Rome receives right-wing message from the anti-state (1993)

[cptmarginal]

I hadn't really heard much about this before, at least not an accurate depiction of how severe these events were. The P2 criminal conspiracy trial started in late 1992; Licio Gelli's assets were seized later in 1993.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 58408.html

"in these days of tension"

Rome receives a right-wing message from the anti-state: The bomb sites are heavy with symbols for the eternal city. War is being declared on Italy's identity - Church, state, culture

From FIONA LENEY in Rome

Sunday 01 August 1993

IT WAS a strange sight, even for Rome in these days of tension. Three volanti, flying squad cars, had forced a grey Fiat Uno to pull over. A huddle of officers were closely questioning a small, irate blonde woman. Fingers on holsters, they ignored her protests as they leafed through identity papers. 'It's just a routine check,' the carabinieri repeated, but no one was fooled. 'I bet this is happening all over the country, to convince us they know who they are looking for,' said an onlooker. 'What a joke.'

But then Italy's most wanted criminal, since last Tuesday's 'night of bombs' which killed five people, has been a slight, fresh-

faced blonde, about 27 years old. She, and a male companion, were seen leaving a car in a sidestreet in central Milan. Minutes later 100 kilos of explosive blew apart the car, three firemen, the traffic warden who had summoned them and a Moroccan immigrant sleeping rough.

In a grotesque reflection of the bombing of Florence's Uffizi gallery, much of the nearby Pavilion of Contemporary Art was demolished, and rooms were damaged in the elegant Villa Reale, which houses its own modern art collection. Unlike the Uffizi, damage to the works of art was slight.

In Rome, less than an hour later, car bombs wrecked two ancient churches: the seventh- century San Giorgio in Velabro, tucked away in a narrow cobbled street by the walls of the Forum; and St John Lateran, the grandiose basilica used by the popes in their role as bishops of Rome.

Investigators yesterday requested a news blackout while they followed 'certain leads'. But few believe that real progress will be made in the inquiry, and even fewer believe that the culprits will ever be brought to justice. In the past 20 years, there have been eight unexplained bomb attacks, killing a total of 145 people. Suspects have been arrested and a handful found guilty, but not one important conviction is still standing today. As people look for an explanation after each new outrage, the great catch-all, 'to destabilise the state', is dusted down and pressed into use again.

The higher reaches of the government, groping for someone to blame, favour the Mafia. Nicola Mancino, the Interior Minister, repeated this week, as he did after the Uffizi bombing, that he believed Cosa Nostra was at the centre of the campaign of terror 'to distract attention from a battle with the authorities in which they have suffered heavy blows'.

'Rubbish,' says journalist and Mafia expert Nicola Lombardozzi. 'Each target in this campaign has been symbolic, and the bombs have not been calculated to cause maximum loss of life. The Mafia's targets are cruder; its methods much bloodier.'

Umberto Bossi, who has led his Northern League from separatist isolation into mainstream politics on an anti-graft, anti-southern platform, also believes that a more sophisticated hand is behind the campaign. 'The bomb at St John Lateran was to warn the Church to watch out - nothing is sacred. The bomb at San Giorgio was a warning to Rome itself.'

The site is indeed heavy with civic symbols for the eternal city. The velabrum was the marsh where Romulus and Remus were found, being suckled by the she-wolf. Above the church rises the Campidoglio, where the city's administration sits. The curving brick walls of the Forum pass not 100 yards away. The attacks on the Uffizi and the two galleries in Milan complete the 'message': war is being declared on Italy's very identity - Church, state, culture.

So the spotlight falls once more on the 'anti-state', an unholy alliance of right-wingers, the secret service and members of the banned (and supposedly dissolved) P2 Masonic lodge, all determined to derail the process of political change. Licio Gelli, the grand master of P2 in its heyday - and some insist it is still alive and kicking - has made no bones about his relations with generals and secret service officers.

Nor is the recent record of the internal intelligence service good. Its former head, Angelo Finocchiaro, who was forced to resign in the aftermath of the bombs, was already in trouble for misleading an investigation into the service's murky finances. One of his lieutenants, Bruno Contrada, is in jail for association with the Mafia; his uncle, Mario de Sena, a senior army officer, is in jail for collusion in organised crime.

