P2 Lodge

An Italian lodge found running ministers, generals, and a bank that buried its banker.

Propaganda Due: an irregular Masonic lodge under Licio Gelli that, when raided in 1981, yielded a membership list of 962 — ministers, 43 MPs, intelligence chiefs, generals, Berlusconi — and a plan ('Piano di Rinascita Democratica') for capturing the Italian state. The parliamentary inquiry called it a state within the state. Its banker Roberto Calvi hung under Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, bricks in his pockets, in a death re-ruled murder two decades later; the Vatican Bank stood behind his Banco Ambrosiano's holes. P2 is the archive's fully-documented specimen: everything the lodge theories allege, found once, in the open, convicted.