Word: gelli
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Until now, arrest warrants have been issued for only two people: P2 Lodge Grand Master Licio Gelli, who fled the country and is believed to be in Uruguay, and Colonel Antonio Viezzer, former head of a government intelligence service, who has been detained. But there was little doubt that other arrests will follow...
Rumors of the scandal finally prompted Forlani himself to detonate the explosion. He released a card file listing the names of 963 members in the secret Masonic lodge designated "P2" (the P standing for "Propaganda"). The list had been found at the Arezzo villa of Licio Gelli, 62, a seemingly innocuous Tuscan-born businessman. Police carted out more than 1,000 letters, documents, diaries and ledgers in a dawn raid. Among the papers were confidential police intelligence reports from the 1960s that the government had ordered destroyed in 1974. Said an investigator: "The documents have a potential for blackmail...
Atop the organization, according to the investigators, was Venerable Grand Master Gelli, who is believed to have fled the country. A onetime mattress manufacturer, Gelli had been a diehard fascist during World War II. He lived for years in South America and used to boast about his connections with the late Argentine Dictator Juan Domingo Peron. Gelli apparently took over an ordinary Masonic lodge and then recruited members primarily on the basis of wealth and station...
...Gelli made no bones about his right-wing beliefs. Says one Italian journalist...
...Arezzo he was king and Pope. Many hated him for his bad character and fascist past, but no one dared cross him." Ermenegildo Benedetti, a onetime P2 member, recalls that in 1972 "Gelli lamented the fact that Italy did not have a dictatorship analogous to that of Greece at the time." Concluded the investigators' report: "Lodge P2 is a secret sect that has combined business and politics with the intention of destroying the constitutional order of the country." Gelli testified in a Bologna court in 1976 that "I am convinced of the need for a constitutional restructuring that would...