riveting fiction but is indeed fact - an astonishing account of enormous wealth, power, and corruption.
"They are afraid that I could reveal some very delicate information that they don't want divulged," Sindona said a few days before his mysterious death. In Power on Earth, Nick Tosches shows just how well founded "their" fears were.
ISBN: 05877957367
