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Frank Sheeran – The (real) Irish Man , life & death

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Frank Sheeran

The (real) Irish Man , life & death

Frank Sheeran (left) & with fellow Teamsters organisers at his first job in Detroit.

Francis Joseph Sheeran (October 25, 1920 – December 14, 2003), known as Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran, was an American labor union official who was accused of having links to the Bufalino crime family in his capacity as a high-ranking official in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the president of Local 326.

Sheeran was a leading figure in the corruption of unions by organized crime. In 1980, he was convicted of labor racketeering and sentenced to 32 years in prison, of which he served 13 years. Shortly before his death, he claimed to have killed Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. Author Charles Brandt detailed what Sheeran told him about Hoffa in the narrative nonfiction work I Heard You Paint Houses (2004).

The truthfulness of the book has been disputed by some, including Sheeran’s confessions to killing Hoffa and Joe Gallo. The book is the basis for the 2019 film The Irishman directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran and Al Pacino as Hoffa.

The Irishman Explained | The Reel Story

My thoughts:

Well I watched The Irish Man yesterday evening, all three and a half of it and to be completely honest I thought it was a load of rubbish and a waste of three and a half hours of my life i’ll never get back. Its not a patch on Goodfellas or The God Father and the constant flash backs to when the main players were younger was to say the least completely off putting and unbelievable in the extreme. They looked and moved like the elder actors they are and it was painful watching these icons of gangsters movies having to shame themselves in this manner. Plus, the story line and the dialogue were abysmal and so far removed from the true events that reality had to be suspended and I had to force myself to sit through the whole sorry mess until the bitter , disappointing end.

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Early life

Sheeran was born and raised in Darby, Pennsylvania, a small working-class borough on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He was the son of Thomas Francis Sheeran Jr. and Mary Agnes Hanson.  His father was of Irish descent, while his mother was of Swedish descent.

World War II

Sheeran enlisted in the Army in August 1941, did his basic training near Biloxi, Mississippi, and was assigned to the military police. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for training in the Army Airborne at Fort Benning, Georgia, but he dislocated his shoulder and was transferred to the 45th Infantry Division, known as “The Thunderbirds” and “The Killer Division”. On July 14, 1943, he set sail for North Africa.

Sheeran served 411 days of combat duty—a significant length of time, as the average was around 100 days. His first experience of combat was during the Italian Campaign, including the invasion of Sicily, the Salerno landings, and the Anzio Campaign. He then served in the landings in southern France[11] and the invasion of Germany.

Sheeran said:

All in all, I had fifty days lost under AWOL—absent without official leave—mostly spent drinking red wine and chasing Italian, French, and German women. However, I was never AWOL when my outfit was going back to the front lines. If you were AWOL when your unit was going back into combat you might as well keep going because one of your own officers would blow you away and they didn’t even have to say it was the Germans. That’s desertion in the face of the enemy.

War crimes

Sheeran recalled his war service as the time when he developed a callousness to taking human life. He claimed to have participated in numerous massacres and summary executions of German POWs, acts which violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs. In interviews with Charles Brandt, he divided such massacres into four categories:

  1. Revenge killings in the heat of battle. Sheeran told Brandt that a German soldier had just killed his close friends and then tried to surrender, but he chose to “send him to hell, too”. He described often witnessing similar behavior by fellow GIs.
  2. Orders from unit commanders during a mission. Sheeran described his first murder for organized crime: “It was just like when an officer would tell you to take a couple of German prisoners back behind the line and for you to ‘hurry back’. You did what you had to do.”
  3. The Dachau reprisals and other reprisal killings of concentration camp guards and trustee inmates.
  4. Calculated attempts to dehumanize and degrade German POWs. Sheeran’s unit was climbing the Harz Mountains when they came upon a Wehrmacht mule train carrying food and drink up the mountainside. The female cooks were allowed to leave unmolested, then Sheeran and his fellow GI’s “ate what we wanted and soiled the rest with our waste”. Then the Wehrmacht mule drivers were given shovels and ordered to “dig their own shallow graves”. Sheeran joked that they did so without complaint, likely hoping that he and his buddies would change their minds. But the mule drivers were shot and buried in the holes they had dug. Sheeran explained that by then, he “had no hesitation in doing what I had to do.”

Discharge and post-war

Sheeran
Sheeran with family

Sheeran was discharged from the army on October 24, 1945. He later recalled that it was “a day before my twenty-fifth birthday, but only according to the calendar.” Upon returning from his army service, Sheeran married Mary Leddy, an Irish immigrant. The couple had three daughters, MaryAnne, Dolores, and Peggy, but divorced in 1968. Sheeran then married Irene Gray, with whom he had one daughter, Connie.

Organized crime and the Teamsters Union

When he left the service, Sheeran became a meat driver for Food Fair, and he met Russell Bufalino in 1955 when Bufalino offered to help him fix his truck, and later worked jobs driving him around and making deliveries. Sheeran also operated out of a bar located in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania which was run by Bill Distanisloa, a soldier for Angelo Bruno.

Sheeran’s first murder was killing Whispers DiTullio, a gangster who had hired him to destroy the Cadillac Linen Service in Delaware for $10,000. Sheeran did not know, however, that Angelo Bruno had a large stake in the linen service. Sheeran was spotted outside the business in Delaware and was brought in for questioning. Bufalino had convinced Bruno to spare Sheeran, but he ordered Sheeran to kill DiTullio as retribution.

Sheeran was also suspected of the murder of Joe Gallo at Umberto’s Clam House on April 7, 1972.

Bufalino introduced Sheeran to Teamsters International President Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa became a close friend and used Sheeran for muscle, including the assassination of recalcitrant union members and members of rival unions threatening the Teamsters’ turf. According to Sheeran, the first conversation that he had with Hoffa was over the phone, where Hoffa started by saying, “I heard you paint houses”—a mob code meaning “I heard that you kill people”, the “paint” being spattered blood.

Sheeran later became acting president of Local 326 of the Teamsters Union in Wilmington, Delaware.

Sheeran was charged in 1972 with the 1967 murder of Robert DeGeorge, who was killed in a shootout in front of Local 107 headquarters. The case was dismissed, however, on the grounds that Sheeran had been denied a speedy trial. He was also alleged to have conspired to murder Francis J. Marino in 1976, a Philadelphia labor organizer, and Frederick John Gawronski, killed the same year in a tavern in New Castle, Delaware.

