Milan - Veteran coach Carlo Mazzone and two Florence doctors are under investigation in connection with the death of a footballer who played for Fiorentina in the 1970s, Italian media reported Wednesday. Mazzone, 70, coached Bruno Beatrice, who died of leukemia in 1987, at the age of 39 from 1975 to 1978. His was the first in a series of suspicious deaths among players of his team.
Prosecutors believe that his leukemia, a bone marrow disease, was caused by X-ray treatments he underwent to treat pubalgia.
La Gazzetta dello Sport quoted Mazzone, 70, as saying that he was not worried about an interrogation that prosecutors set for Friday.
Mazzone last summer quit his last coaching job at Livorno, seemingly ending a career he began in 1968.
"I was a coach. I don't know what I can say about this matter. I have said already that I had no knowledge of what the medical staff was doing," he said.
The probe stems from the denunciation made by Beatrice's wife, Gabriella Bernardini, who with her daughter founded the Association for families of victims of doping.
Bernardini said that in 1976 Fiorentina prescribed her husband weeks of X-ray therapy and gave him drugs she later found out to be anabolic steroids, now banned as performance-enhancing substances.
"I'm certain that Bruno and the other boys of Fiorentina died or got ill because they were doped or because they were cured with criminal therapies," Bernardini said.
Three other footballers who were at Fiorentina in the 1970s died between 2003 and 2006: Nello Saltutti, Ugo Ferrante and Giuseppe Longoni, aged between 56 and 64.
Saltutti died of a heart attack similar to the one suffered without consequences by his team mate Giancarlo Antonioni in 2004, the same year when Ferrante died of cancer.
Mimmo Caso is a cancer survivor, while Massimo Mattolini underwent a kidney transplant and Giancarlo De Sisti, then captain of Fiorentina, was treated for an abscess in his brain.
Ongoing investigations regard the high rate of Lou Gehrig's disease among footballers. The latest victim of the illness affecting the neuromuscular system was former Avellino player Adriano Lombardi, who died last month at 62.
