Mobster indicted for rival’s birthday killing
A fugitive extortion gangster is to be tried for ordering the prison cyanide murder of a rival crime boss nearly three years ago, senior judges ruled yesterday. The Council of Piraeus Appeals Court Judges rejected an appeal by lawyers representing Giorgos Tsakoyiannis, 33, against his indictment earlier this year to stand trial for inciting an Albanian convict to murder extortion racket leader Theodoros Grigorakos in January 2002. Grigorakos died after eating a cyanide-laced dish of spaghetti during a birthday bash in his cell in Athens’s top-security Korydallos Prison. Albanian national Ilir Periku is suspected of having put cyanide in Grigorakos’s food – on orders by Tsakoyiannis, a sworn enemy of the Grigorakos clan – when the gangster visited the toilet. Grigorakos’s father and brother were killed in a 2002 gang turf war.