Judge after judge investigating the massacres of the 'years of lead' from 1969 to 1984 threw up evidence of co-operation between the ultra-right and a sector of the secret service determined to save the country from veering too far to the left. General elections expected to usher in a new political class are planned for next year.

But that will prove of little consolation to the widow of Stefano Picerno, one of the firemen killed in Milan. They had been married 20 days when he died. And it is of little interest to Franco Pistolicci, who sits slumped in the shade of the Forum wall, surveying the shattered windows and crazed walls of his tenement block. 'I was born in that flat and my children were all born there. And now we've lost everything.'

http://tuscantraveler.com/2013/florence ... ili-mafia/

Tuscan Traveler’s Tales – Twenty Years Ago A Terrorist Bomb Shook Florence

May 25, 2013

The Uffizi Is Targeted By A Terrorist Bomb

Twenty years ago, a little more than one hour after midnight, May 27, 1993, a massive explosion echoed throughout Florence. It was a true case of domestic terrorism.



Today an olive tree stands where the bomb detonated in 1993

A stolen white Fiat Fiorino van, loaded with explosives, was driven into the city center and parked under the Torre dei Pulci in Via dei Georgofili. The car bomb (280 kilograms of Pentrite and T4 (both components of Semtex) mixed with a small quantity of TNT) was detonated blasting a crater ten feet wide and six feet deep. Fragments of metal debris landed as far away as Via dei Calzaiuoli.

The terrorists were the members Cosa Nostra in Sicily. This was an act of intimidation.

The explosion killed five people: municipal police inspector Fabrizio Nencioni; his wife Angela, the live-in custodian at the Accademia dei Georgofili; their daughters, nine-year-old Nadia and seven-week-old Caterina; and a 22-year-old architecture student Dario Capolicchio, who lived in a nearby apartment. Another 33 people were hospitalized for injuries.



Apartment of the Nencioni family

To the mafia the dead were just ancillary damage. The Uffizi Gallery was the main target of the blast. The structural damage to the museum cost more than a million dollars to repair. Although the reinforced window glass of the museum shattered, it protected most of the artworks from the full force of the blast. Three paintings were completely destroyed, thirty-three others were damaged and three statues were broken.

The damage was far greater to the fifteenth-century Torre dei Pulci, home since 1933 to the Accademia dei Georgofili, established in 1735, the world’s first learned society of agronomy and scientific agriculture. The building imploded and crumbled to the ground, completely destroying the apartment of the Nencioni family. Over one thousand of the Accademia’s 40,000 rare books, manuscripts and historic archives were irretrievably lost.



Damage in the Uffizi Gallery from the bomb blast

The Florentines pulled together as they had after the extensive damage in World War II and the Arno Flood in 1966. A month later a memorial for the dead filled the Piazza della Signoria where the orchestra and chorus of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino played in concert. It took three years to reopen the Accademia dei Georgofili. Work on parts of the Uffizi Gallery and the Vasari Corridor took much longer.

This year, on May 26, the twentieth anniversary brings a number of events and presentations about the events in the early morning of May 27, 1993, including the presentation of a permanent memorial to the victims, a statue by sculptor Roberto Barni, commissioned by the Friends of Florence, the Associazione tra i Familiari delle Vittime della Strage di Via dei Georgofili, and the Uffizi Gallery organizations. The sculpture is called I Passi d’Oro (The Golden Steps).



Sketch of Roberto Barni's memorial statue

Domestic Terror Planned and Carried Out By the Mafia

The attack on the Uffizi and Accademia dei Georgofili bore similarities to a bomb targeting anti-mafia campaigner and television host (The Maurizio Costanzo Show) Maurizio Costanzo, which had exploded in the fashionable Roman neighborhood of Parioli 13 days earlier, injuring 23 people.

The Cosa Nostra’s involvement in the bombing was confirmed a month later, in July 1993, when three bombs were detonated, almost simultaneously: one in Milan (at the Pavilion of Contemporary Art, where five people died) and two in Rome (at the cathedral of San Giovanni in Laterano and at the church of San Giorgio in Velabro).

