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New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. The youngest pope to die in 400 years, John Paul I. This is George Lucian Gregoire. And we traveled many miles to Baltimore, Maryland to ask him a question. Could Pope John Paul I have been murdered? When he died...
They had said he died of a heart attack, but was challenged by the Italian Medical Society. He died unwitnessed, and he had no heart problems. The reason we're asking George this question is because he knew Pope John Paul I. The first time I saw him, it was probably a mile or two from the bishop's castle. It was halfway up a mountain. He was in his 50s, early 50s, and he was a mountain climber.
He scaled his last mountain outside of Trento about six or seven months before he died. So he was a fit guy. Right. When George met the future pope, he was the bishop of a mountainous region in northern Italy. And he still used his birth name, Albino Luciani. What was he like? He was a really good guy. Swords and sandals and wine. That's in 68, when Luciani got involved with the priest worker movement.
And that movement had ties to Italy's growing Communist Party, one of the largest Communist parties in Europe, second only to the Soviet Union. George says he visited Luciani at a time when the West was trying to stop the spread of communism around the world. And of course, Shefa Bishop was linked directly to this movement. Priest's okay, but a direct appointment of the Pope would be a serious thing.
George says that the CIA was looking for someone to go to northern Italy to find out whose side Albino Luciani was on. And they thought I could do the investigation as a NATO officer. And I went there on a guise of vacationing. The night after George arrived, he got himself invited to the bishop's castle for a meal. Did he describe his childhood to you? Oh yeah, he gave me all these little stories. Can you tell us some of those? His father was an outcast of the church.
In fact, he had to migrate. He was called a migrant worker because nobody would hire him locally. Luciani's father was a socialist, and he was critical of the Catholic Church. He said that the church claimed to be working on behalf of the poor while was really taking money from the poor to amass wealth and power. But his mother was Catholic. His mother was Catholic. His mother's dedication to the church and her husband's passion for the poor had a deep influence on their son, Albino.
Evidently he was 10 years old and he's on his way to church with his fellow Catholics on a cold winter day and they passed a bunch of children begging in the streets and he turned around and went back to his house. He cooked up a big bowl of soup and put all the lentils that they had and he put it in the midst of the children.
Albino Luciani told George that watching the orphans eat the meal he had prepared for them had filled him with joy. And that's when he decided to become a priest. So at just 11 years old, Albino wanted to go to seminary. But he needed his father's blessing. So Albino wrote him a letter. His father wrote back and offered his blessing under one condition. They gave him the order to change the church back to a church for the poor.
Once he became priest, Luciani always had a smile, especially for the local children. He was well-liked by working people. He also proved a good administrator and moved up in the church hierarchy. Eventually, he caught the eye of Pope John XXIII and in 1958 was appointed bishop.
Luciani had not forgotten those hungry children. He even got your own chapel. Hehehehe.
And it was at one end of the plaza. The great cathedral is at the other end of the plaza. And he pointed to the cathedral and he said, that's not what Jesus told us to do. And he pointed to the other end of the plaza. He had an orphanage. He said, this is what Jesus told us to do. Luciani continued to rise through the ranks of the Catholic Church. But according to George, Luciani's passion for the poor didn't make him popular with everyone.
He sums this up with a quote from another Catholic priest from that time. When I preach compassion for the poor, they call me a saint. When I do something about it, they call me a communist. The John Paul struggle for the poor cost him his life. I'm Mark Smerling, and these are the confessions of Anthony Rimondi. It's just after half past seven, and here's Laurie McMillan with a summary of the news. Pope John Paul I is dead.
If the Mafia wished to bring some of their clean money into Italy, they used Vatican Bank channels. Follow history, Anthony. For as long as we've had popes, if we didn't like them, we'd kill them and we'd put our own guy in there. Luciani was contemplating cleaning up the Vatican Bank. Well, obviously, he passed away before he was able to do it. He only lasted 33 days. Why is he calling you? Because I was the guy that they were bringing up in the family to be the gangster. You don't mess with the Mafia. Chapter 2
So, let's recap. After talking to George Lucian Gregoire, a guy who actually met Bishop Albino Luciani, maybe there were people who wouldn't want Luciani as Pope, because he was determined to bring the Church back to the poor, and Popes ultimately are in charge of the Vatican's finances. But the question remains, was Luciani murdered? And more importantly, was our Brooklyn gangster Anthony Rimondi involved? We needed to find out more about Anthony.
