Unmasking the Masonic Conspiracy _ Our History

There was likewise this cable tow, with a running noose about your neck, which would have rendered any attempt at retreat equally fatal. The cable tow, or noosed rope, is central to Masonic ritual, as is violent death. ...having your throat cut across, your tongue torn out by the root, and buried in the sand of the sea at low water mark, or a cable's length from the shore, where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in 24 hours. On the 18th of June 1982, an Italian Freemason named Roberto Calvi was found hanged under London's Blackfriars Bridge. His body was suspended from scaffolding at a level where the tide ebbs and flows twice every 24 hours, in line with the Masonic ritual. Now, the only way that a death could have occurred without causing neck damage was by holding on to some of the bars with the hands, which of course is impossible without leaving traces of rust or dirt. He didn't think about to kill himself, to commit suicide, because he loved the life, he loved us, he wanted to stay with us. Earlier this year, an Italian court decided that Calvi had indeed been murdered. One of Italy's most successful bankers, he had handled the secret finances of a powerful Masonic lodge. So was his death a ritual murder? Was he killed for threatening to reveal what Italian Masons had done with a missing 200 million pounds? Or did he know too much about a Masonic plot to undermine Italian democracy? Calvi was boss of Italy's largest private bank, and so close to the Vatican and the Pope that he was known in Rome as God's banker. How he died 1,000 miles away in London is a bizarre mystery. Journalist Paul Foote investigated his death. I've never had any doubt about it at all. It seemed to me perfectly plain that it was a ritual murder, carried out in the Masonic tradition. Foote believes even the name of the bridge where Calvi died may have been significant. The image of a black friar is especially emotive for Italian Masons. The man who is in effect their painter and saint, Giordano Bruno, was a 17th century monk burnt to death for his beliefs by the Papal Inquisition. The scaffolding from which Calvi was found hanged had been erected next to a ladder, which for Masons symbolizes death. Stonework plays a central role in all Masonic ritual. A rough, uncut stone symbolizes the uncultured man before he joins Freemasonry, and a smooth stone indicates the fit member of a civilized society, which a Mason becomes after years learning the craft. Rough stones or bricks, as found in Calvi's pockets, symbolize failed or treacherous Masons. It seemed to me that this was a Masonic ritual murder. And the astonishing thing about the whole affair was the casual way in which it was investigated by the City of London Police, the casual way in which the suicide verdict was effectively accepted by the establishment, and that no one to this day has any real idea how Calvi was murdered. On our soil, in the middle of our city, this thing happened, and we've no idea how it happened. The job of investigating Calvi's death fell to the City of London Police, a small force with just 80 detectives. At the London inquest, City officers gave evidence suggesting Calvi had killed himself. His bank, the Ambrosiano, was in deep financial trouble with 1,000 million pounds of debts, and Calvi was facing four years in jail over a conviction for illegally exporting Italian currency. At the inquest, the coroner warned the jurors not to bring in an open verdict, so they decided Calvi had committed suicide. His wife felt this was an unacceptable decision, so she applied to the High Court for a second inquest. This time, the jury reached an open verdict, meaning Calvi might have committed suicide but might have been murdered. This removes the stigma of my father's name. We think that the jury has done the best on the evidence, and it's very difficult to bring the whole picture into a coroner's court. The whole picture would have involved revealing Calvi's secret membership of an Italian Masonic lodge. This wasn't mentioned to the jurors who visited Blackfriars Bridge during the inquest, but six months later, the foreman said that had they known about Calvi's Masonic connections, they would have reached a homicide verdict. Some Italian reporters thought there had been a cover-up. There was a wish not to create a big scandal. There was a wish to keep things undercover, and you can imagine anything you want. You may even imagine that they wanted to protect something. Last January, three Italian judges decided Calvi had been murdered. They were convinced by reconstructions of his death under Blackfriars Bridge, enacted five years later on nights with similar