Five Minutes to Midnight: The Sicilian and New York Mafias, the Catholic Church and a huge finance scandal

“You never know what enough is unless you know what is more than enough.” - William Blake   

It’s a story with more twists and turns than a novel by Agatha Christie. A list of characters, narratives and story-lines that range from failed, wannabe-gangster Henry Hill, to Pope Paul VI, the Sicilian and New York Mafias, the Italian Secret Service, an illegal Masonic Lodge, several of the most prominent banking institutions in Europe and America, two former presidents of the United States, and the head of the Italian government.

A chronicle of greed and financial corruption with problem-solving by murder.

Intrigue, and double-dealing along with political manipulation, on a scale that is bigger than Ben Hur.

Some of the leading players will end up dead.

One is shot outside his home in Milan. Another is hung by a rope under a London Bridge; a hit-man crushed under a 400-pound Cuban drug dealer after they both fall off a prison roof. The leading actor poisoned by cyanide in a maximum-security prison while under watch by 15 guards.

Like Eulerian Circles, the links are overlapping, chasing each other in ever-decreasing orbits to that final day when the piper is paid in Voghera, Lombardy.

If this were a movie pitch, no self-respecting Hollywood producer would even look at it. So outlandish a shooting-script, it will never get past the first assistant PA.

And yet it happened.

Here’s how.  (more...)

Five Minutes to Midnight: The Sicilian and New York Mafias, the Catholic Church and a huge finance scandal    Part I    Part II