Wealthy, unrepentant fascist
Licio Gelli, a buccaneering Italian financier and self-professed fascist who was implicated in terror crimes, scandals and a secret society that, with him as its grandmaster, was accused of plotting a right-wing coup, has died at his villa in Arezzo, Italy. He was 96.
Gelli never wavered in his convictions. In a 2008 television interview, he declared, “I was born under fascism, I studied with fascism, I fought for fascism, I am a fascist, and I will die a fascist.”
His near-mythic ignominy evoked popular fictional conspiracy tales, such as Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Codeand the movie The Godfather Part III, and he personified what Italians encapsulate as dietrologia — the reflexive, widely held suspicion that behind any official government narrative lurks a more sinister explanation.
But if Gelli was a scoundrel to many Italians, to others he held out the promise of stability in turbulent times, when the Communist Party was advancing at the polls and the economy was declining.
He exerted much of his influence as leader of a cabalistic breakaway Masonic lodge, known as Propaganda Due, or P2, which the Freemasons had officially dissolved. The authorities said hundreds of government, business and military leaders had joined the lodge, defying Italy’s ban on secret societies.
Investigators linked the group to plots to destabilize the Italian state, to blame leftists for unrest, and to foment a rightwing coup during the “years of lead,” when Italy was besieged by terror attacks.
The group was suspected of trying to discredit Communists by thwarting the rescue of former prime minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1978 by leftist Red Brigades guerrillas. P2 was believed to have had a hand in the horrific bombing of a Bologna train station in 1980 that left 85 dead and that was generally attributed to another neo-fascist group.
And it was investigated in 1982 in the death of Roberto Calvi, a lodge member who was called “God’s banker” because of his financial ties to the Vatican’s bank. Calvi’s body was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London — a suicide, the authorities ruled.
Gelli was convicted of bank fraud and obstruction of justice. He mysteriously escaped from prison or house arrest twice and served the remainder of his term in his villa, a 30-room redoubt near a15th-century church in the Tuscan hills.
There he was found to have a gold thumb when nearly $2 million in bullion was discovered in 1998 in the terrace garden, hidden in terra cotta flower pots beneath begonias and geraniums.
In God’s Banker, his 1983 biography of Calvi, Rupert Cornwell wrote, “Italy, it must be recorded with honesty, albeit bemusement, has produced few more remarkable individuals this century than Licio Gelli.”
Gelli joined Benito Mussolini’s fascist Blackshirts in fighting for Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain’s Civil War in the 1930s. He served as an Italian liaison to Nazi Germany during the Second World War, then switched sides to support Communist partisans in his native Pistoia province.
After the war, he fled to Argentina, where he became a confidant of dictator Juan Perón. Returning to Italy, he became successful as a financier and selfmade industrialist manufacturing mattresses.