Did The Vatican Cover-up a Child Kidnapping & Murder Due to Mafia Ties?

The faint smell of incense and candle wax permeates the church of Sant’Apollinare near Rome’s famous Piazza Navona. The basilica is one of a handful of churches outside the walls of Vatican City owned by the Holy See.  It is used primarily by members of the ultra-conservative Opus Dei prelature for special masses for student priests and for celebrations of marriage and baptism of those affiliated with the sect. Behind a side door near the back of the basilica is a small courtyard that’s closed to the public. There, in an external crypt near the ornate sarcophaguses of bishops and cardinals, is the curious tomb of Enrico “Renatino” De Pedis, a prominent member of the infamous Magliana organized-crime gang who was ambushed and murdered by rival gang members in 1990.

Why a known-mobster like De Pedis is buried on the grounds of a Vatican church has been the object of much speculation since 1997, when a church maid revealed the tomb’s existence to an inquisitive journalist. The Vatican was always cagey about why the mobster was buried in one of its churches, and ultimately, the church’s silence spurred countless conspiracy theories.  Now, thanks to shocking Vatican letters leaked in the Vatileaks scandal that is rocking the Holy See, the Italian police are less interested in why he’s buried there. Instead, they want to open the tomb to see if the remains of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi are interred with those of the mobster.

Orlandi was the daughter of a prominent non-clerical Vatican employee who worked in the Vatican’s special events office that organizes papal functions and Catholic celebrations. She disappeared without a trace after leaving her Vatican apartment for music lessons on the afternoon of June 22, 1983. Her lessons were in a music school adjacent to Sant’Apollinare church, and the last witnesses to see her alive told investigators the girl crawled into a dark green BMW, though that lead could never be corroborated. Her disappearance came at a tense moment for the Vatican, and nearly everyone associated her presumed kidnapping with a wider scandal.  In 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, shot Pope John Paul II, nearly killing him. Orlandi’s parents received a series of phone calls from thugs who said they would give back their daughter if the Vatican released Ali Agca. The calls soon stopped and the Orlandi family was left wondering if their daughter was alive or dead.

Another theory surfaced a year later, when an unidentifed tipster told police Orlandi was kidnapped to keep her father quiet. Mr. Orlandi, it was said, had stumbled upon sensitive documents that tied Roberto Calvi, known as God’s Banker for his close association with both the Holy See and its primary banking facility, Banco Ambrosiano, and to an organized-crime syndicate.  Calvi had been found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982, and speculation was swiftly turning from suicide to homicide in that case. It made sense that if the elder Orlandi knew something, taking his daughter would surely seal his lips.

At the time of the teenager’s disappearance, the Vatican secret service firmly believed she was kidnapped to be used as leverage either by supporters of Ali Agca or Calvi.  Last Saturday, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, Federico Lombardi, acknowledged they probably were wrong. “At the time, the authorities shared the prevailing opinion that the kidnapping might have been used by some obscure criminal organization to send messages or enact pressure in the context of the jailing and interrogation of the pope’s attacker,” he said. But because the Vatican is a sovereign city-state, Italian police do not have jurisdiction to investigate so-called Vatican crimes. The investigation began in earnest again after a series of breaks in late 2004, but John Paul II died shortly after the new lead surfaced, and the thread was lost in the transition in leadership at the Holy See. In 2008, the case was opened again when the transcript of an Italian police interrogation with De Pedis’s lover tied the mobster to the girl’s disappearance.  The lover told police the young girl was kidnapped on the orders of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who was then the head of the Vatican bank.

Marcinkus, an American, died in 2006, but records show that even the Vatican was suspicious of the priest. De Pedis’s lover said the death was to avenge a debt after the Vatican reneged on mafia loans secured by De Pedis, and that the girl’s body was dumped in a cement truck near the Roman seaside town of Ostia.  De Pedis, having exacted his revenge, then forgave the loan in exchange for the prestigious burial plot inside the Vatican church, she said.

Now, the focus of the investigation has turned to the Vatican itself, and, according to revelations in a letter leaked to the Italian press last week, the Vatican is taking it very seriously. A three-page letter from Lombardi to church higher-ups indicated even he suspected a cover-up.  In the letter, shown on Italian Rai Tre state television, Lombardi wrote of his concerns and asked how to address the press. “Was the non-collaboration [in the initial Orlandi investigation] normal and justifiable affirmation of Vatican sovereignty, or if in fact circumstances were withheld that might have helped clear something up.”

Italian magistrates are now wondering the same thing, and say they feel the Vatican may still be covering up vital information about Orlandi’s mysterious disappearance. They are picking up on a series of leads that stalled in 2005, starting with a tip from an anonymous caller to an Italian detective program Chi’l’ha Visto (“Who Has Seen”). The caller said Orlandi was kidnapped on the orders of the then vicar of Rome, Cardinal Ugo Poletti, and that “the secret to the mystery lies in a tomb in Sant’ Apollinare basilica.”

