"Beautiful Italy, so warm, so fresh, so utterly enveloped in alien"
"corruption from beyond the stars!"-- The Man in Black

Background Notes from Davide Manana

Date: Sat, 07 Nov 1998 13:38:02
From: Davide Mana
To: mib@cyberspace.org
Subject: Re: DG: Emerald Hammer Outline

Greetings.

You wrote...
> EIGHT
> Location: Italy
> Tome: Unausprechlichen Kulten
> Bischofe: ???
> Pawns: P2 Masonic Lodges
> Synopsis: Vatican orders (St. Jerome etc) butt in, Alzis slain yet again.
> Grimaldi Cave rituals.
 Some considerations...
[I'd like to offer more, but I've too many projects going at the moment]

> Location: Italy
Pretty generic... I'd suggest Rome (Political Capital, Hub of the World - or so they say ;>), Palermo (Criminal Capital, "The City that Eats Law Enforcers") or Milan (Economical Capital, "Moral Heart of the Country", yeah, right... buy this one they you'd buy anything).

> Bischofe: ???
Do you need an actual character?
Let me know...

> Pawns: P2 Masonic Lodges

Now, P2 was a single Masonic Lodge.
And all in all, P2 is a thing of the past: while some of the things that the Lodge set in motion reached as far as the early '90s, the Lodge proper was gutted in the mid '80s. Bringing back P2 in a turn of the century campaign would probably leave a lot of people cold.

I therefore humbly submit some alternatives

- Hardcore Separatists

While the Italian "Lega Nord" party is a mild bunch of comedians, some of their fringe organizations show real potential. I'm talking about the "Serenissimo Governo della Repubblica Veneta" guys, that designed and built a radio-controlled mini-tank and deployed it in Venice, taking the San Marco Tower as hostage; or the Tyrolean border "Schutze", that stole their name from a SCA-like blunderbuss-fans organization, but are a really bad-ass, gun-freak, Arian-supremacist gang of dangerous nuts. Add to this mix odd "celtic" rituals, new-age crap galore, the Cult of the Boar God and the "Green Shirt" patrols - middle aged, middle-class guys that roam the streets by night as vigilantes - and you have a picture of the guys.

- Third Level

The existence of Third Level was postulated in december 1982 during a convention of Law Enforcement Agency Directors, Judges and Politicians on the subject of organized crime.
Theory proposers were
Montalto - DA in Trapani - killed in January 1983
Chinnici - DA in Palermo - killed in May 1983
Palermo - DA in Trento - barely survived an attack in april 1985 in which all his escort and a few passerbys were killed
Falcone - Judge in Palermo - killed in spring 1992
Borsellino - Judge in Palermo - Killed in summer 1992

Third Level is the name the five investigators gave to a structure connecting various figures (criminal bosses, ruthless business-men, corrupted politicians), whose activities no longer had a criminal character, but were by all means political in scope, range and modus operandi. In other words, Third Level members were wielding so much power that their ways had to be like those of a national government and not like those of a crime syndicate.

In this sense, P2 was actually a Second Level structure striving to become a Third, as it was acting through the political powers, but could not be considered a fully operational alternative to the Government, yet.

Survivor Carlo Palermo is currently pursuing the logical consequences of the theory, and recently postulated a Fourth Level, connecting international crime, religious foundamentalism and fringe cults and political subversion, acting on a regular international basis.
He even postulated that P2 was actually a decoy thrown to the investigators so that the actual Third and Fourth Levels could go on doing business as usual.

And this is it.
Sorry for the long message, but I imagined that you'd like to have some up to date facts about the darker side of my country for your project.



List Discussion

DAVIDE MANA / MiB

> Pawns: P2 Masonic Lodges
> Now, P2 was a single Masonic Lodge.
 In RL sure, but this is gaming! Anyway, the DG book definitively states that the Karotechia uses/used P2 as a pawn.

> was gutted in the mid '80s. Bringing back P2 in a turn of the century
> campaign would probably leave a lot of people cold.
Exactly.

Although to be realistic, I guess your alternatives would be the pawns of the pawns (allowing third or fourth level stuff leading back to the Karotechia). A conspiracy of ex-P2 Karotechia types running with your alternatives sounds like a suitably evil idea still conforming to the flippant listing in the Karotechia chapter of DG.