Evidence was soon found suggesting that the bombs were placed by Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian organized crime syndicate. These terrorist attacks were meant not only to deter, by way of warning, its members from turning state’s witness, but also to force the over-ruling of Art. 41 (bis) of the Penitentiary Law of August 1992, which imposed harsh living conditions on prisoners, especially those accused of being members of mafia organizations, severely curtailing their contact with those outside prison.

After the arrest of mafia boss Totò Riina from Corleone in January 1993, the remaining bosses, among them Giuseppe Graviano, Matteo Messina Denaro, Giovanni Brusca, Leoluca Bagarella, Antonino Gioè and Gioacchino La Barbera came together a few times (often in the Santa Flavia area in Bagheria, on an estate owned by the mafioso Leonardo Greco). They decided on a strategy to force the Italian state to retreat in its pressure on the Cosa Nostra. The Graviano brothers were seen as the organizers of the operation, in particular to select the men who would carry out the bombings.

It was nearly ten years before some of the perpetrators were brought to justice. In 2002, for ordering the bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan, bosses Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano each received a life sentence for the bombings. For their part, Leoluca Bagarella, Totò Riina, Bernardo Provenzano and Matteo Messina Denaro (still a fugitive), along with another ten members of the clan were also sentenced to life imprisonment.

Finally, this month, two decades after the horrific acts, Sicilian fisherman Cosimo D’Amato, 68, was sentenced to life imprisonment for supplying explosives for Mafia massacres in Rome, Florence and Milan. He was convicted on testimony from a former mafia member Gaspare Spatuzza. Police say that D’Amato recovered large amounts of TNT, later used in several mafia bombings, from World War II remains he found in the sea. D’Amato is related to other members of the mafia involved in the Falcone and Borsellino slayings.

D’Amato is also being probed for a role in supplying the dynamite used in a massive explosion that killed anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca, and three bodyguards in May 1992. That explosion occurred on the motorway near the town of Capaci near Sicily’s regional capital. Falcone is considered a national hero. The 21st anniversary of Falcone’s murder was marked with ceremonies in Palermo Thursday.

-

See also, contemporaneously:

The terror trail that won't grow cold: Dark forces bombed Bologna station in 1980, killing 85. At a retrial tomorrow, the victims' relatives may see justice done - Sunday 10 October 1993

[cptmarginal]

From the same time frame, with a title also worthy of it's own thread:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... vice=print

Spirit of the Masons lives on in the murky recesses of Italian life: A Calabria prosecutor has uncovered a chilling plot - a Masonic conspiracy to overthrow the state. Patricia Clough reports from Rome

PATRICIA CLOUGH

Sunday 18 July 1993

Italian fiscal police, investigating possible swindles of European Community funds by pig- breeders in the tiny Calabrian town of Roccella Ionica, came upon something very odd last year. It was a makeshift Masonic temple, complete with throne and chairs arranged in a horseshoe, neatly folded hoods and Masonic symbols on black-draped walls.

The Grand Master of the lodge turned out to be Baron Pasquale Placido, a local aristocrat who had come down in the world. In his house they found a huge archive of secret documents, including correspondence with one Licio Gelli, former Grand Master of the sinister P2 secret lodge, whose members were key figures in all areas of Italian public life, and in the lodge's intrigue to subvert and possibly take over Italy.

For Dr Agostino Cordova, the tenacious cigar-smoking public prosecutor in nearby Palmi, the discovery turned out to be one of the first key pieces in a vast puzzle he and other magistrates are putting together on the secret activities of Italian Freemasons. The picture it now reveals, although still incomplete, is chilling.

The P2, or at least the spirit behind it, is not dead; apparently excised, it has instead grown again secretly in many other parts of Italian society.

Mr Cordova and his colleagues have come across strong evidence that a large number of secret - and so illegal - Masonic lodges are operating alongside, and in some cases protected by, legal Masonic lodges. Even respectable lodges, they believe, have secret members - high-ranking police officers, magistrates or public officials - whose identities are disguised in the lists of members, or who are not listed at all.

