-Caveat Lector- from: http://x48.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=499452668&CONTEXT=935765833.1873412115&hitnum =7 <A HREF="http://x48.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=499452668&CONTEXT=935765833.1873412115&; hitnum=7">Deja.com: Those dirty bankers...</A> ----- Those dirty bankers... Date:1999/07/10 Author:Thee Dude < [EMAIL PROTECTED] "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered". --Thomas Jefferson in 1802 in a letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin WARNING Read at your own peril Ever since the Nugan Hand Bank affair of the late 1970's, bank crashes have followed a slick and familiar template. Narcotics trafficking, gun running, CIA covert ops, money laundering and fraud on a massive scale are just some of the ingredients that have sent bank after bank crashing to its knees. Once the smoke clears, bank depositors and shareholders are left picking up the tab. With a spate of billion-dollar financial scandals hitting the headlines, 1995 wasn't such a good year for harassed bank regulators and shareholders. Calls for tougher regulation of the burgeoning financial markets in the wake of Daiwa, Barings and other debacles are little more than PR palliatives designed to calm the nerves of a cynical public who still form the hard backbone of bank depositors. With the best will in the world, regulators can't keep pace with an evolving and sophisticated money machine that daily shuffles upwards of 24 billion E-bucks around the globe in the blink of an eye. Yet tough regulation, even when emplaced, is easily and regularly evaded. Banking and crime Cimmerian handmaidens for the simple reason that banks are where the money is. Having access to the money and being 'connected' is the name of the game where the stakes are other people's money. This is the dark side of the financial community, a hidden face that largely goes unreported - until, that is, a major banking scandal hits the front pages. Squirming under the glare of public attention, successive bank disclosures have revealed the sinister connections that leading banks have with organised crime and the intelligence community. The money-shufflers of 'Spooksville' need 'black funds' to finance covert operations and appear happy to exchange guns and military hard ware for dope that is, in turn, peddled for dollars used to finance other black operations. This happy-go-lucky 'Ferris wheel' approach to money-raising on the part of the intelligence community reveals a long history of entanglements with the Mafia. Organised crime syndicates are now the single largest business sector on the planet and are set to grow. They just love banking. Having accumulated a staggering US$820 billion from investment interest over the last decade, the Mafia is now estimated to earn US$250 billion a year from its legitimate investments. Dozens of nations who maintain strict bank secrecy laws are, de facto, providing full banking services to these mandarins of dirty money. A large number of banks are actually owned by Mafia syndicates. Some of the largest and most respectable appear content to turn a blind eye and earn massive commissions from laundering dirty money. The prudent image of the banker is just that: an image. Banking survives purely on depositor confidence, making it the biggest ongoing ' confidence trick ' the world has ever witnessed.That confidence has been dented by one scandal following on the heels of another. One of the earliest scandals was the Nugan Hand Bank affair. Michael Hand, an ex-CIA operative from the Bronx, joined up in 1973 with Frank Nugan, an Australian playboy and inheritor of a Mafia fortune, and incorporated the Nugan Hand Bank. The bank sported an interesting and exclusive board of directors. President of the bank was (Retired) Rear Admiral Earl Yates, former chief of the US Navy's strategic planning. Legal counsel was the CIA's William Colby, and Walter McDonald, former deputy director of the spook agency was listed as consultant. An in-house commodity trader on the bank's payroll was also a leading heroin importer, while Richard Secord, later to be implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, was said to have a business connection. Seven years later, the bank collapsed following the discovery of Frank Nugan's body slumped in his Mercedes. Clutching a gun in one hand and sporting a hole through the head, Nugan was also holding a bible that contained an embarrassing list of names including William Colby, DCI of the CIA, and Bob Wilson, the House Armed Services Committee's ranking Republican. Other names listed had a variety of backgrounds, ranging from known narcotics traffickers, politicians and businessmen to personalities from sport and the media. Beside each name were listed amounts running into five and six numbers. Following public outrage, the US Senate held an investigation into Nugan Hand's operations. Amongst other things it discovered that the bank operated a branch in Chiang Mai , Thailand - heart of Triad country. The branch was dedicated to laundering the Golden Triangle's heroin revenue. Connected to the bank's office by an interconnecting door was the DEA's (Drug Enforcement Administration's) local office - premises that were also shared with the CIA. At about the same time that Frank Nugan's skull was developing powder burns, Michele Sindona, a free-wheeling financial whiz-kid and consigliere for the Sicilian Mafia, had purchased New York's Franklin National Bank and driven it to the wall with losses totalling US$40 million. Ranked the 29th largest bank in the US, the Franklin crash became the biggest on record at that time. Establishing a fictitious company, Fasco AG, in Liechtenstein, Sindona was able to obtain a majority interest in the Italy-based Banco Privata Finanziera. BPA was an excellent acquisition for Sindona, for not only did it have a close relationship with Britain's blue-chip Hambros Bank but it also had a preferential partnership arrangement with Continental Illinois Bank of Chicago, owned and presided over by David Kennedy (later to become Finance Minister in the Nixon administration). Continental Illinois was later to crash spectacularly in the mid-80's, only to be rescued with an estimated four billion US tax dollars. Described by TIME magazine as "the greatest Italian since Mussolini", Sindona used his relationship with David Kennedy to get close to Bishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank (the Institute for Religious Works [IOR]), and thereafter set in motion a tangled web of financial fraud that almost brought the IOR to its knees. His