So Zach and I fly to a place where old gangsters go to die, of natural causes, Palm Beach, Florida. Hey, good morning. How are you? I am fine. I'm Mark. I'm Virginia. Nice to meet you.
This is Virginia Guido. Ralph is in the kitchen. He's going to take you out on the lanai, if that's okay with you. Virginia leads us to a big man standing in the kitchen, Anthony's cousin, Ralph Guido. And Ralph looks a lot like Anthony.
They grew up together on Baltic Street back in Brooklyn. His mother and my mother were sisters. My father and his father are cousins. Ralph leads us out back to a covered porch. You like the sunny side or the shady side? Who, me? I sit in the shady. Okay. And we start at the beginning. Can you give me your first memory of Anthony? My first memory of Anthony? He was a fat little boy. Well, then...
Home plate when they played stickball was right outside my mother's bedroom window. He was always heavy. And when we hung out together, they used to make fun of him and all. Ralph, he was kind of like the leader of this whole little block consort. You know, so he always did come to his defense. I used to stop it, tell him, go ahead, go home now. Don't look for a fight with them. Just go.
because he really couldn't take the teasing that they were giving him. Anthony, he wanted so much to be part of it. They were already set with their cliques and everything, so I can understand the frustration.
I was always at his family's house. I kind of liked that whole Italian thing with the dinners and everything like that. You know, they had all these brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles, and I found them mesmerizing. You know, it's like watching a show that you're not really part of, but you want to be.
And according to Virginia and Ralph, the real star of the show on Baltic Street was a broad-shouldered tough guy, half Italian, half Scottish. A guy Anthony told us about in episode one, Hugh McIntosh. My cousin Mac used to come to my house. He used to pull up my friend, he'd say, oh, there's a driver, Jerry parked the car.
Every time Mac walked into a room, it was like the Pope arrived, get his coat, get him a seat, find out what he wants to drink. You know, I'm going to show the proper respect that everybody else is showing because apparently this is somebody who can get things done. They all knew. When Ralph says they all knew, he means they all knew Mac was a gangster. Can I tell them about the engagement party and the gun?
I mean, well, I just said it. We had an engagement party and his cousin Mac leaned over to kiss me and he had a gun. And I was like, oh, that's a hell of a thing to bring to an engagement party. Is it my gift? You know, it was just like... But it was at my house. It was at your mother's house. I know, but you got to remember, I'm 19. Wow, that's a hell of a thing.
And according to Ralph, Anthony looked up to Mac. Mac took him under his wing, and that's all he needed. Mac must have put the bug in his head, and he just started to get wiser and wiser and wiser and doing more and more and more. And he wound up with him. And then he just became, he became Mac. His nickname, do you remember his nickname? Pluto. Mac, he gave him the name Pluto. I don't know if he thought he looked like the dog on Mickey Mouse, you know?
He took it because it was Mac. Pluto was Mickey Mouse's sidekick, his best friend. And most of all, he was his faithful pet. You know, nobody was going to mess with him with Mac there. For him, it was a good thing because he was trying to find who he was. He wanted to be someone like the people he admired. That's my wedding album, if you want to see a picture. I definitely want to see a picture. Do you want to show me? Sure.
Look how beautiful you are. Wow. Thank you. I start flipping through Virginia and Ralph's wedding album, circa 1973. There's Frank's, there's Anthony's, and there's Ralph's. There's a lot of them. Right. In my wedding, you didn't really have to know too many names. You just throw out a few and...