Like the P2, uncovered in 1981 and banned, these lodges bring together in criminal conspiracy some of the most powerful or influential people in the country: politicians, Mafia bosses, senior police officers and civil servants, suspected members of the secret services, bankers, businessmen.

There is evidence that they have bred arms-running rackets and corruption, enabled Mafia criminals to get off lightly, recycled dirty money and been behind bomb attacks and assassinations. Suspicions focus primarily on Sicily, Calabria and Campania, the regions dominated by the Mafia, where almost one-third of Italy's 30,000-odd Masons are based. Whether they are all linked in one single conspiracy or are operating individually is still not clear. Licio Gelli, although still on trial in connection with the P2 plot in a slow moving and almost forgotten case, is free and evidently still active. And while about one-third of the P2's 2,500-odd members were identified and many removed from their posts, most of the rest have not been unmasked.

So sinister has the picture become that the United Lodge of England, the oldest, biggest and - in Italian eyes - most authoritative Masonic organisation in the world, last month suspended recognition of the main Italian organisation, the 18,000-member Grande Oriente d'Italia.

The move, which in effect bans visits between Italian and English members, has been made 'pending clarification'. The Irish, Scottish and French lodges are taking similar measures.

Two months earlier, the growing accusations caused a dramatic split in the Grande Oriente. Claiming that he was being obstructed by his Masonic brothers from cleaning up the organisation, its Grand Master, a bearded professor of philosophy called Giuliano di Bernardo, with some 300 others, quit to found a new one called the Grand Regular Lodge of Italy.

Accused by his successor, Armando Corona, of failing to defend the Grande Oriente from the accusations against it, he in turn complained that all his attempts to break the links among the Grande Oriente, the P2 and other secret groups had failed. Then Mr di Bernardo, who suspects that there are some 1,500 secret Masons, met Mr Cordova in a secret place and, it is reported, told all he knew.

The English Masons expect the 'clarification' to come from Mr Cordova. But while anti-Mafia prosecutors can now work unimpeded and the corrupt and conspiratorial old political system appears to have collapsed, mysterious forces still seem bent on obstructing Mr Cordova's investigations.

From the beginning, he has been kept desperately short of staff by the authorities in Rome. And now, as mountains of documents fill his offices and his investigations cover the whole country, instead of the 10 deputy prosecutors he is legally entitled to, he has only five.

Mr Cordova's office has been subjected to repeated 'inspections' by the Justice Ministry. His nomination by his fellow magistrates for the post of super-prosecutor of the Mafia was blocked by the former justice minister, Claudio Martelli, a Socialist. And a promotion to public prosecutor of Naples was also torpedoed.

Ten days ago Mr Cordova protested to the parliamentary anti- Mafia commission about a 'general reluctance' among the carabinieri and fiscal police to carry out the investigations he required. He said he had been brought out-of-date lists of members or been given little clue to their identities. And he had been told there were no lodges in areas that were 'well known to be swarming with them'.

Mr Cordova left no doubt in members' minds about why he thought such reluctance had arisen. The various police forces, he made it clear, were full of corrupt Masons.

He has recently sent the High Council of the Judiciary, its self- governing body, a list of names of fellow magistrates who, he has discovered, are Masons. There is nothing illegal about membership in itself, but in dozens of cases the magistrates allegedly used their position to help Mafia criminals.

Mr Cordova's report includes evidence from Mafia pentiti. One allegedly spoke of a network of lawyers, magistrates, police officials, politicians and others that 'gave us protection, such as acquittals, reduced sentences and house arrest (instead of jail), and in return we killed anyone who was a nuisance to them'. And he told the anti-Mafia commission that 19 hitherto unknown P2 members were past or present members of parliament; one was a member of the anti-Mafia commission.

