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FTR #887 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained here. [1] The new dri­ve is a 32-giga­byte dri­ve that is cur­rent as of the pro­grams and arti­cles post­ed by late spring of 2015. The new dri­ve (avail­able for a tax-deductible con­tri­bu­tion of $65.00 or more) is com­plete through the late spring of 2015.

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This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment [6].

Intro­duc­tion: Updat­ing and fur­ther devel­op­ing pre­vi­ous areas of inquiry, this pro­gram begins with analy­sis of the armed occu­pa­tion of an Ore­gon wildlife refuge by the armed fol­low­ers of Ammon Bundy. The son of anti-gov­ern­ment icon Cliv­en Bundy, the junior mem­ber of the fam­i­ly is pur­su­ing a polit­i­cal agen­da craft­ed by pow­er­ful cor­po­ra­tions and their asso­ci­at­ed polit­i­cal and media elites.

For all of their self-pro­mot­ed grass roots bona fides, the Bundyites are actu­al­ly putting into prac­tice the ide­ol­o­gy of the Wise Use move­ment [7] and, more recent­ly, the Koch Broth­ers [8]. Eclipsed since its hey­day in the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion, the Wise Use move­ment tar­gets gov­ern­ment-owned land for use by cor­po­rate devel­op­ers, such as tim­ber, fos­sil-fuel  and min­ing inter­ests.

Lion­ized by Fox News and its media attack dogs, Cliv­en Bundy’s cache erod­ed fol­low­ing his open air­ing of his racist views. It should come as no sur­prise that Fox should have cham­pi­oned Bundy, because Sean Han­ni­ty and the net­work is heav­i­ly influ­enced by Koch-fund­ed insti­tu­tions. Cliv­en Bundy apol­o­gist Sean Han­ni­ty has enjoyed adver­tis­ing sup­port from the Her­itage Foun­da­tion and the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots, both fund­ed by the Koch Broth­ers.

We note in the con­text of the Bundy mili­tia and the tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism high­light­ed in pre­vi­ous pro­grams, that both the tech­nocrats and the Bundyites man­i­fest the eth­ic that David Golumbi [9]a describes: ” . . . the polit­i­cal world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it . . . mem­bers of demo­c­ra­tic poli­ties have no choice but to accept them hav­ing that role.”

Vet­er­an lis­ten­ers should not be sur­prised to learn that Fred C. Koch [10], father of David and Charles, admir­er of Mus­soli­ni and a founder of the John Birch Soci­ety built a large oil refin­ery for Hitler [11].

On the sub­ject of Hitler him­self, the inves­tiga­tive hypthe­sis pre­sent­ed in FTR #‘s 791 [12] and 864 [13] that Hitler may have sur­vived the war and escaped from Ger­many has been but­tresse [14]d by for­mer CIA offi­cer Robert Bae [15]r, author of Sleep­ing with the Dev­il [16], among oth­er books.

The cir­cum­stances that brought Hitler to pow­er are being par­tial­ly reca­pit­u­lat­ed by polit­i­cal tur­moil swirling around the recent influx of large num­bers of Mid­dle East­ern refugees. In Cologne and oth­er Ger­man cities, as well as Helsin­ki, large num­bers of women were sex­u­al­ly abused by Mid­dle East­ern men, many of whom were recent emi­gres from the Mid­dle East. Amid alle­ga­tions [17] that some of the attacks may [18] have been planned, an anti-immi­grant back­lash from fas­cist street cadres recalled the Kristall­nacht [19] pogrom for some observers.

A major chap­ter in glob­al post-war fas­cism closed with the death of P‑2 Grand Mas­ter Licio Gel­li [20], a prime-mover in Ital­ian, Vat­i­can, Latin Amer­i­can and U.S. pol­i­tics for decades.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

1. We begin with dis­cus­sion of the ide­o­log­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity between the occu­pa­tion of an ani­mal refuge in Ore­gon by Ammon Bundy and para­mil­i­tary sup­port­ers and the Wise Use move­ment. Mint­ed by GOP con­ser­v­a­tives seek­ing to uti­lize gov­ern­ment-owned land in the West for devel­op­ment, the Wise Use move­ment has had an uneasy but dis­tinct sym­bi­ot­ic res­o­nance with the mili­tia move­ment.

For back­ground on the mili­tia move­ment, we rec­om­mend L‑3 “The Mili­tia Move­ment: Ene­my or Pawn of the State?” [24].

“The Ide­o­log­i­cal Roots of the Ore­gon Stand­off” by Alan Feuer; The New York Times; 1/10/2016. [7]

It is tempt­ing to dis­miss the antigov­ern­ment gun­men who took con­trol of an ani­mal refuge in Ore­gon on Jan. 2 as fanat­ics work­ing at the fringes of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. But if the meth­ods used by the ranch­er Ammon Bundy to seize the fed­er­al prop­er­ty were rad­i­cal, the ide­o­log­i­cal roots of the oper­a­tion were some­what more main­stream.

By storm­ing the Mal­heur Nation­al Wildlife Refuge and vow­ing to return it — by force of arms, if nec­es­sary — to the peo­ple of Har­ney Coun­ty, Mr. Bundy and his men were echo­ing the teach­ings, if not the tac­tics, of the Wise Use move­ment: a con­ser­v­a­tive land-use doc­trine that has been a part of the nation­al dis­course for near­ly 30 years.

A suc­ces­sor to the Sage­brush Rebel­lion of the 1970s (itself a suc­ces­sor to the anti-nation­al parks Boomers project of the ear­ly 1900s), Wise Use answers the ques­tion of who should own the West by grant­i­ng moral pri­ma­cy to nat­ur­al resource com­pa­nies and to log­ging and ranch­ing fam­i­lies like the Bundys, some of which have worked the land since the pio­neer expan­sion.

Though com­posed of many activists and scores of orga­ni­za­tions, Wise Use found its voice in the late 1980s when a tim­ber indus­try advis­er named Ron Arnold pub­lished “The Wise Use Agen­da.” The man­i­festo offered an expan­sive plan to gut envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tion, increase pri­vate own­er­ship of pub­lic land and com­pel the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to open its hold­ings to min­ing, oil and log­ging com­pa­nies and to the unre­strict­ed use of off-road vehi­cles.