tides. They felt a man of Calvi's age and physical condition could not have climbed the scaffolding, especially without leaving any trace of rust on his hands, whereas he could easily have been strung up from a boat. But why would Masons have wanted to kill Calvi? Why is it even relevant to look for Masonic symbols in his death? The reason why lies in a police raid 15 months earlier on the properties of an obscure mattress manufacturer in Arezzo, Tuscany. His name was Licio Gelli. The police seized thousands of documents relating to a Masonic lodge called P2, which almost no one outside Freemasonry knew anything about. What shocked the police were the names on a list of 980 members. There were dozens of leading Italian businessmen and industrialists, and the police chiefs of Italy's four biggest cities. A total of 43 MPs, including the Ministers of Justice and Foreign Trade. There were 51 generals and admirals, and the heads of all Italy's secret services. Together these men operated like a private government, manipulating one of Europe's biggest democracies. Leading bankers like Calvi completed the list. When the Italian government gave out publicly the list of P2, we were astonished. It was like discovering that Italian democracy was something else from what we had always believed. We saw that there was another something going on underneath the surface of events, and so we asked ourselves why. The answer goes back to a bitter struggle between Freemasons and the Catholic Church in Italy, which has lasted ever since English gentlemen and sea captains introduced the brotherhood here in the 1730s. The Church soon branded Freemasonry the work of the devil, and excommunicated all Catholic Masons. Italian Freemasonry turned anti-Catholic and revolutionary, and went underground. It has had a clandestine and persecuted history ever since. The Grand Orient is Italian Freemasonry's ruling body. Contrary to what happens in England and America, where the state not only tolerates Freemasonry, but recognizes it, here state and church don't recognize it, but even condemn it without knowing it. In 1926, Italy's dictator Mussolini banned Freemasonry. After World War II, it was made legal again, and an old secret elite lodge was reborn as Propaganda Due, or P2. This failed to recruit many members, until the Grand Master at the time asked Licio Gelli to take over in 1970. Gelli immediately set about changing the character of P2. Tonight, he speaks out in defense of his lodge. Inside the P2 lodge, we had the top men Italy had in all fields, in the world of politics, in diplomacy, the top men from industry, the press, the law, and the civil service. They were all the very best. By joining P2, they wanted peace and tranquility within the lodge, so that they could all contribute in their own fields to the betterment of society. Gelli initiated his P2 elite in a suite in Rome's Excelsior Hotel, not in a Masonic temple. It never met like a conventional lodge. Instead, select groups of members plotted to control the state, as agendas seized at Gelli's premises revealed. The political and economic situation of Italy, the threat of the Italian Communist Party, aiming at the conquest of power, the spread of immorality, indiscipline, relationships with the Italian state, we were striving for the improvement of society, to make a contribution, to safeguard the democratic institutions of our country. This was P2. But in the 1930s and 40s, when Mussolini ruled Italy, Gelli was a dedicated fascist, and he's never been a friend of democracy. After the war, he fled to South America. He returned in the 1960s when he was wealthy, respectable, and an ideal Masonic recruit. I felt Masonry was the university where one went to learn rules of right and wrong, and graduated with a degree in morals, sound principles, and ethics. These were the only reasons I joined the Masons, and I'd join them again. I have been a Mason, I am a Mason, and I shall behave all my life as a Mason. He's a man that likes darkness. He's a man that likes intrigue. He's a man that says that like democracy, but has a very strange idea of democracy. He comes from the extreme right. I don't think he has ever left that position. His friends are still the same fascists that he met with during the war. After the raid on Gelli's villa and the exposure of P2, it became clear that the main aim of the Lodge was to subvert democracy. An exhaustive parliamentary inquiry found that P2 was a state within a state, a cell of extreme right-wingers bent on maintaining power by ruthless means. For example, in 1978, Italy's Christian Democrat Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, favoured bringing the Communists into government in a plan known