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Gianni Russo, 81, has witnessed executions, assassinations, and conspiracies spanning six decades in the underworld. But perhaps his strangest story centers around what really happened to the pontiff.
He alleges that Pope John Paul I didn’t die from a heart attack in 1978, as is widely believed, but was instead murdered by the mob after just 33 days on the job.
“He was killed for not getting with the program,” Russo writes in his new memoir “Mafia Secrets: Untold Tales from the Hollywood Godfather,” written with Michael Benson (Citadel, out now). “He was taken out, given a hot shot of an untraceable drug, because he wouldn’t play ball.”
In the book, he asserts that, in the 1970s, the Vatican bank became a money laundering machine for mob and intelligence money. Archbishop Paul “the Gorilla” Marcinkus, the head fiduciary of the Vatican Bank, oversaw the operation, investing the mob cash and turning the institution into a heavenly “wash ‘n’ dry.” He cites a former Swiss Guard who told him the pope was killed with an “untraceable” injection.
(The Vatican has consistently denied wrongdoing in connection with the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, though it paid $250 million to the collapsed bank’s creditors in the 1980s. Marcinkus, who avoided prosecution by claiming diplomatic immunity, maintained his innocence until his death in 2006.)
Russo claims he worked as a courier for Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo, flying Vegas casino skim money to Rome every two weeks where it was received by Marcinkus. When Pope John Paul I discovered the scheme and ordered it stopped, Russo writes, the deliveries suddenly paused.
Soon after, the 65-year-old pontiff was found dead in his chambers. “He crossed the mob and had to go,” Russo, who lives on the Upper East Side, told The Post in an exclusive interview.
It’s one of many outrageous claims in the memoir.
One of his most explosive tales involves Marilyn Monroe. In 1959, Russo was 16-years-old, washing her hair at the Lilly Daché Salon in New York, when he realized he had an erection pressed against the most famous movie star on earth.
It wasn’t on purpose, he said, just a side effect of the close quarters. “I thought I was gonna get fired,” Russo remembered with a laugh. “But after that first appointment, she started requesting me. I didn’t know whether she liked the boner in her ear or the massage. She gave me a $5 check every time.”
That uncomfortable encounter became the beginning of what Russo claims was a years-long relationship with Monroe. “We never made love, per se,” Russo said, but, “We had a lot in common.”
During long walks across the Brooklyn Bridge at night, she told him about being raised in an orphanage in Burbank where she could see the Warner Bros. water tower. “She told herself, ‘Someday I’m going to be a movie star,’” Russo remembered.
Russo would eventually make his own mark in Hollywood, playing the wife-beating Carlo Rizzi in 1972’s “The Godfather,” a role that came decades after his introduction to the real-life underworld that inspired the film.
A decade before that, in the summer of 1962, his personal history with Monroe collided with hard politics at the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. On paper, it was owned by Frank Sinatra but, Russo notes, effectively controlled by Chicago boss Sam Giancana.
Frank Costello, the legendary “Prime Minister of the Underworld” who had effectively adopted Russo as a teenager, sent him there as his “eyes and ears” for a weekend summit with Sinatra, Giancana, and the Kennedy brothers, furious that Bobby Kennedy was prosecuting the mob after Jack’s election owed much to mob muscle.
“Marilyn Monroe is going to be there,” Costello warned him, “and I want you to stay away from her.” She was, he explained, “part of the plan.”
According to Russo, the “plan” was crude and cinematic: a filmed three-way in Marilyn’s bungalow with both Kennedy brothers, a pornographic kompromat project that would guarantee leverage over Camelot. “What could go wrong?” Russo writes, before answering his own question: everything.
When Sinatra finally explained the scheme to Monroe in private, Russo said he heard her screams from across the pool. By the time he got close enough to listen, she was raging.
“These Kennedy brothers. I am done with them. They’re using me like a piece of meat!,” Russo claims to have overheard her saying. “Bobby got me pregnant six weeks ago and made me have an abortion!”
Russo reported this to Costello afterward. “She said ‘abortion’? She said that word out loud so people heard?” Costello asked. When Russo confirmed it, Costello allegedly made a chilling prediction: “They’re going to kill her.”
That ability to be present at history’s most dangerous moments, but always just peripheral enough to survive, traces back to how Russo entered the mob’s orbit in the first place.
It began with an act of defiance. In 1955, Russo was twelve, half-crippled from childhood polio, standing on a Manhattan corner selling ballpoint pens when a stranger in an expensive suit kept stopping by, peeling off a bill and rubbing the withered arm he dragged behind him.
A doorman finally explained what was happening: “That’s because you’re, you know, handicapped. Rubbing your gimpy part. It’s good luck.”
Russo decided he’d had enough. The next time the man approached, the kid pulled away and snapped, “I ain’t your gimp … Here’s a rabbit’s foot. Keep your hands off me.”
Instead of walking off, the man pulled out a wad of cash and peeled off two hundred-dollar bills. “Give me all those pens. No more pens. From now on, you work for me.”
Only after he left did the doorman tell Russo who he’d just backtalked: Frank Costello, one of the most powerful mob bosses in New York.
From that moment, Russo became Costello’s courier, delivering envelopes of cash through Manhattan’s underworld. “Costello loved me because I was a gimp,” Russo told the Post. “Nobody would ever think I was carrying $4,000, $5,000. But I was.”
Dressed in a sharp suit, a teenage Russo moved easily through bars, bookie joints and nightclubs.
One day he was delivering envelopes at the Copacabana, watching Frank Sinatra do a soundcheck. “Sinatra looked at me and asked the manager, ‘Who’s this guy?,’” Russo recalled. “He said, ‘That’s Costello’s boy.’ I felt ten feet tall.”
Russo’s proximity to power came with risks. Monroe was only one node in what he frames as a larger web of hidden conspiracies, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
He writes that in November 1963, Costello sent him to New Orleans to meet with Carlos Marcello, the mob boss who controlled Louisiana and much of Texas. Russo claims he bumped into Lee Harvey Oswald coming out of Marcello’s private bathroom at a restaurant days before the assassination. The House Select Committee on Assassinations later concluded that Marcello had the “motive, means, and opportunity” to kill JFK, noting he could be linked to both Oswald and Jack Ruby.
Costello then shipped Russo to Europe “for [his] safety” in the run-up to Dallas.“I was on the lam and laying low, but I hardly thought about it,” he writes of the twenty-two months he spent being moved around Spain and Italy under an assumed name.
In one of his book’s most harrowing passages, Russo describes being ordered to attend the execution of Tony “the Ant” Spilotro and his brother Michael in a Midwest basement after Spilotro’s reckless violence threatened the Outfit’s skim in Las Vegas. “The men with the bats were professionals and precise with their blows … shoulders, chest, legs. Everywhere but the head,” he writes. “The head would be saved for last.”
Gag removed for a moment, Anthony looked at him and begged: “Gianni … tell them to stop beating Michael. He ain’t done nothing. Please.” Russo couldn’t intervene; he simply watched as the brothers were bludgeoned to death.
After a shooting at his Vegas club put him in trouble with both law enforcement and Colombian drug traffickers, Russo went to John Gotti for help, only to hear the Teflon Don roar with laughter and offer to buy him a one-way ticket: “Because you ain’t coming back!”
Gotti was right to laugh. Russo was being sent to Medellín, Colombia, the heart of Pablo Escobar’s cocaine empire. At Hacienda Nápoles, Escobar’s sprawling estate, drug money and eccentricity were indistinguishable. “The more I learned about my host, the crazier he sounded,” he writes. Escobar “had a ton of guns, a ton of coke, and a ton of money, but he also had a giant rubber-tipped stick for beating his hippos,” a detail that reads like farce until you remember those hippos’ descendants still roam Colombia today.
Again, these are claims, not findings of any official inquiry, and Russo presents them in that spirit: sensational, sourced to particular individuals, and impossible to fully corroborate decades later.
When asked if he worries that somebody might try to kill him for what he’s revealed, Russo is dismissive. “There’s nobody around now,” he said with a laugh. “Everybody’s dead.”
He insists that he was never formally “buttoned up” into any family, despite having “made [his] bones and [been] qualified to be made,” and that this liminal status is precisely what allowed him to navigate between mob bosses, movie stars and politicians. “I rose from quarantine in Bellevue to the World of Billionaires,” he writes. “I am a made man — only by God.”
