‘Godfather’ Actor Claims Pope was Murdered in Mob Plot to Silence Vatican Secrets

Former Godfather star Gianni Russo, now 81, is making explosive claims that sound straight out of a Hollywood thriller — except he swears they’re true.

In his new tell-all, Mafia Secrets: Untold Tales from the Hollywood Godfather, Russo says Pope John Paul I didn’t die of a heart attack in 1978 after just 33 days as pontiff. Instead, he claims the pope was “taken out” by the mob for uncovering a money-laundering operation inside the Vatican Bank.

“He was killed for not getting with the program,” Russo writes. “He was given a hot shot — an untraceable drug. Because he wouldn’t play ball.”

Russo alleges that in the 1970s, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, known among mob circles as “The Gorilla,” turned the Vatican Bank into a secret laundering hub for Mafia and CIA cash. According to Russo, he himself served as a courier for Chicago boss Tony Accardo — flying skimmed Vegas casino money to Rome every two weeks for Marcinkus to “clean.”

When Pope John Paul I learned of the scheme, Russo claims he demanded it be stopped. “That’s when the deliveries stopped,” Russo said. “And soon after, the pope was dead. He crossed the mob — and had to go.”

The Vatican has long denied any role in the infamous Banco Ambrosiano scandal, though it quietly paid $250 million to the bank’s creditors in the 1980s. Marcinkus, who died in 2006, was never charged, shielded by diplomatic immunity.

Russo’s new book isn’t just about popes — it’s packed with star-studded scandal. One story involves Marilyn Monroe, whom he says he met as a teenage shampoo boy in 1959 at the Lilly Daché Salon in New York.

“She started requesting me after the first time,” Russo told The Post. “I didn’t know if it was because of the massage — or because she liked the boner in her ear.”

Russo says the two struck up an unlikely bond that lasted years. They’d take long walks across the Brooklyn Bridge, where she’d talk about her rough childhood and dreams of stardom. “She said she used to stare at the Warner Bros. water tower from her orphanage in Burbank and promise herself she’d make it,” Russo recalled.

By 1962, Russo was working for mob boss Frank Costello — a man he says “adopted” him as a boy. Costello sent him to Frank Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, supposedly to keep watch during a meeting between Sinatra, Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, and the Kennedy brothers.

Costello’s warning: “Stay away from Marilyn. She’s part of the plan.”

That plan, Russo alleges, was to secretly film Monroe in bed with John and Bobby Kennedy to blackmail the White House. But the scheme fell apart when Monroe realized she was being used.

“She was screaming at Sinatra,” Russo recalled. “‘Those Kennedy brothers are using me like a piece of meat! Bobby got me pregnant six weeks ago and made me have an abortion!’”

Russo says he reported her outburst to Costello, who simply replied, “They’re going to kill her.” Monroe was found dead weeks later.

Russo claims he brushed shoulders with some of the most dangerous men of the 20th century. He says he met Lee Harvey Oswald days before JFK’s assassination while visiting mob boss Carlos Marcello in New Orleans — a man later suspected of having both the “motive and means” to kill Kennedy.

In another chilling account, Russo describes watching mob enforcer Tony “the Ant” Spilotro and his brother beaten to death in a Midwest basement — the same gruesome killing dramatized in Casino. “The men with the bats were precise,” Russo writes. “Everywhere but the head. The head was saved for last.”

After a shooting at his Las Vegas club left him in trouble with both the law and Colombian cartels, Russo begged John Gotti for help. The Teflon Don laughed and told him, “You ain’t coming back!”

Gotti was half right. Russo says he was sent to Pablo Escobar’s compound in Medellín, where the drug lord entertained him by beating his pet hippos with a rubber stick. “He had a ton of coke, a ton of money — and a ton of crazy,” Russo writes.

When asked if he fears for his life after publishing such claims, Russo only laughs. “There’s nobody left,” he said. “Everybody’s dead.”

Still, the actor insists he never officially joined the Mafia — though he admits he earned his way. “I made my bones,” Russo says, “but I was only made by God.”

Gianni Russo’s memoir, “Mafia Secrets: Untold Tales from the Hollywood Godfather,” co-written with Michael Benson, is available now from Citadel Press.