Many of the jigsaw pieces Mr Cordova is trying to piece together are startling. There is the case of the hold-up in 1990 in which 100bn lire ( pounds 43bn) worth of securities were stolen from a bank transport van. Two years later a Swiss woman called Winifred Kollbrunner was arrested while attempting to sell some of the stolen securities in Geneva. Ms Kollbrunner turned out to be employed as a kind of ministry consultant by Mr Martelli, who is under investigation in connection with the case and with the existence of a secret bank account allegedly opened in his name by Mr Gelli. She is suspected of selling the securities through a network of Masons in several Italian banks. Before leaving the Grande Oriente lodge, Mr di Bernardo suspended four Masons accused of being involved in the affair, including a former grand master of the lodge at Palmi and a former director-general of the Finance Ministry.

Mr Cordova has come upon evidence of Masonic involvement in illegal trade in guns, tanks and missiles from Pesaro and Brescia, in a Mafia operational base in Milan, of rackets involving toxic waste disposal in Naples, Brindisi and Savona and in fraudulent bankrupcty.

Sicilian magistrates are also probing the deaths of three people involved in Operazione Cesare, the code-name for investigations into links between the P2 and the island's Mafia. One was Boris Giuliano, an Italian secret service officer who, according to Tom Tripodi, a former undercover CIA agent who had been working with him, was killed 'because he had discovered the role of the P2 in the recycling of drug money'.

Giovanni Spadolini, Senate speaker and prime minister at the time of the P2 scandal, has said: 'There is an intrigue, still in many ways to be identified, between the P2 and the Mafia. Behind the destabilisation of Italy (by bombs and massacres in the past 30 years) were centres of corruption, very powerful and very closely linked to the political system . . . The P2 question is not closed.'

(Photograph omitted)

"Spirit of the Masons lives on in makeshift Masonic temple run by aristocratic pig-breeders"

That sound lurid enough?

[cptmarginal]

While looking up the name of that prosecutor from the previous Freemasonry article (Agostino Cordova) I came across something that is a good illustration of the real power of the right-wing in Italy, and the displacement of the left.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/m ... balisation

(Harsh content ahead)

Naples riot sparks political row

Today's May Day rallies in Italy are taking place in the shadow of allegations of police torture after a riot last year, says Rory Carroll

Rory Carroll

Wednesday 1 May 2002

What has become known as the torture chamber is a collection of cells and bathrooms in a Naples police barracks.

Here dozens of leftwing protesters were allegedly punched, kicked and sodomised with implements, turning it into a cesspit of blood, vomit and urine.

They were allegedly forced to kiss portraits of Benito Mussolini, threatened with rape, mocked and terrorised, even the disabled detainees. It was payback.

Hours earlier Naples had erupted when an anti-globalisation rally turned into a riot.

Protesters with clubs attacked police who responded by charging the crowd, leaving violent as well as non-violent protesters bloodied.

When the city calmed, the police swept into the Vecchio Pellegrini hospital and took 80 injured people to the barracks, known as Raniero, where the alleged torture took place.

The shadow of that day in March 2001 will darken today's May Day rallies in Italy because for some it has become a warning of what can happen when the far right gains power.

To see what's at stake in France's presidential election, they say, look no further than Naples, where the police can torture with impunity and ignore criticism from Amnesty International.

Or can they? Prosecutors have just charged 21 police officers with confining, attacking and injuring protesters.

Eight have been arrested and more than a 100 are under investigation for the aftermath of the March 17 rally outside a conference on technology and government.

The alleged brutality foreshadowed by four months the G8 summit in Genoa, but the police have angrily rejected the accusations as unfounded and ludicrous.

Stories of blood-splattered walls and sodomy are just that, stories, they say, and point out that no officer has been tried or convicted and that nothing has been proven.

They say the detainees were questioned without violence and their injuries were from the riot.

The key question of who ordered the raid on the hospital has yet to be answered.

Nor is it clear why the magistrates waited 13 months to make the arrests.

A fraught, grave case to be resolved by the legal system?

In Italy it does not work like that. Controversy over what really happened in those cells and bathrooms has convulsed Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government and the centre-left opposition in a furious row.

What should be a judicial process of evaluating evidence has become a platform for the government to ally itself with the police and renew attacks on a judiciary it deems politically biased.

That snapping sound is public confidence in state institutions.

Umberto Bossi, the reforms minister, denounced the magistrates as dangers to democracy.