Prison and death

Sheeran was indicted along with six others in July 1980, on charges involving his links to the labor leasing businesses controlled by Eugene Boffa Sr. of Hackensack, New Jersey. On October 31, 1980, Sheeran was found guilty of 11 charges of labor racketeering. He was sentenced to a 32-year prison term and served 13 years.

Sheeran died of cancer on December 14, 2003, aged 83, in a nursing home in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, Pennsylvania.

Hoffa death

The Sinister Disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa

Charles Brandt claims in I Heard You Paint Houses (2004) that Sheeran confessed to killing Hoffa. According to Brandt’s account, Chuckie O’Brien drove Sheeran, Hoffa, and fellow mobster Sal Briguglio to a house in Metro Detroit. O’Brien and Briguglio drove off and Sheeran and Hoffa went into the house, where Sheeran claims that he shot Hoffa twice in the back of the head. Sheeran says that he was told that Hoffa was cremated after the murder. Sheeran also confessed to reporters that he murdered Hoffa.

Bill Tonelli disputes the book’s truthfulness in his Slate article “The Lies of the Irishman”, as does Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith in “Jimmy Hoffa and ‘The Irishman’: A True Crime Story?” which appeared in The New York Review of Books.

Blood stains were found in the Detroit house where Sheeran claimed that the murder happened, but they were determined not to match Hoffa’s DNA.  The FBI continues its attempts to connect Sheeran to the murder, retesting the blood and floorboards with latest advancements in forensics.

Biographical film

The book is the basis for the 2019 film The Irishman directed by Martin Scorsese. Scorsese was long interested in directing a film about Sheeran’s life and his alleged involvement in the slaying of Hoffa. Steven Zaillian is the screenwriter and co-producer Robert De Niro portrays Sheeran, with Al Pacino as Hoffa, and Joe Pesci as Bufalino.[The film had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 27, 2019, and was released on November 1, 2019, with digital streaming that started on November 27, 2019, via Netflix.

Main Source : Wikipedia Frank Sheeran

“The Irishman” Official Documentary

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The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre – 14th Feb 1929

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The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre 14th Feb 1929

The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was the 1929 Valentine’s Day murder of seven members and associates of Chicago’s North Side Gang. The men were gathered at a Lincoln Park garage on the morning of Valentine’s Day. They were lined up against a wall and shot by four unknown assailants who were dressed like police officers. The incident resulted from the struggle to control organized crime in the city during Prohibition between the Irish North Siders, headed by George “Bugs” Moran, and their Italian South Side rivals led by Al Capone.

The perpetrators have never been conclusively identified, but former members of the Egan’s Rats gang working for Capone are suspected of a significant role, as are members of the Chicago Police Department who allegedly wanted revenge for the killing of a police officer’s son.

The Massacre

Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre – Al Capone, George ‘Bugs’ Moran and the Irish North Side Gang

At 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, February 14, 1929, seven men were murdered at the garage at 2122 North Clark Street,  in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side. They were shot by four men using weapons that included two Thompson submachine guns. Two of the shooters were dressed as uniformed policemen, while the others wore suits, ties, overcoats, and hats. Witnesses saw the fake police leading the other men at gunpoint out of the garage after the shooting.

The victims included five members of George “Bugs” Moran‘s North Side Gang. Moran’s second in command and brother-in-law Albert Kachellek (alias James Clark) was killed along with Adam Heyer, the gang’s bookkeeper and business manager, Albert Weinshank, who managed several cleaning and dyeing operations for Moran, and gang enforcers Frank Gusenberg and Peter Gusenberg.

Two collaborators were also shot: Reinhardt H. Schwimmer, a former optician turned gambler and gang associate, and John May, an occasional mechanic for the Moran gang. Real Chicago police officers arrived at the scene to find that victim Frank Gusenberg was still alive. He was taken to the hospital, where doctors stabilized him for a short time and police tried to question him. He had sustained 14 bullet wounds; the police asked him who did it, and he replied, “No one shot me.” He died three hours later.

Al Capone was widely assumed to have been responsible for ordering the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in an attempt to eliminate Bugs Moran, head of the North Side Gang. Moran was the last survivor of the North Side gunmen; his succession had come about because his similarly aggressive predecessors Vincent Drucci and Hymie Weiss had been killed in the violence that followed the murder of original leader Dean O’Banion.

Al Capone was widely assumed to have been responsible for ordering the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in an attempt to eliminate Bugs Moran, head of the North Side Gang. Moran was the last survivor of the North Side gunmen; his succession had come about because his similarly aggressive predecessors Vincent Drucci and Hymie Weiss had been killed in the violence that followed the murder of original leader Dean O’Banion.

Several factors contributed to the timing of the plan to kill Moran. Earlier in the year, North Sider Frank Gusenberg and his brother Peter unsuccessfully attempted to murder Jack McGurn. The North Side Gang was complicit in the murders of Pasqualino “Patsy” Lolordo and Antonio “The Scourge” Lombardo. Both had been presidents of the Unione Siciliana, the local Mafia, and close associates of Capone. Moran and Capone had been vying for control of the lucrative Chicago bootlegging trade. Moran had also been muscling in on a Capone-run dog track in the Chicago suburbs, and he had taken over several saloons that were run by Capone, insisting that they were in his territory.

The plan was to lure Moran to the SMC Cartage warehouse on North Clark Street on February 14, 1929 to kill him and perhaps two or three of his lieutenants. It is usually assumed that the North Siders were lured to the garage with the promise of a stolen, cut-rate shipment of whiskey, supplied by Detroit’s Purple Gang which was associated with Capone. The Gusenberg brothers were supposed to drive two empty trucks to Detroit that day to pick up two loads of stolen Canadian whiskey. All of the victims were dressed in their best clothes, with the exception of John May, as was customary for the North Siders and other gangsters at the time.

Most of the Moran gang arrived at the warehouse by approximately 10:30 a.m. on Valentine’s Day, but Moran was not there, having left his Parkway Hotel apartment late. He and fellow gang member Ted Newberry approached the rear of the warehouse from a side street when they saw a police car approaching the building. They immediately turned and retraced their steps, going to a nearby coffee shop. They encountered gang member Henry Gusenberg on the street and warned him, so also he turned back. North Side Gang member Willie Marks also spotted the police car on his way to the garage, and he ducked into a doorway and jotted down the license number before leaving the neighborhood.

