The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (67 page)

Two of Gelli’s principal sidekicks were Michele “The Shark” Sindora, a banker in the clutches of the Mafia, and Roberto Calvi, chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank. Sindora and Calvi were duly hired by another P2 member Archbishop Marcinkus, head of the Vatican bank, to manage the Vatican’s money; when police raided Gelli’s safe in Arezzo they found evidence that Calvi had created hundreds of fictitious bank accounts to launder Mafia drug money. An ensuing audit of Banco Ambriosiano, Italy’s largest bank, revealed that 1.3 billion dollars was missing from the bank’s account. Calvi fled to London. On 18 June 1982, Calvi was found hanging at the end of a rope under Blackfriar’s Bridge, his pockets stuffed with bricks. It is widely assumed that “God’s Banker” was “suicided” by either P2 or the Mafia because he intended to name P2 members involved in corruption. The London coroner’s conclusion was “cause of death” unknown; an Italian court, meanwhile, formally indicted Gelli for conspiring to murder Roberto Calvi.

Calvi is just one of the few associated with the P2 scandal to have died a mysterious death or disappeared off the face of the Earth. Sindona died in a Milan prison cell complaining he had been poisoned. Gelli vanished from a Swiss prison where he was being held for extradition, and has never been seen since.

Some investigators charge P2 with the mysterious death of John Paul I. After announcing on 28 September 1978 that he intended to remove Archbishop Marcinkus from the Vatican bank, John Paul I was found dead next morning.

P2 was formally banned by the Italian authorities in 1981. Its “work” might be said to linger on. Just before he disappeared into thin air, Gelli told
La Repubblica
newspaper: “I look at the country [Italy under Silvio Berlusconi], read the newspaper, and think: ‘All [the
Piana di Rinascita Democratica
] is becoming a reality little by little, piece by piece.’ ”

Further Reading

Luigi DiFonzo,
St Peter’s Banker
, 1983

Philip Willan,
The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi
, 2007

David Yallop,
In God’s Name
, 1984

REPTILIAN HUMANOIDS

Long, long ago, David Icke (rhymes with bike) was a soccer player for Coventry City in England. Thereafter, it was all downhill in a handcart. He played for Hereford United, became a BBC sports commentator, became a Green Party activist, before dressing entirely in turquoise and informing the world that he, Dave Icke, was the Son of God. Could one go lower?

David Icke answered that himself with his book
The Biggest Secret
(1999), in which he claimed that a race of 12-foot lizards known as the Babylonian Brotherhood from planet Draco have colonized Earth. If you think that 12-foot lizards might be easy to spot, more fool you; the critters can shape-shift by day to look like humans.

Got a feeling of déjà vu? Yes, that’s right: the TV SF series
V
had much the same premise.

Icke’s twist is to put a little Marx into the mix. The reptilians are the ruling class to the human proles
,
and the scaly-skinned ones make up all the past and present royal families, the presidents of the USA and entire crew of leading financiers. Just so that the poor proles don’t catch on to what is going on, the reptilian humanoids rule through various front organizations, such as the Bilderberg Group, the Trilaterial Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the
Bavarian Illuminati
and the Knights Templar. Naturally, the conspiratorial goal of the repto-humans is the
New World Order
(although their weakness for drinking human juice means that sometimes they have to have a blood-break from the great work).

In one mad moment Icke syntheses science fiction, New Age spiritualism and all popular conspiracy theories.

To be fair to Icke, he dislikes some lizards more than others. He has a particular downer on the British Royal Family, but then they did murder
Princess Diana
(who blurted out her in-laws’ lizard nature to Icke) and they do control the gateway to the great underground reptilian city, which is situated on one of their Scottish estates.
Scotland
. A bit cold, surely, for lizards?

David Icke’s books sell by the barn load and his meetings are well attended. Which only goes to prove that you can fool a lot of people a lot of the time.

Further Reading

David Icke,
The Biggest Secret
, 1999

David Icke,
Children of the Matrix
, 2001

SARS

February 2003. A Chinese-American businessman flying from China to Singapore became severely ill with what appeared to be pneumonia, obliging his flight to land in Vietnam for his hospitalization. Despite the best efforts of the staff at the French Hospital of Hanoi, the 48-year-old businessman died. Realizing that they were dealing with a mysterious and highly infectious virus, the hospital contacted the World Health Organization (WHO), which issued an alert warning the world of the arrival of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Panic – and face masks – spread across the world. The outbreak lasted until the summer of 2003 by which time over 8,000 cases had been confirmed, and 800 deaths reported.

Midway through the epidemic, Nikolai Filatov, head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, stepped forward to inform reporters he thought SARS was not a natural occurrence, but man-made because “there is no vaccine for the virus, its makeup is unclear, it has not been very widespread, and the population is not immune to it”.