Mr. Arnold adopt­ed the phrase “wise use” from Gif­ford Pin­chot, the first head of the Unit­ed States For­est Ser­vice (who said that “con­ser­va­tion is the wise use of resources”). In 1988 he held a con­fer­ence, bring­ing togeth­er the likes of Exxon and the Nation­al Cattlemen’s Asso­ci­a­tion, with the goal of seed­ing the West with grass-roots groups that could wrest con­trol of fed­er­al land and give a local fla­vor to his Rea­gan­ite aims.

“Arnold sent orga­niz­ers into dis­tressed rur­al com­mu­ni­ties to set up front groups with envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly sound­ing names that whipped up hos­til­i­ty against the gov­ern­ment,” said Tar­so Ramos, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Polit­i­cal Research Asso­ciates, a research group that stud­ies right-wing move­ments. What result­ed, Mr. Ramos said, was a “coali­tion of nat­ur­al-resource com­pa­nies, prop­er­ty devel­op­ers and con­ser­v­a­tive activists work­ing with a net­work of com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions.”

This coali­tion achieved suc­cess in push­ing its agen­da. By the ear­ly 1990s, politi­cians friend­ly to the Wise Use cause had intro­duced or passed leg­is­la­tion in near­ly 30 states giv­ing local gov­ern­ments and cit­i­zens expand­ed pow­ers to lay claim to fed­er­al land. Among those politi­cians was Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Helen Chenoweth-Hage, an Ida­ho Repub­li­can, who became noto­ri­ous for mock­ing the Endan­gered Species Act by hold­ing what she called “endan­gered salmon bakes.” [25] There was also Gale A. Nor­ton, the inte­ri­or sec­re­tary under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, who once worked as a lawyer for the Moun­tain States Legal Foun­da­tion, which has billed itself as “the lit­i­ga­tion arm of Wise Use.”

“The Wise Use crowd got very close to the cen­ters of pow­er,” Mr. Ramos said.

It also got close to the mili­tia move­ment, experts say. In 1994, the Nation­al Fed­er­al Lands Con­fer­ence, a Wise Use group that main­tained that coun­ty gov­ern­ments should con­trol fed­er­al land, pub­lished an arti­cle in its newslet­ter that bore the title “Why There Is a Need for the Mili­tia in Amer­i­ca.” Around the same time, Wise Use ral­lies often fea­tured pam­phlets from groups like the Mili­tia of Mon­tana, said David Hel­varg, the author of the “War Against the Greens.” Nor was it a coin­ci­dence said James McCarthy, a pro­fes­sor of geog­ra­phy at Clark Uni­ver­si­ty, that mili­tia mem­bers in cam­ou­flage fatigues con­duct­ed armed exer­cis­es in the very fed­er­al forests in New Mex­i­co that the Wise Use move­ment was try­ing at the time to pry away from Washington’s con­trol.

“There were many peo­ple who were active simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in the Wise Use and mili­tia move­ments and who saw them as dif­fer­ent man­i­fes­ta­tions,” Mr. McCarthy said. “How­ev­er, it is also true that many Wise Use activists were uncom­fort­able with the mili­tia com­ing into their fold.”

In an email titled, “Wise Use and prop­er­ty rights activists vs. Wack­os,” Mr. Arnold denied that his move­ment was con­nect­ed to men like Ammon Bundy, who stood down the gov­ern­ment two years ago in a sim­i­lar engage­ment over cat­tle-graz­ing rights at his father’s ranch in Neva­da. “I don’t see any Wise Use-ish ‘doc­trine’ in any­thing that’s been called ‘patri­ot mili­tia,’” Mr. Arnold wrote.

And yet the ques­tion stands as to why vig­i­lantes with AR-15 rifles have repeat­ed­ly con­front­ed the gov­ern­ment on behalf of local landown­ers in the West–a clas­sic Wise Use prin­ci­ple, if not a Wise Use tac­tic. This spring, gun­men from the Oath Keep­ers mili­tia group helped the own­ers of an Ore­gon gold mine chase away fed­er­al agents who were try­ing to enforce a stop-work order: A few months lat­er, anoth­er Oath Keep­er tac­ti­cal team stopped the gov­ern­ment from shut­ting down a mine in a nation­al for­est in Mon­tana.

Part of the answer is that, in a region where the ground itself is large­ly owned by agen­cies in Wash­ing­ton, the Wise Use and mili­tia move­ments share “the same seething resent­ment at fed­er­al over-reach,” said Jef­frey St. Clair, a jour­nal­ist who has writ­ten about envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­tics in the West for 30 years. If the Wise Use move­ment did not con­done or sup­port mili­tias, it cre­at­ed an intel­lec­tu­al frame­work for mili­tia oper­a­tions and has, on occa­sion, lent the groups ide­o­log­i­cal bal­last. “In some way,” Mr. St. Clair said, “the patri­ot move­ment is glom­ming onto the Wise Use move­ment as some­thing that has a polit­i­cal pres­ence and a real-world pow­er” that the patri­ot move­ment “has nev­er had.”

After the Bush years, the Wise Use move­ment lost much of its vibran­cy, and even Mr. Arnold acknowl­edged that it is lit­tle known today. But the rela­tion­ship between activists in suits and angry men with guns con­tin­ues. Last year, Michele Fiore, a Repub­li­can assem­bly­woman in Neva­da, intro­duced a bill [26]to pro­hib­it the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment from own­ing or man­ag­ing land in Neva­da with­out the state’s con­sent. Ms. Fiore, as it hap­pens, is also a strong sup­port­er of the Bundys. A month after her bill was intro­duced, she debat­ed Chris Hayes on MSNBC [27], live from the stand­off at the Bundy fam­i­ly ranch. . . .

2. Next, we high­light the Koch broth­ers lucra­tive sup­port for the goals of the wise use move­ment, and their sup­port for “The Loud­est Voice” [28] in the room–Fox News. Until he “jumped the shark” with an overt­ly racist com­ment about African-Amer­i­cans, Cliv­en Bundy enjoyed the enthu­si­as­tic sup­port of Fox News.

“The Mon­ey Behind Fox’s Pro­mo­tion of Cliv­en Bundy’s Bat­tle with the Feds” by Olivia Kit­tel; Media Mat­ters; 4/25/2014. [8]

Right-wing media have been rush­ing to dis­tance them­selves from the Neva­da ranch­er they’ve spent weeks cham­pi­oning after Cliv­en Bundy revealed his racist [29] world­view, but two of Bundy’s biggest cheer­lead­ers — Sean Han­ni­ty and Fox News — have vest­ed cor­po­rate, finan­cial, and polit­i­cal inter­ests in the pro­mo­tion of Cliv­en Bundy’s anti-gov­ern­ment land own­er­ship agen­da.

