The Lonely Death of His Holiness John Paul I (Alberto Luciani)

The Pope, the spiritual figure who leads the world's 800 million Roman Catholics, is not an ascetic hermit. Yet, Pope John Paul I (Alberto Luciani) reigned and led those millions of Roman Catholics for a mere thirty-three days, died on fall night in 1978 alone in his papal apartment at the Vatican.



David Yallop presented a case for Pope John Paul I's poisoning. Yallop is an investigative reporter who wrote the book In God's Name which argues that in spite of a brief reign, the late Pope wanted reform. The priority for Luciani was the Vatican City Bank and its inter-connected Church financial institutions--the Church's temporal empire.



After Giovanni Montini's reign (Paul VI) the Vatican Bank had emerged as a multinational, highly financed and diversified institution, like the money changers in the Temple of Jesus' time, not a frequent lay over for the Holy Spirit. This emergence had begun 50 years before when the Vatican, deftly, negotiated with Benito Mussolini's fascist government and negotiated a similar concordant with Hitler's Nazi regime.



Luciani was seeking to dismantle this 50 years of Vatican financial history. Luciani addressed the Vatican diplomats--his first statements as Supreme Pontif and prior to his first Mass as Pope--"We have no temporal goods to offer, no economic interests to discuss."



This single statement stunned the diplomats. The banking and real estate owned by the Vatican Bank had combined assets of $3 billion. The Vatican Bank was an overwhelming force that had nearly demolished the Italian economy in the 1960's. The Italian government had approached the Holy See, seeking some tax revenue to be paid on the Bank's lucrative stock portfolio. The Holy See threatened to sell off all of its holdings onto the Italian stock exchange, a move that would have buried the Italian economy. Result: The Vatican remained tax exempt.



The most unsavory tie was the Vatican Bank's involvement with P2, the Masonic Lodge and probable criminal syndicate with members in the Italian government, the Mafia, and the Vatican itself. P2 was connected to a neo-fascist political cadre which resorted to terrorist activity including a train station bombing in Bologna.



Licio Gelli, P2 founder, was a business associate (hmm, Robert Wagner gave himself this label in his work with Bryan Kocis) of Klaus Barbie (a financial backer of Argentine dictator Juan Peron; CIA informan; and honored guest at Ronald Reagan's 1980 inauguration) which illustrates the veracity of the motto, "the doors to all bank vaults open to the right."



Bishop Paul Marcinkus, an American clergyman, ran the Vatican Bank. Bishop Marcinkus, for some unexplained reason, was walking through Vatican City at dawn on the morning Pope John Paul I was found dead. Marcinkus had never been known for 6 a.m. walks. He was known for having entered into numerous agreements and arangements on the Bank's behalf with P2 members Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi.



Sindona ended up in prison. Sindona had been an international speculator and Mafia thug who caused frauds that rocked banks in American and Italy with failures. Good Bishop Marcinkus would claim an ongoing business relationship (hmm something else Wagner claimed with Bryan Kocis) with Sindona. Alternatively, Marcinkus denied any meetings with Sindona.



Bishop Marcinkus said of Roberto Calvi, the other P2 speculator, "Calvi merits our trust. This I have no reason to doubt." Yallop wrote,

[Roberto Calvi's] comments are particularly illuminating, coming as they did just eight months after Calvi had been fined $13.7 million and sentenced to four months in prison, and only seven months after both the Vatican and Bishop Marcinkus discovered (the Vatican version of events) the Calvi had stolen ovr $1 billion and left the Vatican to pay the bill.

That Calvi was a corruption nightmare is an understatement. He was a pilfering Italian banker who took millions, the epitome of the white collar criminal. Immoral yes. His exemplar of behavior: Mario Puzo's novel, The Godfather.

Calvi's death and the scandals leading up to it formed the basis for The Godfather, Part III, a sequel to the film version of the Mafia saga. Calvi met Doom at the end of a noose tied to the underside of London's Blackfriar's Bridge. The coroner ruled the hanging a suicide, but more likely met Doom through his P2 associates (Wagner's favorite word). When the body was discovered, his pockets were loaded with bricks.

Marcinkus ordered the Vatican Bank to front for Roberto Calvi's complex and illegal stock deals. The Vatican Bank nominally owned many of the companies that were actually controlled by Calvi. The Vatican and Calvi raked in millions of dollars. Further, Calvi functioned as P2's financial manager. When Gelli phoned Calvi, he used the code name "Luciani."

The ethical papacy of Alberto Luciani placed this network in the maelstrom. Luciani was looking to divest the Vatican of its vast wealth--the Church, the bride of Christ, like Jesus, should be poor--and of Bishop Paul Marcinkus.

