This article was spotted by S.D. and G.P. who passed it along, and to whom I'd like to give a big "thank you," because it concerns a subject that I have written about, in my book Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations, that subject being what I have called "the hidden system of finance." In this case, the story concerns an alleged member of the Mafia, Anthony Raimondi, a nephew of the notorious America mob boss, Lucky Luciano, and his claims stated in his recent "tell all" book, When the Bullet hits the Bone, that he was part of a team that had murdered Pope John-Paul I (Albino Cardinal Luciani), who was pope for a mere 33 days. Pay attention to that number, because we'll be getting back to that. Here's the article:

Meet the mobster who claims he helped whack Pope John Paul I over stock fraud

What concerns us here is Mr. Raimondi's central statement:

He helped kill the pope — so his pals could stay out of hell. That’s the shocking claim from longtime Colombo gangster Anthony Raimondi, who says that, in 1978, he went to Italy with a team of hit men who whacked John Paul I. They allegedly poisoned him with cyanide just 33 days into the pontiff’s reign, according to Raimondi’s new book, “When the Bullet Hits the Bone,” out now from Page Publishing. Raimondi, the nephew of legendary godfather Lucky Luciano, claims he was recruited for the murder at the age of 28 by his cardinal cousin, Paul Marcinkus, who ran the Vatican bank. Raimondi’s job was to learn the pope’s habits and be on hand to observe as Marcinkus knocked out John Paul by spiking his nightly cup of tea with Valium. “I stood in the hallway outside the pope’s quarters when the tea was served,” he writes, adding that the drug did its job so well that their victim wouldn’t have stirred “even if there had been an earthquake,” he recounts. “I’d done a lot of things in my time, but I didn’t want to be there in the room when they killed the pope. I knew that would buy me a one-way ticket to hell.” Instead, he stood outside the room as his cousin readied a dose of cyanide, he claims. “He measured it in the dropper, put the dropper in the pope’s mouth and squeezed,” Raimondi writes. “When it was done, he closed the door behind him and walked away.” After the snoozing pontiff was force-fed the poison, a papal assistant checked on him, then cried out that “the pope was dying” — after which Marcinkus and two other cardinals in on the plot “rushed into the bedroom like it was a big surprise,” Raimondi writes. A Vatican doctor was summoned, who ruled that John Paul I had suffered a fatal heart attack, he writes. ... They targeted the pope because he had threatened to expose a massive stock fraud run by Vatican insiders, according to the book. The billion-dollar scam involved a forgery expert at the Vatican who faked the church’s holdings in blue-chip American companies such as IBM, Sunoco and Coca-Cola. Mobsters then allegedly sold the phony stock certificates to unsuspecting buyers. John Paul I had vowed to defrock the perpetrators, which included Marcinkus and about “half the cardinals and bishops in the Vatican,” Raimondi told The Post. “They would have been thrown out and subject to the laws of the US and Italy,” he said. “They would have gone to jail.” (Emphasis added)

Now before I get to today's high octane speculation, it's necessary for me to lay my cards on the table: I do not believe, and have never believed the idea that Pope John-Paul I simply died quietly in his sleep. I do believe, and have always believed, that John-Paul I was murdered, and murdered precisely for his probable knowledge of, and determination to eliminate, the financial corruption in and around the Vatican bank and its connections. There are a number of "contextual" stories and events at that time that would indicate such. John-Paul I was the Cardinal Archbishop and Patriarch of Venice when he was elected Pope... let that one sink in for a moment. And since we're mentioning weird coincidences, perhaps it is more than a little significant that Mr. Raimondi is a nephew of Lucky Luciano, whose surname bears an uncomfortably close clannish similarity to that of the murdered Pope. In any case, in 1978, during John-Paul's brief pontificate, both Italy and the Vatican were poised on the cusp of the notorious P2 Masonic lodge scandal, which would break out in 1981 when Italian financial authorities, probing the finances of Italian banker Michele Sindona, discovered links to the lodge, which in turn had deep links into the Vatican, and the Vatican bank. In the culture of corruption that is in my opinion Grand Orient masonry, the number 33 has especial status and significance... interesting that John Paul I was murdered on the 33rd day of his pontificate.

While there is an inaccuracy - either in Raimondi's book or the reporting on it, I do not know - in that the American born bishop, and later archbishop Paul Marcinkus was never a cardinal, there is something in the article's summary of Raimondi's book that rings true, profoundly true, and that's the part about the Vatican being involved in the forgery and sale of fraudulent American corporate bonds and securities to the tune of $900,000,000, in the 1970s(!), for I mentioned this incident in Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations, pp. 100-112. To make a very long story short, the New York Mafia had been contacted, via an intermediary, by a high-ranking Vatican official, to counterfeit nine hundred million dollars of American corporate securities. The story was investigated by two New York City detectives, who were able to trace the origin of that deal to none other than French hierarch, Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, who at the time was also head of the Vatican archives! As I posited in that book, the pattern of fake bonds and securities was repeated - again and again - in the later bearer bonds scandals of the early part of this century, and thus in my opinion they're a profound clue as to the nature, structure, and functioning of the hidden system of finance, as banks, central banks, secret societies, forgery, and the Vatican are all interwoven in a very complex system involving weapons, drug and human trafficking, money laundering, forgery and fraud.

There is a second aspect of Raimondi's story that rings true in my opinion, and that's his specificity about the manner in which it was done: vallium to knock the Pope out, and then cyanide, to knock him out permanently. Such would have been immediately detectable in an autopsy, and of course, in Vatican law, autopsies on Popes are forbidden for reasons of piety. Thus, for anyone determined to murder a pope for whatever reason, poison of some sort would be the method of choice... knives, guns and so on would be too obvious, and "accidents" would run the risk of exposure. So at first pass, and without having yet read Raimondi's book, I for one think his story might very possibly be true.

The sad thing is, that Pope John-Paul I may never have known the full extent of the global corruption he was fighting...

...or perhaps he did.

See you on the flip side...