His views were echoed by Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of Russia’s Academy of Medicine, who asserted that the virus was a cocktail of mumps and measles. “We can only get that in a laboratory,” he added.

Tests by Dutch and US scientists confirmed that the disease could be man-made.

If SARS was man-made, who could be behind such a dastardly plot? In China, at least, the baddies were identified as the USA in liaison with Taiwan, with the virus having been manufactured in Fort Detrick or
Plum Island
as a biological weapon to kibosh its Sino rival. According to financial giant J. P. Morgan, SARS did more damage to the Pacific Rim economies than the
Indian Ocean tsunami
because of the disruption it caused. Theorists maintain that the virus was specifically tailored to the Chinese race, pointing out that of the SARS cases just twenty-seven occurred in the US (with no fatalities), while China had the most reported cases by far. In
The Last Defense Line: Concerns About the Loss of Chinese Genes
, a Chinese businessman by the name of Tong Zheng claimed to have witnesses to American researchers collecting mainland Chinese people’s blood and DNA in the 1990s from twenty-two provinces – the same twenty-two provinces mainly affected by SARS.

Then again, some point the finger of blame at China itself. A Chinese army doctor Jian Yanyong whistle-blew to the press that his unit had known about the disease since November 2002, and the authorities had suppressed the information. Although the scandal caused the heads of government ministers to roll, Yanyong himself was whisked away for “political re-education”. Inevitably, the proven desperation of the Chinese to hide knowledge about SARS fed the belief that they themselves had concocted the virus. WHO’s investigation was interesting in this respect: WHO concluded that the first cases of SARS were soldiers in Guangdong Province – the location of China’s main biowarfare establishment.

Officially, WHO considers SARS to be a coronavirus which has jumped species. As with
Ebola
, the animal host may well be the bat. Civets – which are commonly eaten in Guangdong – are also in the frame. The explanation for the non-incidence of SARS deaths in the USA is the superiority of Stateside medical services.

Further Reading

Angela McLean (ed.),
SARS
, 2005

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

It was not Shakespeare as many liked it.

In 2011, Hollywood director Roland Emmerich released
Anonymous
, a movie about the Bard, the author of England’s classic theatre pieces,
Macbeth
,
Hamlet
,
King Lear
,
Othello
,
The Tempest
, etc. Controversy was
Anonymous
’s trailer, because Emmerich rehashed the theory that “William Shakespeare” of Stratford-upon-Avon was not author of said works but rather Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the man with the talented quill pen. Since writing plays was beneath an aristocratic personage, and politically dangerous in turbulent times (those associated with
Richard II
were all interrogated, because Elizabeth perceived it as a personal attack), de Vere allowed Shakespeare, a humble theatre producer to stage his masterpieces and take the credit.

Emmerich is not the first, neither will he be the last, to suggest that de Vere was Shakespeare. And de Vere is only one of seventy-seven contenders put forward for the title of “real” Shakespeare. Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Rutland and the Earl of Derby all have strong supporters

The evidence for Shakespeare of Stratford not being the author of the plays is, essentially, the lack of evidence that he
was
the author of the plays. Aside from a birth certificate, some legal documents, and a fleeting mention in contemporary chronicles next to nothing is known about Wm. Shakespeare, Esq. His death in 1616 was a non-event outside Stratford, to which he had returned after his career as a comic actor, friend of criminal lowlifes (the Elizabeth/Stuart state was excellent at recording wrongdoings) and manager of the Globe Theatre in London. His life – and this is the killer argument, for the Shakespeare conspiracists – is almost impossible to square with the literary brilliance and erudition of the Shakespeare plays, which are rich in allusions to classical literature, much of it actually only available in the Classical languages of Greek and Latin. The books are full of Cambridge University slang, show a deep knowledge of the law, display a knowledge of foreign countries (north Italy especially) and a ready familiarity with the mores and tropes of the aristocracy, down to the technical terminology of falconry. None of this makes sense if the plays were penned by William Shakespere, son of a glover from a backwater Midlands town, the staple trade of which was sheep-selling. This line of reasoning was first developed by J. Thomas Looney in
“Shakespeare” Identified
as far back as 1920 (see Document, p.479).

Edward de Vere, on the other hand, studied law at Cambridge, travelled much, was a first-rate poet and supported a theatre company. The sonnets attributed to Shakespeare are heavy ammunition on de Vere’s behalf, because they reference his life, and contain anagrams (the Elizabethans loved riddles) that identify him. The lines “That every word doth almost tell my name” from Sonnet 76 being the prime case; “every word” is almost exactly an anagram of “Edward Vere”.