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Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. Maybe you'll find inspiration in the incredible true story of black female mathematicians at NASA in Hidden Figures, or the fantasy world of Throne of Glass. There's more to imagine when you listen. As an Audible member, you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog,
New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. In the 1970s, the United States was spending millions to fight communism around the world.
Americans have gone to far lands to fight for freedom. That has brought us to Vietnam. LBJ immediately asked Congress to sanction any steps necessary to counter communist aggression. While in Italy, more and more people were voting communists into power.
In this country of political turmoil, the Communist Party has been steadily growing. In this conflicted world, the Catholic Church found itself caught between a political philosophy that rejected religion and the Italian voters' desire for political change. Not only the working class, but business people and middle class people are now supporting the Communist Party in larger numbers.
Meanwhile, in northern Italy, the Bishop of Vittorio Veneto was fulfilling a promise he made to his father to serve the poor and working class. At a meeting of bishops held in Rome in 1971, Albino Luciani stood up and told his fellow prelates that industrial nations should give 1% of their income to poor nations. In his words, it would be just compensation owed for injustices the consumer-oriented world is committing.
Then, Luciani rose in the church to become the powerful patriarch of Venice and sold off the gold cross and chain gifted to him by the Pope to raise money for disabled children. In 1972, a messenger brings Luciani some upsetting news. The Vatican is trying to sell off one of its local Venice banks.
The Banco Cattolico wasn't just another bank. It was a bank owned by the church and really was the prize asset in terms of banks that the Vatican had. This is Gerald Posner, author of the book God's Bankers, which is all about the history of the Vatican's financial dealings. They really viewed this bank as very special. Banca Cattolica was almost 100 years old.
And because it was in Venice, it was under the supervision of the city's patriarch. But Albino Luciani was kept in the dark about the Vatican's decision to sell the bank. He hears that the Vatican Bank wants to do a deal for a group of investors to sell Banco Cattolica. And Luciani was absolutely opposed to it. Luciani was opposed to the sale because Banco Cattolica was established to serve the mission of the church.
It loaned money to priests, farmers, and workers. And it financed the church's charitable pursuits. So Luciani decides to take his opposition to Rome. He goes down to the Vatican, and eventually he beats with the Pope. Pope Paul VI wants to get rid of him, so he shoves him over to the director of the Vatican Bank, Marcinkus. As in Paul Marcinkus, the guy you heard about from our Brooklyn gangster Anthony Raimondi in our first episode. He goes, show us how to take him out.
in a nice way. This is the man Albino Luciani must convince not to sell Banca Cattolica. Garlis Paul Marcinkus, this quintessential American six foot three inch, you know, cowboy priest. He smoked cigars and smoked them openly and wasn't embarrassed. They said that's not very priestly. But then, you know, he's able to ingratiate himself with everybody, gets the loyalty of the Pope, and he's tapped to run the Vatican Bank.
officially known as the Institute for Religious Works. Everyone knows that the Vatican has a huge portfolio, but no one knows where the money is invested. No one, that is, except for a few key people at the top of the Vatican, like Paul Marcinkis. So when that meeting takes place, you really have a situation in which Luciani is making the case not to sell Banco Católica, this Venice-based bank,
And Marcinkus hears him out, sort of, you know, listening and not listening and looking out the window and everything else. It's still not too late to stop the deal. It's moved along, but you can still put the brakes on it. And then Marcinkus says, "Eminence, don't you have anything better to do with your time?" That's the end of the meeting. He didn't give him the time of day. He didn't listen to his arguments and talk about them seriously. So on that day, Marcinkus earned a new enemy,
But little did he know that that new enemy would eventually become a pope. I'm Mark Smerling, and these are the confessions of Anthony Rimondi. The Vatican Bank over the last hundred years or so has not been without scandal, you know, certain dirty dealings, certainly money laundering. The Pope Luciani was contemplating cleaning up the Vatican Bank. Well, obviously, he passed away before he was able to do it.
