Thread by @StringwallApp

Let’s revisit Roberto Calvi, Italy's Banco Ambrosiano, Licio Gelli, and Calvi’s murder in 1982.

theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the…

The cast of characters includes Paul Marcinkus, the American archbishop who was head of the Vatican Bank (part-owner of Ambrosiano) when Mr. Calvi died; Opus Dei, the powerful conservative group within the Roman Catholic Church; Mr. Calvi's son Carlo, who lives in Montreal;

Giuseppe Calo and other Mafiosi; and P2 (Propaganda Due), the secretive Masonic lodge that counted among its members Mr. Calvi, Archbishop Marcinkus & the young Silvio Berlusconi, the property developer and budding media magnate who would later become Italy's prime minister.

The story of Calvi's death and the subsequent collapse of Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank and the one favoured by the Vatican, is filled with some of the most powerful & notorious rogues, criminals, businessmen and politicians in modern Italian and European history.

The investigations and court trials have shed light on a secret power network that used Mr. Calvi and his bank to finance Italian political parties, anti-communist activities in Central America and support for Poland's Vatican-backed Solidarity movement.

Roberto Calvi was found swinging from the scaffolding under London's Blackfriars Bridge on June 18, 1982. An orange rope was around his neck. His feet were in the water. He was wearing an expensive grey suit and, bizarrely, two pairs of underwear.

Bricks and stones were found in his pocket and in his crotch. He was carrying the equivalent of £7,370 in various currencies.

The day before Mr. Calvi's body was found, his personal secretary, Grazziella Corracher, had killed herself by jumping out of a window at Ambrosiano's Milan HQ. The note she left behind read: "May Calvi be double-cursed for the damage he has caused to the bank and its employees."

The Italians never believed the Calvi suicide theory. They knew that he was in trouble, that his world was collapsing around him, that certain forces might have found him more valuable dead than alive.

If he wanted to commit suicide, why not do it in Milan instead of concocting a new identity and fleeing the country? Why would he humiliate himself by ramming a brick down his pants? Why would he shave off his mustache shortly before he was found hanging?

Mr. Calvi's problems first became public four years before his death, when Bank of Italy inspectors accused him and Ambrosiano of violating exchange controls. A year later, the prosecutor who had taken on the case was murdered.

A few months after that, a Milan lawyer was murdered. The lawyer was the liquidator of a bank controlled by Michele Sindona, the Mafia-linked financier from Sicily who had done business with Mr. Calvi (and was later convicted of having the liquidator liquidated).

In 1980, Italian magistrates investigating Ambrosiano withdrew Mr. Calvi's passport. He got it back, only to be arrested a year later for violating Italian currency-export controls. He was sentenced to four years in prison and released on bail.

The day before he died - six days after he had fled Italy - the Ambrosiano board revoked his powers as chairman and called in the Bank of Italy.

By then Mr. Calvi was in London with Flavio Carboni, the Sardinian "businessman" who was one of his closest associates (later accused in his death) as well as another defendant, Silvano Vittor, a smuggler from Trieste hired by Mr. Carboni to spirit the banker out of the country.

In the late 1970s & early 1980s, when Ambrosiano was at the height of its power, Italy was on the front lines of the Cold War. The Italian Communist Party was a major force & NATO countries feared that Italy was never more than 1 election away from Soviet-backed leftist takeover.

Western governments, the Vatican and the P2 Masonic Lodge - effectively a shadow government made up of senior politicians, businessmen, journalists and religious leaders - was adamantly anti-Communist.

The P2, led by Licio Gelli, who is still alive, invited Mr. Calvi to join, presumably to exploit Ambrosiano's banking network in its ideological quest against communism.

At the same time, Ronald Reagan's Republicans were financing a covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Pope John Paul II was supporting Poland's Solidarity movement, led by Lech Walesa. All these anti-communist efforts required financing.

Big corporations used Ambrosiano to funnel money to non-communist political parties. Conveniently, Ambrosiano had a string of offshore banks.

Mr. Calvi was at the vortex of the three main elements of Italian power - the Mafia, the Vatican and the puppet masters behind top Italian politicians - through his association with Mr. Sindona, Archbishop Marcinkus and P2's Mr. Gelli.

It's known that vast sums of money vanished. Just before he died, Mr. Calvi was trying to find $300-million (U.S.) to pay to the Vatican Bank. When Ambrosiano collapsed after he died, $1.3-billion (U.S.) was missing from its accounts.

