Linking the JFK Assassination and the Vatican Bank Securities Scandal
A newly discovered connection links figures reputedly involved in the JFK assassination with an alleged securities fraud scheme known as the Vatican Connection.
In the early 1970s, Joe Coffey, a New York detective working under the city’s longtime DA Frank S. Hogan, uncovered a plot involving a Genovese crime family soldier colluding with others home and abroad to sell black-market stolen or counterfeit securities worth $14.5 million and $3.7 million in counterfeit bonds. The case was chronicled in Richard Hammer’s 1982 bestseller, The Vatican Connection (and was the basis for Puzo & Coppola’s first draft of what became The Godfather, Part III).
One of the swindlers evidently cultivated powerful relationships within the Vatican. Austrian confidence man Leopold Ledl allegedly gained the trust of octogenarian French cardinal Eugene Tisserant. How did such a con artist as Ledl gain access to such a venerable prince of the church?
A friend of Ledl knew someone, who for a certain price could dress up Ledl with the kind of credentials one needed in order to rub elbows with Vatican hierarchy: impressive-sounding degrees, diplomatic titles, passports, documents showing ownership in shipping lines, and honored member in esteemed chivalric orders around the world. Of course, none of these things were legitimate — they were worth no more than the paper they were printed on. But that was the business of the man in Toronto who supplied Ledl with that kind of identity. Earl Anglin James, the mad bishop tied to Jack Martin and David Ferrie, knew a lot of people. Nothing was beneath him for the right price. Even coups.
According to the account Ledl later told Coffey and the FBI, Cardinal Tisserant lamented in an after dinner conversation with his new friend Ledl about the shrinking size of the Vatican’s coffers, preventing church funds from reaching far-flung missions and supporting Italy’s Christian Democratic government, which backed the Vatican’s tax-free status, something the rival Communist party sought to reverse.
According to Ledl, Tisserant wondered aloud if the Austrian might happen to come upon first-class securities of American companies? Possibly even counterfeit, in the ballpark of, say, about $950 million? Such a number would alleviate the financial woes with interest, you understand, Tisserant explained to Ledl. The fake securities would be used as collateral for dollar-for-dollar financing. So when the Vatican would loan or invest, it could make billions based on that collateral of phony stocks. Those involved would pay out $625 million to the crooks, with a kickback of $150 million. The Bank of Italy and Istituto per le opere di religione, commonly known as the Vatican Bank, would be the two financial channels. At least that’s how Ledl laid it out.
Tisserant is an interesting character to suggest such a scheme. For more than two decades he was Secretary of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, which made him the chief Vatican authority, next to the pope, of Eastern Catholic churches, and the Catholic Church in regions such as Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, the Middle East, the Ukraine, Hungary, and Bulgaria. In short, Tisserant would have been deeply invested in anti-Bolshevik, anti-Communist initiatives; in other words, he would have been extremely knowledgeable of the movements of the White Russian community.
Furthermore, as Chairman of the Council of the Presidency, Tisserant was a prominent figure at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) — only the pope held more authority. Among the objectives of the Council was to increase dialogue with non-Catholic Christian churches; this was underscored by inviting non-Catholic representatives to be observers to the proceedings. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal of Sept. 23, 1964, five days before the opening of the third session of the Council, a delegate from the “Russian American Orthodox Catholic Church” arrived in Rome to be such an observer for the discussions related to Eastern Orthodox churches: The Most Rev. Christopher Maria Stanley, whom Earl Anglin James consecrated bishop.
However, Stanley’s name does not appear at all in the official record of ecumenical observers at Vatican II. The article was likely disinformation meant to make Stanley’s church appear legitimate.
In any event, Tisserant died in early 1972. But the plan he initially pitched continued, Ledl related. In Turin, a meeting took place to test the quality of the securities. Newly appointed president of the Vatican Bank, the American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, arrived in a BMW. Tisserant’s former assistant, whose name has never been unmasked, was there. So was a flamboyant monsignor, Alberto Barbieri. The $14.5 million in forged securities was delivered as a deposit. To prove the Vatican’s complicity, Ledl produced for the American investigators a letter from the Sacra Congregazione dei Religiosi dated June 29, 1971, detailing the purchase plan of the securities over five installments. The signature at the bottom is illegible, with no typed name under it. The document appears legitimate and on the face of it certainly confirms Ledl’s tale, but it is also just vague enough to question its veracity.