Neva­da ranch­er Cliv­en Bundy became Fox News’ favorite folk hero after he refused to com­ply with court orders [30] direct­ing him to remove his tres­pass­ing cat­tle from pub­lic land. Han­ni­ty and many oth­er [31] right-wing media [32] ral­lied around Bundy and his armed sup­port­ers as they threat­ened vio­lence against fed­er­al law enforce­ment offi­cials attempt­ing to impound Bundy’s cat­tle and col­lect the $1 mil­lion he owes in fines and fees after decades of non­com­pli­ance with the law.

Bundy has said he does­n’t rec­og­nize [33] the exis­tence of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment nor its author­i­ty [34] over the land and has attacked the fed­er­al own­er­ship of lands as sub­vert­ing Nevada’s “state sov­er­eign­ty.”

Han­ni­ty has pro­mot­ed Bundy’s anti-gov­ern­ment rhetoric [35], argu­ing that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment owns far too much land and push­ing Bundy’s claim that not only does the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment not have land-own­er­ship author­i­ty but that they don’t need or use the land they claim to own. On the April 23 edi­tion of his show, Han­ni­ty attacked the gov­ern­ment for own­ing too much land, agree­ing with Fox News legal ana­lyst Andrew Napoli­tano that they do not have the con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty to own any of the land. Through­out the land bat­tle, Han­ni­ty con­tin­u­ous­ly argued that the gov­ern­ment is irre­spon­si­bly fight­ing for land they have no intend­ed [36] use [37] for — such as build­ing hos­pi­tals, schools, or roads — and should focus their efforts else­where to rapists, mur­der­ers, crim­i­nals, and pedophiles.

Bundy and Han­ni­ty’s pro­mo­tion of state own­er­ship of fed­er­al lands gives air­time to an issue [38] that con­ser­v­a­tives have long been cam­paign­ing for but have had dif­fi­cul­ty get­ting vot­ers excit­ed about — an issue in line with the land  inter­ests of the Koch broth­ers. Slate report­ed [39] on April 23 that the Fox News cor­po­rate, finan­cial, and polit­i­cal inter­ests being served by Han­ni­ty’s pro­mo­tion of Bundy lie in the net­work’s con­nec­tion to the Koch broth­ers:

Bundy’s anti-fed­er­al agen­da is close­ly aligned with that of Charles and David Koch, major Repub­li­can donors who have been push­ing for states to gain con­trol over fed­er­al lands — so they can be sold or leased to peo­ple like the Koch broth­ers in deals.

Fox News Net­work and Sean Han­ni­ty have a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in the pro­mo­tion and real­iza­tion of such Koch inter­ests because their fund­ing depends on it — Han­ni­ty receives major fund­ing and large ad buys from Koch-affil­i­at­ed Her­itage and Tea Par­ty Patri­ots.

Han­ni­ty’s Koch-affil­i­at­ed fun­ders have a long his­to­ry of pro­mot­ing the pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic lands and con­demn­ing [40] the fed­er­al own­er­ship of land. Tea Par­ty groups have sup­port­ed local efforts [41] to trans­fer fed­er­al lands. Her­itage has advo­cat­ed [42] shrink­ing the U.S. gov­ern­men­t’s con­trol by sell­ing its phys­i­cal assets such as “huge swaths of land (espe­cial­ly out west).” Her­itage was also a loy­al pro­mot­er [43] of the Fed­er­al Land Free­dom Act of 2013, advo­cat­ing for the trans­fer of fed­er­al land man­age­ment to state reg­u­la­tors for ener­gy resource devel­op­ment.

Giv­ing air­time to an issue that is obscure but sig­nif­i­cant to his con­ser­v­a­tive fun­ders makes per­fect sense for Han­ni­ty. Politi­co report­ed [44] that Her­itage began spon­sor­ing Han­ni­ty in 2008 and in 2013 Han­ni­ty began adver­tis­ing for the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots, “lend­ing his name to fundrais­ing dri­ves, host­ing its lead­ers on his radio and Fox News shows, and even using the Fox air­waves to pro­mote the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots web­site.”

The Koch broth­ers have been covert­ly fund­ing [45] right-wing orga­ni­za­tions such as Her­itage Action and the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots through the non-prof­it busi­ness league Free­dom Part­ners whose tax code sta­tus as a trade asso­ci­a­tion allows the orga­ni­za­tion to con­ceal its donors. Free­dom Part­ners is one of the largest donors of con­ser­v­a­tive groups and its board has deep ties to the Koch broth­ers with many of its mem­bers being long­time employ­ees of Koch Indus­tries and the Charles G. Koch Foun­da­tion.

The Koch-fund­ed Free­dom Part­ners made grants [46] of $236 mil­lion in 2011; among many con­ser­v­a­tive groups its recip­i­ents include Her­itage as well as the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots. Her­itage Action received [47] $500,000 in 2011 from the Koch broth­ers through Free­dom Part­ners and addi­tion­al funds [48] from the Charles G. Koch Char­i­ta­ble Foun­da­tion. In 2012, the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots received $200,000 [49] from Free­dom Part­ners.

The leg­isla­tive efforts of such groups to trans­fer con­trol of fed­er­al lands to states are “noth­ing more [50] than cor­po­rate-backed mes­sag­ing tools” ini­ti­at­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive groups like the Koch-affil­i­ates. Such efforts are root­ed in the inter­ests of the Kochs and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive groups to use the land in whichev­er way is most prof­itable to them such as min­ing, drilling, and oth­er resource extrac­tion.

3. We next re-exam­ine one of the most impor­tant ana­lyt­i­cal arti­cles in a long time, David Golumbi­a’s arti­cle in Uncomputing.org about tech­nocrats and their fun­da­men­tal­ly unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic out­look. The tech­nocrats, the Wise Use move­ment and the Bundyites are part and par­cel to the same basic phi­los­o­phy and ide­ol­o­gy.