Capone’s lookouts likely mistook one of Moran’s men for Moran himself, probably Albert Weinshank, who was the same height and build. The physical similarity between the two men was enhanced by their dress that morning; both happened to be wearing the same color overcoats and hats. Witnesses outside the garage saw a Cadillac sedan pull to a stop in front of the garage. Four men emerged and walked inside, two of them dressed in police uniform. The two fake police officers carried shotguns and entered the rear portion of the garage, where they found members of Moran’s gang and collaborators Reinhart Schwimmer and John May, who was fixing one of the trucks.

The Guns of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

The fake policemen then ordered the men to line up against the wall. They then signaled to the pair in civilian clothes who had accompanied them. Two of the killers opened fire with Thompson sub-machine guns, one with a 20-round box magazine and the other a 50-round drum. They were thorough, spraying their victims left and right, even continuing to fire after all seven had hit the floor. Two shotgun blasts afterward all but obliterated the faces of John May and James Clark, according to the coroner’s report.

To give the appearance that everything was under control, the men in street clothes came out with their hands up, prodded by the two uniformed policemen. Inside the garage, the only survivors in the warehouse were May’s dog “Highball” and Frank Gusenberg—despite 14 bullet wounds. He was still conscious, but he died three hours later, refusing to utter a word about the identities of the killers. The Valentine’s Day Massacre set off a public outcry which posed a problem for all mob bosses.

Victims

  • Peter Gusenberg, a front-line enforcer for the Moran organizations
  • Frank Gusenberg, the brother of Peter Gusenberg and also an enforcer
  • Albert Kachellek (alias “James Clark”), Moran’s second in command
  • Adam Heyer, the bookkeeper and business manager of the Moran gang
  • Reinhardt Schwimmer, an optician who had abandoned his practice to gamble on horse racing and associate with the gang
  • Albert Weinshank, who managed several cleaning and dyeing operations for Moran; his resemblance to Moran is allegedly what set the massacre in motion before Moran arrived, including the clothes that he was wearing
  • John May, an occasional car mechanic for the Moran gang[8]

Investigation

Within days, Capone received a summons to testify before a Chicago grand jury on charges of federal Prohibition violations, but he claimed to be too unwell to attend.

The Purple Gang

It was common knowledge that Moran was hijacking Capone’s Detroit-based liquor shipments, and police focused their attention on Detroit’s predominantly Jewish Purple Gang. Landladies Mrs. Doody and Mrs. Orvidson had taken in three men as roomers ten days before the massacre, and their rooming houses were directly across the street from the Clark Street garage. They picked out mug shots of Purple members George Lewis, Eddie Fletcher, Phil Keywell, and his younger brother Harry, but they later wavered in their identification. The police questioned and cleared Fletcher, Lewis, and Harry Keywell. Nevertheless, the Keywell brothers (and by extension the Purple Gang) remained ensnared in the massacre case for all time. Many also believed what the killers wanted them to believe: that the police did it.

On February 22, police were called to the scene of a garage fire on Wood Street where they found a 1927 Cadillac Sedan disassembled and partially burned, and they determined that the killers had used the car. They traced the engine number to a Michigan Avenue dealer who had sold the car to a James Morton of Los Angeles.

Claude Maddox

The garage had been rented by a man calling himself Frank Rogers, who gave his address as 1859 West North Avenue. This was the address of the Circus Café operated by Claude Maddox, a former St. Louis gangster with ties to the Capone gang, the Purple Gang, and a St. Louis gang called Egan’s Rats. Police could not turn up any information about persons named James Morton or Frank Rogers, but they had a definite lead on one of the killers. Just minutes before the killings, a truck driver named Elmer Lewis had turned a corner a block away from 2122 North Clark and sideswiped a police car.

He told police that he stopped immediately but was waved away by the uniformed driver, who was missing a front tooth. Board of Education president H. Wallace Caldwell had witnessed the accident, and he gave the same description of the driver. Police were confident that they were describing Fred Burke, a former member of Egan’s Rats. Burke and a close companion named James Ray were known to wear police uniforms whenever on a robbery spree. Burke was also a fugitive, under indictment for robbery and murder in Ohio. Police also suggested that Joseph Lolordo could have been one of the killers because of his brother Pasqualino’s recent murder by the North Side Gang.

Police then announced that they suspected Capone gunmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, as well as Jack McGurn and Frank Rio, a Capone bodyguard. Police eventually charged McGurn and Scalise with the massacre. Capone murdered John Scalise, Anselmi, and Joseph “Hop Toad” Giunta in May 1929 after he learned about their plan to kill him. The police dropped the murder charges against Jack McGurn because of a lack of evidence, and he was just charged with a violation of the Mann Act; he took his girlfriend Louise Rolfe across state lines to marry.

The case stagnated until December 14, 1929, when the Berrien County, Michigan Sheriff’s Department raided the St. Joseph, Michigan bungalow of “Frederick Dane”, the registered owner of a vehicle driven by Fred “Killer” Burke. Burke had been drinking that night, then rear-ended another vehicle and drove off. Patrolman Charles Skelly pursued, finally forcing him off the road. Skelly hopped onto the running board of Burke’s car, but he was shot three times and died of his wounds that night. The car was found wrecked and abandoned just outside St. Joseph and traced to Fred Dane. By this time, police photos confirmed that Dane was in fact Fred Burke, wanted by the Chicago police for his participation in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Thompson submachine guns,

Police raided Burke’s bungalow and found a large trunk containing a bullet-proof vest, almost $320,000 in bonds recently stolen from a Wisconsin bank, two Thompson submachine guns, pistols, two shotguns, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. St. Joseph authorities immediately notified the Chicago police, who requested both machine guns. They used the new science of forensic ballistics to identify both weapons as those used in the massacre. They also discovered that one of them had also been used to murder New York mobster Frankie Yale a year and a half earlier. Unfortunately, no further concrete evidence surfaced in the massacre case. Burke was captured over a year later on a Missouri farm. The case against him was strongest in connection to the murder of Officer Skelly, so he was tried in Michigan and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1940.

The Real Scarface: Al Capone (Full Documentary)

See: Wikipedia Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre for more details

Barry Seal – DEA Informant : Life & Death

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Adler Berrima Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal

Barry Seal

Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal (July 16, 1939 – February 19, 1986) was a Trans World Airlines (TWA) pilot who became a major drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel. When Seal was convicted of smuggling charges, he became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and testified in several major drug trials. He was murdered in 1986 by contract killers hired by Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín Cartel.

