A quarter of a century ago, when Diego Maradona was (supposedly) recovering from cocaine addiction in Cuba at the invitation of his friend Fidel Castro, Argentina’s genius and arch-cheat granted me an unforgettable audience.
Though he was massively overweight and had narrowly survived a near-fatal, drug-induced seizure, copious supplies of white powder were still being smuggled into his chalet. Yet, deluded as ever, he assured the world of his invincibility.
‘If Maradona does not stop taking drugs he will surely die,’ he declared, hubristically referring to himself in the third person like the emperor Julius Caesar.
‘And Diego Maradona does not intend to go to heaven with just one Beatle [John Lennon was then the only one to have died]. Maradona will only ascend there when all four Beatles are waiting to meet him.’
Crazy. Pure crazy. And yet this week, five years after his death, the madness that always surrounded Maradona – who consorted with the Italian Mafia, took a 15-year-old Cuban girl as his mistress and bragged of bedding 6,000 women (‘you can add a zero’ to that, laughs a friend) yet considered himself a global statesman – is back again from beyond the grave.
In a court case that is becoming more sensational by the day, the seven medics caring for him when he died at home of a heart attack, in November 2020, are charged with his manslaughter.
But prosecutors claim their maltreatment went way beyond neglect. They accuse his ‘home hospitalisation’ team of plotting his murder.
Given his gargantuan excesses, it is something of a miracle that the world’s finest – and most egomaniacal – footballer survived until shortly after his 60th birthday in 2020, when he suffered a fatal heart attack while recovering from a brain-bleed operation.
By then he had swapped cocaine for beer, wine and rum and he retained the appetite, as well as the ego, of a Roman emperor, so it seemed reasonable to assume his death to have been self-inflicted.
But in his homeland the scales never fell from people’s eyes.
While the little bull became England’s bete-noire after the infamous ‘hand of God’ goal that eliminated our national team from the 1986 World Cup, when Argentina went on to win the tournament he returned home a living legend, enhancing his ghetto-cred in those benighted, post-Falklands War times, with his self-styled far-Left views.
When a legend dies it can’t be their own fault. Someone else must be held responsible and brought to account.
And so, this week, I sat in a stifling courtroom in San Isidro, a handsome colonial town an hour north of Buenos Aires, and listened as a phalanx of testosterone-charged lawyers tried to pin Maradona’s death on the seven hapless medics.
Led by his publicity-loving personal physician Dr Leopoldo Luque and including a psychiatrist and psychologist who were trying to wean him off booze, they are all accused of ‘homicide by negligence’, a charge similar to involuntary manslaughter in England and Wales.
The plaintiffs are Maradona’s sisters, three of his countless exes and their offspring (including his belatedly acknowledged illegitimate daughter Jana and son Diego Junior) and when the case opened, the prosecution immediately upped the ante.
Brandishing a photo of his hideously bloated corpse before the three unlikely-looking judges – a cadaverous Christopher Lee lookalike flanked by two trout-pouts – chief prosecutor Patricio Ferrari barked: ‘Maradona died like this!
‘Those who say they didn’t know what was happening to Diego are lying to your face! On November 25, [2020], the defendants deliberately and cruelly decided he should die.’
The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Fernando Burlando, went further, depicting an ‘inhumane and effective plan’ whereby the far-from-magnificent seven ‘willingly neglected their duties with the aim of causing death’.
Maradona’s carers had ‘switched his meds as if they were experimenting on an animal’. Lest his inference wasn’t clear, he added: ‘It’s clear that Maradona was murdered.’
Read from afar, it sounded like an outlandish exaggeration.
Listening to the evidence unfold this week, however, I began to countenance a chilling possibility: that the scapegoats Argentina desperately needs to find to protect their unofficial patron saint’s reputation really do exist.
This suspicion grew when, away from the courtroom, a Maradona family lawyer told me he is fighting to retrieve a £54million fortune the star secretly salted away in Jersey and other offshore havens.