as the Historic Compromise. But then, Moro's car was ambushed and he was kidnapped by left-wing terrorists. Evidence which later emerged suggested that the longer Moro was held captive, the better it suited the P2 Masons who headed the secret services. A committee drawn up from the staff of the Interior Ministry was put in charge of finding Moro. They were nearly all P2 men. Later, I was on the Moro inquiry. I read all the documents, the few there were from that committee, and I must say, dispassionately, that they had no intention of finding Moro. To leave Moro in the hands of the terrorists, to let the situation rot, was a sure way to make sure that the Historic Compromise did not come to fruition. Three months after Moro's kidnap, he was found dead in the boot of a car. His body bore the marks of repeated torture. But Italy's body politic had also been mutilated and the Communists had been shut out of government ever since. According to the Italian Parliament's report, P2 members in a black propaganda campaign also planned or backed grotesque acts of terror, including one of Europe's worst terrorist crimes. In 1980, a bomb blew up in Bologna station, killing 85 people. To discredit the Communists, this was made to look like an act of left-wing terror, but it was committed by fascists. The massacre, according to the High Court of Bologna, was committed by some subversive neo-fascist individuals. But it's also a fact that a near-permanent contact was established between right-wing subversive elements, the P2 Lodge, and the men of P2. Today, under the nervous protection of armed police, Gelli is at liberty in his magnificent home in Tuscany. While not directly involved in the Bologna bombing, this year he was convicted of covering the bomber's tracks and given a 10-year jail sentence. However, the terms of his earlier extradition from Switzerland mean he will never go to jail for the crime. But the P2 Lodge, of which he was venerable master, has also been implicated in allegations that in London, Roberto Calvi suffered a ritual masonic murder. As head of Italy's largest private bank, Roberto Calvi was a valuable target for recruitment into P2, which he joined in 1977. His masonic sponsor was none other than Licio Gelli. But it's alleged Gelli and his P2 friends soon set about looting Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano. In one of the world's biggest financial scandals, the bank's debts rapidly exceeded its assets by 1,000 million pounds, so Calvi was under severe financial pressure. By 1982, the Vatican Bank was demanding the return of 200 million pounds of its money, which Calvi had diverted for the benefit of Licio Gelli and the P2 group. Much of it was meant to be used to further the P2 plot to control Italian politics by buying Italy's largest newspaper empire, Rizzoli. But the money had disappeared overseas. Calvi was also under pressure from the law. His appeal against his currency conviction was about to be heard. If it failed, he would go to jail. And the Bank of Italy was after him, about dozens of shadowy banking operations he had set up outside Italy. In June 1982, Calvi fled to London on a false passport. But why he came is still a mystery. He may have hoped to pressure his debtors, but the men who had smuggled him out of Italy, who had got him the false passport, had their own reasons for getting him to London. It was a place where they had strong criminal connections. We know that the men that accompanied my father to London had both contacts with the underworld in London and with masonry in Italy. We know that they had contacts with a group that was specialised in laundering money that was coming both from common crimes and right-wing terrorism. So if Calvi was threatening to expose the men who had looted his bank, London was probably a most dangerous place for him to do it. Significantly, most of the documents which he brought to London in his briefcase disappeared. Francesco Siniscalchi is the Italian mason who first exposed Gelli and P2. He believes Calvi died because of what he was threatening to reveal. It's my opinion he had documents in his hand suitcase, which has not been found completely, to show that he could blackmail, in some way, people there. And when someone is using this type of means, of course, he risks his life. If you have a secret, you must tell today. If you say, tomorrow we talk, you are destroyed. They kill you. You must speak before, not say, I have secrets of yours and I will tell tomorrow. Whatever secrets Roberto was threatening to reveal in London, he telephoned his wife two days before he died to say he was on the verge of solving all his problems. He told me, it is happening something wonderful that will