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The Rise & Fall of Pablo Escobar El Patron Medellin Cartel Documentary

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Early life

Seal, born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was the son of Mary Lou (née Delcambre) and Benjamin Kurtis Seal, a candy wholesaler. Seal began flying as a teenager. According to his flight instructor, he was a naturally gifted pilot. He earned his student pilot certificate at 16 and a private pilot’s certificate at 17.

In 1961, Seal enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard for six years, serving with the 20th Special Forces Group. He graduated from United States Army Airborne School but never completed United States Army Special Forces selection and training. Seal later served in the 245th Engineer Battalion with his MOS being radio telephone operator.

Early career

Barry Seal In his TWA uniform

Seal joined TWA as a flight engineer in 1964 and was soon promoted to first officer, then captain, flying a Boeing 707 on a regular Western Europe route. He was one of the youngest 707 command pilots in the TWA fleet.

Seal’s career with TWA ended in July 1972, when he was arrested for involvement in a conspiracy to smuggle a shipment of plastic explosives to Mexico using a DC-4. The case was eventually dismissed in 1974 for prosecutorial misconduct, but TWA in the meantime fired Seal, who had falsely taken medical leave to participate in the scheme.

Drug smuggling career

According to statements Seal made after becoming a DEA informant, he began smuggling small quantities of cannabis . By 1978, he had begun flying significant loads of cocaine, because pound-for-pound it was more profitable.

In December 1979, Seal was arrested in Honduras after returning from a drug smuggling trip to Ecuador. Although the Honduran police did not find any cocaine, they did find an M-1 rifle, and Seal was imprisoned until July 1980.

Undeterred by his arrest, Seal expanded his operations upon returning to the United States. He hired William Bottoms, his ex-brother-in-law, as a pilot, and from 1980 on Bottoms was the main pilot in Seal’s smuggling enterprise, while Seal oversaw planning and operations.

Seal later began working for the Medellín Cartel as a pilot and drug smuggler. He transported numerous shipments of cocaine from Colombia and Panama to the United States, and earned as much as $1,300,000 per flight.

After successful runs at his home base in Louisiana he moved operations to Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport, in Mena, Arkansas. There he bought, sold and operated many planes.

Undercover informant and operative

Seal was eventually arrested in connection with his drug smuggling activities. In a Florida federal court, he was indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. After his sentencing, Seal approached the DEA and offered to cooperate with the government as an informant.

Federal officials agreed to use him in that capacity and mentioned his cooperation during hearings in which Seal sought a reduction of his sentence. With an agreement reached, Seal began working as a federal informant in March 1984.

According to the Frontline: Godfather of Cocaine investigation, Ernst “Jake” Jacobson was Seal’s DEA handler during this period. Jacobson claims he still has the high-tech message encrypter which he gave Seal.

“We made sure all of his aircraft were equipped with the most expensive cryptic radio communications we had ever seen at that time,”

said Jacobson.

In order to mitigate his 1984 arrest in Fort Lauderdale, Florida for money laundering and Quaalude smuggling, Seal agreed to testify against his former employers and associates in the drug trade, and thereby contributed to putting several of them in jail. Among those against whom Seal testified were Chief Minister of the Turks and Caicos Islands Norman Saunders and members of the Medellín Cartel. Seal also testified before the President’s Commission on Organized Crime in October 1985.

Jacobson, testifying in 1988, told a House Judiciary Committee that Seal had flown to an airstrip in Nicaragua in an airplane that had cameras installed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Seal took pictures during the Nicaragua sting operation that showed Pablo Escobar, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vásquez, and other members of the Medellín Cartel loading kilos of cocaine onto a C-123 transport plane. Federico Vaughan, the Sandinista Minister of the Interior, who Seal claimed was a top aide of Tomas Borge‘s, was also photographed with Sandinista soldiers helping load the plane.

Pablo Escobar

Seal was both a smuggler and a DEA informant/operative in this sting operation against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. In 1984, Seal flew from Nicaragua to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida with a shipment of cocaine that had been allegedly brokered through the Sandinista government.

This cocaine was seized by the DEA and was never received by the cartel’s distribution handlers in Florida, which in Medellín caused suspicion to fall upon Seal as the person responsible for this lost shipment.

Edmond Jacoby’s report in the July 17, 1984 issue of the Washington Times linked officials in the Sandinista government to the Medellín cartel and discussed Seal’s mission to Nicaragua. The public disclosures jeopardized Seal’s life and quickly brought an end to the sting operation designed to capture the cartel’s leaders.

Questioned about the identity of the source, Jacobson replied, “I heard that the leak came from an aide in the White House”. He stated that Iran–Contra figure Oliver North had attended two meetings about the sting operation and had motivation to release the information. UPI reported: “By linking the Sandinistas with drug traffic … aid to the rebels accused of human rights violations might seem more palatable”.

Subcommittee chairman William J. Hughes strongly suggested that North was the source of the leak, but Representative Bill McCollum said,

“…we don’t know who leaked this. No one has been able to tell us”.

 Citing testimony of DEA Administrator John C. Lawn, the report of the Kerry Committee released in December 1988 pinned the leak on North stating he “decided to play politics with the issue”. In an interview with Frontline, North said he was told by his superiors on the National Security Council to brief Senator Paula Hawkins about the operation, but he denied leaking the report.

Hawkins told Frontline that neither she nor her staff leaked the information after the briefing.Jacoby later denied that North was the source of his story and attributed it to a deceased staff member for Representative Dan Daniel.

The Wall Street Journal also printed the story, contributing to media coverage that indirectly exposed Seal’s involvement in the operation. The articles also exposed the Colombian cartel leaders and Nicaraguan Interior Minister who had been photographed moving cocaine onto Seal’s aircraft. Despite these pressures, Seal went ahead and testified with the pictures taken during the trip showing Sandinista officials in Nicaragua brokering a cocaine deal with members of Colombia’s Medellín Cartel.

Murder

Seal was sentenced to work in public service at the Salvation Army facility on Airline Highway (U.S. 61), in Baton Rouge, as a modification by the judge to Seal’s original plea deal. On February 19, 1986, Seal was shot to death in front of the site. His murder abruptly brought the DEA’s investigation to an end.

