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Misplaced Pages and documentary evidence on the life and times of Vito Roberto Palazzolo

I would like, respectfully, to take up the serious issue of the defamation in his wiki page. I understand that it is against your principles to allow something like this to happen so must bring it to your attention.

The saga concerning Vito Roberto Palazzolo has been going on now for nearly 30 years. There has been a mountain of litigation in 5 countries, for and against him, and given the nature of the allegations, which are Mafia related, the Press have had a field day. No sooner have the last charges been thrown out of court in Rome, Palermo or South Africa, that the courts in Palermo, using the same evidence re-cooked, or the questionable testimonies of “pentiti” (State witnesses), resurrect another charge or indictment. Which would indicate a conspiracy against him, but that would be nearly impossible to prove.

That and the fact that exciting stories about the Mafia, fuelled by the Press, take on a life of their own, means the actual facts have become blurred and indistinct. And it is into this oblique area that the press or anyone who proclaims to take an interest in Palazzolo can go and – apparently without accountability - say what they like. Which is very damaging to Palazzolo and his family, not to mention the aspect of our civilization that we treasure the most - justice.

Unfortunately Palazzolo’s wiki page, authored by one Don Calo (who signs himself as Mafia Expert, but uses only newspaper articles as his sources), has taken that route. As a result Misplaced Pages is promoting a biased and defamatory view of Palazzolo which, being the single most powerful source of information on the internet, is no small matter.

Don Calo makes many defamatory selections, based occasionally on facts but extrapolated, by inference, into aspersions. I give a few examples:

• Italian and US intelligence officers estimate that Palazzolo helped to launder more than US$1.5 billion in drug money through Switzerland.

The figure was $6m which, under threat of his life, he returned to the men who, from October 1982, he knew were in the Mafia. Before then he was blameless.

• State witness Antonino Giuffrè claimed that the Sicilian Mafia's interests in the drug trade in Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and the Far East were managed by Palazzolo.

Guiffre admitted in court that he never met Palazzolo and his "evidence", as evinced by a letter from the Attorney General in Palermo in March of 2005, produced nothing. He was totally discredited.

• Investigations into Palazzolo restarted in 1995 when police in the Cape received inquiries from Italian police, who were after Mariano Tullio Troia, a Sicilian mafioso wanted for the murder of Salvatore Lima, an associate of former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti.

This allegation is as amusing as it was ridiculous. When Troia was arrested in Palermo (not South Africa) they found a baby born of the woman who had hosted him since becoming a fugitive. It was unlikely that he had the time or the opportunity to have slipped away into hiding, meanwhile, in South Africa. When the police raided a house in South Africa they found not Troia but a law abiding, ordinary South African citizen, who reported them to the Police! The Italian Police were ordered by a highly embarrassed Attorney General in Palermo to fly back to Italy immediately.

The list is endless and I have tried to alter the page many times and have conducted dialogues, regarding it, with wiki editors. See below:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/User_talk:UnicornTapestry#Palazzolo

• http://en.wikipedia.org/User_talk:SarekOfVulcan#Defamation_using_unsubstantiated_newspaper_sources
• http://en.wikipedia.org/User_talk:Fircks

Palazzolo’s lawyer even approached wikipedia (see below: “Information Misplaced Pages has purposefully ignored in favour of Vito Roberto Palazzolo”)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Vito_Roberto_Palazzolo#Text_removed_from_article_on_May_28.2C_2009

I have even given Don Calo my email address in the hope that we could discuss the page and his motives in writing unsubstantiated, defamatory material, but he hasn’t responded. In short, I cannot dislodge the page and the defamation goes on.

I looked into the matter of your editorial rules and found the following, with my answers in Bold.

• Whether a specific news story is reliable for a specific fact or statement in a Misplaced Pages article is something that must be assessed on a case by case basis. When using news sources, care should be taken to distinguish opinion columns from news reporting.

