The East Village Mafia by Thomas F. Comiskey

Author:Thomas F. Comiskey [Comiskey, Thomas F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480875678
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Published: 2019-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

Sindona’s investment tips to Marcinkus, not surprisingly, led to the loss of millions of dollars from the Vatican coffers. In early 1971, Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, dean of the College of Cardinals and archivist of the Vatican Secret Archives, asked an Austrian swindler, Leopold Ledl, to produce $950 million in counterfeit securities for blue-chip US companies. The request was actually reduced to writing on Vatican letterhead.

The counterfeit securities were described as $950 million in “merchandise.” According to Coffey, half would go to the Vatican Bank to cover Marcinkus’s losses, and half would go to the Bank of Italy, which was in debt for over $4.5 billion. Cardinal Tisserant told Ledl that the Vatican and the Bank of Italy would pay $475 million for the forged securities. Tisserant also told Ledl that if they were caught, the Vatican would simply say that they were innocent victims of a fraud—and no one in the US government would ever consider prosecuting anyone in the Vatican.

Ledl called Manuel Ricky Jacobs, a Los Angeles bookmaker and dealer in stolen and counterfeit securities. (In 1965, Jacobs and Los Angeles Mafia leader John Roselli were caught running fixed card games at the Beverly Hills Friars Club, ripping off Hollywood stars and West Coast sports figures for over $500,000.) Jacobs contacted his connection for counterfeit financial instruments, Vincent Rizzo. It was agreed that the Mafia would produce a sample of forged financial instruments for the Vatican worth $14.5 million. Half of the counterfeit bonds were created by Louis Milo in his printing plant on Avenue A and Twelfth Street. An attempt to deposit the fake bonds in a Swiss bank failed when the bank discovered that they were counterfeit.

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