They would be there. As I said, to me, it was an experience. I bet. The photographer's making everyone nervous. We didn't let him stay for the whole wedding. Remember the scene in The Godfather where, in the beginning, where the guy was taking pictures and they ripped the film out? Well, we had to get this guy to stay away from certain people. Oh, no. Yeah, there was a fistfight on the steps. So I said, just do me a favor and just go home.
After they were married, Virginia and Ralph moved away from Baltic Street, and they lost track of Anthony. From what I understand, he became an enforcer. That's, you know, I don't know if he killed anybody. I can't say yes or no, you know, because I have no first-hand knowledge of that. I had a job, I was working. I had the kids, my twin daughters, and I had my own problems.
These days, Ralph and Anthony keep in touch, but they don't see each other that much. I call him every once in a while, and he just keeps going over the old times. I said, I'm not really into it, you know. I'm into my grandkids. Before we leave, there's one more story from his childhood I need to ask Ralph about, because Ralph went to the same grade school Anthony did, St. Augustine's in Park Slope.
How about the airline? The plane crashed. December 16, 1960. Only a few days before Christmas, two commercial airliners collide in the sky above New York City. One plane carrying 84 passengers falls on the park slope section of Brooklyn. The neighborhood was in chaos. Many thought that nearby St. Augustine School, where 1,700 children were attending classes, had been bombed. We were both in school and the plane flew off.
Right by our windows, it was that low. It only crashed up the block. I mean, it was loud and the jet fuel was running down the street. It was pretty bad. Do you remember seeing him that day? Yeah. Yeah, he was scared. He was really scared. He says, "I saw them. They were screaming. They were screaming." You know, I don't know if that affected him, but I think the most that affected him is when we were teenagers.
And they used to pick on him. I guess he decided he wasn't going to just take it anymore. Do you remember his story about seeing death? He says he saw death walking down the street. Maybe. I don't remember what I did two days ago. I don't remember what I did this morning. You said that the plane crash may have put an imprint on Anthony. How did you mean it? I think that made him feel that nobody is immortal, you know?
that he could die at any time. Might have messed up his head a little bit, I think.
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You said that had an effect on you. So what was that effect? I looked at things differently, so to speak. Like, how can I put it? We're back with Anthony Raimondi in Brooklyn, and we're talking about the plane crash when he and Ralph were at St. Augustine's Catholic School. I wanted to be like my uncles because they're coming to the house and everything. And I heard about when they killed somebody or whatever. You know, I said, I could kill somebody. I mean, it's all going on 9, 10, 11.
At that point, it didn't faze me if I hurt anybody. For whatever reason, it didn't faze me. But back then, Anthony was just a kid. And there would be a lot of living Anthony would do between seeing this plane crash in Brooklyn and being called to the Vatican to help plan the murder of a pope. And to understand how Anthony got from one to the other, I need to hear it all. Like this story from Anthony's early teens. I was having a problem with this kid, Raymond Cicero, sticking me in the back with something.
Anthony says he went to school the next day, armed with a penknife and his father's blessing.
Raymond's sticking me. I said, Raymond, stop, stop. I took it out. I stabbed him in the arm and opened up his arm. The nun almost had a heart attack. She almost dropped dead. How old were you? I don't know. I was in the seventh grade. And then there's the story from when Anthony was in high school. He says he threw a desk at a teacher and the school called his parents. I caught a beating that night for my father. I'm not going to lie. He said, what's wrong? I said, I don't want to go to school. I said, I want to be like all my uncles. What happened?
My father, my uncle Frank, my uncle Sal, and my cousin Mac got together, and they were discussing amongst themselves what to do with me. Mac and me were close. I woke up, I go, Mac, what are you doing? He came back up, he hit me, so I went right on the floor. Now, he never would raise his, he never, ever raised his hands to me.
I'm looking at him. I said, what the fuck? He goes, you want to be a tough guy? You want to be a gangster? And he pulled out. I remember, I'll never. He pulled out a gun and put it right to my mouth. He says, you think you got the balls to do this? Just walk up somewhere and blow their fucking brains right out? I looked at him, and I remember he says, I want to be like you guys. I want to be like all of you. If I'm not going to be like you, you might as well kill me. After that, they put me with my cousin, Mac. He brought me down to the Diplomat. It used to be on Carroll Street and 3rd Avenue.