Almost everything Don Calo writes and infers can be refuted with documentary evidence, his only “evidence” being low-brow newspapers, mostly in South Africa.

• Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Sources should directly support the material presented in an article and should be appropriate to the claims made. The appropriateness of any source depends on the context. In general, the best sources have a professional structure in place for checking or analyzing facts, legal issues, evidence, and arguments; as a rule of thumb, the greater the degree of scrutiny given to these issues, the more reliable the source.

Patently not the case when quoting the Mail and Guardian or the Sunday Independent in South Africa.

• Where available, academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources, such as in history, medicine, and science. But they are not the only reliable sources in such areas. Material from reliable non-academic sources may also be used, particularly if it appears in respected mainstream publications.

The only academic or peer-reviewed sources are court documents and affidavits from lawyers. Newspapers are concerned with allegations made against Palazzolo, but not his protestations, which don’t sell newspapers.

I tried to answer some of the allegations made against him in Don Calo’s narrative, which I put into the page, but which he removed. I was then advised by wiki editors to take the case to you as there is no reasoning with Don Calo and certainly no chance of clearing his page from Misplaced Pages. See below.

Answers to Don Calo's aspersions on the wikipage Vito Roberto Palazzolo 

Vito Roberto Palazzolo (Terrasini, July 31, 1947) is an Italian living in South Africa. Since he moved to South Africa in the mid 1980s he also goes by the name Robert von Palace Kolbatschenko. It has been alleged, among other things, that he is or was a member of the Sicilian Mafia. All of which he denies.

He assumed these names, which are ancestral, in a bid to travel and go unhindered. See the section below entitled Burgersdorp and von Palace Kolbatschenko

Court cases:

In March 2009, the highest court in Italy confirmed a 2006 nine-year sentence for collusion with the Mafia.

Since 1985 there have been a multitude of court cases and sentences for and against him. Notably here Don Calo omits the fact that on 3 December 2010, in regard to the resulting extradition request from Italy, the Cape High Court interdicted the South African police from arresting him, pending further proceedings in that Court. And on 16 December 2010 an Italian Appeal Court in Caltanissetta admitted a review application with regard to the Palermo conviction. This is a very rare judicial intervention and a full review before the Court will be heard on 5 May 2011.

Corleone Mafia:

He is alleged to be a Mafia treasurer linked to Bernardo Provenzano, the Mafia boss arrested in April 2006 in Corleone, Sicily, and his predecessor Salvatore Riina, both serving life sentences in Italian jails.

The Corleone are considered to be extremists amongst the Mafia and this rumour, like all others, has never been substantiated. One source was the testimony of a man named Antonino Giuffre, a State witness, who also claimed that Palazzolo managed the Sicilian Mafia's interests in the drug trade in Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and the Far East. Guiffre admitted in court that he never met Palazzolo and his "evidence", as evinced by a letter from the Attorney General in Palermo in March of 2005 . produced nothing. Neither had he mentioned Palazzolo in his first informative memo (issued within 108 days from when he becomes a State witness) which, by Law, he cannot change or add to. All of which is covered in a memorandum by the advocate Baldassare Lauria on 13th May 2009.

Money laundering accusations

Italian and US intelligence officers estimate that Palazzolo helped to launder more than US$1.5 billion in drug money through Switzerland.

An interesting extrapolation of the figure for which he was sentenced, in Dolus Eventualis (a vague legal definition pitched somewhere between intent and negligence), which was $6m.

Swiss sentences

A Swiss court sentenced Palazzolo in September 1985 to a three year prison term for money laundering, after establishing he was in control of some of the accounts where money raised from the heroin sales were deposited. The appeal court increased the sentence to five-and-a-half years in April 1986.

It was the same court (Cassation and Criminal Review) on the 5th November 1993, that amended their previous judgement, convicting him instead to 3 years and 9 months imprisonment.

The United States

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) considered him to be one of the top seven in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra..

What Don Calo omits is that this rumour originated from a speaker at the US Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, and was immediately refuted by Louis Freeh, no less, the Director General of the FBI.

