Episode 1: Genesis
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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. Where is the closest Catholic church to you right now? I bet you could get there in less than 20 minutes.

Whether you're at home or at work, in your car or out for a walk, whether you're in a big city or small town, any place in the world, either hemisphere, it doesn't matter. There's a Catholic church nearby. There are almost a billion and a half Catholics in the world, a population equal to China.

And ministering to all those Catholics are more than 400,000 priests, who report to more than 5,000 bishops, who report to around 650 archbishops and cardinals. And they all report to one man: the Pope. He oversees a vast empire of wealth. His church is one of the largest landowners in the world. The Pope has the power to influence world leaders. Popes have changed the course of history. Anyway, I've been thinking about all of this way too much lately.

I have a stack of books on the subject next to my bed. It's been keeping me up at night. And it's all because of this guy. I wish you guys could have seen this neighborhood years ago. If you guys would have seen this neighborhood years ago, you would have loved it, believe me. This is Anthony. Ramondi, okay? Anthony Ramondi. Anthony has a story to tell about a pope in the Catholic Church. And we'll get to that. But today, Anthony has invited my producer Zach and I on a tour of his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

he wants to show us something. "Hey, you want to come in the car with me?" "Yeah, you want to go?" "Yeah, whenever you guys are ready, whatever you want to do." Anthony's a big guy, approaching seven years old, with slick-backed salt-and-pepper hair. And he dresses like a gangster, because Anthony was a gangster. He says he used to be a made member of the Italian Mafia in Brooklyn. Today, Anthony's sporting a shiny black tracksuit, a gold bracelet, and dark sunglasses.

Think of Big Pussy from The Sopranos. "Alright, is it ready?" "Yep, we're ready." We hop in Anthony's muscle car, a Dodge Challenger, all black. "Let's go." When Anthony grew up here in the 1950s, this was a working class neighborhood. He calls it South Brooklyn.

By the time I moved here in the early 90s, people had started calling it Park Slope. And the neighborhood has changed a lot over the years. These days, your kid will need to be on a wait list to get into daycare.

And everywhere you look, there seems to be an artisanal coffee shop where you can buy a $6 cup of coffee. I was talking with somebody about it, and they said, Anthony, it's called Progress. I said, but you killed the neighborhood. But one place hasn't changed. The local Catholic church. Like the one I got married in. I got married, the church was the one down on 6th Avenue. Big, big stone church, beautiful, Catholic. It might have been St. Augustine's. Yeah, it might have been St. Augustine's. It might have been St. Augustine's.

And it turns out the St. Augustine's Church is where Anthony is taking us right now. There is St. Augustine's Church. That's the stone church right there. That's where I got married. Oh my God, that's so weird. What a small world, huh? St. Augustine's. I did my communion there. I did my confirmation there also. Anthony pulls into a parking spot. Now, St. Augustine's School is connected right onto it, I assure you. He struggles out of his car. He's had some health issues lately, so he walks slowly with the help of a cane.

He leads us toward the building behind the church, St. Augustine's School. See that top floor right there? You see there's the open window over there, and then right next to you, you see the open windows? Anthony has brought us to St. Augustine's to tell us a story about something that happened here. Not a crime story about a mob hit or a famous heist. A more personal story from when he was just seven years old. That's where our class was. I was at the last window over here. One, two, three, right up there.

Nine days before Christmas in 1960, Anthony was sitting in his second grade classroom. There was a big blackboard in front, and then there was all the seats with the benches. If you were bad, you had to sit near the window. And that day, Anthony was sitting by the window. I remember it was in the morning, Mrs. Piccarelli, she's writing something on the blackboard, and we heard this explosion. So me, I want to see what's on there. I want to see what's there.

It sounded like a rocket kept coming and getting louder and louder. And that's when Anthony says he saw something unbelievable, a passenger jet flying by his classroom window. So close, he says, he saw the passengers inside. You heard people screaming on the plane. You can actually hear people screaming. Oh, yeah, you can hear them screaming. And it hit the window, and I got the glass came in my face. That's how close it was. That's when the building shook.

The nuns came and said, "Everybody's got to leave the building. We have to leave the building." There was fire engines all over the place. Alarms were going off. You couldn't see the sun. You couldn't see the light from all the smoke. The sky was totally black.

The jet fuel was coming down the block this way and you could see the snow actually melt and it was on fire when it came down.

It took out the pillar of fire church, it took part of their roof off. There was the laundromat, the candy store, the funeral parlor, and there was 14 brownstones that went out. And I'll tell you, there was a guy, I'll show you the spot, who was selling Christmas trees. When the plane hit, they never found his body. The ambulance that took me to the hospital, it was parked over there, the ambulance.