When I preach compassion for the poor, they call me a saint. When I do something about it, they call me a communist. I heard about when they killed somebody or whatever. I said, I could kill somebody. Mac must have put the bug in his head and he just started to get wiser and wiser and wiser.
So I want to see Sally Burns. I want to stand out with him. I was talking to this girl who comes from my neighborhood, and I hear her say, Anthony's behind you. And I just emptied the whole gun. Boom. Anthony doesn't look familiar to me at all. Chapter 3. Proverbs. In Anthony Raimondi's book, When the Bullet Hits the Bone, there are many chapters that lead up to the murder of Pope John Paul I. And according to Anthony, they're all part of his journey to becoming an assassin.
Chapter one begins with a Brooklyn kid growing up in a big Italian family who eventually quits high school to join the mafia. In chapter two, that 16-year-old commits his first murder in a nightclub in Bay Ridge. I just emptied the whole gun. Boom. The whole 13 rounds I emptied. Now Anthony's back with his friends in the Colombo crime family at the Diplomat Lounge on 3rd Avenue, and he's asking them for help. They says, we're going to send you up to the farm. See what happens.
It turns out that Joe Colombo was not only the head of one of New York's largest mafia families, he owned a farm in upstate New York, too. October goes by, November, December, January I come back. I'm in Brooklyn. Okay, I'm home about two days. Two detectives come in. They arrest me for the murder of Salvatore Grinello, Sally Burns. And I looked at my cousin Mac, he says, it's all right.
Anthony says that Joe Colombo found him a lawyer. Abraham Gritz, they called him. He was a bail bondsman and a lawyer, and he was connected all the way up to the yin-yang. According to Anthony, Abraham Gritz made an appeal to the court under New York State's Youthful Offenders Act. Because remember, Anthony was just 16. He goes, look, the kid's never been in a problem before. The most you can give him is maybe five years.
Anthony says he was released on bail until sentencing.
Then a couple days later, he was driving through Brooklyn with the Colombo underboss. Jerry Lang had a big Lincoln Continental. Remember the big four-door job? He had one of them. There was me, there was Mac, there was Joe Colombo. We go down Atlantic Avenue, and you know when you make that turn off to go on Boren Place? Boom! Our four cars come on us. The feds grab us on Boren Place. They're pulling everybody out of the car. Joe Colombo's fucking screaming. Everybody's yelling. They go, we got him.
The FBI had been trying to take down the Columbos for years, and now they had a chance to arrest a young kid close to the top of the organization.
So Anthony says they brought their own charge against him, a more serious charge. They charged me with the civil rights violation of one Salvatore Grinello, a.k.a. Sally Burns. Here's how you violated him. You caused his death. He cannot be with his wife. He cannot see his children grow up. He cannot earn money to take care of his family. He cannot grow old and be a grandfather, and on and on and on this goes.
99 years. Eligibility for parole after 33 years. I said, okay, I'm screwed. The feds locked Anthony up, so Abraham Gritz got him a better lawyer. William Kunstler. This is one of the most brilliant guys you can get. You may recognize the name William Kunstler, if not from the trial of the Chicago 7, then from the movie The Big Lebowski. You don't know shit, Lebowski. What a fucking lawyer, man.
I want Bill Kunstler. This guy comes in. It looked like he just woke up out of bed, sleeping in his clothes. Hair out the hair, his eyebrows were like monsters. And they said, "How would you like to get out of here?" "Are you serious? Who do I gotta kill?" He goes, "Don't talk like that, you." I said, "All right, I'm sorry." I said, "What do I gotta do?" "You gotta go into the military." He goes, "You gotta get trained, and you gotta do a couple years." He goes, "You go to the Southeast Asian Conference."
Anthony says he arrived at the Marine training facility in North Carolina just before it lights out. He was thrown into a barracks with other violent convicts who had traded stiff sentences to join the military. He tried to get some sleep, but at 5 a.m.,
You motherfuckers, you get up. I get up and I see Captain Emil Bass. And he's walking up to everybody. You think you're a tough guy? No, sir, no, Captain. He's like this with the finger in your face. Now he comes up to me. You think you're a fucking tough guy? No, sir, Captain. I am not a tough guy, Captain.