One credible theory is that the bank was used to launder Mafia money. The prosecutor in the current trial says Mr. Calvi was murdered because he had embezzled Cosa Nostra funds and to prevent him from blackmailing his accomplices in politics, in the P2 and at the Vatican Bank.

Liceo Gelli, the former P2 boss, was sentenced to 12 years for fraud in connection with the Ambrosiano collapse. Until recently, he was under house arrest in the Tuscan villa where he lived until his death in 2015.

Quick source change to note Gelli’s death in 2015. 🔽
abc.net.au/news/2015-12-1…

Archbishop Marcinkus, the former head of the Vatican Bank, went into comfortable retirement in Arizona and died in 2006 at the age of 84. Attempts to implicate him in the collapse of Ambrosiano were thrown out by the courts on jurisdiction grounds.

Michele Sindona, the Sicilian P2 member who taught Mr. Calvi how to set up offshore banks, committed suicide in prison in 1986.

H/t @ThorValHallen for tipping me off to this entire story.

https://twitter.com/thorvalhallen/status/1408557765036056585

Also learn more about Gelli and Propaganda Due from @karolcummins here.

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1237204101814878208

The reason that I chose to share this story now is because it illustrates the important intersection of Cold War era anti-communist crusaders, global organized crime networks, the Catholic Church, Masonic linked secret societies, money laundering, and financial fraud.

Here are a few more details about Licio Gelli. I’m thinking that maybe @jimstewartson and @davetroy might find some of this interesting.

abc.net.au/news/2015-12-1…

Licio Gelli was a masonic grand master implicated in some of the darkest chapters of Italy's post-war history and one of the worst scandals to rock the Vatican

Gelli was a fascist sympathiser and the founder and leader of the notorious P2. P2, or Propaganda Due, was an influential secret network that counted politicians, judges, bankers and senior military figures amongst its members.

P2 is best known internationally for having been at the heart of a murder mystery involving both the Mafia and the Vatican which centred on the death of "God's banker" Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging beneath London's Blackfriars bridge in 1982.

Despite being outlawed in 1981, the lodge was later shown to have been involved in a major 1990s political corruption scandal known as tangentopoli (bribesville) and the creation of an anti-communist paramilitary group, Gladio.

But its global notoriety is largely down to its role in the collapse of the Vatican-linked Banco Ambrosiano.

The death of Calvi, the bank's chairman and a P2 member, was initially deemed to have been a suicide. But subsequent investigations pointed to it having been a murder which Italian prosecutors believe was the work of the Sicilian Mafia.

The organised crime syndicate had used Ambrosiano to recycle funds, some of which were moved out of Italy via the Vatican bank (aka: Institute of Religious Works or IOR).

No-one was ever convicted for carrying out or commissioning Calvi's murder. Gelli was investigated over the death but never formally indicted.

The location of Blackfriars bridge (scene of Calvi’s murder) was seen as indicating a link to P2, because members of the illegal group referred to themselves as 'frati neri', Italian for 'black friars'.

Around the time of P2's outlawing, Gelli fled to Switzerland. He was arrested there in 1982 but subsequently escaped from prison and was a fugitive until 1987, when Switzerland agreed to extradite him for prosecution for his role in the Ambrosiano collapse.

This is the part that I thought you might find especially interesting, @davetroy:
“New charges of huge tax fraud were filed against him two years ago and the state has taken ownership of his villa, where, in 1982, police seized 179 gold ingots weighing 168 kilograms.”

Born in Pistoia, Tuscany on April 21, 1919, Gelli first became involved in politics as part of Benito Mussolini's fascist movement, and volunteered to fight with future dictator General Francisco Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War.

Reminder: The Opus Dei cult is also connected to Franco and his fascist movement.

https://twitter.com/StringwallApp/status/1407432991803162632

He fought briefly with Italy's anti-Nazi resistance, the Partisans, at the end of World War II, but later joined the neo-fascist MSI political party.

Reminder: The Catholic Church helped thousands of Nazis and Nazi collaborators escape to Latin America via “ratlines”, after WWII.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1407432189453680640

IMPORTANT => According to Italian media, Gelli worked for the CIA during the [cold] war, a time when the US secret services also enlisted the help of the Mafia in an effort to counter the influence of one of Europe's biggest Communist parties.