They looked at me and they seen all the glass in my head. And then they see they put another kid in the ambulance with me. This kid was burned so bad, you did not know if he was black or white. That's how bad he was burned. And this kid was still alive. He actually fell out of the plane between 6th and 7th Avenue. He died the next day. And this is when Anthony takes a beat. And his story takes an unexpected turn. Now, when they put me in the ambulance...

As I'm going down, and you could think I'm crazy, people think I'm crazy when they hear this, whoever. I kept telling them that I seen somebody standing on the plane. Just to be clear, Anthony's saying that he saw a man riding on top of a crashing plane. First time I seen him on the plane, standing on the plane because I was looking out the window. The second time I seen him was when they were bringing me in the ambulance. He was walking down the block.

And I kept telling him, there he is, there he is. He said, who? I said, the guy on the plane. They all thought I was nuts. I said, the guy on the plane. He just kept on going down the block and he faded away. Anthony believes that the man he saw standing on that plane and then walking down the street that day wasn't a man at all. That was death on the plane. I don't care what anybody tells me. Whether you want to call him death, whether you want to call him the angel of death, in the Jewish religion they call him the Machu Mochus, they call him.

He wasn't a skeleton. His skin was pulled so tight on his face that you could see like, you know, like the bone, the structure of the bones and everything. My mother and father, they had sent me to a psychiatrist, Jesus, for what? Three years. My father took me to a psychiatrist in Manhattan, Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn. They all said the same thing. It's one of two things happen. Either

I had, from the shock of the plane, that I put this in my head, what I supposedly seen. Or they said, he'd really seen it. That's the only two answers they could give. Nobody could give another answer. I'm telling you, I know what I saw. As I've gotten to know Anthony, he's told me a lot of stories like this one. Stories rooted in truth. There was a plane crash in Park Slope back then. But his stories often grow to biblical proportions.

Death appears to seven-year-old Anthony like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Only instead of the pale horse Death rides in the Bible, Anthony's version of Death rides a crashing airplane. I know he's the one that's going to come for me when my time comes. He's going to come and get me. It ain't going to be my mother or my father. No, it's going to be him. I'm telling you, it's going to be him when I go. That much I do know.

And Anthony tells another unbelievable story, one that he thinks will come back to haunt him on Judgment Day. It's the story that's been keeping me up at night, about corruption and murder at the highest level of one of the world's oldest and most powerful institutions, the Vatican. You know what's going to happen to me when I die? I'm going to go into heaven. God's going to say, nah, fuck you. You killed one of my popes. You're talking about killing a fucking pope. I'm Mark Smerling, and these are the confessions of Anthony Raimondi.

Just after half past seven, and here's Laurie McMillan with a summary of the news. Pope John Paul I is dead. The public speculation that this death was not natural grew by the minute. Men and women were heard shouting as they passed the body, who has done this to you? Who has murdered you?

When is a central bank not a central bank? When is a private bank public and a public bank private? Sound mysterious and full of secrets? Well, that's the Vatican Bank. The Vatican Bank over the last hundred years or so has not been without scandal, you know, certain dirty dealings, certainly money laundering. If the mafia wished to bring some of their clean money into Italy, they used Vatican Bank channels.

The Pope, Luciani, was contemplating cleaning up the Vatican Bank. Well, obviously, he passed away before he was able to do it. He only lasted 33 days. You may have seen the movie Godfather III. Yeah. It's sort of loosely based on what happened during that time. You don't mess with the mafia. Chapter 1, Genesis. Let me tell you how I first heard about Anthony Raimondi.

A few weeks before that day in Brooklyn, I got an email from a guy at NBCUniversal named Josh. He works on podcasts there. It said, Hi Mark, we are greenlighting a fascinating series involving the Mafia and Vatican. A deathbed confession from a Mafia enforcer and an alleged papal assassination. It's the kind of story that I think is right up your alley and would love to discuss. I gave Josh a call.

And that's when I learned that Anthony had published a book about his life, as a made member of a New York mafia family. It's called When the Bullet Hits the Bone, subtitled The Incredible and Possibly True Stories of the Last Mafia Enforcer. In it, Anthony puts himself in the center of mafia folklore. He says he's related to mafia royalty, a Sicilian mobster named Lucky Luciano, who many people believe founded American organized crime.