He said, now you guys are a unit that whether you get killed, we don't give a shit. He goes, I'm going to teach you. You're going to go to Vietnam. Vietnam? Captain, sir, what happened to the Southeast Asian Conference? He goes, are you that fucking stupid? That is Vietnam. I says, holy Christ, I'm screwed. They figured we were no good. We were two for the American species. We were the garbage.
because we took people's lives, let's put it that way. So the government figures, hey, you bring them there, if they die, they die. Who gives a damn, one way or the other? They've been spending their life in jail. But once you come out, everything is destroyed. Everything is gone. Your criminal record, your military, everything is taken out. Captain Bass had a dislike for me for two reasons. One, because I came from New York.
Brooklyn to be specific, and two, because I was involved with, as they said, organized crime. He was teaching us, and every time he showed something for hand-to-hand combat, I was his practice dummy. He gave me a fucking beating one day. My face was all swollen around here. Later that day, Anthony was working on the roof of one of the barracks when a ranking colonel walked by. Hey, Mundy, come down here. I look down, and I see a colonel standing there. He looks at my face. He says, who hit you?
I said, no, nobody hit me. He goes, where's Captain Bass? He looks at me again. He goes, tell me the truth. I said, nobody hit me. I said, I'm telling you. I said, I fell off the ladder yesterday. He goes, all right. After dinner, Anthony was exhausted, so he headed back to the barracks early. Captain Bass comes walking in. I got up and I was like this saluting him. He goes, come here, let's talk. Why didn't you tell the colonel that I hit you? Captain, he didn't hit me. I fell off the ladder.
So he's looking at me now, and I can see the wheel turning in this guy's head. Why didn't you tell him I hit you? I says, Captain, sir, may I speak? He says, yeah. I said, where I come from, you don't rat on somebody. After that, I became this guy's prize pupil because I didn't rat him out. Now Anthony tells us about another soldier he met at Camp Lejeune. Hans L. Forsin, Fuji. That's the soldier Fuji.
He was training us with hand-to-hand. Here's a guy that you don't mess around with. This guy must know about a hundred different ways to take you apart. Taught me how to kill with a knife, with a wire. He said, you could kill a man with a paper clip. You grab a guy and you punch him in his throat over here at the carotid artery. He ain't coming back because the blood spurts out. This guy was a serious guy. This guy was no joke.
After weeks of training, Captain Emil Bass gathered his men together. He goes, we got to get deployed. We're getting deployed in another week and a half. Cut to Anthony in a helicopter flying over Cambodia with a parachute strapped to his back. He's sitting next to Captain Bass and Master Sergeant Hans Forsen, a.k.a. Fuji. When I'm saying to myself, I got to jump out of a fucking helicopter. My turn comes, I go out. And you hear, zing, zing, zing.
"Fuck 'em. How big are these bees? They're coming up this way." So we hit the ground. I says, "Captain, let me ask you a question." "You know what?" I says, "There's bees. How'd they get up so high?" So he looks at Hans L4C and he goes, "You want to tell them or should I?" He goes, "Let me tell them." I said, "All right." And they're laughing. I said, "Come on, what's the joke?" He goes, "Anthony, those weren't the bees. They were bullets. They were shooting at us." I threw up. I ain't kidding you. I threw up. I thought my insides came out.
There ain't no freaking way I'm dying over here. To survive, Anthony says he came to depend on Master Sergeant Fuji. Look at the trees. Wherever you see something moving, like leaves, that's your target in there. I'm looking and I see like this, like leaves moving in a tree. I says, yeah, I see something. He goes, man, let the round go. Guy falls out of the tree.
With Fuji's help, Anthony says he shot and killed three men on that first mission. Anthony tells us that he did two tours fighting in Vietnam. Then he came back to his old life in Brooklyn with the Colombo crime family.
