Nation: Missing Person

Did Sindona scamper?

He was an international financier with a personal fortune once estimated at $450 million. Nonetheless, when Michele Sindona, 59, was reported kidnaped in New York City last week, hardly any one showed signs of alarm about his safe ty, not even the federal prosecutors who had planned to try him next month for fraud. The charges stem from his pur chase in 1972 of a controlling interest in New York’s Franklin National Bank, which collapsed two years later in the biggest bank failure in U.S. history. Reason for the calm: just about everyone figured that the kidnaping was a hoax.

Sindona’s disappearance was first reported by his secretary, who said she had received a phone call from a man with a foreign accent. His message: “We now have Michele Sindona as our prisoner. You will be hearing from us.” Several days later, the missing man’s family reported getting a letter from his captors saying that he must answer to “proletarian justice.” U.S. law enforcement officials remained skeptical and listed him as a “missing person” rather than as a kidnap victim. Said Italian Magistrate Guido Viola of Milan, where Sindona has been charged with a bank fraud totaling $225 million: “More likely, he has fled to some distant place. He has disappeared in his most difficult moment, when he was to come before American justice.”

Actually, police in New York suspect that Sindona may be more afraid of the charges against him in Italy, which are simpler than the 99 counts in the U.S. indictment. It sets forth a case that is scarcely less complicated than a New York subway map; criminal lawyers suggest that a jury might find the evidence too confusing to vote conviction. More over, one of the chief witnesses against him, Lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli, the court-appointed liquidator of Sindona’s bankrupt Italian empire, was killed last month by three gunmen in Milan, a day before he was to sign a 50-page deposition for U.S. prosecutors.

Clearly, Sindona has the funds to maintain a luxurious lifestyle in almost any country. Investigators believe that he actually has been living on money that he salted away during his years of wheeling and dealing. In any event, he had no trouble in making bail after his arrest in New York last March: he put up his apartment in the Pierre Hotel, which is worth $500,000, and $ 150,000 in cash.