Licio Gelli - The 1981 Raid & The P2 List

The 1981 Raid & The P2 List

Licio Gelli's downfall started with the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, which led to a 1981 police raid on his villa and the discovery of the P2 covert lodge. On March 17, 1981, a police raid on his villa in Arezzo led to the discovery of a list of 962 persons composed of Italian military officers and civil servants involved in Propaganda Due (also known as "P2"), a clandestine lodge expelled from the Grande Oriente d'Italia Masonic organization. A list of alleged adherents was found by the police in Gelli's house in Arezzo in March 1981, containing 962 names, among which were important state officials, some important politicians and a number of military officers, including the heads of the three Italian secret services. Future Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was on the list, although he had not yet entered politics at the time. He was then just starting to gain popularity as the founder and owner of "Canale 5" TV channel, was listed as a member of P2.

The national scandal that ensued was quite thrilling, given that most of the most delicate affairs of the republic were controlled by Gelli's affiliates. A Parliamentary Commission, directed by Tina Anselmi (of the Christian Democratic party), found no evidence of crimes, but in 1981 the Italian parliament passed a law banning secret associations in Italy. Gelli was expelled from GOI freemasonry on October 31, 1981, and the P2 scandal provoked the fall of Arnaldo Forlani's cabinet in June 1981

The P2 lodge did undoubtedly have some form of power in Italy, given the public prominence of its members, and many observers still consider it to be extremely strong. Several famous people in Italy today (starting with the top TV anchor-man Maurizio Costanzo) were affiliated with P2. Among these Michele Sindona, a banker with clear connections to the Mafia, has been clearly associated with P2. In 1972, Sindona purchased a controlling interest in Long Island's Franklin National Bank. Two years later, the bank collapsed. Convicted in 1980 in the USA, "mysterious Michele" was extradited to Italy. Two years later, he was poisoned in his cell while serving a life sentence. The P2 membership list was authenticated, with a few exceptions, by a 1984 parliamentary report.

On the run, Licio Gelli escaped to Switzerland where he was arrested on September 13, 1982 while trying to withdraw tens of millions of dollars in Geneva. Detained in the modern Champ-Dollon Prison near Geneva, he managed to escape and then fled to South America for four years. In 1984 Jorge Vargas, the secretary general of the Union Nacionalista de Chile (UNACH, Nationalist Union of Chile, a short-lived National Socialist party ) and a former member of the Movimiento Revolucionario Nacional Sindicalista (National-Syndicalist Revolutionary Movement ), declared to La Tercera de la Hora that Gelli was then in Chile.

Finally, Gelli surrendered in 1987 in Switzerland to investigative judge Jean-Pierre Trembley. He was wanted in connection with the 1982 collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano and on charges of subversive association in connection with the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing, which killed 85 people.

He was sentenced to two months in prison in Switzerland, while an Italian court in Florence sentenced him on December 15, 1987, in absentia, to 8 years in prison on charges of financing right-wing terrorist activity in Tuscany in the 1970s. Gelli had already been sentenced in absentia to 14 months in jail by a court in San Remo for illegally exporting money from Italy.