 Barry Seal | American Dope

Colombian assassins sent by the Medellín Cartel were apprehended while trying to leave Louisiana, soon after Seal’s murder. Authorities thus concluded Seal’s murderers were hired by Ochoa. The killers were indicted by a state grand jury on March 27, 1986.

In May 1987, Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz, Miguel Vélez (died in custody 2015) and Bernardo Antonio Vásquez were convicted of first degree murder in Seal’s death, and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Barry Seal’s Grave

Louisiana Attorney General William Guste wrote to United States Attorney General Edwin Meese criticizing the government’s failure to protect Seal as a witness. At Guste’s request, Meese launched an investigation to determine whether or not attorneys in Louisiana, Miami, and Washington had mishandled the case, and to determine whether or not Seal should have been forced into protective custody. Government attorneys stated that Seal placed himself in danger by refusing to move his family and enter a witness protection program.

In 1991, cartel member Max Mermelstein testified that he had been instructed in December 1984 either to kidnap Seal and return him to Colombia, or to murder him. The reward to kidnap Seal was $1 million, and the reward to kill him was $500,000.

Personal life

Deborah DuBois his third wife and children

Seal married three times; the first to Barbara Dodson from 1963 to 1971 and to Lynn Ross from 1971 to 1972 – ended in divorce. His marriage to Deborah DuBois, in 1973, ended with his death in 1986. Seal had 6 children, 2 from his first wife, one child from a relationship he had in between marriages and three more with Debbie. 

Media depictions

Films

  • Seal is portrayed by Dennis Hopper in the docudrama Doublecrossed (1991), which prominently features Seal’s co-pilot and collaborator Emile Camp[27][28] (portrayed by G. W. Bailey), although some of the Camp plotlines stand in for actual events involving William Roger Reeves, who met Seal in jail and introduced him to the Medellín Cartel.
  • Seal is portrayed by Michael Paré in the American crime drama film The Infiltrator (2016), in two brief, historically inaccurate scenes that exercise dramatic license to depict the film’s title character, Robert Mazur, as a passenger in a car being driven by Seal who is killed in a motorcycle drive-by shooting.
  • Seal is portrayed by Tom Cruise in the crime drama-comedy film American Made (2017), loosely based on Seal’s life, produced by Imagine Entertainment. Little of the film is historically accurate; most of the plot, such as the assassination of Seal’s brother-in-law, were invented for purposes of the film.

Television

  • Seal is portrayed by theater director Thaddeus Phillips in the 2013 TV series Alias El Mexicano.
  • Seal is portrayed by Dylan Bruno in Season 1, Episode 4, of the Netflix series Narcos (2015).

Inside the Colombian Cartels

Other drug stories

See: Kiki Camarena – The Brutal Torture & Death of a Narc

See : Gangster Warlords – Amado Carrillo Fuentes – Lord of the Skies

See: Dublin’s deadly Gang War – Kinahan vs Hutch

Gangster Warlords – Amado Carrillo Fuentes – Lord of the Skies

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Gangster Warlords

Amado Carrillo Fuentes

Lord of the Skies

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Amado Carrillo Fuentes  December 17, 1956 – July 4, 1997) was a Mexican drug lord who seized control of the Juárez Cartel after assassinating his boss Rafael Aguilar Guajardo.

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Amado Carrillo became known as “El Señor de Los Cielos” (“The Lord of the Skies”), because of the large fleet of jets he used to transport drugs. He was also known for laundering money via Colombia to finance his large fleet of airplanes.

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He died in July 1997, in a Mexican hospital, after undergoing extensive plastic surgery to change his appearance.

In his final days Carrillo was being tracked by Mexican and U.S. authorities

BornAmado Carrillo Fuentes
December 17, 1956
Guamuchilito, Sinaloa, Mexico
DiedJuly 4, 1997 (aged 40)
Mexico City, Mexico
Other namesEl Señor de los Cielos
OccupationDrug lord
EmployerHead of Juárez Cartel
Known forDrug trafficking and weapons
PredecessorRafael Aguilar Guajardo
SuccessorVicente Carrillo Fuentes
Spouse(s)Lesley Arriaga Carrillo
ChildrenVicente Carrillo Leyva
RelativesErnesto Fonseca CarrilloVicente Carrillo Fuentes

Early Life

Carrillo was born to Walter Vicente Carrillo Vega and Aurora Fuentes in Guamuchilito, Navolato, Sinaloa, Mexico. He had eleven siblings. Carillo was the nephew of Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, also known as “Don Neto”, the Guadalajara Cartel leader. Amado got his start in the drug business under the tutelage of his uncle Ernesto and later brought in his brothers, and eventually his son Vicente José Carrillo Leyva.

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Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo,

Carrillo’s father died in April 1986. Carillo’s brother, Cipriano Carrillo Fuentes, died in 1989 under mysterious circumstances.[

Career

Initially, Carrillo was part of the Guadalajara Cartel, sent to Ojinaga, Chihuahua to oversee the cocaine shipments of his uncle, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo (“Don Neto”), and to learn about border operations from Pablo Acosta Villarreal (“El Zorro de Ojinaga”; “The Ojinaga Fox”) and Rafael Aguilar Guajardo.

Amado Carillo Fuentes – Mexican Drug Lord Kingpin (Crime Documentary)

Later, Carrillo worked with Pablo Escobar and the Cali Cartel smuggling drugs from Colombia to Mexico and the United States. He worked with El Chapo Joaquin Guzman Loera, the Arellano Felix family and the Beltran Leyva Organization. During his tenure, Carrillo reportedly built a multibillion-dollar drug empire. It was estimated that he may have made over US$25 billion in revenue in his career.[

Death

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Amado Carrillo Fuentes

The pressure to capture Carrillo intensified among U.S. and Mexican authorities, and perhaps for this reason, Carrillo underwent facial plastic surgery and abdominal liposuction to change his appearance on July 4, 1997, at Santa Mónica Hospital in Mexico City. However, during the operation, he died of complications apparently caused either by a certain medication or a malfunctioning respirator.

Two of Carrillo’s bodyguards were in the operating room during the procedure. There is also very little paper work regarding the death of Amado Carillo Fuentes. On November 7, 1997, the two physicians who performed the surgery on Fuentes were found dead, encased in concrete inside steel drums, with their bodies showing signs of torture.

