VOGHERA, Italy -- Michele Sindona, mastermind of the biggest bank failure in U.S. history and the man who shook the Vatican's financial empire, died Saturday three days after swallowing cyanide in his prison cell.
Officials said it was still not clear whether Sindona killed himself or was murdered.
Carabinieri military police armed with submachine guns and wearing bulletproof vests were stationed outside the morgue where Sindona's body was held, awaiting an autopsy.
Sindona, 65, died from cardiac arrest between 2:10 p.m. and 2:14 p.m., hospital officials said. The medical certificate listed the cause of death as 'cardiocirculatory arrest consequent to anoxia (total deprivation of oxygen) from poisoning.'
The 65-year-old Sindona had been kept alive by life support systems since Thursday, when he was rushed to the hospital from his prison cell in what doctors called an 'irreversible coma.'
Sindona's heartbeat had become continuously more erratic since late Friday, hospital officials said. Monitors registered no brain activity Friday night, they said, and at 1 p.m. he suffered cardiac arrest.
Sindona's wife Caterina and son Marco and Marco's fiancee were at his bedside in the intensive care section of the Voghera hospital when he died, said Dr. Francesco Nicrosini, director of Voghera hospital.
The wife and son wept as they left the hospital with Marco's fiancee.
'You are jackals,' Mrs. Sindona shouted at reporters waiting outside.
Another Sindona son, Nino, told reporters shortly before his father died that the family planned to bury him in a Milan cemetery where several of his relatives are interred.
The gray-haired financial wizard, once called 'the most successful Italian since Mussolini,' swallowed the cyanide Thursday morning while drinking a cup of coffee.
The poisoning occurred despite the fact Sindona was under 24-hour guard at Voghera, a prison for women 35 miles south of Milan. He was the only male inmate. His meals were prepared under police supervision and served in sealed containers.
'We are still at the initial phases of the investigation,' Assistant State Attorney Giovanni Simoni said. 'We still have to accertain if it is a case of suicide or homicide. The only certainty is that we are in the presence of a poisoning. We will do an autopsy as soon as possible.'
On Tuesday, a Milan court had sentenced him to life imprisonment after Sindona was convicted of paying American gangster William Arico $50,000 to murder Milan lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli in July 1979.
Sindona had been extradited from the United States to Italy in September 1984 to face trial for the fraudulent financial transactions that led to the collapse of his Banca Privata Italiana and the murder of Ambrosoli, the lawyer appointed to liquidate his crashed Italian bank.
Prior to the extradition, Sindona had been serving a 25-year jail sentence handed down by a New York court in 1980 for fraud in connection with the 1974 crash of the Franklin National Bank, which Sindona had bought two years before. Investigators later found $20 million was lost in foreign exchange dealings.
At the time, Franklin was the 20th biggest bank in the United States and was the largest federally insured bank ever to fail.
Sindona had also been a financial adviser to the Vatican since 1969, when he began advising Pope Paul VI on how to sell the Roman Catholic Church's share of a development company that owned the Pan Am building in Paris, the Montreal Stock Exchange building and the Watergate complex in Washington.
The Vatican poured money into Sindona's financial enterprises, eventually losing a sum unofficially estimated at between $46 million and $200 million. The Vatican never disclosed the amount of its financial loss but insisted it was much less.
