Real Life Angels & Demons

Real Life Angels & Demons

Nazi Gold & The Vatican Bank

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 3, 2009

Vatican Bank Plaintiffs
www.vaticanbankclaims.com
resistk@yahoo.com
+1 202-318-2406
Dr. Jonathan Levy, Esq.

San Francisco:

The Dan Brown based movie, Angels and Demons, will preview in Rome next week to great acclaim. Many will assume it to be a work of fiction but a lawsuit in the US Federal courts that has persevered against all odds for ten years suggests otherwise. Not everything at the Vatican is, as it seems.

Alperin v. Vatican Bank, US District Court for Northern California, Case No. C-99-4491 MMC, ostensibly is a lawsuit against the Vatican Bank and Franciscan Order to obtain the return of Nazi loot known as the Ustasha Treasury. The Ustasha Treasury was a horde of gold, diamonds, and other valuables plundered from Serbs, Jews, and Roma by Nazi allied Croatia and laundered by the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor and the Vatican Bank after the Second World War. However, the lawsuit is about more than the gold and jewels estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. First and foremost the plaintiffs want to know who laundered the loot and what did they do with it and therein lays the trouble – the truth is embarrassing to the historic legacies of several Popes from Pius XII to present.

The cast of characters in this saga is right of Hollywood central casting: the aptly nicknamed “Golden Priest”, Fr. Krunoslav Draganovic was a former Ustasha officer who specialized in laundering money and helped thousands of Nazis escape Europe via the Vatican ratline before becoming an American spy; another prelate, Fr. Dominik Mandic, the Grand Definitor and Treasurer of the Franciscan Order in Rome espoused bizarre racial theories of Croatian superiority; and a major Nazi war criminal Ante Pavelic who cheated justice and was the ultra Catholic dictator of wartime Croatia. Pavelic and his loyal Ustasha black shirts slaughtered well over 500,000 Serbs, Jews, and Roma in his own brand of brutal concentration camps and delighted in putting villages of Orthodox Christians “schismatics” to fire and sword with the full knowledge of the Vatican. Pavelic died in exile in Spain in 1959 after seeing his Ustasha terrorist movement firmly transplanted to Argentina, the US, Canada, and Australia.

Mandic, Draganovic, and Pavelic were responsible for an improbable ten-truck convoy loaded with Axis loot that entered St. Peter’s Square in 1946 and was received at the Vatican Bank. Sworn testimony by Rome based US Special Agent William Gowen about his 1947 investigation of the Ustasha corroborates the event. Gowen investigated and infiltrated an Ustasha hideout at a hostel run by Draganovic and Mandic and interrogated Draganovic and others who admitted their roles in the bank plot. US government documents point to involvement at even higher levels, Jim Angleton the CIA station chief in Rome and the Vatican Undersecretary of State Montini (late Paul VI) were implicated. Gowen’s career as a Special Agent was ended for his efforts and he was transferred from Rome and investigated by the infamous Congressional Un-American Activities Committee.

The unholy alliance between war criminals and the Catholic Church was forged to fight the evils of Communism and spawned a decades long wave of bombings, assassinations and counter assassination that spanned the globe with the Church firmly on the side of former Nazis and war criminals. Notable events in this secret war included mafia style executions, airliner hijackings and bombings, commando raids in Yugoslavia, and even a terrorist bombing at the Statute of Liberty.

Enter the Gospa

The Franciscan Order along with the Vatican Bank was the prime mover of the Ustasha Treasury in the United States. In 1952 Fr. Dominik Mandic, one of the Ustasha Treasury paymasters, immigrated to Chicago where he founded with Ustasha funds a Franciscan publishing empire dedicated to racist propaganda, which argued Croatians were Aryans, and Serbs descended from Africans. Another Franciscan hat trick was the Gospa, the Croatian Virgin Mary, who first manifested herself at a small village named Medjugorje, Herzegovina near the site of a wartime massacre of Serbs.. It was on the tenth anniversary of this vision that all out war between Croatia and Yugoslavia erupted. The handlers and promoters of the visionaries are Croatian Franciscans of the Order of Friars Minor whose antics have brought censure from local bishops and belatedly from the Vatican in 2008. Funds from the Ustasha Treasury are alleged to have played a role in the Medjugorje phenomena.

Despite ten years of litigation, this real life Angels and Demons continues to unfold in federal courts in California as new information is revealed including revelations that Ustasha Treasury diamonds were passed by the Catholic Church to Croatia to purchase arms in 1990s and an Ustasha plot just last month to assassinate the Bolivian President, Still neither side has budged despite mounting evidence of the Vatican Bank and Franciscans’ involvement in the Ustasha criminal enterprise.