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Juárez Cartel after Carrillo

On the night of August 3, 1997, at around 9:30 p.m., four drug traffickers walked into a restaurant in Ciudad Juárez, pulled out their guns, and opened fire on five diners, killing them instantly.[

Police estimated that more than 100 bullet casings were found at the crime scene. According to a report issued by the Los Angeles Times, four men went to the restaurant carrying at least two AK-47 automatic rifles while others stood at the doorstep.[

 On their way out, the gunmen claimed another victim: Armando Olague, a prison official and off-duty law enforcement officer, who was gunned down outside the restaurant after he had walked from a nearby bar to investigate the shooting. Reportedly, Olague had run into the restaurant from across the street with a gun in his hand to check out the commotion. It was later determined that Olague was also a known lieutenant of the Juarez cartel.[

Mexican authorities declined to comment on the motives behind the killing, stating the shootout was not linked to the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Nonetheless, it was later stated that the perpetrators were gunmen of the Tijuana Cartel.

Underworld Tijuana Cartel Documentary

Although confrontations between narcotraficantes were commonplace in Ciudad Juárez, they rarely occurred in public places. What happened in the restaurant threatened to usher in a new era of border crime in the city.[

In Ciudad Juárez, the PGR seized warehouses they believed the cartel used to store weapons and cocaine; they also seized over 60 properties all over Mexico belonging to Carrillo, and began an investigation into his dealings with police and government officials. Officials also froze bank accounts amounting to $10 billion belonging to Carrillo.[

In April 2009, Mexican authorities arrested Carillo’s son, Vicente Carrillo Leyva.[

Funeral

Carrillo was given a large and lavish expensive funeral in Guamuchilito, Sinaloa. In 2006, Governor Eduardo Bours asked the federal government to tear down Carrillo’s mansion in Hermosillo, Sonora.[

The mansion, dubbed “The Palace of a Thousand and One Nights”, although still standing, remains unoccupied.[c

Main Source : wikipedia Amado Carrillo Fuentes

Media Portrayals

See : Kiki Camarena – The Brutal Torture & Death of a Narc

See: Dublin’s Deadly Gang-War

Dale Cregan: ” One Eyed “Cold-Blooded Cop Killer

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Dale Cregan 

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Dale Cregan was jailed for life for the murders of David Short, 46, and son Mark, 23, and of policewomen Nicola Hughes, 23, and Fiona Bone, 32, in a horrifying gun and grenade attack in 2012. The murder of the two female police officers shocked and appalled all right minded folk in the Uk and across the globe and I was profoundly  saddened and sickened by this brutal and unforgivable crime.

Since the  abolition of death penalty in UK gun crime has risen substantially year on year and yet our police forces walk the streets largely unarmed and this makes them  the envy of many other police forces throughout the world. Sadly many good men and women within the forces have died at the hands of gun/knife wielding madmen and the death of these two innocent police women is testament to how dangerous the job is.

I salute you all!

See below for a list of all police deaths in the line off duty.

Dale Christopher Cregan (born 6 June 1983) is an English convicted drug-dealer and murderer who was sentenced to a whole life order in prison for four counts of murder (including the killing of two police officers) and three separate counts of attempted murder, meaning that he will never be released from prison.

Murders and subsequent convictions

Victims: Cregan first murdered Mark Short at a birthday party in May and then killed his father David Short (left) three months later

On 25 May 2012, Cregan shot dead Mark Short, 23, in the Cotton Tree pub in Droylsden, Greater Manchester. In the same incident, he tried to kill three other men.

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On 10 August, he killed Mark Short’s father, 46-year-old David Short, at his house in Clayton, Manchester by shooting him nine times with a Glock pistol and then throwing a M75 hand grenade onto him, blowing his body apart.

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On 18 September 2012, Cregan made a hoax emergency call to the police. Police Constables Nicola Hughes, 23, and Fiona Bone, 32, Greater Manchester Police officers, were mobilised to Cregan’s call in Hattersley.

He claimed that there had been an incident of criminal damage at his house.

When they arrived, Cregan ambushed the constables, shooting them and throwing an M75 hand grenade at them. Both officers were hit by at least eight bullets as Cregan fired 32 shots in 31 seconds.

He later handed himself in at a local police station, admitting to killing Hughes and Bone. He was swiftly charged with these murders, and soon afterwards charged with the murders of Mark and David Short.

During his trial, which began on 4 February 2013, Cregan was detained at Manchester Prison. The trial was held at Preston Crown Court, where scaffolding was erected to accommodate armed officers.

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Police snipers watched over the building from nearby offices. The daily convoy, carrying Cregan between Manchester and Preston, included two prison vans, police cars, motorcycle outriders and a helicopter.

In total, 120 Greater Manchester Police officers were deployed daily. The total cost of the trial was in excess of £5 million.

Cregan was convicted of all four murders and of three attempted murders in the Mark Short incident. Cregan was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order on 13 June 2013.

In August 2013 it was reported that Cregan was on hunger strike at HM Prison Full Sutton.

He was moved to Ashworth Hospital in September 2013.

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Andrew Summerscales

Dale Cregan Police officer filled out own death report before killing himself

Andrew Summerscales is believed to have been one of the first officers on the scene of his murdered colleagues

A former police officer filled out his own death report before taking his own life after two of his colleagues were murdered by one-eyed gangster Dale Cregan, an inquest has heard.

Andrew Summerscales had “loved” being a police officer until fellow officers on his shift, his “very good friends,” Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone, were both murdered by Cregan.

He is believed to have been one of the first officers on the murder scene.

Cregan, who was already wanted by police for the double murder of a father and son, lured the officers with a bogus call before killing them in a gun and grenade attack in Hattersley, Tameside, in September 2012.

 See:  Independent for full story
 
 
 
 
 
 
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National Police Officers Roll of Honour and Remembrance

In Memory of British Police Officers who Lost their Lives in the Line of Duty

Annual Roll

English Roll – Scottish Roll – Welsh Roll – Island of Ireland Roll – National Forces Roll – Ports & Tunnels Roll – Islands Roll

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See here for : List of British police officers killed in the line of duty

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Roberto Calvi God’s Banker – 13 April 1920 – 17 June 1982

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Roberto Calvi

God’s Banker

13 April 1920 – 17 June 1982

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Roberto Calvi (13 April 1920 – 17 June 1982) was an Italian banker dubbed “God’s Banker” (Italian: Banchiere di Dio) by the press because of his close association with the Holy See. A native of Milan, Calvi was Chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in one of modern Italy’s biggest political scandals. His death in London in June 1982 is a source of enduring controversy and was ruled a murder after two coroner‘s inquests and an independent investigation. In Rome, in June 2007, five people were acquitted of the murder.