Last month, former Rome mayor and vice premier Walter Veltroni took up the case, asking the Italian interior ministry to ascertain whether the church of Sant’Apollinare is protected from Italian law or whether investigators could exhume De Pedis’s tomb.  The Vatican quickly offered access to the tomb and suggested that perhaps moving the mobster’s remains was a way to quash speculation once and for all. But in an about-face this week, the prosecutors backed down and said they won’t be opening the tomb anytime soon—saying instead that it’s time for someone inside the Vatican to tell the truth. “There are those in the Curia who know elements of the circumstantial evidence,” Giancarlo Capaldo, assistant prosecutor in the case, said on Italian television. “There are people still alive, and still inside the Vatican, who know the truth.”

In the meantime Orlandi’s family is hoping investigators change their minds and open the tomb, even though De Pedis’s widow, Carla Di Giovanni, reportedly is the only person with keys, and now even she is under preliminary investigation in the nearly three-decade-old mystery and probably not feeling very cooperative.

“The declaration by the prosecutors that the truth is known in the Vatican is very heavy, but it’s overshadowed by the strange decision not to open De Pedis’s grave,” Orlandi’s brother, Peter, told La Stampa newspaper over the weekend.  “Implicating the Holy See directly is a huge step forward. Now the Holy See has a moral duty to give a response after years of refusing to cooperate.”

But as long as it’s sealed, the mobster’s grave won’t give up any ghosts, or shed any light on the mystery.

Thanks to Barbie Latza Nadeau

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“Mob Wives Chicago" Smears Italian Americans

 I’m a Chicagoan looking to join a public protest, and I’ve come up with a good one.

Not against NATO or bankers on La Salle Street, but against a TV show being filmed in Chicago. It’s called “Mob Wives Chicago,” another one of those insensitive, dumb things that pick on Italians -– stereotyping Italians as da Big Al Capone, or da “Big Tuna,” Tony Accardo. It’s wrong to make fun of ethnic minorities, to embarrass our neighbors or influence our children to think Italians are gangsters.

You want to stereotype Italians? Try Christopher Columbus and Galileo; Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; Puccini and Verdi; Versace, Gucci and Armani; Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra and Rocky Marciano. How about Phil Cavaretta?  How about Ron Santo?

C’mon, you TV movie moguls. Get a life. Have some decency and respect. Before you finish filming “Mob Wives Chicago,” give it a wrap

 Perspective by Walter Jacobson.

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James Formato Sentenced to 4 Years Prison for Role in Mob Ring

A former crooked Berwyn cop was sentenced Tuesday to nearly four years in prison.

James Formato admitted he couriered mob cash and provided inside law enforcement information to members of the Chicago Outfit while he was still a patrolman for the Berwyn Police Department.

After his arrest, Formato cooperated with the FBI and agreed to secretly record conversations with mobsters and Outlaw biker Mark Polchan. He testified at the trial, providing information that helped convict Polchan, mob boss Michael "the Large Guy" Sarno and three other associates who were involved in bombing a rival video poker business, committing home invasions and jewelry heists netting nearly $2 million.

During his sentencing hearing, Formato told U.S. District Judge Ronald Guzman, "I need to apologize to the people I took an oath to protect. I made a very bad decision." He went on to say he owes the biggest apology to his teenage son, "I let him down as a father."

Formato's attorney Terry Campbell said Formato became involved with the crime ring after his marriage fell apart and he began abusing alcohol.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tinos Diamantatos acknowledged how helpful Formato's cooperation was to the government's case but said because of the severity of the crimes he committed, "Mr. Formato will deserve each and every day he spends in prison."

Thanks to Chuck Goudie

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Las Vegas Mob Museum Covers American Jewish History

In the mid-20th century, a cadre of tough Jews, shedding the bookish bearing of exile, went forth to create a new society in a forbidding desert. Armed to the teeth, they lived outside the law and built their outpost by any means necessary. Against all odds, despite implacable enemies, the desert bloomed.

Think you already know this history? Think again. This is an American tale told by the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, in downtown Las Vegas. Open since February, and already better known as “The Mob Museum,” it is essentially an American Jewish history museum by another name.

The museum tells the story of American organized crime, from its birth in the ethnic slums of established cities like Boston, New York and Chicago to the city the mafia itself begot, the Mojave metropolis of Las Vegas. The institution is the brainchild of Oscar Goodman, the flamboyant Philadelphia-born mafia attorney whose clients included Meyer Lansky, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein. Goodman went on to serve as mayor of Las Vegas from 1999 until 2011.