Reminder: Paul Behrends, a former aide to Dana Rohrabacher (Putin’s favorite congressman) associate of Erik Prince, and Knights of Malta member, partnered with oligarchs and organized crime to topple the Soviet state.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1406808091006586887

Gelli also spent part of the 1970s in exile in Argentina, where he forged close links to the generals who installed a military dictatorship in 1976.

Speaking of Argentina, see also: Nazis.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1409289762293305348

So a bit earlier in this thread, a friend challenged me to connect the Calvi/Ambrosiano Bank/Gelli/P2 story to current events. So let’s try to do that next…

First, a quick reminder that this entire saga is a story about anti-communist crusaders & fascist sympathizers who partnered with global organized crime and the Catholic Church to launder money and fight communists.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1409212625452425216

It also includes Masonic secret societies, political influence operations, and paramilitary groups.

https://twitter.com/StringwallApp/status/1409280847069564931

As noted earlier, this parallels the life of Paul Behrends who was a Catholic, a knight in the Sovereign Order of Malta, and an anti-communist crusader who partnered with organized crime and Russian oligarchs in an effort to bring down the Soviet state.

https://twitter.com/StringwallApp/status/1406808727966162945

He was also the chief lobbyist for Erik Prince’s paramilitary mercenary contracting company, Blackwater.

https://twitter.com/wsj/status/888232104093515776

Behrends is also who arranged for Erik Prince to work as an intern in the congressional office of Dana Rohrabacher.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1375931361496825859

As in: Putin’s favorite congressman.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1375931573359554563

In fact, it was Paul Behrends who converted Erik Prince to Catholicism!

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1384212581036879872

So is Erik Prince a Knight of Malta? Probably. A lot of researchers here on Twitter would argue “definitely”. Besides his relationship with Behrends, here is what I know:

ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-toda…

Jeremy Scahill reports that a former Blackwater employee and an ex-Marine have given sworn testimony accusing Prince of either murdering, or facilitating the murder of employees who were cooperating with the federal government's probe of the company.

This same sworn testimony describes how Erik Prince thought of himself… "as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe."

According to this testimony, Prince "intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar”

Scahill's long study of Blackwater reveals a fascination with military campaigns in the name of God, and he reports that some Blackwater bosses boast membership in the Sovereign Order of Malta, another Crusader brotherhood.

So now let’s take a closer look at the Knights of Malta. I should note that this @Salon article also cites Kremlin propagandist Glenn Greenwald, so some skepticism is understandable.

salon.com/2011/02/28/sey…

Known formally as the "Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta," the Knights of Malta is a Roman Catholic order founded in roughly 1048.

Though the Knights operated as a military order during the First Crusade, today their approximately 12,500 members, 80,000 volunteers and 20,000 medical professionals work "in the field of medical and social care and humanitarian aid."

Reagan-era CIA director Bill Casey’s KOM membership has been widely reported & never denied by Casey. Historian Joseph E. Persico lists Casey’s membership in a routine list of charitable accomplishments, in his sympathetic biography Casey: from the OSS to the CIA (Penguin 1990).

Casey was also listed publicly as a Knights of Malta member in both Mother Jones (07/1983) and the Washington Post (12/27/1984).

!! => The implications of Casey’s membership are even alluded to in Bob Woodward’s "Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987," in which Casey’s deep Catholicism and the Catholic Church’s opposition to Nicaragua’s left-leaning Sandinista government are both recurring topics.

The Knights of Malta also counted among their members former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton -- a fortuitous alliance as Angleton led the postwar intelligence efforts to subvert Italy’s 1948 elections.

!! IMPORTANT !! => His success partnering with organized crime, right-leaning former fascists and the Vatican not only marginalized Italy’s homegrown Communist Party, it also encouraged Congress in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Conservative luminary/National Review founder William F. Buckley (who spent 2 years after college as a CIA "political action specialist" in Mexico City) was also a Knight, as was William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

From 1970 to 1981, France's intelligence agency was also headed by a member of the Order, Alexandre de Marenches.

De Marenches would later co-found the Saudi-funded private intelligence group the Safari Club, one of George H. W. Bush’s many end-runs around congressional oversight of the American intelligence establishment & the locus of many of the worst features of the mammoth BCCI scandal.

