Vito Roberto Palazzolo

Vito Roberto Palazzolo (born July 31, 1947) is an Italian businessman previously living in South Africa.

He left home in 1962 at the age of 15 and emigrated to Switzerland.

He completed his studies in Switzerland and Germany and started working as a private banker, servicing high-net-worth individuals, and made substantial amounts of money in the diamond trade.

Born in Terrasini, he moved to South Africa in the mid-1980s.

He also goes by the name Robert von Palace Kolbatschenko.

He is alleged to be a member of the Sicilian Mafia, an allegation he denies.

In 1982, he founded Consultfin SA with Franco Della Torre, a financial services arm of one of three major Swiss banks in Lugano, Switzerland.

The company became a conduit for financial operations of heroin traffickers linked to the Mafia.

Palazzolo first came to the attention of law enforcement in Italy and the United States in the course of money laundering activities in the Pizza Connection heroin trafficking ring between Turkey, Sicily and New York.

Italian and US intelligence officers estimate that Palazzolo was involved in a network that laundered more than US$1.6 billion in drug money through Switzerland.

The Court established that Palazzolo and his partner Franco Della Torre moved 6 million dollars in 1982, half of which was converted into 200 kg. of gold, for Mafia boss Antonio Rotolo, who seriously threatened Palazzolo to return him the money when the latter was warned that the FBI was investigating the suspicious money transfers.

Palazzolo "participated in the financing of the illegal trafficking of narcotics and served as intermediaries in its financing, making the necessary preparations and contributing in this way to dealing in considerable quantities of morphine base, which were shipped by sea from Turkey to Southern Italy, where it was processed into heroin, and from there sent to the USA for sale to consumers."

Some of the money was moved by Palazzolo through offshore companies and fronts from 1979 until his arrest in Lugano (Switzerland) on April 20, 1984, on an international arrest warrant from Italy.

An arrest warrant was issued in April 1984 by prosecuting magistrate Giovanni Falcone requesting Palazzolo's extradition.

The extradition was refused because he was already on trial before the Swiss courts.

The Swiss Criminal Court in Lugano 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.

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.

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.

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 former Ciskei ambassador plenipotentiary, Douw Steyn, told the Harms Commission which investigated the so-called "Palazzolo affair" that Ciskei law had been specially amended to accommodate Palazzolo on condition he donate money to the homeland.

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.

In March 1992 a criminal court in Rome convicted Palazzolo for the crime of "association with the purpose of financing for narcotics trafficking" and sentenced him to two years.

He was acquitted on the charge of Mafia association, however, because the fact "did not exist".

The conviction was suspended, because Palazzolo had already served three years in prison in Switzerland, for the same facts.

At the time, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) considered him to be one of the top seven in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.

However, he is never mentioned as a member of the top echelon of Cosa Nostra in court sentences and academic studies.

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.

Giuffrè's claim could not be substantiated.

In 1993, the Bundesgericht in Bern reduced the sentence to three years and nine months, for having acted in "dolus eventualis", which is a legal interpretation of reckless disregard, somewhere between intent and negligence.

In Italy he was charged for the same offences in the procedures against the Italian end of the Pizza Connection.

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.

Palazzolo maintains his innocence and claims that he has been persecuted by the Italian government, the press, lawyers, politicians, and "opportunists" for many years.

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

On March 30, 2012 Palazzolo was arrested by Interpol at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, Thailand.

Palazzolo was born in Terrasini, Sicily (Italy).