When Luciani died on 28 September 1978, of natural causes, it was a tremendous relief for Gelli, Calvi, Sindona, and Marcinkus, the Mafia and P2. The first three men had plotted before: Mafia rivals and police investigators. Marcinkus also had a motive for eliminating Pope John Paul I.

At the time of his death, Pope John Paul I, the world's most influential spiritual leader, went through his daily under virtually nonexistant security. Not only was Luciani both unguarded and unattended on the night of his death, some sources say that when his distress struck, he pushed a bedside alarm button. This alarm flash was ignored the Swiss Guardsman in charge of the Night Watch had retired for the evening. No one asked why the light in the papal apartments, visible from without, burned throughout the night, despite Pope John Paul's routine 9:30 p.m. bedtime.

Oddly, no post mortem was conducted on Pope John Paul I's remains. This raised eyebrows. The Vatican Secretary of State tried to placate the press, falsely stating that Church law prohibited papal autopsies (no such edict exists). Instead, the pope's death was ruled a heart attack--acute myocardial infraction--but no death certificate was issued for that, or any other, cause of death.

Yallop writes that without a post mortem, a fatal dose of digitalis would present the symptoms of a heart attack. Yallop selected digitalis because Gelli ordered all P2 lodge brothers to commit suicide with a dose of digitalis, provided providentially, by the lodge, if being forced to reveal P2 Lodge secrets.

Yallop was told that when Luciani's body was found, his hands held a set of notes detailing many of the changes he proposed in Vatican operations. The Vatican Secretary of State stated that Pope John Paul I held a copy of The Imitation of Christ. Reporters in attendance at that press conference broke out in disbelieving laughter.

When Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, was elected Luciani's successor he received a briefing on the reorganization plans of John Paul I. John Paul II did not implement any of them.

Reference:

Yallop, David. In God's Name. NY: Bantam, 1984.

Goosestepping in Washington, DC or The American Putsch that Failed to Launch

During the Great Depression, a coalition of millionaire bankers and industrialists conjured a scheme to grab control of the federal government and place a Fascist dictatorship in its place. It was a macabre event in US history.

John L. Spivak wrote a history, A Man in His Time. Spivak commented on the attempted putsch thusly, What was behind the plot was shrouded in a silence which has not been broken to this day. Even a generation later, those who are still alive and know all the facts have kept their silence so well that the conspiracy is not even a footnote in American histories.

A congressional committee investigated and confirmed the allegations, yet those very findings were kept on dthe down low and archived. For what reason? One good reason was that the plotters were American financiers in the JP Morgan and EI DuPont banking and industrial empires, right-wing conservatives bitterly opposed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and alliance with the labor unions.

A patriotic military leader, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler remained true and blew the whistle on the scheme. During the summer of 1933, the putsch cabal approached Gen. Butler, a retired commandant of the US Marine Corps and a popular hero of WWI who was known as the Fighting Quaker. The cabal offered Gen. Butler the job of shaping the American Legion into a 500,000-man radical militia, to be the advance in an American coup d' etat.

The ironic paradox for fascism turned out to be Gen. Butler himself. Butler was the conspiracy's Battle of the Little Big Horn. The conspirators chose Gen. Butler because of his charisma with rank and file soldiers. Yet, it was Gen. Butler's anti-elitist leanings and his reputation for honest dealing which made him popular. The conspirators selected a leader with scrupples and, therefore, most unlikely to agree to direct a fascist takeover of the US government. Shrewdly, Gen. Butler decided to play along, feigning interest in the plans in order to draw the plotters into the spotlight and expose the takeover scheme to Congress.

Gen. Butler testified before the House of Representatives' McCormack-Dickstein Committee, which was investigating Nazi and Communist activities in America. Butler was first approached by Gerald G. MacGuire, a bond salesman and former Commander of the Connecticut American Legion. News accounts described MacGuire thusly: MacGuire was a short stocky man tending toward three chins, with a bullet-shaped head which had a silver plate in it due to a wound received in battle.

Butler told the McCormack-Dickstein Committee that MacGuire described to him what was tantamount to a plot to seize the government, by force if necessary. MacGuire, Gen. Butler testified, stated that he had traveled to Europe to study the role played by veterans' groups in propping up Mussolini's fascist government in Italy; Hitler's Nazi Germany, and the French government. MacGuire heaped praise on France's Croix de Feu as an organization of super-soldiers with tremendous political influence. Then, MacGuire, the man with the silver plate in his skull stated that our idea here in America is to get up an organization of this kind because the political setup has got to be changed a bit.