Anthony's talking about the Diplomat Lounge, the hangout for members of the Colombo crime family. If Anthony's violence streak wasn't working for his teachers, it would certainly work for these guys.
The Colombo family is thought to be one of five organized crime families in New York City. This man is Joseph Colombo Sr. He's the number one mafia boss in New York, the head of a Brooklyn family that controls organized crime. What they want to know about Joe Colombo, he's gangster. He's connected with every dirty thing there is. We, the family, know he isn't.
He took on a high profile when he challenged the FBI's tactics by forming the Italian American Civil Rights League. Blood and crime, shylocking, extortion, hijacking, labor racketeering, the restaurants, funeral parlors and businesses taken over because owners couldn't pay off their loans. Joe Colombo's first public nose-thumbing started two years ago with the nightly picketing of Manhattan's FBI headquarters. And when Colombo personally made an appearance, the cheers were loud.
They gave me a little job, clean out the bathroom, mop the floor. After about maybe a week, he gave me a route. You had like the numbers, you had sports, you had horses. Picking up numbers, dropping more, taking the sports bets. And then there was the Shylock business, the guys who had to come down and pay that big, that juice every week. And little by little, I started learning more and more. So they put me in the cadaver club.
The Cadabra Club was on 3rd Avenue between 85th and 86th Street. According to Anthony, the Cadabra Club became his home base. Most days, he would sit at the bar and collect bets or hand out numbers slips. So I'm in there, and I'm, you know, doing my thing. Guy comes in and says, "Who's taking the action here? Who's in charge?" So I go, "I am." Idiot, that should have kept my mouth shut. Guy walks over with a gun. Bang!
Kicks the living shit out of me. Tells me, you come back here. I'm going to blow your head off. Your mother's going to have to have a closed coffin for you. Somehow I made it out to the car and now I'm driving. I'm 16. I got no license. I don't even got a permit. I'm driving down to 3rd Avenue, Cavill Street. I go to make a turn. I crash right into the diplomat wall. They come out. They said, what happened? I said, this guy came into the joint and I told him what happened. So we'll look into it.
And a few days after Anthony took a beating at the Cadabra Club, he found out who it was who assaulted him. He's Sally Grinello's cousin. I said, Sally, I said, you're talking about Sally Burns, the old man? He's no equal to cousin. Salvador Grinello, a.k.a. Sally Burns, was a notorious mobster back then. He was high up in the Genovese crime family. But that's not the guy Anthony says assaulted him. According to Anthony, that was his cousin, also named Salvador Grinello.
And Anthony says his cousin also used the alias Sally Burns. Okay, he's been shaking down the club. He's shaking down everybody with the drugs in the district. Now, my cousin Mac says, wait a couple days, I'm going to bring you down to 3rd Avenue. It's okay. Brings me down to 3rd Avenue. Joe Colombo's there, and we're in Monty's Restaurant down the block. How you feeling? Good, you know, I'm all right. He goes, I want to talk to you. He says, nobody touches my man. He goes, I'll have it taken care of.
I looked at him and says, "Thank you, Joe." He goes, "Don't even worry about this." Now I'm sitting there and my cousin, Matt, calls me over and said, "Listen, let me explain something to you. If Joe Colombo takes care of this for you, you belong to him." I says, "Right." He goes, "But if he don't want you made, you never get made. And you can't make a move without getting his okay. If you had a thing where you can make a million dollars in five seconds and he says, 'No, you can't do it.'" I says, "What do I do?"
Tell him you're going to handle it. So I walk over to Joe and I say, Joe, I want to thank you very much. I said, but I feel I should handle this. It's my responsibility. You put me there. All of a sudden he gets up, he grabs me, he hugs me, he kisses me. He goes, give him a drink. Whatever you do, I back you 100%. Now I'm saying to myself, how the fuck am I going to handle this?