I’ll return later to this intriguing, and hitherto unknown, twist to the story.
Back in court, meanwhile, expert medical witnesses had been giving damning descriptions of the conditions at the soulless, modern villa rented for Maradona’s recovery, in a gated complex on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
Colin Campbell, the first doctor to enter Maradona’s ground-floor bedroom after he died, noted the absence of basic post-surgery medical equipment such as a defibrillator, and the poor state of hygiene.
And pathologist Dr Mauricio Casinelli, who conducted the post-mortem examination (assisted by five other doctors because of Maradona’s importance) declared it ‘likely’ that, given the appropriate care, Argentina’s unofficial patron saint would still be among us.
Though he suffered a fatal heart attack, Dr Casinelli said his autopsy proved his death was not ‘sudden’ at all.
In truth, it was ‘entirely predictable’ and caused by oedema – water retention that caused huge bloating yet apparently went undetected by his carers for at least four days.
Bristling with indignation, he said it could have been alleviated if his medics had put him on a salt-free diet. Instead, they fed him with sandwiches and crackers.
Other witnesses have claimed Maradona was also supplied with beer and wine from a fridge beside his bed despite his alcoholism.
Though several people were in the house on the day he died, Dr Casinelli said he must have spent up to 12 hours ‘dying in agony worse than that suffered by patients in the last throes of terminal cancer’.
He had deduced this from the blood clots in Maradona’s heart, which was double the normal size and weighed 1.11lbs. (I later worked out that this is about three ounces more than the footballs he once dribbled.)
Removed from his body before he was buried in a private cemetery, for fear that it might be stolen by ghoulish fans, this inflated organ remains locked in a laboratory safe.
As the grisly evidence wore on, illustrated by slides that turned the stomach, it posed a rather obvious question: assuming Maradona’s squalid death was no accident, who might stand to benefit from it, and why?
For the first five days of the trial nobody had deigned to address the matter of a motive, but on Thursday, when Luis Ramirez – the lawyer for Maradona’s son Diego Junior – rose to his feet, a possible answer emerged.
Ramirez appealed for two of Maradona’s five sisters – Rita and Claudia – to be dismissed as plaintiffs because they are also embroiled in a civil case over his estate, due to begin behind closed doors in Buenos Aires on April 8.
Given the chaos that always surrounded his business affairs, this second lawsuit is enormously complex.
However, in his later years Maradona signed the rights to his lucrative brand – which endorses everything from noodles to gambling machines – over to Sattvica, a company set up by his business manager Matias Morla and Morla’s brother-in-law Maximilian Pomargo.
According to Argentine Press reports, the pair planned to use it as the platform for a money-spinning project called Maradona Universe.
This would see Diego-themed bars, restaurants and theatre shows open around the world, and four new Maradona museums, in Naples, Tokyo, Havana and Buenos Aires, where his embalmed body would be exhibited when he died.
This grandiose vision is yet to be realised, but 21 Maradona-branded ventures and products were registered in Argentina at the time he died, with 105 more in the offing and a further 120 earning royalties in other countries.
However, daughters Dalma, 37, and Gianinna, 35, have claimed their father was tricked into signing his rights to Sattvica while under the influence of drugs and hired calligraphy experts to analyse his signature.
Morla, for his part, claims to have 640 audio and video messages proving Maradona’s consented clear-headedly to the contract – adding that the agreement spared him from succumbing to overtures from a Chinese businesswoman.
It remains to be seen how much of this story unravels in the impending civil case, in which several of Maradona’s heirs accuse Morla and Pomargo of fraudulently depriving them of their share of the branding rights and demand redress.
But when attorney Ramirez called – vainly – for the sisters to be excluded from the manslaughter case, and others backed his appeal, the lid was blown clean off this Pandora’s box.
