Paul "the Gorilla" Marcinkus Dies

Scandal-hit Vatican banker dies: Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who was involved in one of the biggest financial scandals to hit the Vatican, has died, church officials say.

MARCINKUS: SILENT WITNESS IN CALVI MYSTERY: The Mafia, the Vatican heavyweight, the 'suicide' of God's Banker 25 years ago... the secrets that will be taken to the grave.

From Everything is Under Control by Robert Anton Wilson:

Paul "the Gorilla" Marcinkus

Paul "the Gorilla" Marcinkus, a political priest so named because of his King Kong musculature, served as bodyguard to two Popes and eventually became Archbishop and was appointed president of the Vatican Bank (IOR). He almost immediately plunged the Vatican into its first major financial scandal of the 1970s, when it was revealed that the Mafia had $1 billion in counterfeit stock, at least some of which got deposited in the Vatican Bank; according to many investigators, all of it was intended for deposit there, but what happened to most of it still remains unknown.

New York D.A. Frank Hogan, who prosecuted several local Mafiosi for this caper, attempted to extradite and prosecute Marcinkus also, but was blocked by White House intervention. (Michele "the Shark" Sindona, one of Marcinkus' colleagues in the P2 conspiracy, had contributed lavishly to Nixon's campaign, and P2 probably had high-level protection as part of the CIA's Gladio operation to control Italian politics).

Later, still under Marcinkus, the Vatican Bank became intimately involved with some of the "ghost banks" (virtual banks) and drug laundromats in the Sindona-Roberto Calvi loop. Marcinkus was listed as co-owner with Calvi of the Cisalpine Bank, a center of drug traffic according to Italian investigating magistrates. When Banco Ambrosiano crashed and the whole P2 scandal made headlines day after day for more than 2 years, the Vatican stonewalled, but later they quietly removed Paul "the Gorilla" from their bank and made him mayor of Vatican City. Later still, they sent him away entirely, and he was last reported in semi-retirement in Cicero, Illinois.

The Calvi Affair

The Calvi Affair by Larry Gurwin of the Institutional Investor (London) attempts to make sense of the P2 Conspiracy that shook up Italian finance, and European finance generally, for several years in the 1970s-1980s. Gurwin concentrates chiefly on Roberto Calvi, president of Banco Ambrosiano, whose strange death -- he was found hanging from a bridge in London, after disappearing abruptly from Italy -- had especially shocked English investors.

Calvi had joined the P2 brotherhood, a secret society within the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry, because he believed that P2 held the keys to economic and political power in Italy. Through his P2 connections, his close links with Archbishop Paul "The Gorilla" Marcinkus of the Vatican Bank, and his fertile imagination -- he created totally fictitious banks all over the world and used them to carry on illegal and clandestine activities -- Calvi became indeed very rich, but also attracted unwelcome attention from bank examiners.

Through Liccio Gelli, founder of the P2 group, Calvi became involved with the Mafia, the CIA, the KGB and an assortment of criminal and terrorist organizations-- but because of his ties to the Vatican, he was called "God's banker" and seemed immune to the hazards of his profession. Then the house of cards fell apart, Calvi found himself indicted for embezzlement, and under suspicion for numerous other crimes, and fled Italy. The day he hanged himself or was hanged in London, his secretary threw herself or was thrown from a window of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan.