A Colombian gangster claims he was present in 1978 when Pope John Paul I was poisoned with cyanide.
In a tell-all new book “When the Bullet Hits the Bone,” Anthony Raimondi (69) opens up about John Paul’s death after just 33 days in office.
Raimondi says his co-conspirators killed the pope because John Paul I threatened to expose a billion-dollar stock fraud by Vatican bank insiders.
John Paul – who died after only 33 days in office – vowed to defrock the perpetrators, who would have been jailed.
If he’d agreed to keep his mouth shut, John Paul “could have had a nice long reign” instead of dying, Raimondi says.
The perpetrators included Raimondi’s cousin, Cardinal Paul Marcinkus, who ran the Vatican bank and about “half the cardinals and bishops in the Vatican.”
Raimondi says Marcinkus recruited him to come to the Vatican to help with the murder.
He had to learn the pope’s habits and observe as Marcinkus drugged John Paul by spiking his nightly cup of tea with Valium.
He was told he needed to observe the process and to testify before God that John Paul I didn’t suffer, Raimondi says.
However, rather than be in the pope’s bedroom while he was being murdered, Raimondi says he chose to wait in the corridor outside the bedroom.
“I’d done a lot of things in my time, but I didn’t want to be there in the room when they killed the pope. I knew that would buy me a one-way ticket to hell.”
He claims the Valium did its job so well John Paul wouldn’t have stirred “even if there had been an earthquake.”
His cousin then measured cyanide in the dropper, “put the dropper in the pope’s mouth and squeezed.
“When it was done, he closed the door behind him and walked away.”
A papal assistant checked on him, then cried out that the pope was dying.
Marcinkus and two other cardinals in on the plot “rushed into the bedroom like it was a big surprise,” Raimondi writes.
A Vatican doctor was then summoned, who said the pope had suffered a fatal heart attack.
Raimondi insists the Valium and the deadly toxin killed John Paul I painlessly.
He says a new plan to kill John Paul’s successor, John Paul II was developed soon after he became the new pope.
The fraudsters believed he would take action against them, Raimondi says.
However the new pope decided not to act because he knew he too would die.
Raimondi says he will stand by the claims he makes in his book “till the day I die.
” If they take [the pope’s body] and do any type of testing, they will still find traces of the poison in his system.”
Source
- Herald Sun
- New York Post
- Image: New York Post