Felix Linfante, who represents Maradona’s illegitimate daughter Jana, told the three judges how ‘dark beliefs’ and ‘rumours’ were swirling around the trial.
Word had it, he told the court, that, having acquired the rights to his name, the footballer’s ‘entourage’ – led by 45-year-old Morla – had good reason to ‘want him dead’.
It was an astonishing allegation. Before the trial’s scheduled end in July, the former manager – already a hate-figure trolled mercilessly by Maradona’s adorers – might have the opportunity to rebut it; and of course he is not on trial.
Yet prosecutors and plaintiffs place him, his sister Vanessa Morla, and Pomargo – to whom they refer as ‘Clan Maradona’ – at the heart of their case.
They suggest this trusted inner circle were instrumental in appointing the accused medical team, persuading the family to accept the ‘home-hospital’ idea contrary to the advice of his clinicians, and choosing the villa where he died.
It’s all intriguing stuff. So how does the plot stretch 7,000 miles to the Channel Islands?
Immediately after Maradona’s passing, he was reported to have died a relative pauper worth just £386,000. The one modest house he owned plus other belongings such as his car were auctioned to pay his debts.
He had undoubtedly hit the skids when I met him in Cuba. Having snorted, drank and cavorted his way through his millions, and been roundly fleeced by his old entourage, he was then relying on Castro’s charity to stay in a shabby hotel-cum-clinic.
By 2018, however, he was boasting to friends that he was extremely wealthy again, apparently by dint of his generous earnings when coaching in Belarus, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates.
His close friend Mariano Israelit told me this week that Maradona left an estate worth £77million. He is said to have left three wills, the contents of which are unknown, and it is unclear whether any of them is valid.
Behind the scenes, therefore, his factionalised family – which has grown with the acknowledgement of three Cuban offspring the year before his death, bringing the number of known children to eight – employed lawyers to track down the missing Maradona millions.
Among these bounty hunters is attorney Mario Baudry, who is now entwined with Maradona’s last-but-one girlfriend Veronica Ojeda and at the manslaughter trial represents her son by the footballer, Dieguito Fernando, aged 12.
This week, Baudry claimed to have uncovered proof of an estate worth around £54million, all but £3.86million of which is stashed, as yet beyond reach, in Jersey.
However, he claimed that the remainder of the fortune, which had been banked in places such as Switzerland, the UAE, and the Seychelles, had been recovered.
His next move will be to win Deguito Fernando a share of the branding rights.
‘To give you an idea of their value, the video of Diego’s second goal against England in 1986 (a mesmerising virtuoso voted the Goal of the Century) has had 60million views and has been watched even more since he died,’ he tells me, saying it earns royalties for the estate – egregiously controlled by his manager, he contends – with every click.
A dizzying week in Buenos Aires ended with another startling claim from a lawyer involved in the trial – only this time in an off-the-record briefing.
According to this source, there is good reason to believe that the truth behind Maradona’s death was covered up by the Argentinian government.
For at the time, the country had a Left-wing Peronist president, Alberto Fernandez, and it would have been disastrous if Maradona, with his Che Guevara tattoo and cosiness with Cuba, was seen to have met with a less-than-heroic end.
Oh what a circus, oh what show, to borrow the lyrics of the musical ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’. So how will it all play out? Will the medical team be absolved or struck off and sent to jail – facing anything up to 25 years?
Gauging by the judges’ draconian reaction this week when Maradona’s security guard Julius Coria perjured himself by denying a rather too cosy friendship with medical-team chief Luque, their prospects seem mighty grim.
Having arrived in court as a witness, the burly Coria, the only staff member with the guts and gumption to attempt mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, was arrested on the spot and marched from the court in handcuffs.
So, Argentina had her first scapegoat. But with ferment rising over the medical ‘murder’ that prematurely condemned Diego Maradona to a meeting with two of the Beatles, I predict there will be more come the summer when this grotesque show trial ends.