Escape to South Africa

While on 36-hour parole from a prison in Switzerland he absconded to South Africa on a false passport – obtained from a fellow inmate at a prison in Lugano, Switzerland – and a holiday visa in December 1986.

In point of fact Palazzolo was at semi-liberty in Switzerland at the time and was awaiting the result of his review application, which in any case he won when he returned to Switzerland, voluntarily, in February 1988. Had he "absconded", as Don Calo states, he would have been charged accordingly, but never was.

Burgersdorp and von Palace Kolbatschenko

Palazzolo travelled to the Eastern Cape, where National Party parliamentarian Peet de Pontes for East London had organised Ciskei residence for him. Palazzolo acquired Ciskei citizenship, and a new name: Robert von Palace Kolbatschenko, claiming aristocratic German lineage, born in Burgersdorp.

Palazzolo has aristocratic Norman Sicilian lineage and his great Grandmother, Princess Kolbatschenko, was in fact German. Hence the name. As to the Burgersdorp claim, when they put in his place of birth the computer in Ciskei wasn't formatted for foreign place names and put in Burgersdorp by mistake. Which was later rectified but by the then the Press had got hold of it and so by default, Don Calo.

Peet De Pontes

On the strength of a new passport in this name, he obtained resident status in South Africa – but all files relating to the application are missing.

The answer to this is that Peets de Pontes was convicted and fined R35,000 because, amongst many other things (including attempted theft from Palazzolo), he got rid of the files.

De Pontes maintained he was wrongly convicted – saying former minister of foreign affairs Pik Botha threatened in 1988 to "destroy him" after a photograph of Palazzolo and Botha together at an NP function was published in a newspaper. De Pontes said among the deals he and Palazzolo worked on was a 1987 sanctions-busting attempt to import submarines and jet fighters for the apartheid regime.

One wonders why, given the credibility of Don Calo's sources, De Pontes and he didn't include atom bombs in their arsenal for the apartheid regime?

Guns and diamonds

After inviting a Home Affairs official to his farm at Franschhoek, Palazzolo was granted a South African residence permit in December 1987. By January 1988, Swiss police had traced him and informed their South African counterparts. The South African Narcotics Bureau (Sanab) raided Palazzolo's Franschhoek farm, Terra de Luc, and arrested him - seizing 10 guns and diamonds worth 500,000 Rand together with documents indicating that Palazzolo had invested more than 25 million Rand in businesses in South Africa and Namibia. He was declared an undesirable person in South Africa and returned to Switzerland to complete his jail sentence.

The diamonds and guns were returned because they were fully documented and legal. There is nothing than can be inferred from this. He was never declared an undesirable person. He returned to Switzerland of his own volition.

Political contacts

In 1992, Palazzolo was reportedly living in a residence in Ciskei belonging to then-military ruler Oupa Gqozo, but soon he was back in South Africa. The Cabinet, headed by president Frederik Willem de Klerk, approved a new South African residence application in March 1993 although at the time Palazzolo was the subject of an Italian extradition warrant, according to the magazine Africa Confidential. In September 1993, De Klerk's government issued a passport to Palazzolo.

The extradition request had been refused because it dealt with the same facts (Double Jeopardy) that had been laid to rest, already, in Switzerland. And it was Mr. Mandela who gave him citizenship in 1994, not De Klerk in 1993.

Blackmail

According to some sources Palazzolo allegedly blackmailed former foreign minister Pik Botha with photographs showing Botha in a compromising position in bed with a black woman. The photographs are said to be in the possession of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA). Botha has said the claim was "absolute rubbish" and threatened a R10 million lawsuit against the Mail & Guardian.

When considering the depths of speculation that Don Calo plumbs when he writes this paragraph, Pik Botha's words, "absolute rubbish" and his "R10m lawsuit", look entirely appropriate.

