From the New York Post [caution tabloid]:
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. He cites a former Swiss Guard who told him the Pope was killed with an “untraceable” injection.