Gianfranco Fini, the deputy prime minister, proclaimed the officers' innocence.

Members of his Northern Alliance party have been especially swift and vociferous in ridiculing the alleged torture.

Claudio Scajola, the interior minister, is expected in Naples today to show solidarity - "to be close to my men".

The prime minister, Mr Berlusconi, has refrained from intervening but enough senior allies have done so to worry the head of state, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, that state institutions risk shredding each other.

It is bad enough that the public sees police officers holding emotional protests and denouncing magistrates but for cabinet ministers to echo the denunciations erodes public confidence in the legal and political system.

The left deplores the controversy for suggesting the police are inured from controls. In fact the left was in government in March 2001 and an interior ministry inquiry at the time absolved the police officers, causing some officials to squirm at the u-turn now they are in opposition.

It is also true that a group of magistrates in Naples has been feuding with the chief prosecutor, Agostino Cordova, who is suspected of rightwing sympathies.

But the impression given by the ruling coalition, especially the Northern Alliance, the reformed descendants of Mussolini's blackshirts, is that the police, right or wrong, are an institutional ally to be protected.

Even if that means subverting the judicial system.

A little bit confusing to figure out who's on the left and who's on the right, then. Was Cordova not "squirming at the u-turn"? Or was he trying to hold the previous government accountable? And does that make him right-wing, then, trying to punish those responsible for the brutal torture of anti-globalization protesters? For what it's worth, every other reference I've seen to Cordova portrays him as a fearless anti-Mafia prosecutor.

[Sounder]

Agostino Cordova, who is suspected of rightwing sympathies.

If you want ill informed others to not think of you as 'right-wing', just accuse a target as being 'right-wing'.

In the aggregate, it still works every time.

[cptmarginal]

Here is another incident that should be mentioned in the context of this thread, from 1995:

Death, drugs and diamonds in tale of global conspiracy

Andrew Gumbel reports on a web of intrigue unearthed in Italy

Monday 03 June 1996

It began, like all the best thrillers, with a mysterious death. Last July a colonel in Italy's military intelligence service, Mario Ferraro, was found hanged from a bath rail by his dressing gown cord. Less than a year later the affair has mushroomed into a global conspiracy fresh from the pages of an improbable blockbuster.

Colonel Ferraro, it turns out, was working to unravel a massive global traffic in arms, drugs, radioactive materials and gems. And where he started, prosecutors from Torre Annunziata, near Naples, have carried on, following a trail of smugglers, dirty money recycled from the war in the Balkans, and murky interests in high places.

This weekend came the most spectacular blitz so far; a flurry of arrests and investigations featuring the oddest array of suspects. Among international figures wanted for questioning are Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian ultra- nationalist presidential candidate; Ricardo Maria Carles, the Archbishop of Barcelona; a Somali businessman; and Licio Gelli, the Grandmaster of the illegal Italian Masonic Lodge, P2.

Between them, this motley crew is named in connection with trafficking everything from Kalashnikovs to plutonium, and re-cycling the profits through some surprising channels including the Institute for Religious Works, better known as the Vatican Bank.

Mr Zhirinovsky is suspected of coordinating the sale of nuclear materials via his secretary, who acts as a honorary consul in Russia for the Liberian government.

Meanwhile, Archbishop Carles was responsible, according to one key witness, for transferring some $100m illegally from the Vatican Bank to a Swiss businessman.

In all, hundreds of people in more than 10 countries are suspected of taking part in the racket, which apparently began to provide weapons to Croatia and Slovenia at the start of the Balkan wars, and then turned around 180 degrees when the arms market in the former Yugoslavia became saturated.

The traffickers bought up small arms in Bosnia and Croatia and sold them, accepting the drugs, gems and nuclear materials in a massive, highly complex international barter system.

Quite how prosecutors stumbled on a criminal conspiracy of this magnitude is not clear, since much of the evidence has remained confidential. But it seems the case started with an intercepted cellular telephone call made by a Neopolitan fishmonger. Colonel Ferraro almost certainly died because he knew too much. The magistrate in charge of the inquiry team, Alfredo Ormanni, believes they have reached a crucial stage by uncovering the core mechanism at the heart of the operation, code-named "Cheque to cheque" by Italian police.