> I therefore humbly submit some alternatives
> - Hardcore Separatists
> - Third Level
I'm also thinking that the Mafia/OSS connection could be used in this as well. (How's the Mafia in Italy doing lately?)

MiB/Davide Mana

> Although to be realistic, I guess your alternatives would be the pawns of
> the pawns (allowing third or fourth level stuff leading back to the
> Karotechia). A conspiracy of ex-P2 Karotechia types running with your
> alternatives sounds like a suitably evil idea still conforming tothe
> flippant listing in the Karotechia chapter of DG.
 Exactly.
I won't go in deep in this at the moment, but you can trace a neat link between:

a - Third Level (the Shadow Government P2 would have liked so much to be) |
[through drug and arms smuggling courtesy of the First Level]
|
b - various muslim foundamentalist groups
|
[through sufitic philosophy and right wing politics]
|
c - Thulegesellschaft (and therefore the K. entity)

So you don't even have to tweak it to make K. the Fourth Level.
A sort of "Core P2" (that survived the wipe-out of the '80s by sacrificing what became known as P2) is the Third Level in Italy. Second and First levels are the various entities such as Organized Crime Structures (see below), hardcore separatists, the often postulated "Industrialist's Party" and what else.

> I'm also thinking that the Mafia/OSS connection could be used in this as
> well. (How's the Mafia in Italy doing lately?)
 Time to put you straight about this stuff.

First of all: please keep in mind that organized crime is in Italy a plague killing thousands each year, directly or indirectly (drugs). And the majority of the population _does not_ acknowledge, condone, approve or support these activities, or the organizations spawning them. So smartasses equating Italian with "Mafioso" maybe think they actually have a good joke there, but are in truth just offensive. With this I'm not censoring any list member. of course, but just a general attitude, so please don't get me wrong.

Having said this, thank goodness "Mafia" is doing not so well.

The Second Level (the crime/economics interface) has been soundly thrashed in the last few years, and a lot of big shots are currently in the can awaiting trial. Third Level is still being investigated, and quite a few political connections have been snipped, so that, at least, we are no more facing politicos telling us "Mafia does not Exist" (the official line through the '70s and early '80s).

The bad news come from the First Level, that is the crime/population inteface; what a lot of people seems too willing to forget is that at this level, expecially in backward or depressed areas of the south, Organized Crime is a cultural phenomenon, from kids up. Law Enforcement is actually hindered by the population as the locals still cast the "Mafiosi" in a positive light.

In a totally surrelistic inversion, the State is the bad guys in the eyes of the small people.

This is the effect of said organizations (Mafia and Cosa Nostra in Sicily, 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, Camorra in Campania, Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia) pervasively operating in their areas for something like 200 years. This is the hardest aspect of the structure to crack, and the worst, as it provides a reservoir of willing new recruits.

In the above paragraphs you probably noticed that I write Mafia and "Mafia".
This is not sloppyness on my part.
The point is that a lot of non-Italians talk about "Mafia" as if it was a single, monolithic structure active in Italy and in other countries (what I'd call a Second Level) as it's shown in movies.
This is actually a generalization and a classificative blunder comparable to the cliche' of putting sunshine and mandolins in a canned ravioli commercial.

The term became popular expecially after the War in the USA, and became synonimous with "The Mob", a generic term.
Incidentally: OSS contacted the Italian Mafia through the USA based Mafia Families, the family being the basic cell-structure in all these organizations.

The organizations that actually make up the fictitious, generic "Mafia" were all born between 17th and 18th century, often with nationalistic attitudes, and at least in a pair of cases, with a Masonic-like lodge structure, rituals and regulations. From there, things went downhill.

So, concluding this long rambling thing, we must distinguish:
name original aims now
Mafia nationalist conspiracy against Napoleonic occupation racketeering
Camorra dock workers/merchants union drug-running with Republican leanings
Cosa Nostra Sacra landowners club money laundering
Corona Unita Mason-like structure with political and religious characters illegal immigration

The only "proper" crime syndicate born as such is the 'Ndrangheta, currently specialized in kidnappings.
Cheers Davide Mana