Business interests

Palazzolo quickly ingratiated himself with the National Party when he arrived in South Africa in 1986 and also successfully wooed many in the African National Congress (ANC) long before Mandela’s party won the 1994 election, which definitively ended the Apartheid regime. Palazzolo established businesses in Southern Africa, ranging from bottled water to diamond prospecting. His interests are represented either through his sons Christian and Pietro, or through the Von Palace Kolbatschenko Trust. The trust, with offices in Cape Town, is affiliated to Palazzolo's Cape International Holdings, registered in the British Virgin Islands.

Palazzolo administers his businesses directly himself, and the VPK Trust is a family Trust.

Among the approximately 20 companies allegedly linked to him are Anglo-Cape Diamonds, Von Palace Cutting Works and La Vie Mineral Waters. One big foreign deal involved taking a 15% stake in a valuable Angolan diamond concession. Since a tax audit on him started in September 1997, he has argued that his only business enterprise in South Africa is the Franschhoek farm, and that he has no other tax liabilities in the country.

Palazzolo has acted and still acts for more than 20 companies worldwide; he is a financial consultant to various mining enterprises and sometimes if the client is short of funds, he accepts some participation in form of shares or equity in projects.

Heading a Mafia "family" in South Africa

Investigations into Palazzolo restarted in 1995 when police in the Cape received inquiries from Italian police, who were after Mariano Tullio Troia, a Sicilian mafioso wanted for the murder of Salvatore Lima, an associate of former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. A March 1998 briefing compiled by Western Cape police intelligence said Italian police claimed Troia was being harboured by Sicilian Salvatore Morettino, a naturalised South African citizen living in Houghton. The Italian police also gave information of contact between Palazzolo and a prominent Sicilian mafia boss, Giovanni Brusca, convicted in Italy for the murder of Antimafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone. The document alleged that Palazzolo was believed to head a Mafia "family" in South Africa. Apart from Troia, Mafia suspects Giovanni Bonomo and Giuseppe Gelardi were given refuge by Palazzolo in South Africa and Namibia after they escaped arrest in Italy. Italian police travelled to South Africa, where they confirmed the presence of a number of mafia suspects and "the existence of a well-knit network of corrupted South African officials that protect the Italian fugitives".

The above came from the PITU (presidential Investigation Task). Bonomo & Gelardi were not fugitives from Italian Justice when they travelled to SA. Troia is the cousin of Dr. Morettino and, since he the day he got married in Johannesburg, has never set foot in South Africa. When he was arrested in Palermo they found a baby born of the woman who had hosted him since becoming a fugitive. It was unlikely that he had the time or the opportunity to have slipped away into hiding, meanwhile, in South Africa. All of these were fabrications by police officials in South Africa who cashed in on the story, paid out by the Italian State Police. The absurdity of which was illustrated when the police raided a house where Troia was supposed to be hiding, where they found instead a law abiding, ordinary South African citizen, who reported them to the Police! The Italian Police were thoroughly embarrassed by this and were ordered by the Attorney General in Palermo to fly back to Italy immediately.

More judicial inquiries

In November 1999, Palazzolo was arrested in connection with fraud and forgery charges relating to his South African citizenship. Home affairs officials discovered that it was issued fraudulently. He was released on a 500,000 rand bail, but re-arrested at his Bantry Bay home in Cape Town in March 2000. In March 2003, he was acquitted of contravening South African law when applying for citizenship in 1994. The judge criticised the Directorate of Public Prosecutions for wasting the court's time with cases they could never win.

The High Court rebuked the Directorate of Public Prosecutions for bringing this case in the first place, told them to withdraw it and to apologise to Palazzolo.