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Roberto Calvi

Gods Banker Life & Death

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Claims have been made that factors in Calvi’s death were the Vatican Bank, Banco Ambrosiano’s main shareholder; the Mafia, which may have used Banco Ambrosiano for money laundering; and the Propaganda Due or P2 clandestine Masonic Lodge.

The Banco Ambrosiano scandal

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Roberto Calvi was the chairman of Italy’s second largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, when it collapsed in 1982. In 1978, the Bank of Italy produced a report on the Banco Ambrosiano, which found that several billion lire had been exported illegally, leading to criminal investigations. In 1981, Calvi was tried, given a four-year suspended sentence and fined $19.8 million for transferring $27 million out of the country in violation of Italian currency laws.

He was released on bail pending appeal and kept his position at the bank. During his short spell in jail, he attempted suicide. Calvi’s family maintains that he was manipulated by others and was innocent of the crimes attributed to him.

The controversy surrounding Calvi’s dealings at Banco Ambrosiano echoed a previous scandal in 1974, when the Holy See lost an estimated $30 million upon the collapse of the Franklin National Bank, owned by the Sicilian-born financier Michele Sindona. Bad loans and foreign currency transactions led to the collapse of the bank. Sindona later died in prison after drinking coffee laced with cyanide.

John Paul II on 12 August 1993 in Denver, Colorado

On 5 June 1982, two weeks before the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, Calvi wrote a letter of warning to Pope John Paul II, stating that such a forthcoming event would :

“provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage.”

Banco Ambrosiano collapsed in June 1982 following the discovery of debts (according to various sources) between 700 million and 1.5 billion US dollars. Much of the money had been siphoned off via the Vatican Bank (strictly named the Istituto per le Opere Religiose or Institute for Works of Religion), which owned 10% of Banco Ambrosiano, and was their main shareholder.

In 1984, the Vatican Bank agreed to pay US$224 million to the 120 creditors of the failed Banco Ambrosiano as a “recognition of moral involvement” in the bank’s collapse.

Death

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On 10 June 1982, Calvi went missing from his Rome apartment, having fled the country on a false passport in the name of Gian Roberto Calvini. He shaved off his moustache and fled initially to Venice. From there, he apparently hired a private plane to London via Zurich. At 7:30 am on Friday, 18 June 1982, a postal clerk was crossing Blackfriars Bridge and noticed his body hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge on the edge of the financial district of London. Calvi’s clothing was stuffed with bricks, and he was carrying around $15,000 worth of cash in three different currencies.

Calvi was a member of Licio Gelli‘s illegal masonic lodge, P2, and members of P2 referred to themselves as frati neri or “black friars”. This led to a suggestion in some quarters that Calvi was murdered as a masonic warning because of the symbolism associated with the word “Blackfriars”.

The day before his body was found, Calvi was stripped of his post at Banco Ambrosiano by the Bank of Italy, and his 55-year-old private secretary, Graziella Corrocher, jumped to her death from a fifth floor window at Banco Ambrosiano. Corrocher left behind an angry note condemning the damage that Calvi had done to the bank and its employees. Corrocher’s death was ruled a suicide.

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Calvi’s death was the subject of two coroner‘s inquests in the United Kingdom. The first recorded a verdict of suicide in July 1982. The Calvi family then secured the services of George Carman QC. At the second inquest, in July 1983, the jury recorded an open verdict, indicating that the court had been unable to determine the exact cause of death. Calvi’s family maintained that his death had been a murder.

In 1991 the Calvi family commissioned the New York-based investigation company Kroll Associates to investigate the circumstances of Calvi’s death. The case was assigned to Jeff Katz, who was then a senior case manager for the company in London. As part of his two-year investigation, Katz instructed former Home Office forensic scientists, including Angela Gallop, to undertake forensic tests.

As a result, it was found that Calvi could not have hanged himself from the scaffolding because the lack of paint and rust on his shoes proved that he had not walked on the scaffolding. In October 1992 the forensic report was submitted to the Home Secretary and the City of London Police, who dismissed it at the time.

Following the exhumation of Calvi’s body in December 1998, an Italian court commissioned a German forensic scientist to repeat the work produced by Katz and his forensic team. That report was published in October 2002, ten years after the original, and confirmed the first report. In addition, it said that the injuries to Calvi’s neck were inconsistent with hanging and he had not touched the bricks found in his pockets.

When Calvi’s body was found, the level of the Thames had receded with the tide, giving the scene the appearance of a suicide by hanging, but at the exact time of his death, the place on the scaffolding where the rope had been tied could have been reached by a person standing in a boat. That had also been the conclusion of a separate report by Katz to the Calvi family in 1992, which also detailed a reconstruction based on Calvi’s last known movements in London and theorized that Calvi had been taken by boat from a point of access to the River Thames in West London.[

This aspect of Calvi’s death was the focus of the theory that he was murdered. It is this version of events depicted on screen in Giuseppe Ferrara’s fictional film reconstruction of the event. In September 2003, the City of London police reopened their investigation as a murder inquiry.

Roberto Calvi’s life was insured for $10 million with Unione Italiana. Attempts by his family to obtain a payout resulted in litigation (Fisher v Unione Italiana [1998] CLC 682). Following the forensic report of 2002, which established that Calvi had been murdered, the policy was finally settled, although around half of the sum was paid to creditors of the Calvi family who incurred considerable costs during their attempts to establish that Calvi had been murdered.[5][13][14]

Prosecution of Giuseppe Calò and Licio Gelli

In July 1991, the Mafia pentito (a mafioso turned informer) Francesco Marino Mannoia claimed that Roberto Calvi had been killed because he had lost Mafia funds when Banco Ambrosiano collapsed.

According to Mannoia, the killer was Francesco Di Carlo, a mafioso living in London at the time. The order to kill Calvi had come from Mafia boss Giuseppe Calò and Licio Gelli. When Di Carlo became an informer in June 1996, he denied he was the killer, but admitted he had been approached by Calò to do the job. However, Di Carlo could not be reached in time. When he later called Calò, the latter said that everything had been taken care of. According to Di Carlo, the killers were Vincenzo Casillo and Sergio Vaccari, who belonged to the Camorra from Naples and were later killed.