But before he takes us into the next chapter of his life, I start thinking about Master Sergeant Hans Forsen and Captain Emil Bass, or anybody else who could help confirm what Anthony has just told us. Last time you told us that there was a good camaraderie over there. Yeah, I did. Did you make friends? I made friends with a lot of guys. Can you give us those names? They were scattered all over. Some of them are dead. They died of cancer. Hmm.
Is there anybody from your life back then, like the late 70s, who when you came home, you confided in? No, because the only ones that I spoke to, they were all gone. That's the only problem. I remember because I was the youngest guy that was around everybody. My grandmother knew. She said when I came home, she goes, I started acting the way my father did when he came home from the war, which I wasn't comfortable sleeping in the bed.
Like in summertime, warm weather, my mother used to find me in the yard and all like that, and I used to go to sleep in the yard and stuff. And in wintertime, you know, I didn't go over cold. Excuse me, if it was too cold, I used to go down to the basement. This lasted for about maybe eight, nine months, like that. But that's the only people, really. Because everybody else that I dealt with, you know, they were all... Then I said, what are we going to do today? How are we going to make money? That's what they were concerned about.
Driving home after the interview, I share with Zach some of my doubts. And a few weeks later...
Zach meets Anthony at a diner near his home. So I know this is a bit of a long shot because it was, this is about Vietnam, because it was sort of like off the books, but this is the form that you would fill out to request your military records? You could send it in, but they wiped out everything. I know. Like, we don't exist. We were never in service, in other words. That's the way they did it. And you can send, I'll sign whatever you want, yeah. Okay, great. Just tell me, we'll fill it out now. Tell me what you want to do, and we'll do it now. So we got a,
Zach sends off Anthony's form to the Military Records Center in Kansas City. Now we find ourselves spending almost all our spare time looking for any proof that the Army recruited violent convicts to fight in Vietnam. We even buy old Camp Lejeune yearbooks off eBay from around the time that Anthony told us he was there. Then we scan through them for anybody resembling a younger Anthony Raimondi.
After a month or so, it's beginning to feel like Anthony's Vietnam story is pure fantasy. Recording in progress. Are you at your computer? Yeah, I'm at my computer. But then, Zach asked me to join him on a Zoom call. He's found something. Something he hints will restore my faith. Okay, I'm going to send you a Slack right now. I want you to look at this photo that I just found. All right, take a look at that. I'm looking at a photo of a headstone.
And there's a name on it. Sergeant Hans-Lennart Forsen. Wow. So there is a Hans Forsen. Where'd you find this?
Findagrave.com, which is like a website where you can go and look up people. This came up. Hans Alforsen Jr., sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps, Vietnam, died in 1999. And this grave is, strangely enough, in Okinawa. It's in Japan, in a military cemetery there. I mean, we've got to see if anybody is alive who can tell us about this guy. Zach had already found someone from Hans Alforsen's family, his daughter.
And he sent her Anthony's book, When the Bullet Hits the Bone, the incredible and possibly true stories of the last mafia enforcer. All right. Are you there? Yep. Okay. I sent you, you know, the book, and I was just wondering if you had any kind of reaction to reading the book and seeing some of the stories about your dad in there.
So this guy Hans Forsen did go by the nickname Fuji. Anthony Raimondi and Hans must have been close. How else would Anthony know Hans' nickname? I've never, you know, known anybody else to know him that way. So I just thought that was wild.
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visit jdpower.com slash awards only at a sleep number store or sleepnumber.com see store for details just introduce yourself judith o'donnell fuji was my son-in-law after zach connected with hans forson's daughter liz we headed to a house in a small town in northern new jersey to meet her in person and that's where we also met hans's mother-in-law do you ever talk about his time in vietnam
Not really, no. He avoided it almost totally. Now I'm wondering if this guy was actually telling truth, if that's what Fuji was doing, undercover missions and that type thing.
