Thirteen years after Gianni Versace’s death at the hands of serial killer Andrew Cunanan, who gunned the designer down on the steps of his Miami home, reports have surfaced in a new book that debts owed to the Mafia were the reason for his murder. Former member of the N’drangheta, the Calabrian Mafia, Giuseppe Di Bella says Versace was being used to launder money.
Di Bella told investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi:”There were rivers of money from drugs, extortion, protection rackets, loan sharking, mountains of money and it had to be made clean.
“Bars, restaurants, property and luxury goods were used but also clean businesses like that of Versace.”
While the Versace family calls the allegations “false and shameful,” Rome-based anti-Mafia authority Giancarlo Capaldo says, “We have opened a file into what Di Bella says — he is an informer and his information in the past has always proved correct.”
Versace murdered ‘because of debts to Mafia’ [Telegraph UK]