This guy is half nuts, this Sally Burns. What do I do? This guy's got a gun. So Anthony got his own gun. And Friday night comes, I get all dressed, I got the gun on me. I park, I get out of the car, and Dookie the bartender's there. He goes, what are you doing here? I said, I want to see this Sally Burns. I want to stand out with him. He goes, what are you, crazy? This guy's going to kill you. He's been shaking down the club. I'm going to talk to him.
I go walking into the back and I make the turn and I see him sitting there with his back to me. Anthony says that Sally Burns was sitting next to a girl he recognized. He's talking to this girl who comes from my neighborhood. Beautiful girl, blonde. So the DJ booth is there, people are dancing, the music goes down to change and I hear her say, "Anthony's behind you." I took the gun out of my jacket and I had it in my hand. Why? I don't know. Was I scared? Probably.
This guy gets up, you dirty motherfucker, you did, I told you I'm going to kill you, your mother's going to have a close fucking coffin for you. He opens up his jacket, and I see he grabs the gun. I just emptied the whole gun, boom. Anthony says he ran out of the Kadabra Club and ditched the gun. Then he headed to a restaurant down the street from the diplomat called Monty's. His cousin Mac was there with some of the other Colombo guys. Come walking in. What are you doing here? I said, I just got back from, uh...
He comes back within an hour. He says, he's dead.
If you looked at his head, you couldn't tell if it was a guy or a girl. So I'm sitting there, and Joe Colombo looks at me. He goes, how do you feel? I said, all right. I said, I'm hungry. He says, give him a 7 and 7. So I'm drinking a 7 and 7. And everybody's looking at me like, there's something wrong with this kid. It didn't really register that I took this guy out. It didn't register until about the next day. I tried to register, and I said, oh, I killed this fucking guy. My cousin Max says, let it go.
It happens to everybody when they first kill somebody. I was 16 years old. There we go. So you have some news for me?
After our interview with Anthony, I asked Zach to look into his story about shooting Salvador Grinello, a.k.a. Sally Burns, in the Kadabra Club back in the late 1960s. There's pretty good records in New York City of murders that happened. You know, you can verify stuff in paper articles. You can look up police reports. And I've done a lot of that legwork. I can find nothing about somebody with this name. You know, we should think about the names themselves.
that are in the story he told that we can track down. Well, you know, I mean, the one that popped out to me was, uh, was the girl he went to high school with. Right. I mean, if she was alive, she's sitting right next to the guy and she would definitely remember it. You know, recording stopped. Hey, Mark. Hey, hey, sorry. We did find that girl.
Zach found an old photo in Anthony's high school yearbook, and then I tracked down her phone number. Sorry about that. I told you I'd call you. Oh, that's fine. Now in her 70s, she doesn't want me to use her name, so I'll call her Sarah. So what do you think of the, that's you in the picture from the high school, right? Oh, yeah, that's incredible. I'm like, oh, my God, so nice to be young, you know.
What was Brooklyn like back then? What was South Slope like? Do you remember the wise guys hanging out? Oh, I knew a lot of mafia when I was growing up. Right around the corner from me
was this mafia bar and like did you ever hear of jimmy duranty of course the schnauzer yeah he used to go there taro marino he's the one that owned the bar and you know what when uh
Me and my sister and brother would see his wife walking down the street. We would take string and tie it to the lamppost, to the fence, and she would get caught up in it, and we would laugh. I said, if he ever found out, he probably had us whacked. Hato, P-A-D-O. Sarah's fun to talk to. And she makes me realize just how much the Mafia was a part of daily life in Brooklyn back in the 60s and 70s. Yeah, go ahead.
I search online for this guy, Tato Marino. And he was this bodyguard for this big gangster. I just found him on our website. He was associated with Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese. That's the guy, Lucky Luciano. He was his bodyguard. Thank you. Now it's time to ask Sarah about Anthony Raimondi and the night he claims he killed Salvador Grinello, a.k.a. Sally Burns, at the Cadabra Club, while she was sitting right next to the guy.
