Gianni Russo has spent decades at the edges of organized crime, Hollywood, and political intrigue.
According to the New York Post, Russo, now 81, is pulling back the curtain on what he claims he witnessed — and what he says powerful people never wanted revealed.
In his new memoir, Mafia Secrets: Untold Tales from the Hollywood Godfather, written with Michael Benson, Russo makes one of his most explosive assertions yet: that Pope John Paul I did not die of a heart attack in 1978, but was murdered by the mob.
“He was killed for not getting with the program,” Russo writes. “He was taken out, given a hot shot of an untraceable drug, because he wouldn’t play ball.”
According to Russo, the Vatican Bank in the 1970s had become a laundering operation for mob and intelligence money. He claims Archbishop Paul Marcinkus — nicknamed “the Gorilla” — ran the scheme, funneling mob profits into investments through church accounts. A former Swiss Guard allegedly told Russo the pontiff was killed with an “untraceable” injection after discovering and attempting to shut down the operation.
Russo says he was directly involved. As a courier for Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo, he allegedly flew skim money from Vegas casinos to Rome every two weeks, where Marcinkus received the deliveries. When Pope John Paul I ordered the laundering stopped, Russo writes, the payments suddenly halted — and the pope died days later.
“He crossed the mob and had to go,” Russo told The Post.
The memoir contains no shortage of jaw-dropping stories.
One of the most bizarre dates back to 1959, when a teenage Russo worked at a New York salon and found himself accidentally pressing against Marilyn Monroe while washing her hair.
Far from offended, Russo says Monroe began asking for him specifically. That encounter reportedly led to a years-long relationship.
“We never made love, per se,” he said, “but we had a lot in common.”
He recounts long nighttime walks over the Brooklyn Bridge, where Monroe confided her childhood dreams of stardom.
Their paths crossed again in 1962 at the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe — a weekend Russo says was thick with mob tension, the Kennedys’ political maneuvering, and Monroe’s growing disillusionment.
According to Russo, Monroe exploded in anger after being told she was supposed to be part of a filmed sexual encounter involving both Kennedy brothers.
Russo claims he overheard her shouting, “These Kennedy brothers. I am done with them… Bobby got me pregnant six weeks ago and made me have an abortion!”
He says mob boss Frank Costello later warned, “They’re going to kill her.”
Russo’s proximity to infamous moments didn’t stop there. He writes that days before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he encountered Lee Harvey Oswald leaving mob boss Carlos Marcello’s private bathroom during a trip to New Orleans. Russo was then hurried out of the country “for [his] safety,” spending nearly two years in Europe under an assumed name.
The memoir also details his presence at the execution of mob enforcer Tony “the Ant” Spilotro and encounters with Pablo Escobar in Medellín, where he describes a surreal world of cocaine, cash, and hippos roaming a drug lord’s estate.
Russo insists he was never fully inducted into any crime family — a status he suggests allowed him to float between powerful circles without being trapped by any of them.
Asked whether he fears retaliation for what he’s now sharing, Russo shrugs it off. “There’s nobody around now,” he said. “Everybody’s dead.”
Looking back at a life bounced between mobsters, movie stars, and political giants, Russo closes his memoir with a simple declaration: “I am a made man — only by God.”