Still, it was enough for the FBI to make moves, including seeking out their fellow American who had lived in the Vatican for nearly two decades, Archbishop Marcinkus. They offered immunity deals to some of the conspirators, hopscotching Europe to corner others, with Leopold Ledl in Vienna their ultimate target.
Securities were stolen from New York offices and international mail shipments from the U.S. Treasury, IBM, and Coca-Cola. Counterfeit bonds for Chrysler, PanAm, AT&T, and GE were created. Later, when Joe Coffey, now teamed with the FBI, rounded up their suspects, they were surprised to find Leopold Ledl already in a Vienna prison for fraud and extortion: selling fake honorary consul titles to the East African kingdom of Burundi. One for $35,000, and another that came armed with an honorary doctorate, price: $100,000.`
By happenstance, Ledl supposedly met Mwambutsa IV of Burundi, exiled to Switzerland when Hutu rebels overthrew the monarchy in October 1965. Mwambutsa IV was hoping to wrest power from the rebels and put his son, Ntare V, on the throne. Mwambutsa offered to make Ledl an honorary consul at a discounted price, along with the rank of diplomat, and personal financial counselor to the exiled royal house. Ledl accepted, and helped incite a coup to fulfill Mwambutsa’s goal.
The honorary doctorate Ledl packaged with the consul title came from Earl Anglin James’s the National University of Canada. Ledl had met James by way of an unnamed Hungarian acquaintance and purported Knight of Malta. Ledl tells us James’s personal motto was, “As long as you live, you have to live.” However, it is important to point out that in the world of fake bishops, fake schools, and fake chivalric orders, Ledl’s acquaintance was likely associated with a pseudo-order pretending to be the real Orders of Malta. This could be any number of individuals, but was probably Count Dr. Pericles Voultsos-Vourtzis, aide-de-camp to governor of Louisiana, honorary attorney general of Louisiana, and “ambassador” of King Ntare V of Burundi, among other fraudulent titles: namely, grand master of the Sovereign Order of St. Dennis of Zante. Voultsos was also a member of the Sons of the American Revolution and a 32nd degree Mason in the Parthenon Lodge №1101 of New York.
“Sir James was not at all stingy,” Ledl writes in Per Conto del Vaticano. “For every doctoral title sold by the National University of Canada, in fact, [James] paid the sum of two thousand dollars into the bank account ‘for the coup d’etat of King Ntare.” This is quite a revealing detail on James’ practices. It begs the question: what other coups did Earl Anglin James financially support?
The investigators then worked channels to arrange a meeting with Marcinkus. It was an unprecedented and delicate matter to approach, needing help from New York’s Cardinal Cooke to arrange introductions — they had no jurisdiction in the Vatican. The only way to get a meeting with Marcinkus would be if the Vatican allowed them in as a courtesy. Eventually, in April 1973, William Aronwold and other American investigators met with the Holy See’s Deputy Secretary of State, Archbishop Benelli, and reticent members of his staff. They were stonewalled. It was essentially the same with Marcinkus three days later. “Look, I don’t have to tell you anything! But I will,” he relaxed, smiling. “Because I want to cooperate with the FBI.”
He dismissed the allegations. He denied meeting Ledl. Marcinkus said an associate of Ledl, Mario Foligni, the self-proclaimed “Count of San Francisco,” only sought to solicit the Vatican Bank in exorbitant deals. The feds left. While they did not have evidence to indict Marcinkus, a federal grand jury in New York indicted sixteen Americans and Europeans for stock fraud, including Vincent Rizzo, Ricky Jacobs, a notorious dealer in counterfeit securities, “Count” Foligni in Italy, and of course, Leopold Ledl.
There are a few incidental connections to the swindlers of the Vatican Connection and the assassination of President Kennedy ten years earlier.
Ricky Jacobs, owner of a Santa Monica card club called Friends with Johnny Roselli, was fingered in the Beverly Hills Friars Club swindle of the 1960s, in which Roselli and Jacobs rigged games using an elaborate system of electronic devices and coded signals. In one year, the club’s exclusive clientele lost about $400,000 cumulatively — about $3.3 million in today’s money.