I text Sarah an old photo of Anthony. Anthony doesn't look familiar to me at all. You don't remember some sort of crazy night in a club, any club, where there was a shooting? No, that I don't. You know, you'll have to excuse me. My mind is like, I go to do something, and then I'm like, what did I come here to do? It's like, you know, sorry, I can't help you with that.
After I hang up the phone, I'm having doubts about Anthony's story. How can Sarah not remember this shooting? The way I see it, there are only a few possibilities. One, Sarah doesn't want to tell me she was there that night. Two, Anthony's got the wrong girl.
Or three, this shooting never happened. And if this story isn't true, then what about Anthony's other stories? Was he even a big-time mobster? Was he actually called in to help poison a pope? But then, a few days later, Sarah calls me back with another story. So tell me the story. So the last day of high school, you graduate. Tell me what happened.
I just saw, I know is that this guy took me to a rally in Bensonhurst because it was like a time section. I don't know. Are you from Brooklyn? Yeah. Yeah. You know, Bensonhurst then, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So he took me to this rally was for Joe Colombo. And all I know, remember the only thing I remember is that that's when he was shot when I was there. Yeah.
Joe Colombo's assassination is a big deal in mafia history. So, I look up the details. I just remembered that he got shot, that's all. I must have heard it, you know.
Then I seen he got shot and I said, oh, time to get out of here. You know? I'm starting to realize just how tricky memory can be. And now I'm wondering if there's a fourth possibility about Anthony's story of shooting Salvador Grinello. Sarah just doesn't remember. At this point, I'm also starting to wonder if there's anyone who can corroborate Anthony's story. Sure enough, there is.
Hello? Hey, is this Billy? Yes. That's when Zach sends me a recording of a conversation he had with an old associate of Anthony's.
He found him down in Palm Beach, Florida. Hey, Billy. This is the guy working on the podcast with Anthony. How are you? Good. How are you? Doing good. Can you just tell me a little bit about how you first met him? Let's see. I met Anthony. I was probably 16, 17 years old. You know, I helped him out with pickups. I drove him around a lot. I hung out at some of the clubs to make sure everything's okay. And that's how we started.
He was running clubs, collecting money. They were doing some loan shocking, sports betting, stuff like that, which was pretty much what went on in those days. I think around that time he ran into trouble with the law for the first time. He got picked up for something. Do you remember that happening? This was in like the early 70s. Oh, that's when he first got, that's when he shot the guy in the club.
Yeah. Yeah, I wasn't around, but I know the stories. You heard it. Did you hear it from him or from someone else? I heard it from a lot of people. Next time, the Cadabra Club shooting catches up with Anthony Raimondi. They charged me with the civil rights violation of one Salvatore Granello, a.k.a. Sally Burns. Here's how you violated him.
He cannot see his children grow up. He cannot earn money to take care of his family. He cannot grow old and be a grandfather and be a grandfather, and on and on and on this goes. And Pope John Paul I gets in a fight with the head of the Vatican Bank. So on that day, Martinus earned a new enemy. Little did he know that that new enemy would eventually become a pope.
The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi is a USG Audio and Truth Media podcast in partnership with Clockwork Films. The show is produced by Alexa Burke, Kenny Kusiak, and Kevin Shepard. Zach St. Louis is our senior producer. Mark Smerling, that's me, is your host and story editor. Executive producers are Josh Block from USG Audio, Jamie Cohen, Naomi Harvey, and Rob Huxley from Clockwork Films, and me, Mark Smerling.
Scott Curtis is our production manager. Production support from Josh Lalonghi at USG Audio. Fact-checking by Dania Saloum. Sound design and mixing by Kenny Kusiak. Music by Universal Production Music, Marmoset, and Kenny Kusiak. Our title track is Big Fish by Kenny Kusiak. Legal review by Linda Steinman and Abigail Overdell at Davis Wright Tremaine.
If you've enjoyed The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi, leave us a review on iTunes. It really helps other people find the show. And thanks for listening.