The tech­nocrats described  by David Golum­bia are arro­gat­ing to them­selves the free exer­cise of infor­ma­tion and tech­nol­o­gy; the Bundyites are arro­gat­ing to them­selves the use of gov­ern­ment owned land. Both man­i­fest the eth­ic that Golum­bia describes: ” . . . the polit­i­cal world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it . . . mem­bers of demo­c­ra­tic poli­ties have no choice but to accept them hav­ing that role.”

We note in pass­ing that Fox News per­son­al­i­ty Andrew Napolitano–mentioned in the pre­vi­ous arti­cle as sup­port­ive of the Koch/Bundy agenda–was an hon­ored guest at the Stu­dents for Lib­er­ty [51] con­fer­ence. Edward Snow­den was also a guest at that event, hav­ing been “skyped” in to the event. (For more on this phe­nom­e­non, see–among oth­er pro­grams–FTR #852 [52].

“Tor, Tech­noc­racy, Democ­ra­cy”  [9]by David Golum­bia; Uncomputing.org [9]; 4/23/2015. [9]

What might be described as the the­sis state­ment of this very impor­tant piece reads: “Such tech­no­cratic beliefs are wide­spread in our world today, espe­cially in the enclaves of dig­i­tal enthu­si­asts, whether or not they are part of the giant cor­po­rate-dig­i­tal leviathanHack­ers (“civic,” “eth­i­cal,” “white” and “black” hat alike), hack­tivists, Wik­iLeaks fans [and Julian Assange et al–D. E.], Anony­mous “mem­bers,” even Edward Snow­den him­self [53] walk hand-in-hand with Face­book and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to con­tribute to the polit­i­cal world, but that the polit­i­cal world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the polit­i­cal world is bro­ken, they appear to think (right­ly, at least in part), and the solu­tion to that, they think (wrong­ly, at least for the most part), is for pro­gram­mers to take polit­i­cal mat­ters into their own hands. . . First, [Tor co-cre­ator] Din­gle­dine claimed that Tor must be sup­ported because it fol­lows direct­ly from a fun­da­men­tal “right to pri­vacy.” Yet when pressed—and not that hard—he admits that what he means by “right to pri­vacy” is not what any human rights body or “par­tic­u­lar legal regime” has meant by it. Instead of talk­ing about how human rights are pro­tected, he asserts that human rights are nat­ural rights and that these nat­ural rights cre­ate nat­ural law that is prop­erly enforced by enti­ties above and out­side of demo­c­ra­tic poli­tiesWhere the UN’s Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion on Human Rights [54] of 1948 is very clear that states and bod­ies like the UN to which states belong are the exclu­sive guar­an­tors of human rights, what­ever the ori­gin of those rights, Din­gle­dine asserts that a small group of soft­ware devel­op­ers can assign to them­selves that role, and that mem­bers of demo­c­ra­tic poli­ties have no choice but to accept them hav­ing that role. . . Fur­ther, it is hard not to notice that the appeal to nat­ural rights is today most often asso­ci­ated with the polit­i­cal right, for a vari­ety of rea­sons (ur-neo­con Leo Strauss was one of the most promi­nent 20th cen­tury pro­po­nents of these views [55]). We aren’t sup­posed to endorse Tor because we endorse the right: it’s sup­posed to be above the left/right dis­tinc­tion. But it isn’t. . . .

4. Jane May­er has a new book [56] out on the Kochs which, among oth­er things, recounts how Fred C. Koch (father of David and Charles), built an oil refin­ery in Nazi Ger­many in com­bi­na­tion with William Rhodes Davis, “The Mys­tery Man.” [57]

“Father of Koch Broth­ers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refin­ery, Book Says” by Nicholas Con­fes­sore; The New York Times; 1/11/2016. [11]

The father of the bil­lion­aires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped con­struct a major oil refin­ery in Nazi Ger­many that was per­son­ally approved by Adolf Hitler, accord­ing to a new his­tory of the Kochs and oth­er wealthy fam­i­lies.

The book, “Dark Mon­ey,” by Jane May­er, traces the rise of the mod­ern con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment through the activism and mon­ey of a hand­ful of rich donors: among them Richard Mel­lon Scaife, an heir to the Mel­lon bank­ing for­tune, and Har­ry and Lyn­de Bradley, broth­ers who became wealthy in part from mil­i­tary con­tracts but poured mil­lions into anti-gov­ern­ment phil­an­thropy.

But the book is large­ly focused on the Koch fam­ily, stretch­ing back to its involve­ment in the far-right John Birch Soci­ety and the polit­i­cal and busi­ness activ­i­ties of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his ear­li­est busi­ness suc­cess over­seas in the years lead­ing up to World War II. One ven­ture was a part­ner­ship with the Amer­i­can Nazi sym­pa­thizer William Rhodes Davis, who, accord­ing to Ms. May­er, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refin­ery in the Third Reich, a crit­i­cal indus­trial cog in Hitler’s war machine.

The episode is not men­tioned in an online his­tory [58]pub­lished by Koch Indus­tries, the com­pany that Mr. Koch lat­er found­ed and passed on to his sons.

Ken Spain, a spokesman for Koch Indus­tries, said com­pany offi­cials had declined to par­tic­i­pate in Ms. Mayer’s book and had not yet read it.

“If the con­tent of the book is reflec­tive of Ms. Mayer’s pre­vi­ous report­ing of the Koch fam­ily, Koch Indus­tries or Charles’s and David’s polit­i­cal involve­ment, then we expect to have deep dis­agree­ments and strong objec­tions to her inter­pre­ta­tion of the facts and their sourc­ing,” Mr. Spain said.

Ms. May­er, a staff writer at The New York­er, presents the Kochs and oth­er fam­i­lies as the hid­den and self-inter­est­ed hands behind the rise and growth of the mod­ern con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. Phil­an­thropists and polit­i­cal donors who poured hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars into think tanks, polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions and schol­ar­ships, they helped win accep­tance for anti-gov­ern­ment and anti-tax poli­cies that would pro­tect their busi­nesses and per­sonal for­tunes, she writes, all under the guise of pro­mot­ing the pub­lic inter­est.

The Kochs, the Scaifes, the Bradleys and the DeVos fam­ily of Michi­gan “were among a small, rar­efied group of huge­ly wealthy, arch­con­ser­v­a­tive fam­i­lies that for decades poured mon­ey, often with lit­tle pub­lic dis­clo­sure, into influ­enc­ing how the Amer­i­cans thought and vot­ed,” the book says.

