Mark Franchetti - March 14, 2010

THE billionaire Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, once met a leading mafia godfather to ask for protection, according to testimony gathered over several years by crime prosecutors.

Mafia informants claim the meeting took place in Milan in 1974, when Berlusconi was already a wealthy entrepreneur, at the offices of his property company. The informers say Berlusconi met Stefano Bontade, then one of the mafia’s most powerful bosses, because he feared for his family’s safety at a time when Italy was plagued by a wave of high-profile kidnappings.

Francesco Di Carlo, one of Bontade’s henchmen who is now in jail, told prosecutors that he was at the meeting. He claims Berlusconi asked for help to ensure that neither he nor his children would be abducted by other mafia clans.

According to the henchman’s testimony, Bontade gave his word that he would personally ensure Berlusconi’s safety. In return Berlusconi told the mafia godfather that he was “at his disposal, for anything”.

Full story

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NB: Not to mention that Berlusconi was also a member of Gelli’s ‘rogue’ Masonic faction, P2. And for the deep connections between the Mafia and the Masons in Italy, see “Operation Hiram: Italian Freemasonry and the Mafia.”

Tom Kington - 1 October 2009

The mafia’s formidable grip on Italy has been starkly illustrated by a new report claiming 13 million Italians live in areas where the mob exerts influence over everyday life.

Commissioned by Italy’s parliamentary anti-mafia commission, the report by research institute Censis used crime statistics to find the number of urban and rural districts where clans are active in the Italian south.

The Italians living in the 610 districts identified, even if law abiding and not members of clans, “are in some way conditioned by a presence that draws its strength from the ability to exert a capillary control in the area”, the report stated.

Giuseppe Pisanu, head of the anti-mafia commission, said the Italian mafia was now “silently prospering, moving on from spectacular crimes and massacres to business and politics, with a prudent dose of intimidation and violence in a bid to take over the fundamental role of the state”.

Full story

Red Ice

Philip Willan has been specialising in Italian parapolitics, working out of Rome for more than 20 years. He is the author of “Puppetmasters, The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy” and his latest book is called “The Last Supper, The mafia, the masons and the killing of Roberto Calvi“. Philp joins us to talk about The Mafia, the masons, The Vatican, the P2 Lodge, the Murder of Roberto Calvi, the Relationship Between Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican and much more. Topics Discussed: Pope John Paul I, The Money changes, Robert Calvi, Banco Ambrosiano, Vatican Bank, Flavio Carboni, Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), PII lodge, Silvano Vito, Yugoslavia, Austria, Umberto Ortolani, Missing Brief Case, Vatican Right Wing Relationships with the Dictators, Rat Lines, Nazi’s, Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele and many others, Who took care of Calvi when he came to England? The Mafia Connections, Calvi’s Murder Trial, Witnesses, Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, the 5 suspects, bande Delimaniana, Ernesto Diotallevi, Silvano Vittor, Chelsea Cloisters, Calò, According to the Trial Calvi was Murdered, Blackfriars Bridge, Alberto Jaime Berti. You don’t want to miss hour two as we discuss more on Propaganda Due the P2 lodge, their grand master Licio Gelli, we’ll talk about Freemasons and the possible P2 membership of people within the Vatican. We also discuss the murder of Pope John Paul the 1st after only 33 days in office …what’s the message? We talk about the Swiss Connection, not only to Hans Kuntz but the Pontifical Swiss Guard of Vatican City. Is there any connection to the powerful financial force of Switzerland and the fact that they hold the World Economic Forum in Davos every year? We also discuss the card found on Roberto Calvi from the Law Firm “Slaughter and May”. We round things up talking about Operation Gladio and Opus Dei.

Daniel Hopsicker - March 20 2009

Another owner of the flight school in Venice Florida that trained Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi to fly is in trouble with the law; current owner Arthur G. Nadel, 75, was arrested recently for running a Ponzi scheme which methodically looted investors in his Sarasota-based hedge funds of more than $300 million.

Nadel’s arrest marks the second time in recent years that the owner of Huffman Aviation, the FBO (fixed base of operations) at the Venice Airport has been involved in crimes traditionally associated with the Mob.

Ponzi schemes, of course, are a trademark Mafia specialty. So, too, is the crime of heroin trafficking in which previous owner Wally Hilliard was implicated.

Full story

Victor Thorn - February 2009

Ponzi scheme financier Bernard Madoff should feel fortunate that he got nabbed when he did. Now under house arrest in his $7 million Manhattan penthouse, he could be lying in a pine box, six feet under if some of the people he crossed got their hands on him.

Former funds manager Harry Markopolos told a House Financial Services subcommittee on Feb. 4 that Madoff had cheated some extremely dangerous figures out of millions of dollars.

“Mr. Madoff was running such a large scheme of unimaginable size and complexity, and he had a lot of dirty money,” Markopolos testified. “Let me describe dirty money to you. When you’re that big and you’re that secretive, you’re going to attract a lot of organized crime money, which we now know came from the Russian mob and the Latin American drug cartel. When you’re zeroing out mobsters, you have a lot of fear. He could not afford to get caught, because once he got caught. . . .”

Full story

Mark Mitchell - February 3rd, 2009

In 2005, Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com and future Deep Capture investigative reporter, began a public crusade against illegal naked short selling (hedge funds and brokers creating phantom stock to manipulate stock prices down). He said, over and over, that the crime was destroying public companies and had the potential to trigger a systemic meltdown of our financial markets.

Soon after, I began to investigate a network of short sellers, journalists, and miscreants. I concluded that many of the people in this network were connected to two famous criminals – “junk bond king” Michael Milken and his associate, Ivan Boesky. I also began taking a close look at the Mafia’s involvement in naked short selling.

In my last installment (click here to read), I described some of the strange occurrences that attended this investigation. Where the story left off, I’d recently been threatened in a bookstore, and then ambushed by three thugs who told me to stay away from this story. My unwitting employer had been bribed by short sellers, Patrick had been told by a U.S. Senator that his life was in danger, and a Russian matryoshka doll had appeared on the desk of an offshore businessman.

Inside this matryoshka doll was a slip of paper marked with the letter “F”…

Full story

An interesting aggregation of (connecting) data relating to the Jewish and Russian mob, the Italian mafia, Madoff, Giuliani, P2, Bin Laden, and more.

Sep 17 2008  By Ian Brandes (via Aftermath News)

THEY trade in everything from stolen art to nuclear technology and leave rivals riddled with bullets in the streets of Moscow.

Now the worst thugs in the Russian Mafia have blasted their way to the top of the global organised crime league.

Moscow’s Solntsevskaya Bratva, known as the Brotherhood, have just been named the worst criminal gang in the world in a major survey.

And the planet’s most famous mobsters, the “Five Families” of the New York Mafia, barely scrape into the top 10.

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NB: Some of the following material is verbatim from a few posts I did at ATS. Since I own the copyright, it is my prerogative to reproduce in anyway I see fit.

Diploma of Giosue Carducci from Propaganda Massonica, Rome on April 21, 1886 (the original P2 Lodge)

Back in June there was a story (in English) about the Italian authorities having concluded an investigation  “into attempts to slow down legal proceedings against members of the mafia with the help of members of the Freemasonry”:

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