The Italian parliament’s commission on the illegal masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2), the powerful anti-communist Italian state-within-a-state controlled by Licio Gelli, stated Jacobs was friends and accomplices of Tampa boss Santo Trafficante and manager of Meyer Lansky’s Havana and Miami holdings. But in addition, based on surveillance photographs taken in the lobby of the Bayerischer Hof in Munich in 1971, during a conference for international bankers, Jacobs was seen conversing with then-U.S. Secretary of the Treasury John Connally. Prior to joining the Nixon Administration, Connally was governor of Texas and fellow Dallas motorcade passenger with his wife, the President and Mrs. Kennedy. After his time at Treasury he became one of Nixon’s closest advisers, even considered to replace the disgraced VP Spiro Agnew in 1974. Under presidents Nixon and Ford, Connally was a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Connally was indicted for allegedly accepting $10,000 in bribes from the Associated Milk Producers. He was acquitted but his presidential hopes were dashed.
However, investigators were told by the top brass that looking into whatever ties Connally had with Ricky Jacobs was unthinkable.
Dominic Mantell was another one of the sixteen indicted in the Vatican Connection. Originally part of the Maggadino family in Buffalo, Mantell was transferred to Tampa under the protection of Santo Trafficante. He once informed the FBI on Trafficante associate Frank “Cowboy” Ippolito. In 1992, the DOJ was notified in a letter by a prison inmate, Thomas White III, that he overheard Ippolito, Trafficante, and lawyer Frank Ragano in 1963 discussing killing Kennedy. Ragano was also Jimmy Hoffa’s lawyer. In his 1994 memoir, Mob Lawyer, Ragano said he passed a message from Hoffa to Trafficante: “You won’t believe this, but he wants you to kill John Kennedy. He wants you to get rid of the President right away.” Later, Ragano said that Trafficante, on his deathbed in 1987, confessed that he and Carlos Marcello did, indeed, follow through on Hoffa’s “little favor.”
We come almost full circle with Chicago gangland boss Sam Giancana. After his murder in 1975, police found a framed photo of Giancana with Pius XII. Giancana’s tomb, in an enormous family mausoleum, occupies a piece of Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery, Al Capone’s final resting place. In Double Cross, co-authored by Giancana’s godson with Giancana’s brother, Chuck, we read about Sam’s apparent closeness with longtime Chicago cardinal archbishop Samuel Stritch. Stritch, according to the book, recommended a young priest, son of a Lithuanian window washer from Cicero, Paul Marcinkus, to work in the Vatican. Giancana employed a priest, appropriately named Father Cash, not only as a local courier, but also to launder his money through the Vatican Bank where Marcinkus was conveniently placed to wash the funds.
In the little known book Citizen Spy, author Robert W. Morgan claims one Fred Kerr, associate of Meyer Lansky and Arizona crime boss Joe Bonanno, confessed how the money laundering process through the Vatican Bank during the tenure of John Cardinal Cody, archbishop of Chicago from 1965 until his death in 1982. Prior to this esteemed role, Cody was coadjutor of the archdiocese of New Orleans; it was Cody who informed his fellow churchmen in Rome of JFK’s assassination back in the States — Cody and other bishops were attending the second session of Vatican II when the Catholic president was assassinated.
Kerr insists both Marcinkus and Roberto Calvi at the Banco Ambrosiano, of which the Vatican was the largest shareholder, were deeply involved in and fully aware of the Mafia’s laundering practices. Calvi constantly funneled money out of Italy to Caribbean shell companies and Panamanian banks Marcinkus and he created. This not only hurt the economy of Italy, but it inflated share prices and was based entirely on unsecured loans. At last, with the dollar rising, Calvi could not plug a gigantic hole of $1.2 billion that had gone missing from the Banco Ambrosiano. Despite assurances from Marcinkus with so-called letters of comfort, there would be no bailout coming from the Holy See. So Calvi fled Milan and Italy. He needed a miracle, fast. According to Ledl, Calvi went to see him in Vienna.
“Marcinkus wants my head,” Ledl claimed Calvi said to him, an exchange chronicled in Ledl’s book, Per Conto del Vaticano. Calvi wanted some sort of dirt on Marcinkus as potential blackmail. How were you able to clear yourself from Vatican ties? Calvi wanted to know.