Many of the fam­i­lies owned busi­nesses that clashed with envi­ron­men­tal or work­place reg­u­la­tors, come under fed­eral or state inves­ti­ga­tion, or waged bat­tles over their tax bills with the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice, Ms. May­er reports. The Kochs’ vast polit­i­cal net­work, a major force in Repub­li­can pol­i­tics today, was “orig­i­nally designed as a means of off-load­ing the costs of the Koch Indus­tries envi­ron­men­tal and reg­u­la­tory fights onto oth­ers” by per­suad­ing oth­er rich busi­ness own­ers to con­tribute to Koch-con­trolled polit­i­cal groups, Ms. May­er writes, cit­ing an asso­ciate of the two broth­ers.

Mr. Scaife, who died in 2014 [59], donat­ed upward of a bil­lion dol­lars to con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es, accord­ing to “Dark Mon­ey,” which cites his own unpub­lished mem­oirs. Mr. Scaife was dri­ven in part, Ms. May­er writes, by a tax loop­hole that grant­ed him his inher­i­tance tax free through a trust, so long as the trust donat­ed its net income to char­ity for 20 years. “Isn’t it grand how tax law gets writ­ten?” Mr. Scaife wrote.

In Ms. Mayer’s telling, the Kochs helped bankroll — through a skein of non­profit orga­ni­za­tions with min­i­mal pub­lic dis­clo­sure — decades of vic­to­ries in state cap­i­tals and in Wash­ing­ton, often leav­ing no fin­ger­prints. She cred­its groups financed by the Kochs and their allies with pro­vid­ing sup­port for the Tea Par­ty move­ment, along with the pub­lic rela­tions strate­gies used to shrink pub­lic sup­port for the Afford­able Care Act and for Pres­i­dent Obama’s pro­pos­als to mit­i­gate cli­mate change.

The Koch net­work also pro­vided fund­ing to fine-tune bud­get pro­pos­als from Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Paul D. Ryan, such as cuts to Social Secu­rity, so they would be more palat­able to vot­ers, accord­ing to the book. The Kochs were so influ­en­tial among con­ser­v­a­tive law­mak­ers, Ms. May­er reports, that in 2011, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive John A. Boehn­er, then the House speak­er, vis­ited David Koch to ask for his help in resolv­ing a debt ceil­ing stale­mate.

...

5. Sup­ple­ment­ing infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed in FTR #791 [12], Baer sup­ports the view that Hitler escaped Europe in the after­math of World War II.
“Hola Hitler! Ex CIA Agent Claims Nazi Leader Faked His Death and Flew to Tener­ife Before Escap­ing to Argenti­na on a U‑Boat” by Dar­ren Boyle; Dai­ly Mail; 1/08/2016. [14]
• Ex-CIA agent Bob Baer does not believe Hitler’s death sto­ry is con­clu­sive
• Baer, a spy for 21 years, said Hitler could have eas­ily faked his death
• New­ly declas­si­fied FBI doc­u­ments sug­gest he could have got to Tener­ife
• Oth­er doc­u­ments claim the Nazi leader made it to Argenti­na by sub­ma­rine.

A CIA agent with more than 21-years’ field expe­ri­ence claims new­ly declas­si­fied evi­dence sug­gests that Adolf Hitler faked his own death before escap­ing to the Canary Islands by air before con­tin­u­ing to Argenti­na.

Bob Baer, who spent his life­time involved in counter-intel­li­gence and espi­onage said the offi­cial ver­sion of his­to­ry with Hitler killing him­self in his Berlin bunker does not stand up to offi­cial scruti­ny.

He claims that new­ly released FBI files sug­gest that inves­ti­ga­tors at the time were also sus­pi­cious about whether the Nazi dic­ta­tor had shot him­self in the head.

Accord­ing to the “Hunt­ing Hitler” doc­u­men­tary on His­to­ry Chan­nel, there was no eye­wit­ness report of Hitler’s sui­cide or of any­one dis­cov­er­ing his body inside his bunker.

The team, fol­low­ing snip­pets of evi­dence, said it was plau­si­ble that Hitler could have faked his own death and escaped through the Tem­ple­hof air­port on the day after he was last seen in pub­lic. One of the air­craft which left dur­ing the mass Nazi exo­dus is believed to have con­tained his lug­gage.

Dur­ing the con­tro­ver­sial doc­u­men­tary series, Baer claims: ‘The nar­ra­tive the gov­ern­ment gives us is a lie. if you look at the FBI files it throws open the inves­ti­ga­tion.

‘What we are doing is re-exam­in­ing his­to­ry, his­to­ry that we thought was set­tled that Hitler died in the bunker but the deep­er we get into it, it’s clear to me we don’t have any facts for it.’

One of the declas­si­fied doc­u­ments express­es con­cern that Hitler’s body had not been recov­ered and the com­plete lack of evi­dence of his death.

The con­tro­ver­sial the­o­ry claims that Hitler flew to the Canary Island and board­ed a U‑Boat which trans­port­ed him to a Nazi-friend­ly area of Argenti­na.

 6a. The Ger­man min­is­ter of jus­tice has hint­ed pub­licly that he thinks the sex­u­al assaults were planned.

“Ger­man Min­is­ter Hints Sex­ual Assaults Were Planned”; Euractive.com [17]; 1/11/2016. [17]

Attacks on women in Cologne and oth­er Ger­man cities on New Year’s Eve have prompt­ed more than 600 crim­i­nal com­plaints, and a Ger­man min­is­ter said the sex­ual assaults may have been planned or coor­di­nat­ed.

The attacks, most­ly tar­get­ing women and rang­ing from theft to sex­ual molesta­tion, have prompt­ed a high­ly-charged debate in Ger­many about its wel­com­ing stance for refugees and migrants, more than one mil­lion of whom arrived last year.

The sud­den nature of the vio­lent attacks and the fact that they stretched from Ham­burg to Frank­furt prompt­ed Ger­man Min­is­ter of Jus­tice Heiko Maas to spec­u­late in a news­pa­per that they had been planned or coor­di­nat­ed.

The debate on migra­tion will be fur­ther fuelled by the acknowl­edge­ment by the author­i­ties in North Rhine-West­phalia that a man shot dead as he tried to enter a Paris police sta­tion last week was an asy­lum seek­er with sev­en iden­ti­ties who lived in Ger­many.

