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 BY BRUCE JOHNSTON IN ROME THE MAFIA WAS behind the assassination plot which left the Pope badly injured in 1991, according to a supergrass. 
 
 Vincenzo Calcara, a turncoat described by Mafia watchers as a serious and reliable collaborator, said Ali Agca, the Turk who shot the Pontiff in St Peter's Square, was a hit-man working for the Mafia. 
 
 Calcara said that Salvatore "Toto" Rina, the Mafia's now jailed Godfather, and Antonio Vaccarino, a former mayor of a small town who has been embroiled in many organised-crime inquiries, were behind the attempt. 
 
 Also working together with them was a man called Antonov, whom the other two later had killed and secretly buried near Milan, Calcara said. 
 
 Magistrates in Sicily have sent transcripts of his testimony to colleagues in Rome; however reports said that a search for a body following the turncoat's indications had produced nothing, adding that investigators had expressed their doubts as to the veracity of the claims. "In the beginning it was said that the Mafia had ordered that the Pope be killed, but there is nothing to suggest that this is true," said Antonio Marini, the prosecutor who handled investigations into the assassination attempt. 
 
 However, Agca did visit Palermo four months before he shot the Pope; and Calcara recently accused a leading Vatican figure and Sicilian criminal exponents of recycling dirty money. Meanwhile, the Mafia's jailed "cashier", Pippo Calo, has become the object of a new arrest warrant. ||||| Image caption Schoolgirl Emanuela Orlandi went missing in Rome in June 1983 
 
 A former mafia mobster has written to the Pope asking to confess three "very important secrets", including details about one of Italy's most famous missing persons cases, it's been reported. 
 
 In a six-page letter, Vincenzo Calcara says he is "convinced" his confessions "can change the course of certain events", according to La Repubblica newspaper. Calcara was a member of Sicily's Cosa Nostra, before becoming a so-called "pentito", or police collaborator. 
 
 Now he wants to meet Pope Francis one-to-one, apparently to divulge information relating to the disappearance of 15-year-old schoolgirl Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, who went missing in Rome in 1983, Il Messaggero newspaper reports. 
 
 "The truth on this incident has been kept hidden for years," Calcara writes. "Because to reveal it would be like opening a box and bringing to light truths so weighty as to throw into crisis a system that links the Vatican with other deviant entities." 
 
 At meeting with mafia victims' families in March, Pope Francis warned mafia operatives they would "end up in hell" unless they choose to repent. The speech is considered one of the Vatican's strongest attacks on Italy's organised crime networks. 
 
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– In what could be one of history's more intriguing cases of a Catholic confessing his sins, a former mobster has asked for a meeting with Pope Francis so he can confess three "very important secrets." Vincenzo Calcara, described by the BBC as a "mafia turncoat" who was a member of Sicily's Cosa Nostra before becoming a police informant, wrote a six-page letter to the pope claiming that what he has to say "can change the course of certain events," according to local media. (This after Pope Francis in March warned mobsters to repent or "end up in hell.") Specifically, he implies he has information about the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee. Calcara wrote that what happened has been kept secret "because to reveal it would be like opening a box and bringing to light truths so weighty as to throw into crisis a system that links the Vatican with other deviant entities." It's not Calcara's first run-in with the church: Years ago, he claimed that Ali Agca, who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in a St. Peter's Square shooting in 1991, was a hitman hired by the mafia, according to the Catholic Herald. And in 1994, the AP reported Calcara claimed that a US archbishop who once ran the Vatican bank had helped mobsters launder $6.5 million through the bank. That allegation was denied by the cardinal who ran the Vatican bank at the time.