In 1997, Italian prosecutors in Rome implicated a member of the Sicilian Mafia, Giuseppe Calò, in Calvi’s murder, along with Flavio Carboni, a Sardinian businessman with wide ranging interests. Two other men, Ernesto Diotallevi (purportedly one of the leaders of the Banda della Magliana, a Roman Mafia-like organization) and former Mafia member turned informer Francesco Di Carlo, were also alleged to be involved in the killing.

In July 2003, the Italian prosecutors concluded that the Mafia acted not only in its own interests, but also to ensure that Calvi could not blackmail :

“politico-institutional figures and [representatives] of freemasonry, the P2 lodge, and the Institute of Religious Works with whom he had invested substantial sums of money, some of it from Cosa Nostra and Italian public corporations”.

 

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The Square and Compasses is one of the most prominent symbols of Freemasonry.

On 19 July 2005, Licio Gelli, the grand master of the Propaganda Due or P2 masonic lodge, received a notification – required by Italian law – informing him that he was formally under investigation on charges of ordering the murder of Calvi along with Giuseppe Calò, Ernesto Diotallevi, Flavio Carboni and Carboni’s Austrian ex-girlfriend, Manuela Kleinszig. The four other suspects were already indicted on murder charges in April in a separate indictment. According to the indictment, the five ordered Calvi’s murder to prevent the banker “from using blackmail power against his political and institutional sponsors from the world of Masonry, belonging to the P2 lodge, or to the Institute for Religious Works (the Vatican Bank) with whom he had managed investments and financing with conspicuous sums of money, some of it coming from Cosa Nostra and public agencies”.

Gelli was accused of provoking Calvi’s death to punish him for embezzling money from Banco Ambrosiano that was owed to him and the Mafia. The Mafia allegedly wanted to prevent Calvi from revealing that Banco Ambrosiano was used for money laundering. Gelli denied involvement, but acknowledged that the financier was murdered. In his statement before the court, he said the killing was commissioned in Poland. This is thought to be a reference to Calvi’s alleged involvement in financing the Solidarity trade union movement at the request of Pope John Paul II, allegedly on behalf of the Vatican.

However, Gelli’s name was not in the final indictment at the trial that started in October 2005.

Trials in Italy

In 2005 the Italian magistrates investigating Calvi’s death took their inquiries to London in order to question witnesses. They had been cooperating with Chief Superintendent Trevor Smith who built his case partly on evidence provided by Jeff Katz. Smith had been able to make the first ever arrest of a UK witness who had allegedly committed perjury during the Calvi inquest.

On 5 October 2005, the trial of the five individuals charged with Calvi’s murder began in Rome. The defendants were Giuseppe Calò, Flavio Carboni, Manuela Kleinszig, Ernesto Diotallevi, and Calvi’s former driver and bodyguard Silvano Vittor. The trial took place in a specially fortified courtroom in Rome’s Rebibbia prison.

On 6 June 2007, all five individuals were cleared by the court of murdering Calvi.

Mario Lucio d’Andria, the presiding judge at the trial, threw out the charges citing “insufficient evidence” after hearing 20 months of evidence. The verdict was a surprise to some observers. The court ruled that Calvi’s death was murder and not suicide.

The defence suggested there were plenty of people with a motive for Calvi’s murder, including Vatican officials and Mafia figures who wanted to ensure his silence.

Legal experts following the trial said that the prosecutors found it hard to present a convincing case due to the 25 years that elapsed since Calvi’s death. Additionally, key witnesses were unwilling to testify, untraceable, or dead.

The prosecution called for Manuela Kleinszig to be cleared, stating that there was insufficient evidence against her, but sought life sentences for the four men.

The private investigator Jeff Katz, hired by Calvi’s family in 1991 to look into his death, claimed it was likely that senior figures in the Italian establishment escaped prosecution. “The problem is that the people who probably actually ordered the death of Calvi are not in the dock – but to get to those people might be very difficult indeed,” he said in an interview. Katz said it was “probably true” that the Mafia carried out the killing, but that the gangsters suspected of the crime were either dead or missing.

The verdict in the trial was not the end of the matter, since by June 2007 the prosecutor’s office in Rome had opened a second investigation implicating, among others, Licio Gelli.

In May 2009, the case against Licio Gelli was dropped. According to the magistrate there was insufficient evidence to argue that Gelli, the former head of the secret Masonic lodge P2, had played a role in the planning and execution of the crime.

On 7 May 2010, the Court of Appeals confirmed the acquittal of Calò, Carboni and Diotallevi. The public prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, commented, after the verdict, that for the family

“Calvi has been murdered for the second time.”

On November 18, 2011, the court of last resort, the Court of Cassation, confirmed the acquittal.  Giuseppe Calò is still serving a life sentence on unrelated Mafia charges.

Films about Calvi’s death

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The Pope and the Mafia Millions Documentary

 

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A 1983 PBS Frontline Documentary, titled “God’s Banker” investigated Calvi’s links with the Vatican, P-2, and if his death was really a suicide.

The circumstances surrounding Calvi’s death were made into a feature film, I Banchieri di Dio – Il Caso Calvi (God’s Bankers – The Calvi Case), in 2001.

Following the release of the film, Flavio Carboni sued the director Giuseppe Ferrara for slander, but lost the action. The lawsuit caused the film to be withdrawn from Italian cinemas, but it was released on video when the legal action ended.

A heavily fictionalized version of Calvi appears in the film The Godfather Part III in the character of Frederick Keinszig.

In 1990 The Comic Strip Presents, a Channel Four television series that had transferred to BBC2 that year, produced a spoof version of Calvi’s story under the title Spaghetti Hoops, with Nigel Planer in the lead role, and directed by Peter Richardson and co-written by him and Pete Richens.

With the same director and co-writers, the comedy film The Pope Must Die (1991), in which a naive priest, played by Robbie Coltrane, is unexpectedly made Pope and takes on a mafia dominated Vatican, has been described by Variety as “Loosely based on the Roberto Calvi banking scandal”.

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In the 2009 film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the character of Tony, played by Heath Ledger, is found hanging (alive) under Blackfriars Bridge, described by director Terry Gilliam as “an homage to Roberto Calvi”