!! IMPORTANT !! Did you catch that part ^there^ about the BCCI connection? That was yet another Billy Barr coverup.

apnews.com/article/d0bc48…

@davetroy you had asked about direct connections to our current cast of characters.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1409376438348922886

…while crackpot speculations about this particular Catholic order are legion, its ties to intelligence organizations in the U.S. and Western Europe are well-documented.

!! IMPORTANT !! =>…with their unusual status as a recognized sovereign state without territory, the Knights of Malta enjoy full diplomatic rights in many countries -- including the ability to bypass customs inspectors by secreting items across borders via "diplomatic pouch."

Hey do you suppose that ability to bypass customs could come in handy for criminal activity?? 🤷‍♂️

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1409391331173077000

Sharing far right sympathies, the Roman Catholic Church and Cold War-era Western intelligence officials became natural allies, and the Knights of Malta became a natural conduit for their collaboration.

With a lengthy, strategic partnership already forged in the name of anti-communism, a strengthening of this network in the name of the "War on Terror" ought to sound more predictable than paranoid

Beginning in 1982, the Knights of Malta began an intensely collaborative partnership with the international aid organization AmeriCares -- a charity group unique in its selective disaster relief to countries friendly to both U.S. business investment and foreign policy objectives.

AmeriCares was founded & led until 2002 by Robert Macauley: college roommate of George H.W. Bush, paper mill millionaire, & self-described agent in the CIA’s precursor, the OSS. Macauley was also the first non-Catholic to receive the Cross of the Commander of the Order of Malta.

A look at AmeriCares activity during this period gives the unavoidable impression that Macauley was running the charity as the velvet glove to Reagan and Bush’s radical hard-line approach to communism and indigenous left-wing political movements across the globe. For example:

In Jan 1990, AmeriCares & the German and Hungarian Knights of Malta supplied $1.4 million in supplies to pro-Western factions after the collapse of Romania’s communist regime, proclaiming it "the first privately organized, large-scale relief effort following the revolution."

The partnership frequently worked with the infamous CIA front company Southern Air Transport. And during the Soviet-Afghanistan conflict in 1984, AmeriCares brazenly took sides, evacuating wounded members of the mujahideen to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington D.C.

Note: President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski -- the man responsible for pairing the CIA with these future leaders of Al Qaeda -- was an honorary chairman at AmeriCares.

Nowhere was the alliance between the Knights of Malta, AmeriCares, and U.S. Intelligence more pervasive and troubling than in Central America.

AmeriCares and the Order held off on relief to an economically crippled Panama in 1989 for six whole months, shuttling $2.5 million worth of medical supplies only after the conclusion of Bush Sr.'s lightning war against (former ally) Manuel Noriega.

Back to Iran-Contra: AmeriCares & the Knights declined to participate with the Red Cross in a 1988 hurricane relief effort in left-leaning Nicaragua, only to pivot 2 years later, once the Sandinista govt fell. (They sent 23 tons of med supplies 3 days after the election.)

Prior to regime change, AmeriCares also provided one-sided medical aid to the Sandinistas' adversaries, the right-wing, CIA-backed contras, through a program controlled by the Iran-Contra scandal's poster child, Oliver North.

If you’ve managed to make it this far through this ridiculously-long thread, then you should probably be saying to yourself, “Well that was entertaining, but so what? What’s the point?”

And the point is this: The idea that top figures in America’s security & political communities became linked with transnational organized crime might seem hard to explain. We spent decades fighting the Soviet Union, so how is it that Putin and his oligarchs now own the GOP?

The answer is because, ever since the end of WWII, staunch anti-communist elements within our govt were partnering with organized crime (and its affiliates within the Catholic Church) to battle communism throughout the world…

But after the communist states failed, criminal syndicates and drug cartels moved in to fill the void.

theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/…

And for various reasons, these relationships and partnerships never ended. Understand: It’s not easy to break up with the mob. For one thing, being in bed with the mob can be exceptionally lucrative.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1389320566788734987

And as poor Roberto Calvi can attest (well…if he hadn’t been murdered), people who are no longer useful to the mob tend to suffer unfortunate accidents.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1409187316988534791

See also: Wirecard’s Marcus Braun.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1404893684722810885

Or Gianmario Roveraro.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1390786639543377922

And Patrice Lescaudron.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1390866451242815488

Plus there’s that kompromat thing that is always a factor.

wired.com/2017/01/russia…