And from what I understand, he did three tours and wanted to go back for a fourth, but he was too injured. He had a metal plate in his head and couldn't hear out of one ear. And he was all types of messed up. The only memory I have of him was him having a flashback from Vietnam. But I didn't know what that was. So obviously this was not over for him.
This is Philip, Hans' brother-in-law. He'd sit there and sharpen a knife for an hour.
Any little thing would, like, be a hair trigger for him to look like he might jump on you and kill you. Some weeks, Hans would use the skills he learned in the Marines to repair firearms at Sarko, the gun company. But other weeks, he could be found at the local veterans' hospital.
Yeah, those were pictures of the VA hospital. My mom would bring me... Liz brought a stack of photos to show us, and she starts thumbing through them. From what I understand, he would go during the week and then would be allowed to come home on the weekends. My mom would bring me there to visit him, and I guess it was one of the weekends that he came home was when he had his little breakdown. The Echo Sentinel, May 26, 1983.
Local Vietnam war vet arrested following discovery of arsenal. According to police, Hans Forsen, who has been described by family members as being emotionally distraught from combat duty during the war, has been charged with illegal possession of weapons and manufacturing machine guns. Police confiscated about 40 rifles, 13 handguns, and dozens of bayonets, swords, knives, grenades, bombs, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
By far the largest number of weapons ever confiscated within the township. So I mean, I had been building up with my sister and I had a basement apartment. So I heard Uji was getting riled up. If she ran out of the house or whatever, or what the commotion was. And my son got the children out of the house and talked to him until the police came. I don't know how the cops even got notified.
Roachie was like, oh, these motherfuckers, they're gonna have a bloodbath here. They want a bloodbath? I'm gonna give them a bloodbath. I guess he wasn't taking his meds, or maybe he was drinking with his meds. I'm not quite sure. It was so sad. Lizzie didn't talk for a couple years after this. Little tiny thing. SWAT guys had to come and
And he just wound up walking out the front door. I saw him walk out. They handcuffed him. And he didn't struggle with them or anything. He got in the car peacefully and they drove away. I never saw him again.
Hans was arrested, and then the police searched the house. The basement was full of boxes, which we never would think to look in. Little boxes, little green boxes, bigger green boxes. There was an arsenal. I think that was even a picture in the paper of the police laying everything out. Ultimately, what I had heard was he was selling guns to the pagans.
The arrival to the Hell's Angels, they were big in Long Island, New York, and New Jersey. You weren't allowed to go to areas where one club was. If the other club was there, it's like, this is our area. They're pretty violent from what I heard. Fuji would always say if they were coming around, don't be anywhere around here. It was time to call Anthony. Hello.
He's back in the hospital again. But I wanted to ask him a bit more about Hans Forsen. Yeah.
It turns out that not only does Anthony know Hans' nickname, without me mentioning anything about it, Anthony starts talking about Hans' side business, selling guns. Lots of guns. I've seen them up there in Jersey. I was at a place called Sizzler.
And we, you know, divided up all the weapons that we had. We loaded them in a car that he had. Everything with us was strictly, you know, business and back and forth over there like that. And never heard from him after that. How was he doing when he got back? He was just as nuts as ever. Just when I thought I was out, Anthony Raimondi pulls me back in.
Next time on The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi. Why did Matt think you should meet Anthony? Well, I guess they knew that I worked on Wall Street. He calls me up and he says, do me a favor, get some clothes together. We're going to the Vatican. Was he a little bit of a storyteller back then? I always believed everything he would say because Anthony would never lie to me. The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi is a USG audio and truth media podcast in partnership with Clockwork Films.
The show is produced by Alexa Burke, Kenny Kusiak, and Kevin Shepard. Zach St. Louis is our senior producer. Mark Smerling, that's me, is your host and story editor. Executive producers are Josh Block from USG Audio, Jamie Cohen, Naomi Harvey, and Rob Huxley from Clockwork Films, and me, Mark Smerling. Scott Curtis is our production manager. Production support from Josh Lalonghi at USG Audio.
And thanks for listening.
