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“Married to the Mob: The diamond boer and the honeytrap” – Louis Lieberman - Part 2

https://mg.co.za/article/2015-04-16-married-to-the-mob-the-diamond-boer-and-the-honeytrap/
16 Apr 2015

Blood ties

Such ties, of loyalty if not blood, link Palazzolo – well-known in South Africa thanks to a series of run-ins with the law going back to the mid-1980s – to Messicati Vitale, who is as obscure in South Africa as he is notorious in his home country.

Both belong to the Corleonesi Mafia clan, today headed by one of the most wanted fugitives of the world, Matteo Messina Denaro, whose surname means “money” and who made the Cosa Nostra a successful capitalist venture. In a sense, Palazzolo and Messicati Vitale are the sons of the same godfather, as well as two of the Mafia’s biggest African investors.

Although Messicati Vitale’s fake-face attempt to flee Italy last year failed, Palazzolo succeeded in a not entirely dissimilar caper 28 years earlier. Sentenced in 1985 to three years in a Swiss prison for laundering heroin money, Palazzolo combined a 36-hour Christmas pass with a fake passport to escape to South Africa.

The same financial gymnastics that landed him in a Swiss prison had previously put Palazzolo in touch with South Africans looking to sidestep international sanctions on the apartheid regime through the use of underworld money channels. By the time of his escape, he already owned a Cape winelands farm. Though he arrived a fugitive, and supposedly broke, he almost immediately began buying assets and property – and legal status, first as a citizen of the Ciskei homeland and, by the end of 1995, as a South African citizen.