Gen. Butler than fleshed out MacGuire's understanding of the proposed treason: Now, did it ever occur to you that the President is overworked? We might have an Assistant President; somebody to take the blame. MacGuire termed this new super Cabinet member to be the Secretary of General Affairs. And, MacGuire said, You know the people will swallow this. We have got newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President's health is failing. Everybody can tell that by looking at Roosevelt, and the dumb American people will fall for this in a second . . . .

Of course, MacGuire denied Gen. Butler's account under oath; however, corroborating testimony came from Paul Comly French, a Philadelphia Record reporter. Gen. Butler asked French to look into MacGuire's plot and put the spotlight on what the Hell it is all about.

MacGuire agreed to French's interview after checking with Gen. Butler. French testified before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee that MacGuire told him, We need a fascist government in this country . . . to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Gen. Smedley Butler, the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.

French's testimony continues: MacGuire said, We might go along with Roosevelt and then do with him what Benito Mussolini did with the King of Italy. If Roosevelt played ball, French summarized, Swell. If Roosevelt did not go along, the conspirators would push him out. French said that MacGuire dropped names to imply that the American Legion hierarchy was involved in the coup plot.

To impress Gen. Butler, MacGuire produced a bank book that itemized deposits that amounted to well over $100,000 available to pay expenses. Then, MacGuire flashed eighteen $1000 bills (at that time, $1000 bills were used to transfer and settle transactions between banks) and boasted of friends who could contribute more cash on short notice.

One of MacGuire's good friends was Robert Sterling Clark, a well known Wall Street banker and stockbroker. When Gen. Butler demanded that MacGuire produce his superiors, the rotund middleman gladly made introductions. Butler's testimony has Clark telling him of spending half of his $60 million fortune to save the other half. Clark sang an ominous tune about Franklin Delano Roosevelt: You know the President is weak. Roosevelt will come right along with us. He was born into our class, and he will come back. Roosevelt will run true to form. In the end he will come around. But we have to be prepared to sustain him when he does.

In stunning form, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee (this committee was similar to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee) never got around to compelling Clark's testimony. And the committee's members--who showed more enthusiasm for nailing Communists than they did rich American Fascists--failed to grill six other coup suspects named by Butler and French. The committee did suppress many of the names, even though French's newspaper articles caused controversy by naming the wealthier conspirators at the height of the Great Depression.

The following is a list of the leading co-conspirators named by MacGuire and Clark:

• Grayson Murphy, a director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel, and panoply of JP Morgan banks. Murphy was the first contributor of the American Legion, which Murphy and other wealthy military officers formed after WWI to offset radicalism. Also, Murphy was MacGuire's boss at the New York brokerage firm.
• William Doyle, a former state commander of the American Legion and the architect of the coup idea.
• John W. Davis, a former Democratic candidate for President of the United States and a senior attorney for JP Morgan & Company, Inc.
• Al Smith, a former Governor of New York state, a Roosevelt foe, former Roman Catholic candidate for President of the United States, co-director of the newly founded American Liberty League which was an organization described by MacGuire as the matrix on which the coup plot would be commenced.

Other businessmen emerged from the shadows, including Smith's co-director at the American Liberty League, John J. Raskob, who was a former Chair of the Democratic Party, a high-ranking EI DuPont deNemours & Co., Inc. officer, and a bitter enemy of Franklin Roosevelt, whom he classified as a dangerous radical. And, far deeper in the shadows, was Conservative industrialist Irenee DuPont, the founder of the American Liberty League. Grayson Murphy, MacGuire's boss, was the Treasurer of the American Liberty League. Then an unwelcome surprise was the presence of heavy-hitting political types from the Democratic Party, FDR's party.

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee's public report, was a gilded lily, going against its internal summary to the House. Briefly, the Committee acknowledged Gen. Butler's veracity and MacGuire's lying. The report concluded:

In the last few weeks of the Committee's life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country . . . . There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed into execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient . . . . MacGuire denied [Butler's] allegations under oath, but this Committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made to Gen. Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principle, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while MacGuire was abroad studying the various forms of veteran's organizations of Fascist character.

In the end, the coup plot's failure owes much to Gen. Butler's ethics as it does to the hubris of the wealthy. Lacking an American Mussolini , but possessing bank vaults full of cash to buy one, America's wealthy elitist -Fascists sent a man with a first-rate, silver plate in his head to obtain Gen. Butler as its own Fehurer. Of course, this scheme went South when, out of stupidity, the elite Fascists decided to buy a dictator with scruples--Gen. Butler--a true, red, white, and blueAmerican with a sense of honor and duty.

References

Archer, Jules. The Plot to Seize the White House. NY: Hawthorn Books, 1973.

Seldes, George. Even the Gods Can't Change History. Seacaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1976.

Spivak, John L. A Man in His Time. NY: Horizon Press, 1967.