In 2019 the murder of Pope John Paul I was claimed by the American gangster Anthony "Pluto" Raimondi, a member of one of the five most powerful Mafia families of New York, who confessed to taking part in the crime in an autobiographical book…
According to Raimondi, the murder was arranged by Bishop Paul Marcinkus, president of the Vatican Bank from 1971 to 1989, who in 1973 was suspected of involvement in supplying the Vatican with counterfeit bonds worth almost 15 million dollars. The gangster writes that Pope John Paul I intended to expose large-scale financial crimes, including fraudulent dealings in Coca-Cola and IBM shares within the Vatican, in which hundreds of high-ranking dignitaries were implicated, up to half of all the cardinals.
The mobster confesses that on the night of 27 to 28 September 1978, after Marcinkus had given the Pope a cup of Valium in his private apartments, he dripped potassium cyanide into the pontiff's mouth. According to the book, the Italian curial cardinal Pietro Palazzini and the Portuguese cardinal António Ribeiro were present. After that one of the accomplices began shouting that the Pope was dead, summoning people to help. The doctor who arrived diagnosed death from a heart attack, and no autopsy was performed. Raimondi writes that the poison can probably still be detected in the Pope's body today, but objections are raised that toxins break down under the action of embalming compounds.
All the participants in this story are now dead, but poisoning, in Raimondi's version, remains only one of the widespread theories about the murder of Pope John Paul I, who intended to put an end to corruption and economic crime within the Vatican.