And Anthony says as a kid, he was close to Lucky's partner, a guy named Meyer Lansky. Lansky was the model for the character Hyman Roth in The Godfather 2. And toward the end of his book, Anthony tells a story about the murder of a pope. I'll be honest, it's a really fun read. Then I check out Anthony online. I find articles and tabloids from around the world. The New York Post, the Daily Mail, the New Zealand Herald. With headlines like, Meet the mobster who says he helped whack a pope.

After he published his book, Anthony went on kind of a publicity tour. Only instead of appearing on the morning talk shows, Anthony did interviews on a whole bunch of Mafia fan YouTube channels I never knew existed. Your uncle was no ordinary. I mean, he's one of the most famous... Uncle Lucky.

Some of these videos got millions of views. Uncle Lucky, yeah. This is Lucky Luciano for those of you who haven't figured it out. And he's one of the most famous gangsters. Uncle Lucky was my grandmother's, my father's mother. That was his half-brother.

In all of these interviews, Anthony sports his black tracksuit, his gold chains, dark sunglasses, and he carries a huge unlit cigar. In your book, you said, Lansky taught me so many ways of shaking down a guy, but he also taught me a lot of ways to actually kill a guy. Oh, yeah. Because Meyer Lansky was deadly. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Meyer taught me a lot of things.

And these interviewers all ended up asking Anthony the same thing. I mean, this is crazy with the whole of the Pope stuff. I mean, basically, what you're saying is the mob killed the Pope. Yeah. I decide to call my producer, Zach, and make a date for us to meet Anthony Raimondi for the first time. Feel the guy out. See what's what. To the corner of your mouth. Yeah. Oh. Why don't we just do that? Yeah.

It's a sunny afternoon when Zach and I meet Anthony in a conference room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. How you been feeling? Some days good, some days bad. I got done with my chemo. Anthony's sporting his usual attire and the cigar. It's crazy. Ever since I got the COVID, I haven't been right. I was in the hospital for it. I don't remember my first six days. Didn't think I was going to make it.

Meanwhile, I had to get two transfusions because my blood levels keep dropping. I wound up getting an infection. Then they put the pacemaker in. But it's like my father says, or my father used to say, no matter what you do in this world, you're going to pay a price. After he died, I realized what he was talking about. Yeah, what is he talking about? It don't make a difference. If he turns around upstairs and says, yeah, you did this good, but I don't like what you did here, well, you're going to have a little bit of a problem now.

After Anthony talks about his latest health problems, I ask him to start at the beginning, when he was growing up in Brooklyn. Now, my grandfather had the house on Baltic Street between 3rd and 4th Avenue. It was eight family, but it was the only family living in there. There was like me and my mother and my father, my grandfather and my grandmother, my Aunt Nanny and her husband, my Aunt Julie and her husband, Uncle Frank and his wife. So it was all around you. Oh, yeah. Everything goes back to the old country.

By old country, Anthony means Sicily. Now, we had an Uncle Ralph guy, though. Uncle Ralph was a member in the Black Hand. And by Black Hand, Anthony is talking about the Sicilian Mafia. My grandfather Frank Cascio was. My grandfather Antonio was. They were old school, these guys,

And I'm telling you, seriously, old school. Whatever they say they've done, who said they're killers and they killed this guy and that guy, to me, it was my family. This is all I knew.

As Anthony goes on, I start to wonder if I'm really looking at an old mobster or if this is some kind of elaborate performance. And I'm his captive audience. They put me with my cousin Mac because I was getting into a lot of trouble. Anthony drops a name I recognize. Mac, as in Hugh McIntosh.

a notorious mob enforcer. He brought me down to the Diplomat, and Joe Colombo came in one day, and Tom DiBella was there. There was the Colombo family, Scappi, everybody's there. It quickly becomes clear that Anthony remembers every mobster he ever met. I saw Joe Sean Amayo. They called him Yogi. And...

They're nicknames. They call him Top, because he was Top, so what had he done? There's a guy, they called him Gorilla. They called him Catfish. Frankie, I forgot his last name, but they called him Frankie Blue-Eyes in the Witness Protection Program. He remembers every spot in Brooklyn where all his stories took place. The Cadabra Club was on 3rd Avenue between 85th and... And we went to Honey's Garage. Honey had a place on Cavill Street between 3rd and...

It was the Desiree After Hour Club. Cousin Mac says, he goes, come on, this is 7th Street and 5th Avenue. And Anthony got into a ton of trouble. I got arrested. My Uncle Frank got arrested. His girlfriend got arrested. My Uncle Sal got arrested. He opens up his jacket, and I see he grabs the gun. I just picked up the gun, and I just emptied the whole gun. Okay, I'm screwed. They pull your head off. It's going to have to have a close-up of the guy with the gun. It made me crazy, but I ain't freaking stupid.

