PALERMO, Sicily -- Seventy-six people, including financier Michele Sindona who is jailed in New York and another man who died in New Jersey, went on trial Monday for trafficking heroin from Sicily to the United States.
The trial, the largest of its kind in Italy, began amid heavy security in the Sicilian capital that has become Europe's largest center for drug trafficking.
The first session was dedicated to a reading of the 1,056 pages of charges. The trial, expected to last several months, was suspended until Friday.
The lawyer for Sindona, who is currently serving a 25-year sentence for fraud that led to the 1974 collapse of the Franklin National Bank, told the court his client would have wanted to attend the trial but was not notified.
Giusto Sciacchitano, the public prosecutor, said Italian officials sent Sindona a notice to stand trial but that it was not delivered by U.S. authorities because of a 'problem of bureaucracy.'
Sciacchitano did not say whether he felt U.S. authorities would have allowed Sindona, who is being tried in absentia, to return to Italy.
Another bureaucratic problem surfaced at the trial's start.
One man who had been ordered to stand trial, Pietro Inzerillo, was killed in Trenton, N.J., last Jan. 15. The cause of death was not revealed.
But because the court has not yet received a death certificate from U.S. authorities, Sciacchitano said Inzerillo could not yet be considered 'officially dead' in Italy and would be tried along with the others.
Members of Palermo's three major Mafia families -- the Gambinos, the Spatolas and the Inzerillos -- are among those charged with trafficking heroin from Sicily to the United States, where the Sicilian Mafia has traditionally good relations with U.S. organized crime.
Sindona is charged with association with the Mafia and two members of the Spatola family are charged with helping the financier in 1978 when he disappeared from New York before standing trial for the Franklin affair.
He resurfaced after 10 weeks and claimed he had been kidnapped but prosecutors said he was actually in Sicily at the time and received help from the Spatola brothers.
The trial ended a long investigation by Palermo magistrate Giovanni Falcone into the Mafia's trans-Atlantic heroin trafficking racket and comes after more than 125 people have been killed in Mafia violence in Sicily this year.
