Francesco Marino Mannoia

Antimafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, who was first to interrogate him, recalled Marino Mannoia as an intelligent and reliable witness.

He was raised in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, and joined the Santa Maria di Gesù Mafia Family, headed by Stefano Bontade.

As it turned out, both Mannoia brothers had been plotting along with Vincenzo Puccio to overthrow Salvatore Riina as the boss of the Sicilian Mafia.

In the fall of 1989 Marino Mannoia’s mistress contacted the police’s Antimafia unit in Rome, indicating the mafioso was ready to talk.

He was able to update the authorities on the activities within Cosa Nostra throughout the 1980s, including the lupara bianca of Filippo Marchese and Giuseppe Greco.

[4] According to Mannoia the killer was Francesco Di Carlo, a mafioso living in London at the time, and the order to kill Calvi had come from Mafia boss Giuseppe Calò and Licio Gelli.

[5] Marino Mannoia testified that his former boss Stefano Bontade had close relations with Sicilian politicians, in particular with Salvo Lima, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti’s man in Sicily.

[1] In April 1993, after the killing of Lima and the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, he gave evidence against former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was accused of Mafia association.

He described a high-level meeting in 1980 with Salvatore Inzerillo and Stefano Bontade at which Andreotti allegedly arrived with Lima in a bulletproof Alfa Romeo belonging to the Salvo cousins.

[9][10] He lived in an undisclosed location with a new identity in the FBI Witness Protection Program, having been granted American citizenship after testifying against a number of Sicilian Mafiosi at work in the US.

[12] Marino Mannoia was disillusioned by the little reward and support he received from the Italian government in relation to the sacrifice he made and family members that had been killed.