You're losing me. These stories fly by, and I have a lot of questions. But before I can say anything, Anthony has moved on to the next chapter. So I'm at the house, and my father says, you got a call. This is from who? He goes, from Italy. It's the story we came here for. Who's calling me from Italy? Your cousin Luigi. He's in the Vatican.

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visit JDPower.com slash awards. Only at a Sleep Number store or SleepNumber.com. See store for details. Back in the conference room in Brooklyn, Anthony Raimondi describes how he first got involved in crimes with the Vatican. His story starts in 1975 with a call from another family member, a Catholic cardinal also named Raimondi.

Luigi Raimondi. Tell me about Luigi. He's actually your cousin? Yeah, Luigi Raimondi, yes. He's working in the Vatican? He is in the Vatican. He was one of the guys that was becoming, what do you call it, the cardinals. He lived in the Vatican. And Anthony says that Cardinal Raimondi had called him with an offer he couldn't refuse. They got...

The Forger from the mafia, from one of the mafia guys, they got the stocks, the AT&T, IBM. According to Anthony, Luigi and some of his friends in the Vatican were running a counterfeiting scam. He goes, if you got somebody in the stock market, I can send you a ton of stocks. You keep your end, you give us our end. And they needed help selling these forged stocks in the United States.

He says, "Yeah, we'll make a ton of money." Why is he calling you? Because I was the guy that they were bringing up in the family to be the gangster, you understand? And they liked me. But the fact is, they loved my grandfather, Antonio. Now he sends me a batch, $100,000 certificates and stocks. Every one of them was a forgery.

With the help of some of his mafia-connected friends, Anthony says he gave the forged stocks to shady brokers, who then sold them to unwitting investors. They were bringing him a ton of money. And what we're doing, we're sending the money overseas to Italy now. And Anthony says that his cousin told him that the counterfeiting scam went right to the top of the Vatican. So now I find out that Paul Paul VI knew about this. They're working together.

And everybody was making a lot of money. Until Anthony got some news about one of his connected friends. And guess what he done? He fucking ratted us all out. The scam was over at that point. Oh yeah, the scam was over. According to Anthony, his partners in the Vatican shut the scam down. And the cops never showed up at his door. Then, just three years later... What happens is Pope Paul VI dies. Pope John Paul I gets in...

Now he becomes the Pope. They go through the whole process. Okay, he's the Pope. Anthony says that Pope John Paul I was a very different kind of Pope, an honest one. Pope John Paul I said, in either his words, everybody and anybody who was involved in the stock fraud and the scam, I am defrocking them now.

And excommunicating them from the church, which meant now they're falling under Italian law. And that's when Anthony says his grandfather got another call from the Vatican. My grandfather, he goes, we got to get rid of the Pope. We got to kill him. What are you fucking crazy? Kill the Pope? Are you out of your fucking mind? Excuse my language, but he says, let me tell you something. He goes, for as long as we've had Popes.

We've been killing popes throughout history. If we didn't like them, we'd kill them and we'd put our own guy in there. I said, Jesus Christ, they're going to kill a pope. I said, good luck with it. My grandfather goes, no. He goes, you got to go with him. I got to go with him. I said, I'm not killing no fucking pope. I said,

I mean, I don't care on the streets. On the street, you're loan sharking, shadow locking. You got a problem with a guy, the guy gets whacked. Who gives a shit, you know? We're talking about the Pope. This is the guy who could, like, supposedly directly talk to God. But my grandfather turned around and says, you're my grandson. I love you. You gotta go. Just when he said it like that, I knew I had to go.

A few days later, Anthony says the mastermind of the entire conspiracy showed up at his door. Marcinkus, Paul Jacob Marcinkus, who is the head of the Vatican Bank. I said, OK, what am I going there for? He goes, show us how to take him out in a nice way. Anthony says that reluctantly, he flew with Marcinkus to Rome to come up with a plan to take out the new pope.

in a nice way. These guys are nothing like New York guys, let me tell you. He says, now how do we, you know, how do we put him at rest? We want you to tell us how we can do it without pain and without him suffering. And you're going to love this. And you are going to be our, what was that word he used, our witness before God.

I'm going to be your witness before God. What the fuck are you talking about? When we die, God is going to say, you killed one of my popes. He never suffered. He went peacefully. And then we can stay in what they call the paradise, what we call heaven, but we can stay with God. And I'm saying to myself, how do I get into this mess? I said, what's his whole schedule? He goes here, he goes there. At nighttime, he always liked tea, but he liked it extra sweet.