In Cologne, police said on Sun­day (9 Jan­u­ary) that 516 crim­i­nal com­plaints had been filed by indi­vid­u­als or groups in rela­tion to assaults on New Year’s Eve, while police in Ham­burg said 133 sim­i­lar charges had been lodged with the north Ger­man city.

Frank­furt also reg­is­tered com­plaints, although far few­er.

The inves­ti­ga­tion in Cologne is focused large­ly on asy­lum seek­ers or ille­gal migrants from North Africa, police said. They arrest­ed one 19-year-old Moroc­can man on Sat­ur­day evening.

In Cologne, where a 100-strong force of offi­cers con­tin­ued their inves­ti­ga­tions, around 40% of the com­plaints includ­ed sex­ual offences, includ­ing two rapes.

Dwin­dling trust

The attacks, which prompt­ed vio­lent far-right protests on Sat­ur­day, threat­ens to fur­ther erode con­fi­dence in Merkel, and could stoke sup­port for the anti-immi­grant Alter­na­tive for Ger­many (AfD) par­ty ahead of three key state elec­tions in March.

Merkel’s pop­u­lar­ity has declined, as she refused to place a lim­it on the influx of refugees.

A sur­vey spon­sored by state broad­caster ARD showed that while 75% of those asked were very hap­py with Merkel’s work in April last year, only 58% were pleased now.

Almost three quar­ters of those polled said migra­tion was the most impor­tant issue for the gov­ern­ment to deal with in 2016.

The Cologne attacks also heat­ed up the debate on immi­gra­tion in neigh­bour­ing Aus­tria.

“What hap­pened in Cologne is unbe­liev­able and unac­cept­able,” Aus­trian Inte­rior Min­is­ter Johan­na Mikl-Leit­ner, a mem­ber of the con­ser­v­a­tive People’s Par­ty that is junior coali­tion part­ner to the Social Democ­rats, told news­pa­per Oester­re­ich.

There had been a hand­ful of sim­i­lar inci­dents in the bor­der city of Salzburg. “Such offend­ers should be deport­ed,” she said, back­ing a sim­i­lar sug­ges­tion by Merkel.

Swiss media con­tained numer­ous sto­ries about sex­ual assaults on women by for­eign­ers, fuelling ten­sions ahead of a ref­er­en­dum next month that would trig­ger the auto­matic depor­ta­tion of for­eign­ers con­victed of some crimes.

In Ger­many, on Mon­day (11 Jan­u­ary), a region­al par­lia­men­tary com­mis­sion will quiz police and oth­ers about the events on New Year’s Eve in Cologne.

The anti-Islam­ic nation­al­ist group PEGIDA, whose sup­port­ers threw bot­tles and fire crack­ers at a march in Cologne on Sat­ur­day before being dis­persed by riot police, will lat­er hold a ral­ly in the east­ern Ger­man city of Leipzig.

...

6b. “Seed­ing the clouds” for the per­fect storm, Islamist ele­ments may have delib­er­ate­ly pre-planned the mul­ti­ple sex­u­al assaults in Europe, seek­ing to pro­voke pre­cise­ly the kind of reac­tion that they got. Note that unarmed, black-clad mili­tia groups call­ing them­selves the Sol­diers of Odin have sprung up in some Finnish cities. Note that Carl Lund­strom [60], who financed the Pirate Bay web­site that host­ed Wik­iLeaks [61], also financed the Swe­den Democ­rats, the anti-immi­grant par­ty poised to ben­e­fit from inci­dents such as the New Year’s Eve attacks in Euro­pean cities.

“. . . . The sud­den nature of the vio­lent attacks and the fact that they stretched from Ham­burg to Frank­furt prompt­ed Ger­man Min­is­ter of Jus­tice Heiko Maas to spec­u­late in a news­pa­per that they had been planned or coor­di­nated. . . .“

In Helsin­ki, author­i­ties were tipped off about plans for the sex­u­al assaults in advance.

“Unprece­dented Sex Harass­ment in Helsin­ki at New Year, Finnish Police Report” b [18]y Richard Orange; The Tele­graph; 1/08/2016. [18]

Asy­lum seek­ers who met in cen­tral Helsin­ki to cel­e­brate New Years’s Eve “had sim­i­lar plans” to com­mit sex­ual assault and oth­er crimes as those who tar­geted women [62] in the Ger­many city of Cologne, Finnish Police have report­ed.

Three Iraqi asy­lum seek­ers have been arrest­ed for com­mit­ting sex­ual assaults dur­ing the cel­e­bra­tions in the city’s Sen­ate Square, where some 20,000 had gath­ered.

Secu­rity per­son­nel report­ed “wide­s­pead sex­ual har­rass­ment” dur­ing the cel­e­bra­tions, police added, with women com­plain­ing that asy­lum seek­ers had groped their breasts and kissed them with­out per­mis­sion.

“This phe­nom­e­non is new in Finnish sex­ual crime his­tory,” Ilk­ka Koski­maki, the deputy chief of police in Helsin­ki, told the Tele­graph. ”We have nev­er before had this kind of sex­ual har­rass­ment hap­pen­ing at New Year’s Eve.”

He said that the police had received tip-offs from staff at the asy­lum recep­tion cen­tres.

“Our infor­ma­tion from these recep­tion cen­tres were that dis­tur­bances or oth­er crimes would hap­pen in the city cen­tre. We were pre­pared for fights and sex­ual har­rass­ment and thefts.”

He said that police had estab­lished a “very mas­sive pres­ence” to con­trol the esti­mated 1,000 Iraqi asy­lum seek­ers who had gath­ered in the tun­nels sur­round­ing the cen­tral rail­way sta­tion by 11pm, many of whom appeared to be under the influ­ence of alco­hol or drugs.

Mr Koski­maki said that sex­ual assults in parks and on the streets had been unknown in Fin­land before a record 32,000 asy­lum seek­ers arrived in 2015, mak­ing the 14 cas­es last year “big news in the city”.

“We had unfor­tu­nately some very bru­tal cas­es in autumn,” he said. “I don’t know so well oth­er cul­tures, but I have recog­nised that the think­ing of some of them is very dif­fer­ent. Some of them maybe think that it is allowed to be aggres­sive and touch ladies on the street.”

Jamel Saltne, a Finnish-speak­ing Iraqi, said that from what he had seen on Ara­bic social media, police had wrong­ly por­trayed events.

“What hap­pened was not the result of an action planned in advance,” he told the Tele­graph. “It was total­ly expect­ed that young men would go to the cen­tre of the cap­i­tal as that is the best place to cel­e­brate New Year’s Eve.”

