Buenos Aires, April 14 (NA) -- Mariano Israelit, a friend of Diego Maradona, stated this Tuesday that his circle, led in recent times by his lawyer Matías Morla and other collaborators, "benefited from him being dead," as they held the image rights and the brand of the legendary footballer and could continue to profit from it. "Maybe they had him sign (documents) under poor conditions, I don't know. Afterwards, what happened, happened...," Israelit confided about the relationship between Maradona and Morla, who is not among the accused in the trial over the death of the former national team captain, which resumed today in the courts of San Isidro. In that sense, the man stated he did not know the reason why the lawyer was not included in the trial, considering that "he knew many things and saw many things" related to Maradona. Furthermore, in statements to Radio Colonia, he did not hesitate to affirm that for the lawyer and his collaborators, the former player "was better off dead, they only took away his image rights and the Maradona brand two months ago," and hinted that in the meantime they continued to earn profits from these areas. On the other hand, and according to what the Argentine News Agency learned, Israelit also criticized Maradona's personal physician, Leopoldo Luque, whom he called a "sycophant and a nobody." "I don't know how he got to Diego, I think Morla introduced him." Regarding the trial, he expressed that "I hope it serves to find the guilty, that no one goes unpunished, Diego's death was a sinister and very sad event," and recalled the poor conditions in which Maradona lived when he died: "I once saw that there were several boxes of beer, wine, and fernet in the pantry. They didn't take care of him, there was a lot of sycophancy around him," he concluded. "How could they give him that when Diego had alcohol problems?". "They changed his cell phone every ten days, which made communication very difficult."