change our life, because it was near to make a deal. And he thought he could make this deal in London? Oh yes, he was so happy. He said, something that will change all our life. So I was full of joy, you know. The joy was short-lived. Roberto was found dead two days later. The Calvi's suspect, London underworld figures, could easily have killed him at the request of their Italian associates. But now, with a cast of suspects that includes criminals, terrorists, bankers, politicians and even priests, where does the allegation that he was murdered by Freemasons fit in? Many of the theories that exist around my father's death and the theory of a Masonic plot or a Masonic execution are not necessarily mutually exclusive, that can very well coexist. Some of these individuals, they may have been criminals or politicians or businessmen or even priests and also have been Masons. And in fact, in some cases, we know that they were. P2 Master Licio Gelli will soon stand trial in Italy. It may be to his advantage that Calvi is not alive to give evidence, but he denies any involvement in Calvi's death. Indeed, Gelli was on the run in South America at the time and he claims great affection for the banker. You know, I too would like to know how Roberto Calvi died, especially because he was a very dear friend of mine, a true friend, besides having a very good head for business, but I haven't got a crystal ball and if I had, I wouldn't know how to consult it or read it. It's a question I can't answer. By the time Calvi died, the Grand Orient of Italy had expelled Gelli and disbanded his P2 Lodge on the grounds that it was a perversion of Freemasonry. But in fact, Gelli and his lodge had merely taken to extremes Italian Freemasonry's centuries-old custom of secretly interfering with the nation's destiny. There remains in the tradition of Italian Masonry this great need for privacy and secrecy. During this century, we have been persecuted by fascism and Nazism. Therefore, in our country, Masons have always had to plot a little against the state. Un po' a complotare contro lo stato. English Freemasonry has a strict policy of not interfering in politics. That's why it had always refused to recognise Italian Freemasonry with its highly political tradition. But in 1972, England's Masonic bosses had a change of heart and recognised their Italian brethren. Ironically, the man who had helped negotiate England's recognition of Italy's Masons was Licio Gelli, the closest confidant of an earlier Italian Grand Master. Grand Master Salvini and I finally obtained the recognition of the Mother Lodge of England. I think that this was one of the greatest satisfactions which P2 Lodge and those who belonged to it ever had. No sooner had Gelli helped bring the two countries' Masons together than England's Masonic leaders went to Italy and mixed unwittingly with the underworld of the city of Florence. In 1973, England's then Grand Secretary, James Stubbs, visited Florence to consecrate an English-speaking lodge. He was welcomed by leading members of P2, including a close friend of Gelli's named Alessandro Del Bene. They honoured Stubbs with a banquet in Del Bene's mansion. Unknown to Stubbs, his host was an illegal arms dealer known in the Italian underworld as the Godfather of Florence. But Gelli claims he met an even more important English Freemason in the 1970s. One rule we have in Freemasonry is not to disclose the names of other Freemasons, but I'll make an exception. I know one, and I'll tell you about him, the Duke of Kent. I don't know if you know him. I met him when he came to Florence. It was a great moment when the Grand Master and I shared the ceremonial embrace with the Duke to celebrate the recognition of Italian Masonry at that time by the Mother Lodge of England. I met him in Florence, and we had lunch together. The Duke of Kent is Grand Master of English Freemasonry. He says, to his knowledge, he has never met any Italian brethren at a Masonic function in Florence. And while he has met a number of Italians over the years, none of them, to his recollection, has declared himself to be a Mason. Someone who certainly met Licio Gelli was Roberto Calvi. Today, Calvi's family in Canada are still pursuing his killers. At first, Clara was in favour of her husband becoming a Mason. Little did she know this might be the death of him. When he joined the Freemasonry, I didn't think that it was the wrong thing to do, because I remember that my mother always spoke very well about Freemasonry with respect. So I thought it was a good idea. It was a protection. But one day, I knew, of course, about all these things that could be Freemasonry symbols. They killed Roberto, but they signed the death, the murder.