“I’m not accus­ing the police of racism, but maybe they have received com­plaints intend­ed to smear peo­ple.”

...

Unarmed mili­tia groups call­ing them­selves “Sol­diers of Odin”, wear­ing black jack­ets and hats marked “S.O.O”, have sprung up in sev­eral towns in Fin­land where asy­lum seek­ers are housed, claim­ing they want to pro­tect cit­i­zens from “Islam­ic intrud­ers”.

Pet­teri Orpo, Finnish inte­rior min­is­ter, con­demned the groups [63] in an inter­view with nation­al broad­caster YLE on Thurs­day.

“There are extrem­ist fea­tures to car­ry­ing out street patrols. It does not increase secu­rity,” he said.

6c. Man­i­fest­ing what we called “The Per­fect Storm [Machi­avel­li 3.0],” Ger­man fas­cists in Leipzig respond­ed to the rapes and molesta­tions with “Kristall­nacht II,” with Mus­lims the tar­get of rage, instead of Jews.

“Ter­ri­fy­ing Echoes of Kristall­nacht: May­or Con­demns ‘Naked Vio­lence’ After Far-Right Thugs Ram­page Through Streets of Ger­many Smash­ing Win­dows of Kebab Shopsby Allan Hall, Jen­ny Stan­ton and Tom Wyke; The Dai­ly Mail; 1/12/2016. [19]

* Anti-refugee riot­ers went on a ram­page in the Ger­man town of Leipzig, trash­ing don­er kebab fast food restau­rants

* 250 hooli­gans — part of the local branch of PEGIDA known as LEGIDA — set cars on fire and van­dalised shops
* May­or Burkhard Jung con­demned the ‘naked vio­lence that took place’ and has described ‘ter­ror on the streets’
* Scenes of smashed win­dows in the city are rem­i­nis­cent of the anti-Semit­ic Kristall­nacht attacks in 1938

The may­or of a Ger­man city has spo­ken of ‘ter­ror on the streets’ of his city after far-right thugs ran riot in scenes rem­i­nis­cent of the anti-Semit­ic Kristall­nacht attacks in 1938.

Burkhard Jung, may­or of Leipzig, has con­demned the ‘naked vio­lence that took place’ after don­er kebab fast food restau­rants were destroyed, cars were set ablaze and shop win­dows were smashed by around 250 hooli­gans of LEGIDA — the local branch of PEGIDA, an anti-migrant, anti-EU orga­ni­za­tion — on Mon­day night.

The ram­page in Leipzig evoked mem­o­ries of the wave of vio­lence against Jews that erupt­ed across Nazi Ger­many and parts of Aus­tria on Novem­ber 9, 1938.

On Mon­day, hun­dreds of anti-refugee riot­ers caused chaos in Leipzig after a demon­stra­tion where they called for asy­lum seek­ers to be deport­ed and their nation’s bor­ders closed.

The right-wingers broke away from a large­ly peace­ful march in the east­ern city to trash the sub­urb of Con­newitz.

At one point the demon­stra­tors, who threw fire­works at police, attempt­ed to build a bar­ri­cade in a main street with signs and torn up paving stones before they were dis­persed.

Fire­men had to tack­le a blaze in the attic of one build­ing set alight by a way­ward rock­et fired by the riot­ers. A bus car­ry­ing left­ist pro-asy­lum demon­stra­tors was also attacked and seri­ously dam­aged.

’It was naked vio­lence that took place here, noth­ing more,’ Jung said. ‘That has been estab­lished and there must be con­se­quences.’

Police said they have iden­ti­fied and arrest­ed 211 of the crowd of right-wing hooli­gans, many of them with crim­i­nal records for vio­lence.

‘This was a seri­ous breach of the peace,’ said a police spokesman, con­firm­ing that sev­eral police offi­cers were injured in the clash­es trig­gered by sim­mer­ing anger over the New Year’s Eve mass sex attacks against women in Cologne and sev­eral oth­er Ger­man cities.

‘Rape Refugees stay away’ was one of the ban­ners car­ried dur­ing the march, the word­ing above a sil­hou­ette of women run­ning from knife-wield­ing attack­ers, one of whom resem­bled a car­i­ca­ture from Aladdin.

When day­light broke in Leipzig, scenes were sim­i­lar to those that fol­lowed Kristall­nacht — the name refer­ring to the shards of glass left strewn across cities in the after­math of the bloody pogroms. 

In Leipzig, hun­dreds of fam­i­lies were per­se­cuted and more than 500 men were tak­en to Buchen­wald con­cen­tra­tion camp.

A Kristall­nacht memo­r­ial in the city is now cleaned each year to ‘make the Nazi crimes vis­i­ble’ across Europe.

The anniver­sary of the night in Novem­ber was due to coin­cide with a week­ly demon­stra­tion by LEGIDA and the right-wing move­ment had planned to walk past the site of a syn­a­gogue that was burned to the ground dur­ing Kristall­nacht.

How­ever, the city ruled that until the end of the year, the LEGIDA could not march through the city, only ral­ly.

Yes­ter­day, Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel said; ‘Now all of a sud­den we are fac­ing the chal­lenge that refugees are com­ing to Europe and we are vul­ner­a­ble, as we see, because we do not yet have the order, the con­trol, that we would like to have.’

She also said the euro was ‘direct­ly linked’ to free­dom of move­ment in Europe, adding: ‘Nobody should act as though you can have a com­mon cur­rency with­out being able to cross bor­ders rea­son­ably eas­i­ly.’

Merkel said that if coun­tries did not allow their bor­ders to be crossed with­out much dif­fi­culty, the Euro­pean sin­gle mar­ket would ‘suf­fer acute­ly’ — mean­ing that Ger­many, at the cen­tre of the Euro­pean Union and its largest econ­omy, should fight to defend free­dom of move­ment.

And tonight, Ger­many feared a new march of the far right fol­low­ing the riots in Leipzig, which added to long-held con­cerns from Ger­man intel­li­gence ser­vices that the far right groups are organ­is­ing into ter­ror­ist cell struc­tures.

...

The vio­lence in Leipzig fol­lowed on from week­end attacks in Cologne by a vig­iliante mob which used the social net­work­ing site Face­book to mar­shall young men — rock­ers, body­builders and club bounc­ers — to go on a ‘man­hunt’ for immi­grants. 