empire grew rapidly, pulling a number of financial institutions into its ownership, including, in addition to his BPA, the Banca Unione, the Germany-based Wolf Bank, the Generale Immobiliare, Geneva's Finance Bank, Edilcentro, a finance company set up in the Bahamas, New York's Franklin National Bank plus 140 other companies spread throughout the globe. Sindona's connection to the Mafia probably dates back to World War II when he joined in the Mafia preparations for American landings in Sicily. However, it was during the '70s that the Sicilian Mafia chose him as their money man. Four years later, in 1974, Don Michele's world began collapsing around him. It was later discovered he had been skimming off the mob's narcodollars which he was charged with laundering. Incarcerated in prison for his part in the Franklin Bank crash, Sindona was later found dead in his cell. A dose of strychnine laced in his coffee brought a 25 year jail sentence to an abrupt end. If Sindona's death was anything, it was too late. His intimate involvement with another bank that crashed with massive losses was to have calamitous and far-reaching effects on Italy's ruling elite as well as the spooks of Langley. Banco Ambrosiano was the largest private bank in Italy until it collapsed in 1982 with losses approaching a massive US$2 billion. At the centre of the scandal was Roberto Calvi, Chairman of Ambrosiano and Lodge brother of Licio Gelli, the shadowy Grand Master of the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge. Gelli, once an Oberleutnant in Himmler's SS, held the reins of power and knew how to use them - for which he was dubbed "The Puppet Master". A consummate blackmailer, he kept a secret record of wrongdoing of all those he came into contact with, and wasn't shy in using it to his advantage. P2's membership roll included highly placed politicians, cabinet members, heads of the Italian Armed Forces and the intelligence services, together with leading industrialists, media magna tes, judges, Mafiosi, members of the Vatican Curia and, of course, high-flying financiers - including Sindona. P2's 'elite' membership, linked by their extreme right-wing political views, perfectly dovetailed with the CIA's long-standing desire to eradicate Communism from the Italian political scene. The P2 and Banco Ambrosiano scandal broke when Calvi was found 'suicided' on 17th June 1982. With his hands tied behind his back and a rope around his neck, he had been suspended from London's Blackfriars Bridge in what some saw as a ritual killing. Calvi was P2's banker and had been involved in embezzling massive sums of money out of his bank and into secretive 'offshore' companies in Liechtenstein and elsewhere. A number of these companies were linked to the Vatican Bank. P2 was responsible for a number of CIA-backed political atrocities at the time, including the bombing if Bologna railway station in August 1980 where 85 innocents were slaughtered - and mischievously attributed to left-wing terrorists. It took 10 years before the real story came out. Francesco Mannino Mannonia, a penitito (defector) from the Sicilian Mafia, confirmed in 1992 that Calvi was strangled by Francesco di Carlo, the mob's heroin 'traffic manager', at the instruction of Pippo Calo of the Corleone family. We now know that Calvi, together with Gelli and Sindona, was embezzling the Mafia out of a fortune. Gelli was 'handling' for the Corleonesi a large sum of money which he passed to Calvi, who promptly used it to shore up his failing bank. Smart to the last, Gelli helped the mob recover "tens of billions of lire" before bolting out sight. Despite his best efforts, he was eventually arrested in Switzerland to where he had travelled to arrange the secret transfer of US$120 million of Ambrosiano's lost loot. Bribing a guard with $20,000, he managed to escape. Once over the French border, he climbed aboard a helicopter for the short trip to Monaco, home of P2's 'super-Lodge'. From Monaco he travelled to Paraguay - a favourite bolt-hole of many of his wartime Nazi comrades - and disappeared from sight. The missing billions have never been recovered. The Ambrosiano affair was significant for revealing the web of interconnections that existed within Italy's ruling class. On the one hand, the CIA was using P2's 'covered' (secret) Lodge and illicit funds to conduct covert warfare on Italy's Communists. At the other extreme, it demonstrated the Mafia's total infiltration of Italian business and politics - a feat achieved following their induction into Masonry. Antonino Calderoni, a Mafia defector, revealed that, during 1977, Mafia bosses were invited to join a covered Masonic Lodge. They agreed to join on the understanding that they would learn the secrets of Masonry but would not reveal Mafia secrets. "Men of Honour who get to be bosses belong to the Masonry : this must not escape you," another Mafia defector Leonardo Messina, revealed. "Because it is in the Masonry that we can have total contact with businessmen, with the institutions, with the men who administer power..." Messina went on to add that the Mafia's secret association with Masonry is "an obligatory passage for the Mafia on a world level." Masons, like the intelligence community, bankers and the Mafia, share a common interest in secrecy. Similarly they all have a common interest in money, especially other people's money. The 'connections' that had been forged and which lay behind Italy's greatest-yet banking debacle were to be re-enacted years later in America. The Savings and Loan (S&L) scam - by far the greatest banking rip-off of all time - sees the same cast of players at work. "Something very significant happened during our country's savings-and-loan crisis, the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. It happened quietly, secretly, without any fanfare and attention. It happened before our very eyes and we knew it not. What we missed was the massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayer to a select group of extremely rich, powerful people." These ominous words opened the introduction to Pete Brewton's massively researched book, The Mafia, CIA & George Bush - the untold story of America's greatest financial debacle. Brewton, an award-winning investigative journalist, spent years tracing the subterranean web of interconnections that sat at the heart of this affair that looted the American taxpayer of close to US$1 trillion. However, there was more to the S&L affair than these words portrayed. I dunno man I didn't do it. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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