Ledl said he simply had an insurance policy: documents implicating the Vatican in the questionable financial undertakings. Seeing Calvi fearing for not only his life but the life of his family, Ledl told a prosecutor in 1988 that if Calvi also had such documents proving the Vatican’s role in forgeries and frauds on a massive level, that would be enough for Marcinkus to back off. But the letters of comfort Calvi had were offset by another letter Marcinkus demanded of Calvi: one that cleared the Vatican of any financial responsibility. Calvi, in essence, was trapped.
Ledl and Calvi chatted for about a half hour. Then Calvi left. His handlers brought him to London. On the morning of June 17, 1982, a postal worker on his way to work noticed Roberto Calvi’s body hanging from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge. The subsequent collapse of Banco Ambrosiano was the largest banking failure in history at that time.
And while the Vatican agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors, Marcinkus, like Connally, was untouchable. He remained within Vatican City State until 1990, when he retired to Sun City, Arizona — Joe Bonnano’s territory, by the by. Marcinkus died in 2006 at age 84.
Let us return to Leopold Ledl. Could it be that he fabricated the entire Vatican Connection, in the same way Archbishop Carl Christopher Maria Stanley told his local newspaper he was attending Vatican II? For professional charlatans like Ledl, Stanley, and James, it is all about the illusion of legitimacy, to simply fool the target just long enough to achieve whatever the con is. One might recall the modus operandi of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) in Schindler’s List: “Not the work, not the work…the presentation!”
Skullduggery, blackmail, subterfuge. These are tools straight from the confidence man’s utility belt, and if they can fool authorities like the NYPD and FBI and investigative journalists like Richard Hammer, all while sullying something out of reach like the Roman Curia in Vatican City — let alone the powerful Vatican Bank — then it is the con artist who prevails, vanishing like the ghost he always was before the fooled wise up. Remember why Ledl was put in the Austrian prison to begin with — for selling fake honorary consul titles and doctorate degrees. Is it not out of the realm of possibility, then, that Ledl forged the story of charming Vatican royalty like Eugene Tisserant? That he, Ledl — Hammer’s only source — conveniently claimed that it was the now-deceased Tisserant who suggested the securities fraud scheme? In the same way it was the exiled king of Burundi who offered to make Ledl an honorary consul? Princeton professor Walter F. Murphy in his review of Hammer’s The Vatican Connection in November 1982 doubted Ledl’s story, noting Vatican directories made no mention of some of the clerics Ledl mentions, such as a “Monsignor Alberto Barbieri.”
Was Ledl, holding millions in forged securities and no prospective buyer, stringing along his co-conspirators, hoping to position the Vatican Bank, Archbishop Marcinkus, and Cardinal Tisserant as the patsies in a totally fabricated con?
Consider the purported photograph of Sam Giancana with His Holiness Pius XII, a commonplace tactic also utilized by Mario Foligni: when investigators searched his premises and went through his safe, they apologized after discovering a “signed blessing” from Paul VI. Such “proof” is yet another sleight-of-hand trick in the world of the hoaxer. My favorite example of this is in Gianni Russo’s book, Hollywood Godfather, in which he includes a photograph of himself with “Pope John Paul II,” but in reality is a lookalike. (Russo played Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather).
Besides, for the all-important meeting in which Ledl presents the fake merchandise to Tisserant and to receive payment, Ledl pointedly does not allow Ricky Jacobs and two other conspirators to accompany him. Hammer:
“Meanwhile, outside the Vatican walls, Jacobs, Grant and Ense were growing very nervous as time passed and there was no sign of Ledl or the others. They had seen them walk away, had not seen exactly where they had gone. Because of the spot where they were parked, there was an assumption that they had gone into the Bancus Spiritus Sanctus, and they had not emerged.”
Was Ledl only appearing to be going into a meeting in the Vatican? After all, he never re-emerges, but later meets up with his associates at the Excelsior Hotel, near the American Embassy and on the other side of the Tiber. The whole scheme, really, was only as good as Ledl’s word.
In this way, improbable as it might be, Ledl’s Vatican Connection fantasy is more akin to the con that was laying the assassination of President Kennedy at the feet of an entirely bemused patsy in Lee Oswald. That both involve Earl Anglin James is just another way of showing the ever-expanding tentacles of the mad bishop.