Two Pak­istani men were hos­pi­tal­ized and a third Syr­ian man was light­ly injured before a stiff police pres­ence on the streets thwart­ed fur­ther attacks.

It is unclear what their con­di­tion is although the police are look­ing to press charges of ‘seri­ous bod­ily harm’ against their attack­ers who kicked, beat and abused them ver­bal­ly.

The Express said the Face­book vig­i­lante groups had promised an ‘order­ly clean up’ of the old town cen­tre in their ‘man­hunt.’

Police con­firmed one Syr­ian man was also hurt in an attack on Sun­day, which took place just 20 min­utes after the first, but is believed to have been car­ried out by a sep­a­rate group of five men.

...

7. Con­clud­ing with the obit­u­ary of one of the world’s most promi­nent fas­cists, we high­light P‑2 chief Licio Gel­li and some of the many bases he touched dur­ing his life. “I was born under fas­cism, I stud­ied with fas­cism, I fought for fas­cism, I am a fas­cist and I will die a fas­cist.”

“Licio Gel­li, Ital­ian Financier and Cabal Leader, Dies at 96” by Sam RobertsThe New York Times12/18/2015. [20]

Licio Gel­li, a buc­ca­neer­ing Ital­ian financier and self-pro­fessed fas­cist who was impli­cated in ter­ror­ist crimes, scan­dals and a secret soci­ety that, with him as its grand­mas­ter, was accused of plot­ting a right-wing coup, died on Tues­day at his vil­la in Arez­zo, Italy. He was 96.

From Our Adver­tis­ers

His death was report­ed by the nation’s news media, and his funer­al on Thurs­day, attend­ed most­ly by fam­ily and friends, was cov­ered by Ital­ian tele­vi­sion.

Mr. 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, like Dan Brown’s nov­el “The Da Vin­ci Code” and 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 Mr. 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 right-wing coup dur­ing the “years of lead,” when Italy was besieged by ter­ror­ist 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. Mr. Calvi’s body was found hang­ing from Black­fri­ars Bridge in Lon­don — a sui­cide, the author­i­ties ruled.

Mr. 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 a 15th-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 Mr. Calvi, Rupert Corn­well wrote, “Italy, it must be record­ed with hon­esty, albeit bemuse­ment, has pro­duced few more remark­able indi­vid­u­als this cen­tury than Licio Gel­li.”

Mr. Gel­li (pro­nounced jel­ly) was born on April 21, 1919, in Pis­toia, north of Flo­rence, in Tus­cany. He mar­ried the for­mer Wan­da Van­naci. She died in 1993, and their three chil­dren, Raf­faello, Maria Rosa and Mau­r­izio, sur­vive him, as does his sec­ond wife, the for­mer Gabriel­la Vasile. (Anoth­er daugh­ter died in an auto­mo­bile acci­dent.)

Mr. 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 World War II, 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 the dic­ta­tor Juan Perón. Return­ing to Italy, he became suc­cess­ful as a financier and self-made indus­tri­al­ist man­u­fac­tur­ing mat­tress­es.

Mr. Gel­li emerged into the pub­lic eye in 1981 as Ital­ian inves­ti­ga­tors were focus­ing on Mr. Calvi, who had presided over the col­lapse of Ban­co Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest pri­vate bank, and on Michele Sin­dona, anoth­er banker who had been accused in the fail­ure of the Franklin Nation­al Bank in the Unit­ed States. (Mr. Sin­dona was lat­er con­victed of mur­der and was him­self mur­dered, by poi­son­ing, in prison.)

Search­ing for the names of busi­ness­men who had ille­gally export­ed cash, the inves­ti­ga­tors found instead — in a leather suit­case in Mr. Gelli’s mat­tress fac­tory — evi­dence of what amount­ed to a right-wing shad­ow gov­ern­ment com­posed of 962 pow­er bro­kers led by Mr. Gel­li. The group, they said, sought to “exert anony­mous and sur­rep­ti­tious con­trol” of the coun­try.

The ros­ter includ­ed Mr. Calvi and Mr. Sin­dona, whom the author­i­ties described as pup­pets of Mr. Gel­li, enlist­ed to help impose what the group called a “Plan for Demo­c­ra­tic Rebirth.”

When so many gov­ern­ment min­is­ters and oth­er offi­cials were revealed to be mem­bers of the lodge, Prime Min­is­ter Arnal­do Forlani’s gov­ern­ment fell. His suc­ces­sor declared that Italy was fac­ing a “moral emer­gency.”

Mr. Gel­li was arrest­ed in Gene­va in 1982 on charges of pass­port fraud. The author­i­ties said he had gone there to with­draw mil­lions of dol­lars from his Swiss accounts.

A year lat­er, just as he was about to be extra­dited to Italy to face charges involv­ing the Bologna bomb­ing, the bank fail­ure and financ­ing right-wing ter­ror­ism, he escaped from a Swiss prison hos­pi­tal with a guard’s help and fled to South Amer­ica. He returned to Switzer­land in 1987 and was extra­dited to Italy under extra­or­di­nary secu­ri­ty.

Mr. Gel­li was absolved of any asso­ci­a­tion with the Bologna bomb­ing but sen­tenced to five years in prison for obstruct­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion and 18 and a half years for his role in the Ban­co Ambrosiano fraud. (His Swiss accounts had been linked to more than $1 bil­lion that the bank was miss­ing.) He lat­er received a 17-year sen­tence on obstruc­tion charges in a polit­i­cal con­spir­acy case involv­ing 15 oth­er P2 mem­bers.

Mr. Gel­li was a “man of Neron­ic wealth and ways,” as the writer Nick Tosches described him in “Pow­er on Earth,” his 1986 biog­ra­phy of Mr. Sin­dona. But Mr. Gelli’s lawyer, Raphael Gior­getti, sug­gested on Thurs­day that his client had mere­ly been a “scape­goat” for the government’s own fail­ings.

Most of the lodge mem­bers escaped pun­ish­ment. Arch­bishop Paul Marcinkus, who was pres­i­dent of the Vatican’s bank, was indict­ed as an acces­sory in the Ban­co Ambrosiano col­lapse. Cit­ing diplo­matic immu­nity, the Vat­i­can refused to com­ply with an Ital­ian arrest war­rant for the arch­bishop, but it paid more than $200 mil­lion to Ban­co Ambrosiano’s cred­i­tors.

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