There could be more revelations to come. A former colleague of Colonel Ferraro's, Francesco Elmo, has written a memo combining fact, confidential intelligence and rumour that would make any prosecutor's hair stand on end.

Did Yasser Arafat sell 30 kilos of gold to swell the PLO's coffers? Was the Somali businessman in cahoots with the disgraced former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi? Were submarines traded illegally in Albania's territorial waters? We will have to wait for prosecutor Ormanni's next move to find out.

Zhirinovsky link in arms racket

Andrew Gumbel in Rome
Sunday, 2 June 1996

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Archbishop of Barcelona and the one- time grandmaster of Italy's illegal masonic lodge, P2, yesterday all found themselves implicated in an international racket in arms, drugs, nuclear materials and precious stones being investigated by magistrates near Naples.

Alfredo Ormanni, chief prosecutor in a case that is rapidly becoming stranger than fiction, placed a total of 31 people under formal investigation and issued a further 36 arrest warrants. The racket, which is believed to have grown out of arms trading to and from the former Yugoslavia, has already led to the arrests of Italian mafiosi, shady businessmen and a retired operative of the CIA.

Mr Zhirinovsky, the Russian ultra-nationalist who is standing as a candidate in the presidential election in two weeks' time, is suspected of involvement in the trade of nuclear materials, while the Archbishop of Barcelona, Ricardo Maria Carles, has been named by one witness as the channel through which some $65m was laundered through the Vatican Bank.

Archbishop Carles appeared to have cleared his name after being named in the affair late last year, but Mr Ormanni said yesterday that the investigation had reached a new phase in which prosecutors were learning more and more about the ring's far-reaching activities.

"We have been able to get much farther into just how arms and radioactive materials were being trafficked," he said. Arrest warrants abroad were being issued through both diplomatic channels and Interpol.

In Italy, a vast police operation included a search of the home of Licio Gelli, one of the shadiest figures in postwar Italy, who secretly manipulated many aspects of public life through his P2 organisation and has been implicated in right-wing terrorist bombings. In this case, Mr Gelli and his son Maurizio are suspected of money-laundering.

Most of the international suspects refused to comment on the case yesterday, with the exception of Archbishop Carles, who described the accusations against him as calumny.

The operation, code-named "Cheque to Cheque", is unravelling a far-reaching network in which weapons from Yugoslavia have been recycled across the globe via established drugs and other criminal trade routes. It has not been without its setbacks, however. Last summer, an Italian secret service agent involved in the investigation was found hanging by a dressing-gown cord in his bathroom.

[cptmarginal]

While in the course of flipping through Rigorous Intuition, the book, this short entry caught my eye. May as well add it here, copied from the blog post (with the original accompanying image via Wayback Machine) and edited to match the book.

The Aristocrats

June 19, 2006



It's always the same, the name of the game
Is who do you know higher up?
- Bob Dylan

Familiar with the joke, and the movie of the joke? It's allegedly the comedian's "secret handshake": a family of vaudevillians visits a talent agent, who's reluctant to take them on because family acts are "too cute." But the act is a litany of scatological and sexual obscenity, often with horrific violence, and the more imaginative the comedian's depiction of the young children's abuse the more successful is regarded its telling. "It's the perfect joke," says Dana Gould. "Just hearing out loud descriptions of giddy shit-covered incest." (Like Otto Peterson's: "then my daughter comes on stage. She's a real sexy 9-year-old. I hit her with an ax handle....") When the family has finished, the agent says "That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?" And the father always replies: "The Aristocrats!"

Get it? The joke's pay-off is the supposed disparity between depravity and nobility. What could be more absurd than a family of torture artists, engaging in polymorphous abuse, identifying themselves by a term denoting high social station?

Here's another variation of the joke, as told by Crown Prince Vittorio Emanuele Alberto Carlo Teodoro Umberto Bonifacio Amadeo Damiano Bernardino Gennaro Maria of Savoy:

Italy is in shock after the son of its last king was arrested as part of an investigation into prostitution and corruption. One of the country's best-known figures, Prince Victor Emmanuel was detained in the north but taken to a jail in Potenza in the south where the probe is based.