Investigators also probed Palazzolo's alleged role in money laundering through Liechtenstein companies and trusts and requested legal assistance from authorities. An international cooperation granted by the regional court in Vaduz in March 2000 has been ruled invalid. Following an agreement between lawyers for the state and Palazzolo, the Cape High Court ordered that the state "shall forthwith withdraw the requests for mutual legal assistance to Liechtenstein and Switzerland respectively and also any similar requests made to any other countries since 1999". This means investigators cannot access documents, computer data and other information obtained from four companies and trusts based in. The material was seized and sealed after the Vaduz court approved the cooperation request, stating that "for the period from 1986 to present, the South African investigation authorities have managed to trace approximately 90 transactions to a total of approximately R101,5-million". The Vaduz court decision filed in the Cape High Court said there was a "shrewd scheme" to conceal money flows of millions of dollars into the control of Palazzolo. Reference was made to various offshore accounts, including suspected "Cosa Nostra accounts" and several other companies based outside South Africa.

It is hard to know what Don Calo is alluding to, suffice it to say that Palazzolo's money was released by the Attorney General of Switzerland and declared in writing that the money was clean and did not originate from any crime.

Convicted in Italy

This section has been covered in Court Cases above, which list the latest, relevant cases. There is no space to list all his cases which are very complex and long winded so to mention just a few aspects (like Pentiti or State Witnesses, as Don Calo does) is a misrepresentation of Palazzolo's case.

Public relations adviser?

He hired a public relations adviser, Aldo Sarullo, a former actor, playwright and director, who advised Palermo's Antimafia mayor, Leoluca Orlando, and later Silvio Berlusconi's party Forza Italia, to change his image as Mafia boss.

Palazzolo did not hire Aldo Sarullo, nor ever considered hiring him.

Denials

In an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA in July 2009 he denied to be the so-called treasurer for former Cosa Nostra bosses Riina and Provenzano. He said that "for me it is a great dishonour to be considered the treasurer of Riina and Provenzano, two of the biggest criminals Italy has known. It is shameful to be accused of managing the wealth of these two men, whom I have never met. Perhaps others are proud of being associated with them, like state's witnesses, but not me." He challenged "the Italian police or any police, even the secret service, to produce one single transaction I am alleged to have carried out on behalf of Provenzano or Riina." Palazzolo claims he had been "persecuted" by Italian magistrates based on testimony given by crime figures who had turned state's witnesses.

Extradition denied

In January 2007 the Italian government requested the extradition of Palazzolo after the nine-year sentence was handed down by the Italian court for collusion with the Mafia. This was the sixth request from the Italians since 1992. In June 2010, the High Court of South Africa blocked the extradition of Palazzolo due to lack of double criminality requirement as South Africa does not recognize the crime of Mafia association as conceived in Italy. Moreover, the Court also found double jeopardy as Palazzolo had already been acquitted of Mafia association in 1992 by a court in Rome. For the Italian authorities Palazzolo remains a fugitive from justice.

This paragraph is largely illiterate. What Don Calo means is that the High Court of South Africa denied Palazzolo's extradition because of the principle of Double Jeopardy, which is the principle that no man or woman can be tried twice for the same crime. Ergo, Palazzolo had already been tried in Switzerland in 1985, for the same facts. Likewise, his acquittal in Rome in 1992.

Palazzolo Website

In September 2010, Palazzolo opened a website to counter the allegations against him. He maintains that he is wrongly persecuted by the Italian judicial authorities. According to Palazzolo he is the victim of "a politically-charged vendetta that has been waged against me by lawyers, crusading politicians, journalists and opportunists who have climbed onto the bandwagon. It is based on a scourge of hearsay, aspersions, half truths, legal twists, inventions and total fabrications. The rule of law has been subverted for the principle of 'success' in the war against crime. Justice has become about newspaper headlines. The political careers of the leading lights in this war have taken on a life of their own, overriding any legal obstacles in securing a conviction against me. I was scooped up in their nets and dished up to the media as proof of their success in the fight against organised crime."

I would like to write a full treatise on Palazzolo for wikipedia you with all the facts and material evidence (court cases, affidavits, etc) attached.

Fircks (talk) 12:14, 19 February 2011 (UTC) Fircks (talk) 14:58, 8 March 2011 (UTC)