That's okay. I says, here's what we can do. I says, can you get liquid Valium? He says, yeah. All right. Bring him his tea and you have liquid Valium in it. But the tea's got to be really sweet because he likes it really sweet because, you know, liquid Valium doesn't have a taste, but sometimes it's a little hint that this doesn't taste right.

According to Anthony, the Valium would put the Pope in a deep sleep, so he wouldn't feel what was coming next. I says, can you get cyanide, potassium cyanide? If you have a high level of potassium in your body, you're gone, you're dead. That night, Anthony says the Pope went to bed as he usually did, after he had his tea. The Pope is out like a light.

The captain of the Swiss Guards comes over. They shake hands, and I can see the ding bottle. And now Anthony says that it was Paul Jacob Marcinkus' job to get the deadly deed done. He gets the bottle. He opens it up, fills up the eyedropper, puts it like this in between here and just squeeze it once. Put the back on, walks out, he closes the door. Now we're standing there. All right. He says the guy's got to come back and check on him.

The Pope, the Pope, the Pope is sick. All of a sudden, doctors, this one, that one comes over. They examine him. They're doing CPR on his chest. They're doing this, everything. Pope is dead. Pope died. Yeah, I had to stay. I had to stay. I had to see this to be a witness before God for them. At this point, I look over at Zach and notice the floor-to-ceiling window beyond him.

It's dark outside. I glance at my phone and see a screen filled with missed calls and text messages. And I realize we've been talking for five hours. But Anthony just keeps going. It's starting to feel like he's auditioning for a role he's always wanted. As we leave, we share the elevator to the lobby. You have to lift this up and push it down.

Before we reach the ground floor, Anthony takes out an old switchblade and hands it to me. It's a switchblade that belonged to my uncle Lucky. As in Lucky Luciano, one of the most famous wise guys of all time. That tip. It's in the north. His name is in Maranzano's rib. The tip of the blade is broken off. He says it's from when Lucky stabbed a guy and it broke off in his ribs. I snap the knife closed and hand it back to him as we exit the elevator and walk out of the building.

Zach and I stand in the dark, watching Anthony limp away down the sidewalk toward a waiting black car. The next day, I start looking for someone who can vouch for Anthony. Anthony says he was a member of the Colombo crime family. There aren't many of those guys left, but I manage to find one guy high up in the Colombo's, and I write him a letter. It wasn't too hard to find him. He's serving a life sentence in federal prison.

I write, I'm researching the connection between organized crime and the Vatican. My interest begins with a possible associate of yours, Anthony Ramondi, who wrote a book in which he claims that he was a member of the Colombo crime family and that he helped murder a pope. I was sure this guy would know Hugh McIntosh, the Colombo enforcer Anthony says was his cousin. So I mention Mac in the letter. Then I make my pitch. You may be the only guy around who could tell me who Anthony really is or isn't.

So I'm asking for your help. I seal the envelope, address it, not forgetting the inmate number, and drop it in the mailbox. Hey, Mark, what's up? Hey, listen, I'm going to record this phone call, okay? Ooh, okay. A week or so later, I call Zach. I got some news. So, remember I sent a letter to...

Apparently, gangsters can text from prison now. At first, the guy texted back that he had no memory of Anthony Raimondi.

But as I predicted, he did know Hugh McIntosh. And he remembered that Hugh had a cousin named Anthony. After a few back and forths, I realized that the Anthony this guy remembers is not Anthony Raimondi. Then he asked me if I know Anthony's nickname. He says back then, everybody had a nickname. So then I looked through Anthony's book and found his nickname back when he was in the Colombo crime family, and it was Pluto.

So I write back that Anthony's nickname was Pluto. And he writes back to me. Yes, I found out that was who you were referring to. I was thinking of another cousin to McIntosh. Obviously, he knows who Pluto is. Yeah, definitely. So he's kind of a roundabout way of saying two things. He's saying, yes, I remember Anthony Raimondi. And yes, he was a cousin to Hugh McIntosh. Exactly. That's something. It is, I guess.

Later that night, this guy sent me one final text message. It simply said,

I do request that you do not contact me again for any reason. Stay safe. Next time on The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi, we learn a lot more about Anthony. So I took him in and he just started to get wiser and wiser and wiser and doing more and more and more. And he wound up with them. What can I say? Do you remember his name? Pluto. Pluto.

And we learn a little about Pope John Paul I. He was a mountain climber. Oh, was he really? Yeah. He scaled his last, was it a mountain outside of Cinto, about six or seven months before he died. So he was a fit guy. Right. The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi is a USG audio and truth media podcast in partnership with Clockwork Film. 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.

Thanks for listening.