His family strongly denies the allegations against the 69-year-old who went into exile with the rest of the country's royals when Italians rejected the monarchy in favour of a republic, in 1946. But the magistrate who signed the arrest warrant for the prince and 12 other men told reporters about what he called "extremely alarming evidence."

"I believe I have made a rigorous assessment without taking into account the rank of the person concerned," said Alberto Iannuzzi.

Others detained include Salvatore Sottile, a top aide to the foreign minister in former Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government.

According to media reports, investigators believe Prince Victor Emmanuel had contacts with Mafia clans and was involved in procuring prostitutes for clients of a casino in Campione d'Italia, an Italian enclave on Lake Lugano near the Swiss border.

Implicated in Victor Emmanuel's corruption charges is also his cousin, Bulgaria's former child King Simeon II, Simeon Saxe-Coburg.

[And on edit, updating with a story from May 29 posted in the comment field:]

Police bust suspected child trafficking gang

A Bulgarian gang of suspected child traffickers has been broken up by police in simultaneous operations in Italy, Austria, Germany and Bulgaria. Police in Italy say dozens of people were arrested in the raids.

Most of the children moved by the gang were from Bulgaria and were between the ages of eight and 13-years-old. They appear to have been sold to the gang by their poverty stricken parents.

Police said some of the children appeared to have been sexually exploited, they had been kept in slave like conditions and they had been used to move drugs and commit crimes. Operation Elvis Bulgaria - coordinated by the Italian Carabinieri - involved police forces in Austria, Germany and Bulgaria.

[It's not a great stretch to see the potential of a link between this action of Italian police and the unspecified "extremely alarming evidence" against Victor Emmanuel, which also appears to have a Bulgarian connection.]

Some other knee-slappers of the Italian Prince have included shooting a tourist to death in 1978 (and subsequently acquited of unintentional homicide), dealing arms for the likes of the Shah of Iran (his son bears the name Reza in honour of Reza Pahlavi), defending Mussolini's anti-semetic legislation under his father, the last King of Italy, as "not that terrible," and having been a member in good, secret standing of P2, Licio Gelli's criminal fascist Masonoic lodge. As was, let's never forget, Berlusconi.

In April 1981, Milan magistrates broke into Gelli's villa and discovered his lodge's membership lists, which read, says Daniele Ganser in NATO's Secret Army: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, like a "Who's Who in Italy and included not only the most conservative but also some of the most powerful members of Italian society." Fifty high-ranking officers of the army, for instance, and ten bank presidents. In the subsequent parliamentary commission, Communist member Antonio Bellocchio lamented that "we have come to the definite conclusion that Italy is a country of limited sovereignty because of the interference of the American secret service and international freemasonry." He regretted most commissioners had not followed their analysis to its logical end, but understood why they could not, because then "they would have had to admit they are puppets of the United States of America, and they don't intend to admit that ever."

Even without a joke, even just as a punchline, there remains something anachronistically comic about the aristocrats. They appear about as serious as actors in a heritage fort or pioneer village, recreating the rituals of a long-dead era. Their form is absurd, because their function appears to carry no consequential gravity. Yet they remain apart from us in a privileged world, linked by blood. And not only by the blood in their veins.

Early in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles - comic art, and as funny as the End of the World - we read a phone conversation between Whitehall and an occultic assassin. Scion of the ruling class Sir Miles Delacourt, who's favourite recreation is the most dangerous game, cuts the conversation short: "Look, I have a Cabinet ritual to attend, and if it's anything like the last one we'll be up to our knees in blood and spunk for at least the next twelve hours." It could almost be a joke.

A network of fascist Princes and Kings, laundering money, shooting tourists, running guns and elite prostitution rings, is a hell of an act. What do you call it?

He was acquitted, by the way.

Transcribed wiretaps that have been published by the media reveal an underworld of right-wing politicians promising showgirls jobs in TV in exchange for sex -- which is said to take place inside the foreign ministry.