While the exhibit only breaks the code of omertà about Jewishness at the beginning of its chronological display — noting the Jewish immigration wave alongside the Irish and Italian — as visitors move through the 20th century they see a pantheon of mosaic Murder Inc. veterans, including Moe Dalitz, Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway, on a progression from street toughs to casino magnates to pillars of the community. The museum doesn’t pussyfoot around the brutality of Jewish mobsters’ methods; indeed, one 1930s photo shows the brutalized body of a Catskills resort slot machine operator on a gurney after he had been caught skimming profits. But it treats the mafia as an institution of immigrant social mobility, a shortcut to the American Dream.

The presentation makes it hard not to sympathize with Prohibition-era “Boys From Brooklyn” (as the Jewish goodfellas called themselves) as they are hounded by bigoted G-men and hard-drinking hypocrites in Congress. A 1939 FBI “Wanted” poster seeking fugitive Murder Inc. boss Louis Buchalter notes his “Jewish characteristics — nose large… eyes alert and shifty — has habit of passing change from one hand to another.”

Bootlegger Dalitz is celebrated for getting the best of a congressional anti-mafia probe with zingers like, “If you people wouldn’t have drunk it, I wouldn’t have bootlegged it.” And when asked about his illicit moonshine fortune, he said, “Well, I didn’t inherit any money, Senator.”

By the end of the exhibit, having built a world-famous city from scratch with their underworld capital, Sedway is receiving letters from Jewish establishment figures saluting his fundraising efforts for United Jewish Appeal, Dalitz is being presented with the key to the City of Las Vegas and Lansky is living the life of a retired real estate magnate in Miami Beach. Buchalter, for his part, has been sent to the electric chair at Sing Sing (an object that is also part of the collection). But even his death has a Horatio Alger twist: He set the record for the richest man ever executed in America.

The museum’s official slogan is, “There are two sides to every story,” and the feds are given their due. The former special agent in charge of the Las Vegas office of the FBI, Ellen Knowlton, outranks even Goodman on the museum’s board of directors. As in real life, though, it is the glamour of gangster glitter — like Benjamin Siegel’s glitzy watch, labeled “Bugsy’s Bling” — that catches the eye. Beyond a reasonable doubt, the goodfellas steal the show.

Not everyone is thrilled with such laudatory portrayals of the Jewish criminals the museum dubs “the other people who built America.” Jenna Weissman Joselit, Forward columnist, director of the program in Judaic studies at George Washington University and author of “Our Gang : Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900-1940,” (Indiana University Press, 1983) thinks the temptation to glamorize the mob ought to be resisted. Museum curators, she said via email, should “attend to America’s abiding fascination with crime with the same rigor and discernment that’s applied to other cultural and historical phenomena.” But Rich Cohen, author of “Tough Jews : Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams” (Simon & Schuster, 1998), understands the appeal of Jewish mobsters — especially when contrasted with the loathsome, privileged Jewish criminals of today, like Bernard Madoff. “These were people who grew up in certain neighborhoods where [the mob] was one way to get ahead,” Cohen said via telephone from Hollywood, where he’s advising “Magic City,” a new TV drama about 1950s Miami mobsters. “These were very tough guys in a very tough world, in a time when Jews were being beaten up and even killed — and they weren’t taking s–t from anybody.”

Cohen is unperturbed by the museum’s family-friendly marketing efforts, which include offering discounted admission to children as young as 5. “I have little kids, and I try to teach them right from wrong,” Cohen said. “I don’t think there’s a danger of people coming out of a museum and it making them gangsters.”

As a whole, American Jews are probably more conflicted than Cohen about the community’s historic mob ties. When Cohen told his grandmother he was working on a book about Murder Inc., her response bespoke this communal schizophrenia. “A Jew should never be a gangster. It’s a shande,” she told him, using the Yiddish word for “a disgrace.” “But, if a Jew should be a gangster, let him be the best gangster!”

For his part, booster-in-chief Goodman, who bequeathed to the museum his “gelt bag”— a large briefcase in which his clients, wary of having their bank accounts frozen by the Feds, paid him in cash — zealously defends the institution’s unconventional take on the history of his city and his people. “These are our founding fathers,” Goodman said of Meyer, Bugsy and the gang. “We [Las Vegans] come from the mob.”

But even Goodman recalls that when he first proposed the museum a decade ago, he faced some pushback from constituents who complained that it would stereotype a particular ethnic group. “Apparently they meant the Italians,” Goodman offered, with his perennial grin and Borscht Belt timing. “I thought they were talking about the Jews!”

Thanks to Daniel Brook

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"Momo: The Sam Giancana Story"

"Momo: The Sam Giancana Story" is the story of the legendary Chicago mob boss whose 1975 murder in his Oak Park kitchen remains unsolved. There are many questions about this 1950's and 60's successor to Al Capone, and Giancana's great nephew Nicholas Celozzi has produced a feature length film with the cooperation of Giancana family members, that he says finally reveals the reality behind the rumors.

"Momo: The Sam Giancana Story" is a nearly two hour film that may be shortened for a future airing on cable. Producers are hoping they can release the full version theatrically some time this year.

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